D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is a pretty high bet. That has not been my experience at all. I played for near 15 years now, and neither in AD&D nor D&D 5th Edition the survavility was dictated by a cleric in the group. Ever.

OK, this is now so absurd that I'm just calling you on it. I flat out disbelieve this statement. Its utter nonsense. I DMed AD&D from 1977 to 1995 continuously on at least a weekly basis. I ran countless thousands of sessions of these games. There's nothing you can tell me about AD&D. I literally can run the game from rote memory without ever referring to a book with virtually 100% accuracy, even after 20 years. To survive any sort of serious adventure without a cleric in AD&D is absurd. I mean, sure, you may be quite able to deal with specific scenarios, but you are taking horrible, horrible risks and the survival rate of a party, of any level, won't even be half what it would be with a cleric.

I don't agree that it is true in 5e either, as I've stated in previous posts. I'm sure its quite a bit less extreme, but a cleric is still the best option in that game. In 4e it was really not true, as I just detailed in my last post. A warlord or bard could easily put out the amount of healing required to get you over the hump, and beyond that was counter-productive.

And me and my players have encountered several out-of-our-league CR monsters, and the fact that my homebrew world is animistic is due to the lack of clerics in my parties. And the healing potions were always scarce and unreliable. We use a lot of non-magical healing, planification and what not. Vampire Touch is one of the favourite "healing" magics, so... no. And between Lay of Hands, DR, Hit Dice, Medicine and the Healer feat we are sufficiently "patched"... and we use optional, slow healing and Healer's Kit dependancy. And an optional rule where, if you drop to 0 hp and go back, you are in harsh pain.

I submit you will increase the survivability of the party with a cleric. I just flat out state it, they are that good. Anything a bard or druid can do, a cleric can do most of it better, and has other unique talents (IE spells) that the other two lack. I'm sure that at least in 5e there are many scenarios where the cleric won't matter much and other healing capable casters will work fine, but you'll find that day before long when you really wanted Mr Cleric.

That in no way was a detriment to fast, brutal fights. Exploration has a heavy say in survavility, much, much more than healing. My players have a say "Attack first, attack twice".*

*Also, you can always kill the cleric first. That is an expectation on many tables, so many players do not put their trust on a single character. That would be borderline stupid in my table, given the crossbowmen firing squads.

Heh, the only PCs in our campaign that have died, all clerics. In fact we're on the 4th party cleric in 5 levels now. We still absolutely demand having a cleric, to the point where we hired an NPC cleric, and then a replacement NPC cleric when nobody would play one. We do have a druid as well, but as I say, he hasn't really evinced any special talent as either a healer or a damage mitigator. Frankly I would rather have the other abilities of the cleric even if the two were equally good at healing. Turn Undead is pretty much mandatory, its saved our bacon 3 or 4 times already.

 

[Manbearcat]

Yeah - dramatically different experience over here. Any utility power that gave you some advantage on a skill check was seen as kind of a waste of a slot by all the tables I played at. The logic tended to run that skill checks were mostly relevant in skill challenges, and there, you could normally sub in a skill check you were proficient at for overcoming any challenge if you made a good enough case for it (and it was not a hard case to make in many situations), making the choice of proficiency mostly cosmetic (though there was some difference between an exploration skill and a social skill, even this eroded with time - "use Athletics to talk about fights with the warrior at the table" and "use Diplomacy to make the NPC's do it for you" were all things that saw actual exposure). I wouldn't dispute that the characters had proficiency in these skills, but I never saw a character voluntarily take skill-enhancing powers when there were perfectly good healing/defensive/movement powers available for that same slot. Proficiency was enough - often MORE than enough - to do everything exploration and interaction requested of us.

Which is just to say that my 4e experience was pretty biased toward fights. More moving parts, more powers, more interesting things going on, more choices, more variety, more fights. Given the misguided complaints about 4e being nothing more than a minis skirmish game, I don't think I was the only one who saw that happening.

