D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm curious if anyone, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], or anyone else can point me to where in 4e it talks about the fiction relationship to scaling DC's... Or is this something, like the switching out of different monster variations, that has become a forum rule but is not explicitely called out in the books?

It really isn't all that explicit, though I suspect if you read through the adventure construction section of the DMG it definitely talks about constructing adventures that are thematically appropriate. DMG64 says "... set a DC that's appropriate to the character's level." and then discusses doors, stating "Don't put an iron door in a dungeon designed for 10th-level characters unless you intend it to be difficult for them to break through."

Later there are fantastical terrains. In DMG1 they are listed in a single group with stats, and it is explained that at each tier some aspects of the terrain may scale:

Terrain scales in order to keep it relevant as PCs
and monsters gain higher attack bonuses and hit
points. It is an element of game balance and a reflec-
tion of the greater magical power present in paragon
or epic locations.

Those terrain elements which do scale, only a small subset of the total, note that fact.

Remember, the entire assumption of the encounter design section of the DMG is that you are building 'level appropriate encounters'. Here and there, as in the door quote above, they link this back to the concept that fiction is linked to level in a thematically appropriate way. Also note that this section is talking about combat encounters, not all encounters in general. 4e DMG1 breaks encounters down into 3 types, combat, skill challenge, and puzzle. Combat and skill challenge both work on the basis of level-appropriate fiction and DCs, but note that never is it assumed that ALL DCs in the world are level appropriate!

The rules repeatedly talk about narrative sense. This is particularly true in the SC rules where it is stated that a proposed skill use must be accompanied by an explanation of the action and it must be relevant to the fiction. Thus for instance if a level 1 PC stated he was going to use an Athletics check to tunnel through solid stone with his bare hands, you wouldn't expect that suddenly all stone is 'level appropriate stone' with a tunneling DC of 12! No, the stone might have such a DC, in theory, but it certainly won't be within reach of this character. Not without powerful magic (IE something that grants a burrowing speed) that isn't normally available to level 1 PCs.

Other books often talk about uses for high level NPCs. For instance Draconomicon (both of them) often talks about encounters with high level dragons which are clearly intended to serve plot purposes (dragons as quest givers, patrons, puzzles, etc). Obviously fighting such a creature at lower levels isn't part of the envisaged course, but the book does mention that dragons might use attacks to cow or toy with PCs, or simply to gauge their ability. Clearly the implication is that the dragon's stats are high level dragon stats, not some sort of 'level scaled dragon' which is never discussed.

It would be quite feasible, though it isn't really discussed, to have adventures featuring high level hazards, creatures, etc that you're not intended to overcome by making checks. At least not THOSE checks. Presumably collapsing the tower on the ancient dragon as a mid-heroic adventure is going to involve finding some sort of way to pull that off that has accessible DCs. I don't see that this is outside the realm of what 4e envisages. I don't recall that earlier editions really discussed this kind of thing explicitly either.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Well, you rattled it off with a large damage projection stating that it was tremendously good protection, like it would go a long ways towards obviating the need for clerical healing. My response is, yes, its a tactically useful spell, but its neither unique nor is the tactic so general that it can be deployed consistently. Its also a pretty nasty double-edged sword, potentially. Web doesn't necessarily do anything to you, though I do see that Restrained imposes disadvantage, so its not ENTIRELY a rosy picture. At least you won't take damage if you have to move for some reason.

Ah, I understand the disconnect. You think I'm one of those people who cares about winning arguments, so when I say something you view it in terms of whatever previous disagreements have come up instead of as an independent item. I on the other hand saw someone who said their druid hadn't been able to do much damage mitigation, but he's a new guy and still struggling to get the hang of things, so I chipped in with a word of advice on his behalf for two of the things that druids can do to mitigate damage. Yes, Spike Growth is situational--it won't work when you're fighting missile mobs, and I believe I said that originally; and it won't work against flying creatures; but it might very well have worked against the Fire Elemental mentioned in your post, depending on terrain and what its motivation was for attacking you. In my experience anyone who sees the spikes is going to be quite reluctant to spend a full turn of movement dashing across them, taking 30 or 40 points of damage in the process (depends on geometry), in order to kill the PCs. I agree that the tactic is situational and not something for every combat, but it's a non-obvious tactic when you first read through the PHB so I thought it worth mentioning.

My point was, there are plenty of other spells you can caste on your own party that will deter melee bad guys from approaching. No one spell casting class has a monopoly on them, so I don't think druid displaces cleric on that basis.

Precisely. Neither does the cleric displace the druid, or the lore bard, or anyone else. The cleric is non-mandatory precisely because of opportunity cost. If you could always add a cleric without losing anyone else, obviously you'd take him and be glad. Either of us can name lots of useful things that a cleric can bring to the party.

