D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[BryonD]

So, to paraphrase "I'm right because I spin WotC's game business to be some sort of endorsement of my position, even though nobody has any hard facts whatsoever, and you're opinion is poopy because... I say so!" lol.

I stick to plain undeniable facts, nothing else. I could drag out all the various things that were known through the years, but I really am tired of the whole debate. Clearly you feel you were 'owed' something by WotC for having the gall to print 4e, and yet I've no business having any issues with 5e. Its amusing, but only for a few minutes.

Now, I bring up 4e in these debates sometimes, but only because I am interested contrast and comparison of game systems, play styles, etc. I don't give a crud about who got their feelings hurt 7 years ago or hearing about the same old stories about how we hated this or that. Its best to stick to talking about what it is, how it works, why it works that way, and what the results are. Anything else is pretty much just an aggravation to the people who probably only want to talk about those things.

It is easy to see why you think all the vitriol was pointed your direction. You are wildly distorting everything into attacks.
I didn't say I'm right. I said the market controls.
If the market wants something I don't, then the market still controls. I have nothing to do with it.

You persistent fiction that I've expressed the slightest suggestion WotC owned me anything is delusional and asinine.

 

[BryonD]

I hadn't looked at it that way. (Which is not to say you're wrong.)

To me, it seems more like your discussion with [MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION]: he wants to frame DCs by reference to Conan and Aragorn, you want to frame them by reference to paragon-tier PCs, and BryonD sees some radical contrast whereas - like you - I don't see the issue at all. What are Conan and Aragorn, after all, but (in 4e terms) paradigms of the paragon tier?


How do we tell if a DC is higher than what Conan can do? What is Conan's bonus to climbing, survival, etc? It seems to me that has to be determined on a genre basis - REH didn't pencil D&D stats into his margins.

It seems to me the real issue is whether the GM, in framing some challenge and assigning it a mechanical difficulty within the system, has regard to the likely prospects of success for his/her players' PCs, and to the likely pacing consequences of the players engaging that ingame situation via their PCs. Some systems make this easier for the GM who wants to do so (Robin Laws's HeroQuest Revised is probably the poster child here, but 4e is at least in the same general neighbourhood). For reasons I don't really understand some people seem to think that having regard to such considerations, as a GM, is inimical to "real" roleplaying. (But many of those critics still use hit point ablation as their combat mechanic!)

You are abusing the fact that I went along with the example provided.
I also compared the exact same blizzard covered mountain to peasants. You are leaving that out.
I'm boggled that you can't wrap your brain around the difference between a hard mountain is hard for everyone and the DC shifts to match that and the exact same hard mountain is deadly to peasants and easy to super heroes.
I've had 3E campaigns in which the players knew on Day 1, "if you go over there you will almost certainly die" and then more than a year later in real time the party was adventuring there. The DCs don't care what level the party is. I get the point that you can do this is 4E. But I dislike the idea that the world would EVER care what level the PCs are, so this whole conversation is about a wart 4E inserted into the mechanics.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Maybe we just never got that far into it, but we were never really in danger of running out of Surges. Maybe too much experience with older editions led us to being overly cautious about taking damage. In any case, the deadliness of the last encounter was usually mitigated significantly by everyone using their Daily powers in rapid succession.

I do remember in the beginning that the players were VERY cautious, if they had to use a healing surge they would try to opt to end the whole day. It took a little while, maybe 5 or 6 sessions anyway before they really got the idea that they could just roll with it. I think really at first none of us knew what to make of the healing mechanics, but then I just decided that I was going to make the players fear for their character's lives, and did it, and then the players kinda said "oh, this is cool" and etc. There was maybe overall a year of kind of playing and sorting out what exactly was going on, trying different things, etc. I suspect it takes about that long for any new game to really get sorted out at the table, unless it is a very focused game (IE we all understood exactly what Paranoia was all about after the first session).

 

[bert1000]

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has said a bit about this not far upthread,in the skill challenge context. What I would add is that even "calibrating the threats" is seen by some as departing too far from ingame "objectivity" (see eg [MENTION=10021]kamikaze[/MENTION]Midget's remarks a way upthread about confronting a dragon in a low-level adventure).

In the context of a combat, the 4e GM doesn't have Doom Pool-style currency to spend, but can just introduce more opponents! Of course GMs in other versions of D&D can do this too, but 4e supports it robustly in a way that other versions of D&D perhaps don't: first, its calibration techniques allow the GM to do this with a lot more precision than in other versions; second, 4e players have a depth of resources to draw on (surges, daily powers, etc) that allow them to respond to this sort of spontaneous amping up in a way that is different from other versions of D&D.

I can see the more robustness aspect, definitely. The 'calibrating threats' is an issue of playstyle. If you are 'scene framing' in 3e or 2e (or playing many types of published modules) you are also calibrating threats.