I agree that your experience was pretty biased toward fights. I also agree that you weren't the only one who saw that happening given the edition warrior refrain of "minis skirmish game." Where the disagreement lies in is the extrapolation of:

If...

we don't leverage (or don't leverage it correctly in many cases - eg with no respect for the fictional positioning at the action declaration or the resolution fallout level) a system's extremely robust noncombat, conflict resolution mechanics (and PC build resources to support that) which are supposed to capture high-stakes, dynamic, action-adventure tropes (that should have major fallout on the fiction)...

and...

we just focus in on combat (and there we also have little respect for the fictional positioning...which is not something inherent to the game at all)...

then...

4e is inherently a minis skirmish game.

I've said it dozens of times at this point. My 4e games featured a LOWER ratio of combat encounters:total encounters than ever before in my 31 year history of running D&D. Around 2:3 combat:noncombat (5ish conflicts/encounters/scenes per day, only 2 of which were typically L2-3 and L4-6 combats). Consequently, my players always invested deeply (or at least at parity with combat) in noncombat resources.

Because certain tables didn't have respect for the fictional position of scenes (and how the mechanics observed/augmented it) and because certain GMs didn't, or didn't know how to (which I've seen a hell of a lot of evidence of that!), run compelling, noncombat conflict resolution (via the closed-scene based mechanics of the 4e SC) is neither a fault of 4e nor a testament of what orthodox 4e play should look like!

Your posted character sheet, as a Slayer, is also light on the attack powers, of which a comparable non-Essentials character, at level 6, would have six if I'm remembering my maths right. Compared to three utility powers.

Nope, she has the same number of encounter powers at level 6 as any 4e character; 2. You get your 3rd at 7. She doesn't have Dailies as Slayers don't have them. They have AW stances that augment their Basic Attacks. Her other encounter powers are 2 theme, 1 racial, 1 skill power (feat), 1 fighter utility (lvl 2), 1 skill power utility (lvl 6).

Nothing so categorical. More that in practice, level-relative DC's can create a feeling of impotence in a player when they know that their achievements and experience don't actually affect the chance of victory very much, and world-relative DC's can by the same token create a feeling of mastery and achievement in a player when they know that they're taking on much harder challenges than they "should."

Which is just to say that a DC table that doesn't take levels into account isn't inherently flawed or backwards or useless or that it must lead to bad play where the PC's can't pass by some DC that is too hard for them or any of the other things AA seemed to presume must happen because 5e doesn't set DC's relative to level, and that setting DC's relative to level isn't clearly a better or more advanced or improved option. The reverse is also true of course: setting DC's relative to level doesn't necessarily mean you feel cheated when you achieve them. But it can.

I know I've felt more than once that 4e is largely a "level-less" game for all its 30 levels (of which I played about 18). And 5e, over the course of 7, is already showing me that setting the DC's relative to the world is a part of the edition's strong antidote to that. In 4e, I always felt at about the same level of badass ("fairly"). In 5e, I've felt the growth that comes from a tier-shift in a way 4e never achieved (going from "not very badass" to "a little badass!"), and in a way is a little more subtle and interesting than bigger numbers.

Going to address this generally with respect to the ongoing conversation that continues to misunderstand 4e's "get to the fun(!)"/every moment should be about conflict ethos and its outcome-based design.

In this post from 1.5 years ago, I relayed an anecdote (and others did in the thread as well) about my 2nd to last 4e game where a level 27 PC soloed the (level 26 Solo) demon lord Juiblex (in his lair with all of his hazards and his minions) after a failed exorcism ritual (a Skill Challenge). A few relevant thoughts:

1) Instead of their level 27 lives being filled with exciting, dramatic conflict (which requires challenges capable of threatening them or their goals) against demon lords, I could easily introduce a "side quest" where we spend a session or two on heroic tier bad guys (say level 5 bandits) so the PCs can "feel" that they are advancing with respect to the world. The level 5 Pinkertons who are hopelessly guarding the caravan against the big, bad bandits could watch awe-stricken as the level 27, legendary PCs dispatch the bandits while sleepily yawning, baking cookies, doing their taxes, and saying something appropriately haughty.

The level 27 PCs could then go back to the level 5 town and the merchants could have thrown them a parade, the hobbits could be singing "ding dong the wicked bandits are dead (!)", the busty noblewomen and tavern winches could be swooning and batting their eyelashes and the mayor could give them the key to the city.