I don't know what you're talking about in terms of bards and healing. They have Cure Wounds and such, but without the WIS bonus inherent to Life domain you won't compete with the Cleric. I don't know what class feature you were referring to, it isn't anything I could find in the PHB.

Ah, so you just didn't know about Aura of Vitality? I will explain.

At 6th level, the Lore Bard gets Magical Secrets: two spells off any class's list. He can steal the 3rd level Paladin spell Aura of Healing. It heals 2d6 hit points with a bonus action every round for a minute, or 70 points of damage on average. This is two and a half times more efficient than Cure Wounds with 20 Wisdom. That's why I say clerical healing is inefficient.

There are other combos that are similarly attractive when done proactively as damage mitigation (e.g. druid's Wildshape into a meat shield, or Polymorph) but Aura of Vitality bards are as good as it gets when it comes to healing damage after the fact. I would not trade my healing bardlock for a cleric, especially since he'll eventually get all the best parts of being a cleric (Bless, Death Ward) through Magical Secrets without giving up the best parts of being a bardlock (crazy good Stealth, Repelling Blast combos to blast enemies off cliffs/into walls of fire/etc., Conjured Animals, improved Counterspelling, lots of bardic inspiration dice, eventual Wish spell) and without the icky RP downsides (to me) of being a PC whom I-the-player can't intellectually respect. (That's a flaw in me BTW, not in other people, but it's one I haven't overcome yet. I am unable to relate to anyone who would worship a D&D godling any more than I can relate to people worshipping Egyptian pharaohs in real life. It just makes no sense to me why you would do that, and yet they did.)

 

[bert1000]

So in 4e, JUST LIKE IN 5E, the differences in stats are derived entirely from a difference in the fiction. There is no case where 4e ever advocated anything like changing the DC of a fictionally identical chandelier from level 5 damage to level 14 damage just because level 14 PCs were present. This notion is nowhere even hinted at in the rules.

Yep, now I can see where all this 'treadmill' stuff is coming from. If you actually play the way Gneech and others are describing, it's of course going to produce inconsistent nonsensical play.

Would anyone really give Level 25 Epic level PCs a Level 25 DC to pick a lock on a farmer's house?
Would anyone really give p.42 Level 25 damage for causing a chandelier to fall on a demigod?

Come on. This just doesn't make any sense. And it doesn't take any more or less skill to realize this than it does to set good, consistent DCs in 5e.

4e assumes you are giving level appropriate challenges to the PCs and the DC table is there to give you a reference point for level appropriate challenges.

But just to be clear, level appropriate doesn't mean exact level either. Whether its skill DCs, monsters, traps etc., you can throw challenges at PCs that are Level +/-5 pretty easily (not sure the exact range) for gradations of level appropriate challenge. This is done in published modules.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Yep, now I can see where all this 'treadmill' stuff is coming from. If you actually play the way Gneech and others are describing, it's of course going to produce inconsistent nonsensical play.

Would anyone really give Level 25 Epic level PCs a Level 25 DC to pick a lock on a farmer's house?
Would anyone really give p.42 Level 25 damage for causing a chandelier to fall on a demigod?

Come on. This just doesn't make any sense.

Nope, they wouldn't. But they might walk away from a game if they thought the game was asking them to do that. Presentation apparently matters.

 

[BryonD]

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.

OK

I've been in numerous debates with 4E fans calling me "h4ter" for not liking this feature.

So be it.

 

[bert1000]

Nope, they wouldn't. But they might walk away from a game if they thought the game was asking them to do that. Presentation apparently matters.

If you are arguing that 4e should have explained itself better, I'm not going to fight you there. It should have. I wish it did.

But shouldn't people have an "ahh hah" moment as soon as someone explains how it is suppose to work (or if 'suppose to' is a loaded phase, 'how it would work better')?

You still might not like it but at least you'd be basing the decision on a system that works (or at the least the system the other side is advocating).

These conversations are really getting silly. We basically have:

"If you do it this way, it doesn't make sense!"

"Don't do it that way."

"But that's what I think the book is saying."

"If you interpret it that way, the system doesn't work. Why don't you try it this way?"

"Prove to me that the book says that."

"I can't 100% prove it, but there is definitely evidence for doing it this way. The biggest piece of evidence is that the system doesn't make any sense under your interpretation. It makes sense this way. Why don't you try it this way?"

"No thanks, I already have a game I like."

 

[Imaro]

It really isn't all that explicit, though I suspect if you read through the adventure construction section of the DMG it definitely talks about constructing adventures that are thematically appropriate. DMG64 says "... set a DC that's appropriate to the character's level." and then discusses doors, stating "Don't put an iron door in a dungeon designed for 10th-level characters unless you intend it to be difficult for them to break through."

