D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[FormerlyHemlock]

5E solves this incongruity in a similar fashion by allowing the DM to determine either during play or encounter creation if he thinks the kobold cave slime is interesting enough to require a roll. If the DM determines the slime isn't dangerous enough to be interesting, he says, "You cross over some slimy ground that sticks to your boots." If the cave slime is interesting, he determines the DC to cross it using Acrobatics or lets them figure out how to do it. If they come up with a means to do so that is foolproof, he allows it to work without bothering with rolls. 5E encourages very naturalistic play and rolling for non-combat challenges when it is interesting or appropriate to do so. If it isn't interesting or appropriate, don't bother rolling. 5E discourages unnecessary dice rolling.

This is really less about dice rolling and more about narrative pacing. If you're in a high-level game but you like the idea of fumbles, one way to do it would be to have your players pre-roll ten or twenty Dex checks at the start of the game session, and then when they cross the slime patch you just glance to see who fumbled it this time and check those rolls off as used.

In practice that's probably too much bother and most people wouldn't do it, including me. Not enough benefit for cost. But I do like having a possibility for even a +18 Stealth check to fail occasionally, because that way you can't just assume that ridiculous things succeed like "I kill everyone in the army by sneaking into their tents and cutting their throats individually. Their perception scores can't beat my Stealth even on a 1, so they're all dead now." I therefore use open-ended rolls for Stealth checks, so that a +18 can still fail roughly one in 120 times even against a mook, so I know about how many people the assassin can kill without getting caught.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Too bad. The "minion takes no damage from a miss" mechanic, alone, made them so much better than just low-hp/level monster hordes.

They were a really cool innovation. Can't recall if it was GURPS or BESM that innovated them, thought...

Although it may not have been the earliest implementation, a rule for such enemies exists in the The Slayers d20 (v3.0) game. Nameless Foes encouraged the DM to play fast and loose with the HP rules, if that was a style they wanted to encourage. Such a Nameless Foe had only 1-2 HP per Hit Die, but could ignore any hit that dealt less damage than that.

TTRPGs

MMO(RPG)

CRPG

These are real categories that already exist.

You could also categorize them by genre, era of production, or height of their elves. Different methods of categorization can be useful for different analysis. Thus, it might be useful to categorize some RPGs as Sim-RPGs (in contrast with Narrative-RPGs); or Silver-Age-RPGs (as contrasted with Bronze-Age-RPGs).

The limit on the number of ways in which information can be sorted grows exponentially with the data set.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I like that clerics are no longer purely healers. They feel more like holy warriors now. No longer there to support the other members, but to hammer down as servants of their god. Clerics feel like they have real combat purpose and power now.

Not to bash on 4E, but the lack of a pure healer was a significant point of contention during early 4E. Some people really like being the healer, but the system was telling them that they had to attack (and actually hit!) an enemy in order to grant an ally a few temporary Hit Points.

If some clerics could make great healers, and other clerics could make decent holy warriors, then that would put 5E ahead of all other editions (in this one aspect).

 

[Hussar]

Not to bash on 4E, but the lack of a pure healer was a significant point of contention during early 4E. Some people really like being the healer, but the system was telling them that they had to attack (and actually hit!) an enemy in order to grant an ally a few temporary Hit Points.

If some clerics could make great healers, and other clerics could make decent holy warriors, then that would put 5E ahead of all other editions (in this one aspect).

Thing is, that wasn't really true. At least not after a very short time. Lazy Warlord builds, for example meant you could largely be a pure healer. And even in phb only 4e, there were so many healing powers for clerics that making a healbot was pretty easy. Sure, you might have your basic attacks, but, beyond that, you weren't doing a whole lot of damage.

This criticism was typical of 4e criticisms in that it required a very facile understanding of the system. Anyone who actually spent a bit of time could certainly make a "pure healer" cleric in 4e.

 

[BryonD]

I don't think I understand this. What is a "narrative presumption"?

Do you mean the assumption that the area the demigods are exploring is more inherently magical than the area the 1st level PCs are exploring?

If that is the "presumption" that you mean, and if it is not wanted, then as [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has said you don't have to do it. Though as he has also said, you probably wouldn't bother wasting table time making players roll checks that can't fail to see if their demigods can keep their footing in cave slime of the sort found at the mouth of a typical kobold lair.

Ok, you don't understand it.
We discussed it at length many time before back when 4E was relevant.

Just be aware that there are people who fully appreciate the point you are making and still find it woefully inadequate compared to other options.