Then they would really "feel" their progress and the treadmill rubbish would be dispelled at long last!

2) If I felt like deviating from 4e orthodox, just to make a point to players and inflict punishment upon myself (for wasting my time and energy), I could certainly frame level 5 PCs into a scenario where they're expected to perform level 27 exorcism rituals against demon lords (or even fight those demon lords!) of which they have 0 capability in flexing the requisite protagonist muscles to move units and save the day.

Or, we could spend lots of time on benign, conflict-neutral exploration of a town. You could chat up a barmaid. You could not skip the guards. You could haggle merchants. All of that good stuff.

There would be no conflict in either scenario. No adventure. No drama. However, perhaps we will have devoted enough on-screen time to conflict-neutral stuff so the players "feel" that they're inhabiting a persistent, living, breathing world!

Except...no. That is not what 4e is about. 4e went all in on Vincent Baker's indie design premise of "every moment, drive towards conflict." The only thing that is supposed to be onscreen is stuff that is exciting, dramatic, threatening, fraught with conflict and adventure. Then 4e perfectly engineered an outcome based system to unfailingly allow you to do just that for all levels 1-30! And then it got raked over the coals for it and we're still having these conversations that somehow utterly misunderstand/represent the system's ethos and outcome-based design!

However, if you're hell bent on it, you can do this all you like as neither 4e's mechanics can forbid you from it nor will any TTRPG police come arrest you for doing so!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The complexity of a PC made it impractical to run for NPCs, especially if you try to apply it to every NPC, which is what you'd need to do to get things back to the established parity of 3E. Furthermore, running a combat of four PCs against four PC-built NPCs became unwieldy after a point. The game just isn't designed for it.

Well, maybe fighters aside depending on how you build them, 3e PCs aren't exactly simpler than 4e ones. And I'll let you in on a little secret, using 4 PCs to fight against a party in AD&D is a huge recipe for slow suckage. The PCs are way more complex than monsters, AND you get a very bad case of glass cannons (IE AD&D magic users make really horrible opponents unless you really gimp their spell lists since they will just unload their best spell again and again).

The problem is that their claims didn't line up with the magnitude of their changes. It's entirely possible to change all of the underlying mechanics, without jumping the shark into such an extreme "NPCs are different" mode.

When 4E came out, I was already familiar with a dozen different RPGs, and none of them were anything like what 4E became. It was literally unthinkable to me, that they would try do such a thing while still claiming to be an RPG.

I don't find that I can engage with people who claim that the RPG I've been running for 7 years "isn't an RPG", lol. I'll just ignore that shot, but you know, get real.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hmmm, I haven't seen any real damage prevention from the druid in our game. The CLERIC on the other hand managed to put up a pretty nasty Protection from Evil 10' Radius (or whatever it is called now, anyway it worked wonders against a fire elemental). Now, maybe our druid is weird or something, the player is a new guy and I am not super familiar with all the details of his character. Still, prevention can't always replace healing, though I suppose its possible it could reduce the need for it sharply.

Your druid needs to look into Spike Growth. It is fantastic^2 for damage prevention against melee mobs. You can cast it on the party and now no one can even approach you without taking 20 to 40 points of damage (depending on placement and terrain) in the process. Plus it creates difficult terrain, and doesn't hurt friendlies as long as they don't move. And it's cheap (2nd level).

Conjure Animals is another druid specialty. Wolves, giant owls, and flying or constrictor snakes are all fun and powerful in different ways.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

PCs were special because they had levels, but everyone with levels worked the same way. An NPC might be a third level wizard, and there's no explanation of that beyond the PC rules, because the idea that a wizard NPC was a mechanically distinct entity was ludicrous! If an NPC had special treatment, then it was because of unique circumstances within the game world, and a PC in that same situation would be identical.

There were many humans with monster stat blocks in the 1977 1e AD&D Monster Manual which would like to talk to you. I refer you to the 'Men' entry, under which are Bandits, Dervishes, Buccaneers, etc. Many of these figures are treated as being 'higher level', but in many cases they have specific stats instead of simply class levels.

I agree that OFTEN it was expected that you would stat up (demi)-human(oid) creatures, but most of those cases are strictly 'fighter's which essentially means added hit dice (and many cases they are just simply described as X+N hit dice figures).