Because 4e is much more "relaxed" about how magic works, and about world metaphysics in general (eg there is no Anti-Magic spell, hence no notion of EX/SU/SP, etc), the GM can easily set a level appropriate DC and narrate in some sort of magical effect or burden to explain, in the fiction, where that hardness comes from - whereas in a game which anchors fiction and mechanics more tightly, the GM would be more likely to feel an obligation to explain the higher DC by reference to codified effects like a curse, a trap etc.

As for fate/luck, this is where some of 4e's "looseness of fit" comes into play. To give a concrete and (I hope) clear example, think about the heroslayer hydra, which gets a damage bonus vs an opponent that has marked it. In the fiction, this means that the heroslayer hydra will tend to overwhelm the hero who marks it (ie tries to solo it) compared to the harm it will do to a member of a group. But I don't think we therefore infer that, in the fiction, the hydra has some sort of magical power to slay heroes. It's a type of metagame device which helps make it true, in the fiction, that this hydra is fated to slay heroes.

Another example is the paladin's at-will power Valiant Strike, which grants a bonus to hit for every adjacent enemy. I think this is best seen as a metagame effect that rewards the player of that PC for making his/her PC be valiant - ie charge into the thick of things. It provides mechanical reinforcement for a type of fate/destiny/archetypical persona for that character.

On the non-character based DC setting side of things, a GM could set a cliff's climb DC very high not because of its slickness or lack of handholds but because the cliffs are fated never to be climbed. Or to be climbed only by a demigod. Etc. This is the same sort of thing, using DC-setting to convey ideas of fate or luck or destiny or archetype rather than more-or-less mundane facts about the gameworld.

A game based on "objective" DCs can still incorporate this sort of thing, I guess - there could be a known ingame state of "Fated not to be bested by mortals" which causes a +10 DC boost or something similar - but I think this tends to push against the whole thrust of an objective DC approach, which is DCs transparently anchored in more-or-less transparent ingame realities.

I hope that makes some sense.

This does make some sense to me. The character examples somehow resonate better with me and feel like more of a difference and "subjective DCs".

The non character ones I have a harder time with.

I agree with the second paragraph - though it's still a difference from a truly "embedded" objective system where that sort of resetting just doesn't work (eg the meaning of a certain mechanical element might just be the typical strength of a human or the amount of hurt a typical person suffers from being struck by a sword).

I mostly agree with the first example, except that if some of the link between DCs and fiction is the ineffable luck/fate/destiny/meta- element, then when that becomes irrelevant DCs can change (eg once the Cliffs of Insanity have been climbed for the first time, we might just handwave from then on - the meta-/story element that underpinned their high DC first time round has been discharged). I think 4e, and similar "subjective" systems, are much more flexible in this respect then the typical "objective" system.

I agree that 4e lays bare the maths. What I've tried to explain in this post how that laying bare, plus some other elements of the game (the associated looseness of fit, the largely independent system for depth of player/PC resources), allow a quite different approach to scene framing and narration of the fiction around action resolution from a more gritty, "objective" game.

I'll have to think about the fate element part. I agree that that there is this more looseness that COULD be applied, but not sure if this is just similar to the Slime discussion or not. You could just say 'fate' but is this a valuable tool or just an easy out?

 

[Burticusb]

So much Troll... plus all that click bait... I can't believe I succumbed to it, it's like a terrible car accident, I just had to look...

 

[bert1000]

Well I think my point was more worrying about the DC is kind of like putting the cart before the horse. If you want a paragon challenge, you build a paragon-level challenge. Then, by the sheer fact that the challenge you have crafted is designed to feel like something fit for paragon characters to tackle, it will make sense to have a paragon-level DC.

The other thing you can easily extrapolate from that is there is no actual difference between objective and subjective DCs other than the angle at which you look at them. After all, couldn't I say something like this...

"Okay, I want a challenge befit my paragon PCs. Let's go with mountain climbing during a blizzard while an avalanche is happening. That sounds sufficiently over the top for paragon. Okay, what DC would that skill check be..."

From there, I could look at a table, like the one presented by 4e, and find a DC based on what I crafted. OR... if I'm using some other system, I might look up what the DC is for climbing a mountain, DC modifiers for blizzards and avalanches (or similar obstacles) and establish my DC.

At the end of the day, I have a DC that's probably the same and the whole objective/subjective thing is just semantics.

This is where I'm at as well. Most of this DC discussion has been about playstyle. I think arguing over 'subjective' and 'objective' is just clouding the real discussion point. (Again, taking away the notion that you assign level DCs to fiction regardless of fiction which is both subjective and nonsensical).

One side seems to be arguing for exploration, sandbox type play while the other is arguing for scene framing play. Those are two different ways to play but in both you set a DC to a fiction and after that it doesn't change. In both, the DC is also relative to other DCs you have already assigned.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, I'd like to note that it was [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] that had a problem with Phantom Steeds, not me. Secondly, I have never said that I thought 4e made magic just be on par with skills. It just spread it around more and made the really most revolutionary capabilities more limited and more high level.