 

[BryonD]

It seems to me that it is really just the D&D concept of character progression in general that is doing the dictating here, isn't it? I mean you can't just fight orcs all day every day for your whole career in AD&D, but nobody would call this a problem with the game 'dictating the fiction' (IE telling the DM to put in Ogres at some point). So it hardly seems like a criticism of any specific version of the game. Nor is something like Cave Slime so critical an element of the game that saying it is being dictated really makes that much sense. You can leave out Cave Slime, nobody will miss it. You can use it once at one level and decree that in your world all Cave Slime is level 10, nobody will even raise an eyebrow. Frankly I doubt in all my time of DMing 4e I ever used one of these terrain types more than once anyway, so the whole thing is one of those mountainous molehills.

A lot of my issues with 4E are molehills.

4E was defined by its molehills.

4E was an ok game.

There are a lot of other games that achieved the same thing without asking me to ignore 25 different molehills every time I sat at a table.

Why should I play a game with molehills when there is a better game available?

 

[tyrlaan]

Ok, you don't understand it.
We discussed it at length many time before back when 4E was relevant.

Just be aware that there are people who fully appreciate the point you are making and still find it woefully inadequate compared to other options.

Gonna be honest with you, I'm not really understanding why you are responding to this thread, and here's why: You have made a few comments now which have raised questions of curiosity or requests for clarity. However, your respond to these can be summed up as "not going to explain".

If you are going to say something other people don't understand, and they politely inquire about, but then you don't contribute anything in response, what's the point of posting?

Fifth Edition doesn't have rules taking into account that you're trying to tell a story, and in my opinion, it is stronger for it. Since 5E isn't trying to tell a story - and rather, just lets the story happen however it unfolds, without regard to its dramatic or narrative weight - the place of the PCs within the story is irrelevant to the rules.

And somewhat as a side-effect, to prevent narrative dead-ends, it chooses to define the world in such a way that Bounded Accuracy is the result.

Not following your second comment here. Care to elaborate?

Other games may have other things to offer, but if they lose that, then they're not the same thing in any way that matters to me. Once the players are given authorial powers within the world (beyond what their characters control), or once characters can draw on the powers of narrative causality to distinguish themselves from NPCs, it spoils the illusion. There might still be some merit to it, as a game or story-telling exercise or what-have-you, but it's just not the same sort of thing.

(emphasis mine)

See, that last sentence there - "there might still be some merit to it". Of course there "might" be some merit to it! Just because you don't care for it, or categorize it differently in the catalog of your brain doesn't mean it is potentially without merit.

I have no interest in watching sports, so they have no merit? Clearly the basketball player that just signed a $44M 4 year deal will disagree with me.

Different than your tastes does not mean it's bad, but your comments read kind of like, "I like all kinds of fruit, well except pineapples since I don't consider them fruit because fruits are defined as not having spiky rinds. I'm sure there's some use for them though, like shining a car or lining a garbage can or something."

 

[BryonD]

Gonna be honest with you, I'm not really understanding why you are responding to this thread, and here's why: You have made a few comments now which have raised questions of curiosity or requests for clarity. However, your respond to these can be summed up as "not going to explain".

If you are going to say something other people don't understand, and they politely inquire about, but then you don't contribute anything in response, what's the point of posting?

Google me. You will find long detailed explanations on these forums.

I'm not going to rehash now pointless minutia regarding 4E.
But it is worth responding when the same old arguments of "but you just don't understand 4E" are pulled out.
I do understand. A lot of people understand. Posting a longwinded lecture on the finer points with the conceit that others are simply failing to appreciate 4E through their own ignorance is worth disputing now as much as it was then. Getting into the details of every issue, not at all worth as much now as it was then.

 

[Manbearcat]

To me, qualitative threat progression (tactical ==> operational ==> strategic) is way more interesting than just scaling up the quantitative DC ("it's really, really slippery slime") of a familiar threat. E.g. Aboleths aren't just upgraded orcs, they're qualitatively different and operate on a completely different, more strategic scale which could involve creating three minions a day every day for a thousand years and sending those minions out to capture more potential minions for you to dominate. If you think a Necromancer with 100 skeletons is bad news, consider that a master Vampire can vampirize an entire army of thousands of hobgoblins. Rakshasas infiltrate your organization and subvert it from within with telepathy and illusions (a la X-Men's Mystique) to defeat it in a way completely different from an orc chieftain or a hobgoblin warlord. Fixed DCs encourage graduation to new types of threats instead of just variations on the same old threat: Ultra Slippery Acidic Cave Slime.

It doesn't need to be in the stead of. Any siloing of the aspects of quantitiative and qualitiative threats away from each other is user-centered, not the machinery of the system.