I don't think it's explicit about the fiction at all. It's telling you that the first priority is to set an "appropriate DC"... it then goes on to give an unclear example of what exactly is appropriate at that level/DC. IMO that's one of the problems with 4e's DC's... it tells you... "Hey set an appropriate DC then construct some appropriate fiction... but it doesn't give you a good basis to design said fiction. In the example above you cited is it saying majority of your doors should be barred? That the PC's should never run into wooden doors at that level or that iron doors are too hard?

I also think it's combination of objective and scaling DC's causes a certain incoherency in the game when it comes to challenges... as illustrated by the difference between a wooden door and the Cave Slime I mention below. One's DC is objective and the other one's is level appropriately based...

Later there are fantastical terrains. In DMG1 they are listed in a single group with stats, and it is explained that at each tier some aspects of the terrain may scale:


Those terrain elements which do scale, only a small subset of the total, note that fact.

The terrain text illustrates exactly what some of the people in here are talking about. If you look under Cave Slime, it states...

"This thin blue slime is harmless but extremely slick. A creature that enters a square filled with cave slime must succeed at an Acrobatics check or fall prone. Use the difficulty Class by Level table (page 42) to set a DC that's appropriate to the character's level."

The rules are specifically stating that this slime scales with the PC's levels... so even though their level and bonuses increase, their chance to not slip stays the same. This is exactly what I and some of the other posters are talking about in this thread... and this isn't the only one written like this.

Remember, the entire assumption of the encounter design section of the DMG is that you are building 'level appropriate encounters'. Here and there, as in the door quote above, they link this back to the concept that fiction is linked to level in a thematically appropriate way. Also note that this section is talking about combat encounters, not all encounters in general. 4e DMG1 breaks encounters down into 3 types, combat, skill challenge, and puzzle. Combat and skill challenge both work on the basis of level-appropriate fiction and DCs, but note that never is it assumed that ALL DCs in the world are level appropriate!

Again I am asking where is this stated. IMO, and I've brought this up before in other discussions, 4e confuses the matter because it is a mixture of objective DC's which are tied tightly to the fiction and scaling DC's that aren't. And, as seen in the case of some of the terrain the fiction is not always changed to match a changing in the DC's.

To address your other statement about level appropriateness and encounters... you listed 3 types of encounters... combat, skill challenge and puzzle. You state that combat and skill challenge are supposed to be built around appropriate level DC's, so that leaves... puzzles? How do you even make puzzles level appropriate? Of course they give rules for puzzles as SC's in which case you would design it as level appropriate.

The rules repeatedly talk about narrative sense. This is particularly true in the SC rules where it is stated that a proposed skill use must be accompanied by an explanation of the action and it must be relevant to the fiction. Thus for instance if a level 1 PC stated he was going to use an Athletics check to tunnel through solid stone with his bare hands, you wouldn't expect that suddenly all stone is 'level appropriate stone' with a tunneling DC of 12! No, the stone might have such a DC, in theory, but it certainly won't be within reach of this character. Not without powerful magic (IE something that grants a burrowing speed) that isn't normally available to level 1 PCs.

Yes but this has nothing to do with level appropriate challenges and everything to do with capability. In other words it is not the fiction around difficulty that is changing... it is the DM judging that the capability to address the challenge in that way is not there.

Other books often talk about uses for high level NPCs. For instance Draconomicon (both of them) often talks about encounters with high level dragons which are clearly intended to serve plot purposes (dragons as quest givers, patrons, puzzles, etc). Obviously fighting such a creature at lower levels isn't part of the envisaged course, but the book does mention that dragons might use attacks to cow or toy with PCs, or simply to gauge their ability. Clearly the implication is that the dragon's stats are high level dragon stats, not some sort of 'level scaled dragon' which is never discussed.

I don't own Draconomicon... so I can't really comment on it.

It would be quite feasible, though it isn't really discussed, to have adventures featuring high level hazards, creatures, etc that you're not intended to overcome by making checks. At least not THOSE checks. Presumably collapsing the tower on the ancient dragon as a mid-heroic adventure is going to involve finding some sort of way to pull that off that has accessible DCs. I don't see that this is outside the realm of what 4e envisages. I don't recall that earlier editions really discussed this kind of thing explicitly either.

This is my point though... not only is it not discussed... it's the opposite of everything the DMG 1 puts forth. In other words having level appropriate DC's is stressed throughout encounter design.

 

[Imaro]

If you are arguing that 4e should have explained itself better, I'm not going to fight you there. It should have. I wish it did.

But shouldn't people have an "ahh hah" moment as soon as someone explains how it is suppose to work (or if 'suppose to' is a loaded phase, 'how it would work better')?

You still might not like it but at least you'd be basing the decision on a system that works (or at the least the system the other side is advocating).

These conversations are really getting silly. We basically have:

"If you do it this way, it doesn't make sense!"