And yet, it held for decades. There were no two different-yet-equal ways to stat up a particular ogre. It only possibly had one stat block, regardless of who was looking at it. Any game that rejects the notion of an objective reality is going to be highly controversial, and unappealing to a significant portion of the potential player base.

Well, there wasn't any specific need for different ogre stat blocks. However there WERE certainly stat blocks for specific ogres, and different flavors of ogre. I am pretty darn sure that for instance there are modules with unique ogres that have unique stat blocks, and 'better armored ogres' with slightly different stats, etc. But without concepts like 'minion' there's not a lot of reason you'd ever make a different stat block for a given individual ogre. To call that some sort of high principle of D&D however is IMHO absurd. Its just something that wasn't deemed useful given the mechanics of D&D pre-4e. Until people suggested minionization of 4e monsters I'd never in more than 30 years ever heard any such principle suggested.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I don't agree that it is true in 5e either, as I've stated in previous posts. *snip* I submit you will increase the survivability of the party with a cleric. I just flat out state it, they are that good. Anything a bard or druid can do, a cleric can do most of it better, and has other unique talents (IE spells) that the other two lack. I'm sure that at least in 5e there are many scenarios where the cleric won't matter much and other healing capable casters will work fine, but you'll find that day before long when you really wanted Mr Cleric.

Lore bards and druids are both better than clerics at summoning meat shields for damage prevention and damage dealing. (Wolves are fantastic.) Lore bards are two and a half times better than clerics at healing. The only thing a cleric brings to the table for healing is if you're willing to take a cheesy a one-level dip in Cleric of Life so that your 3rd level Aura of Vitality heals 120 points of damage per casting instead of 70.

Now, I agree that clerics are good for things besides healing. When you said I didn't you were attacking a straw man. I loathe clerics from an RP perspective and refuse to play them, but mechanically they are quite tempting (e.g. Death Ward is fantastic insurance, Aid is excellent, Bless is terrific... I find Guidance quite meh since it only lasts a minute but it has its niche for short tasks that you see coming when your concentration is not otherwise occupied). But there's always an opportunity cost, and forgoing a cleric to pick up a Lore Bard or a Paladin/Sorcerer looks like a defensible trade to me, and in my 5E experience it's worked out just fine.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's the opposite situation. It's perfectly reasonable to have two different monsters that use a similar stat block. You just can't have the same monster with different stat blocks.

Any given individual within the game will have one true Strength score, and one true HP total, etc. These numbers reflect the in-game reality of that individual.

I call nonsense. Hit points don't objectively exist within AD&D. They are not a characteristic of individuals in the narrative fiction of the game universe. This is explicitly covered in the descriptions in both 1e and 2e PHB and DMG, which I will not even bother to repeat here as you must have read them (or maybe you need to do so). Hit points reflect luck, skill, divine intervention, and sometimes innate toughness. So, objectively the creatures in an AD&D game have those characteristics, they are simply abstracted into a hit point number. Since hit points do not exist, they cannot be said to be innate to a creature and any given creature might potentially evince different hit point totals under different conditions. The same could be said of other attributes.

Now, as I said above, in AD&D's mechanics nobody had ever really thought to build different versions of monsters. However, I HAVE seen the same NPC given both a character sheet and a monster stat block. I've also seen characters, even PCs, given both D&D stat blocks, Battlesystem stats, and Chainmail stats.

 

[bert1000]

In re: the Diary of Vecna, I think the thing that drove me most crazy about the levelling treadmill in 3.x and 4E both was it made levelling feel like a lot of math for no benefit. As someone said upthread, if you have +5 against a DC 15 lock at level five and +10 against a DC 25 lock in the same situation at level ten, then what purpose do those levels serve. Ditto fighting... if you've got +5 to hit and do 10 damage against an AC 15/20 hp orc at level five, then +10 to hit and 20 damage against an AC 25/40 hp orc at level ten... why have you bothered?

The answer, presumably, is that your abilities have broadened, thanks to gained feats/class features/etc., and I can totally get behind that. But if that's all that -really- changes, why not just track that stuff and chuck out the arbitrary number inflation?