The Powered By the Apocalypse engine has a subjective DC system for its conflict resolution, the same as 4e. In my current Dungeon World game, Aboleths from the Far Realm, their mind-slave servitors, and their "body-snatched" offspring are the PCs' primary antagonists. They've been running through the qualitative threat (I'm going to call it a) continuum (and put the arrows both ways; tactical <==> operational <==> strategic) you've depicted above.

* They have micro-decisions to make that involve the intensive investigation of an eerily abandoned/quiet mountain settlement (a la "Phantoms") to discover just what happened. They have micro-decisions about threat assessment and management of physical conflict.

* They have macro-decisons to make that involve striking out on a perilous, blizzard-threatened journey to a hobgoblin trading outpost and looking for friendlies/intel...or huddling in shelter for days as it blows over...while the timebomb continues to tick They have macro-decisions to make on whether or not to attempt to play off the vanity of the Ancient White Dragon that calls the highland realm home. Can they convince him to aid against this alien invasion of his land? Or will he just be inclined to eat them. If they do seek parley with the dragon, how to get leverage and/or irrefutable evidence of their claim?

They're still climbing harrowing, frozen mountains. They're still in peril of falling into a crevasse or a frozen-over sucking bog. They can still be burned to death by a Remorhaz vaporizing and pressurizing lower layers of permafrost and the steam geysers overwhelming them. But they're extremely powerful PCs (bordering on epic in DW's progression), so all the topographical or environmental hazards they face are turned up to 10 or "variations on the same old threat" as you put it.

4e plays the exact same way. The continuum of tactical <==> operational <==> strategic persists simultaneously with the "variations of the same old threat".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Another thought on Cave Slime.

Consider a system (of which some posters at least think 5e is an instance) which simply says: Cave Slime, DC 10 DEX (Acro) to avoid slipping prone when you walk on it.

How does this differ from 4e?

First, it doesn't expressly suggest that you might want to scale up your slime (from Green Cave Slime to, say, Ultra-violet Cave Slime) in encounters in more fantastic locations of the sort that higher-level PCs are more likely to engage with. Maybe there is even an implicit suggestion that higher-level PCs aren't more likely to have adventures in locations that are more fantastical.

Second, it suggests that rolling even for small chances is important. The 4e rules give the opposite suggestion: namely, don't leave DC 10 slime hanging around for parties where most of the PCs have +8 or better bonuses, but rather scale it up to slicker slime!

A further implication that might be derived from non-4e approach, in combination with 5e's bonus progression, is that it is good for the game that high level PCs have even a slight chance of slipping on bog-standard Cave Slime. There is a sense that nothing is beneath the notice of even high level PCs. Whereas 4e has a very robust sense that, as the PCs gain levels, the scale of their concerns, and of things that might trouble them, changes fundamentally.

Yeah, I agree. I think those observations are probably true to one extent or another. Obviously you can take the Vargasian approach and just not require checks for trivial Cave Slimes, but then again 5e's progression system makes it hard to HAVE really trivial checks. You have to actively fiat these things, which bothers me personally.

And in the end, it is almost certainly true that 4e produced a sort of super heroes like kind of aesthetic where high level characters really aren't much troubled by the ordinary muck and dreck of existence. The interesting thing is, in that system you can simulate the effects of luck, fate, an evil plot, whatever, by simply placing a level 20 cave slime in the path of a high level character who's 'walking down the street'. Its a sort of natural thing to do in fact. What is the fictional justification? Luck, fate, evil plot, run with it!

On the topic of contrafactual or latency: I think we can see that there are simply people who's exposure to different concepts in RPGs is not wide. I suspect that a lot of people have pretty much stuck to a few similar games that they were exposed to around the time they started playing, and the very thought of other RPG constructs is just hard for them to contemplate.

Consider AC as an example. AC in 5e is just as abstract a thing as it is in any other D&D. Most of your AC is just some sort of inherent attribute of your character, you start with 10 points of it, and even if your character is restrained (and thus certainly cannot dodge, parry, etc) you STILL have that 10 points of AC. What does it represent? It has to be much like hit points, largely luck, skill, etc. Yet there is a sort of fiction about the mechanics that says that 'plate armor is AC 16, that's a physically modeled realistic thing.' But then why isn't it 6 if you're restrained? Why, if 2/3 of that value is really some sort of abstraction is it that one would feel a requirement to have every single creature in 5e that is clad in plate armor be AC 16? I mean even in terms of the qualities of armor itself there's a huge difference between a 2mm thick 13th Century plate breastplate and a 16th Century 8mm thick high quality steel one. Its simply a convention, and IMHO its the conventionality that is desirable to some people. They want everything to conform to a pattern that is familiar. The qualities of the pattern are irrelevant, although many of them will vociferously object and attribute 'objective' qualities to AC, etc. It really has nothing to do with game design per-se in a technical sense.