"Don't do it that way."

"But that's what I think the book is saying."

"If you interpret it that way, the system doesn't work. Why don't you try it this way?"

"Prove to me that the book says that."

"I can't 100% prove it, but there is definitely evidence for doing it this way. The biggest piece of evidence is that the system doesn't make any sense under your interpretation. It makes sense this way. Why don't you try it this way?"

"No thanks, I already have a game I like."

Except in some places that's exactly how 4e tells you to do it...

 

[bert1000]

Here's my theory: it means that, when the published Monster Manuals are used, PCs automatically graduate through the "story of D&D".

If you strip out the half-level bonus from PCs and NPCs/monsters, nothing changes mathematically when PCs confront level-equivalent challenges, but that progression/graduation is lost. (This is roughly what 5e does with bounded accuracy. Whether it's a good or a bad thing to lose the progression is obviously a matter of contention.)

I agree and I think there are probably some mechanical reasons for the spread as well. For instance, ability to add a bunch of bonuses from various sources (powers, etc.) and still not overwhelm the 'base' modifier.

I like 4e. It uses "subjective" DCs. I like Burning Wheel. It uses "objective" DCs. They're different games, intended to generate different play experiences.

I'm not even sold that subjective and objective DCs give you widely different play experiences (or have to).

I'm not even sure I agree with this. For instance, if - as a GM - I can't remember to give the rusty locks in the dungeon lower DCs than Vecna's secret lock, how can I be relied upon to remember that Vecna's secret lock is Super Hard (DC 30) while the rusty locks are pretty easy (DC 8)?

I'm not sure this is true either. I was just pointing it out as a position we can have a reasonable debate about vs. the strawman being served up.

The benefit of the 4e level charts is that you can easily know what DC equates to a 60% success rate. It makes it a lot easier to assign a DC to something and know what that means in terms of ability to overcome.

The Vecna example is a perfect example of not having this kind of ready calibration in 5e. In 5e, if you assign a Hard (20) DC what does that mean? I don't know 5e that well, but seems to mean that a 5th level Rogue PC could have at least a 50% chance of success. Another PC with tools prof and a +2 Dex would have a 25% of picking this diary as well. Is that what the DM had in mind in the fiction?

In 4e you know the %, so you can easily calibrate. You can say, you know this is actually one of Vecna's minor diaries but it still should be very very tough for 7th level PCs and doable but hard for 15th level PCs. It's not really an at level challenge for 7th level. It's a minor diary but it's still Vecna!

So you set the DC at 30 (a Hard for 15th Level). This gives the 7th level PCs ~ 20-25% chance of opening the thing for a skilled PC. It also rewards a PC who has spent extra resources (powers, magic items, etc) on boosting skill checks.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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).

As I said, NPCs used PC rules to determine their abilities, except in situations where the in-game reality diverged. An orcish shaman might not have the same spell access as a PC priest, but only in as much as a shaman is actually different from a priest within the world.

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.

As I said, the game mechanics reflect the in-game reality. Ogres could have better AC by wearing better armor, because that's how armor works within the world, as confirmed by the rules for when a PC wears armor.

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.

Until 4E came around, it wasn't something worth talking about, because it was just one of those obvious things that didn't need to be said. It wasn't a particular principle of D&D, because it was such a fundamental assumption of all RPGs that there was never any reason to question it. Kind of like how gravity affects everything, all the time, and you don't usually need to mention it unless it changes suddenly.

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.

Hit Points don't exist, but the realities of the game world which are reflected in the Hit Point mechanic do exist, objectively. It is objectively true that a given character possesses certain characteristics of luck, skill, toughness, and whatever else. It is a true fact of the game world that it takes an average of X number of 'hits' from Y weapon before a given character will be unable to continue fighting, for whatever definition of 'hit' you choose to employ. Or to use a less abstract example, it is a true fact of the world that some people can survive a fall from any height without dying. Hit Points reflect a real, objectively measurable phenomenon.

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.

Definitions are useful in as far as they allow meaningful discussion and inform decision-making. I consider the objective reality - the consistent-stat-representation-requirement - to be such a fundamental rule of RPGs that I would not consider games which violate that rule to still be in the same category of game. If someone refers to something as an RPG, then that word carries a lot of meaning to me, and I would be disappointed to later find out that it was this other thing - that it didn't follow the basic rules for what makes an RPG.

You can shift definitions around in any way that promotes decision-making and allows for discussion. Some people don't consider StarCraft or Magic to be real sports. Some people don't consider RPGs to be real games. By sticking with my definition, I'm trying to draw awareness to this phenomenon, and to get people to understand just how big of a deal it actually is. This is a huge deal. It's not something that should be changed without significant consideration. Breaking this rule will turn away a significant portion of the player base.