Someone more versed in 4e than I can chime in on what the benefits of number inflation are (large range of bonuses gets you).

I'm not positive I prefer relative DCs to fixed DCs anyway, but it annoys me that people keep misrepresenting how to play with relative DCs.

In short, those ARE NOT the same locks. Those ARE NOT the same orcs. If they were than you wouldn't be giving them the same relative level-appropriate DC.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wow.

No he doesn't. At two different points in his life he is modeled two different ways. The is completely and entirely unlike 4E where the EXACT same individual in the exact same second is modeled differently depending on who is standing next to him.

I still want to know where people get this from. NOTHING in 4e ever suggests using different stat blocks for the same creature situationally. It has been accepted practice in the 4e community to do so, but it is entirely a step beyond what the rules suggest. In fact I don't know of any 4e text which suggests that the developers of 4e held a view clearly different from Saelorn's.

 

[Manbearcat]

That is a major feature in achieving 5e's DM Empowerment goal, yes, and applying a Forge label to it doesn't make that a bad thing (for 5e). 5e isn't simply a bad game asking you to paper over its flaws with 'GM Force,' it presents players with an explanation of the DM's central role in resolving all aspects of the game, and instills an expectation that the exercise of that role will be both commonplace, and for the good of the play experience, for all.

So, 'GM Force' or 'DM Empowerment,' the idea is that the success and quality of each instance the game experience (campaign/session) rests primarily with the DM, rather than the players or the system (or the designers of that system).

I agree that it doesn't make it a bad thing (for 5e or for any other system) so long as it is there is player buy-in. Further, if OMGFORGE terminology forces (yeah) otherwise reasonable men to get all sandy below the belt, to tremble with rage and be incapable of further communication, then let us just call it "Steve" or "Pudding" or "Ham Sandwich".

The point is GM Ham Sandwich is a thing. A thing that has consequences on play. And we can talk about those consequences on play that GM Ham Sandwich has.

Czege's principle is certainly not an axiom: it's meant to be an empirical generalisation that rests on understandable facts about human motivation and the experience of drama. Let's call an empirical generalisation that's grounded in that way a theoretical generalisation.

You know I love it when you talk all game theory and academic to me. /shiver.

Also, we can call it a theoretical generalisation. I think that is good for his meaning. I think the way it was used in the prior post was very "axiomish" though. But I'm very comfortable with it being a theoretical generalisation (and that being his meaning).

Now, as we all know, when a theoretical generalisation is confronted with contrary evidence, the first thing a defender of the generalisation does is reinterpret (ie interpret away) the evidence! So here's my go at that:

Naturally, given the rocky terrain.

The Sorcerer-style kicker isn't really an instance of the player authoring his/her own adversity. It's true that it is more like that then (say) the player choosing that so-and-so is his/her PC's rival. In that latter case, the player chooses the antagonist but hands the antagonist over to the GM to use in scene-framing.

But in the context of the kicker, it's still the GM who decides how the kicker event is located within the broader backstory of the game, and who is responsible for adjudicating and narrating the consequences of the kicker as play unfolds.

In this way, the kicker is more like a formalised way for having the players make suggestions to the GM as to how to use his/her scene-framing authority. But it's not the player fully setting his/her own stakes.

How'd I do?

You have gained skill at rhetoric and reasoning (300)!

I think maybe (or maybe not?) we're probably parsing language just a little bit differently here. The original post that I was responding to was about content creation, authoring adversity, and simultaneously authoring action resolution.

I will agree all day long that the formula of:

Situation creation + authoring adversity + playing prior authored adversity within the fictional positioning of the situation + authoring action resolution

is basically playing the game by your self. However, a character creation prologue scene in Dogs where the player wants the adversity to be "do I lick this bad habit" or "do I overcome my fear of heights" or "do I break my horse's wild spirit", the GM is then obliged to play that adversity (the bad habit, your fear of heights, your horse's wild spirit) that the player authored (with at least some input from the player on situation and consensus and transparency of stakes).

It certainly doesn't fully subordinate the GM's scene-framing authority to the player, but the input of the player on authoring their own adversity/situation (not playing/resolving, that is the GM's role), and thusly generating content, is well beyond the typical line of demarcation.