The phantom steed stuff was showing up by mid-level-spread in 4e - it gave one ritualist the power to kind of negate what should have been an important part of the challenge of the game for all 30 levels.

4e's approach to magic isn't a panacea - it had the problems you're talking about. And in comparison, my experience with 5e does not have those problems.

Your interpretation seems to make the spell useless. If not then its still useful, right? In fact it changes the attitude of the NPC to you. That has implications beyond skill checks.

Advantage on skill checks are the major use of that spell. The change in attitude to "friendly acquaintance" is little more than a fluff justification for why you have advantage on skill checks. It all means the same thing: you have advantage on skill checks to interact with the charmed person.

That has a use - you are now much less likely to miserably fail your skill check because you are a wizard with 10 CHA, and you might even get lucky! If you really need to get past the guard, and you don't have the luxury of waiting around for the paladin, give it a try!

Outside of combat the rules are not nearly so rigid. Unless an enemy is looking for you, or you blow your stealth check by some really significant amount, there's no reason to suppose that an enemy is automatically aware of anything more than that there was a sound/smell/stirring dust/whatever from 'over there'. They might or might not investigate and if they do you could certainly still make another check to try to slip away. This is exactly as it worked in 4e, where outside combat it was largely up to the GM to weigh different factors such as the surroundings, the degree of alertness of the enemy, what sorts of senses they rely on, etc. While invisibility is no guarantee, it is a huge benefit when trying to sneak, and not just because it counts as a form of 'concealment'.

Blow your stealth against the ancient red dragon in his lair who constantly looks for thieves and you're probably in big trouble, invisible or not, blow it against some orcs that you're shadowing, not so critical.

That is some weak sauce noodly-armed limp toothless DMing, man. "You fail your check and nothing happens" is no way to fail a check!

And still, you could do the same thing with a rock or a hedge to hide behind - "you fail your Stealth check and nothing happens" doesn't need Invis to work! So the point still stands: useless as long as you're not in a barren room.

Only if I'm planning to stick around and care whether people know I bamboozled a guard with magic. If I'm exiting the castle with the Baron's funds its not such a bad idea.

If it might take you more than an hour, it is.

Plus, there seems to be this assumption that a charmed creature is somehow putty in the PC's hand - my guards don't let their friendly acquaintances take a look at the baron's treasure. They'd be pretty awful guards if any friend of theirs could waltz in and do whatever! I've got friends I wouldn't trust near an open bag of potato chips let alone with treasure.

You're kind of ignoring the rules to amp up the power of these spells, and if that's how you play, it's no wonder your mages dominate the game. You're giving them all sorts of power ups that the RAW doesn't give them!

I'd think in almost any case where you're lost in a woods this would be quite handy, or are scouting for a fixed location, etc.

Flying doesn't mean you can find your way. You can see a hill off in the distance, it doesn't mean when you're back on the ground that you can do anything with that information - that's what Survival checks are for.

Beyond that I see no reason why you would need a check if you were say being levitated up to a balcony, or anything like that. Honestly, I haven't used the spell, but I can think of times when I would memorize it and a few situations where if I had it that it would have been handy.

The RAW says if you want to do anything more than move vertically, you've gotta climb - which means Athletics check.

I don't think our DM is particularly giving away anything. I just think the game we are playing is one where the action is pretty grounded. If you were wandering around in the real world with 5e invisibility on you, nobody would notice you, and likewise in our game. Now, obviously invisibility is something that is known to exist in the game world, so there will be SOME people keeping it in mind, but its still a huge boon.

Your table is reading all sorts of advantages into these spells that aren't written there. Your DM is making very generous rulings. You're running with Older Edition Instinct and gut-checks that make these things significantly more powerful than they're written to be. You're letting them bypass skill checks that they shouldn't be bypassing.

This isn't a problem if everyone's having fun, but it doesn't illustrate any flaw in 5e's design with regards to the power of non-combat magic.

It just illustrates that old habits are hard to break.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Advantage on skill checks are the major use of that spell. The change in attitude to "friendly acquaintance" is little more than a fluff justification for why you have advantage on skill checks. It all means the same thing: you have advantage on skill checks to interact with the charmed person.

I dunno about that. It seems to me that this spell is just describing the mechanical effect of friendship - i.e. A character has advantage on Charisma-based skill checks made against friendly acquaintances. It's easier to convince your friends to do stuff, than it is to convince a stranger of the same stuff.

But they're still a friendly acquaintance, with all that entails. Sometimes, that might mean there is no check necessary (if the DM determines that the outcome of your action is not uncertain). Most likely, asking the guard if you can go look at the treasure would not have an uncertain outcome, and your friendly acquaintance would just remind you that they would lose their job and/or head if the king ever found out. (And since this is your friendly acquaintance, the guard would also assume that you should care about their safety and well-being.)

At least, that's my interpretation of how they expect it to play out. Ruling Not Rules, though, YMMV, etc.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I dunno about that. It seems to me that this spell is just describing the mechanical effect of friendship - i.e. A character has advantage on Charisma-based skill checks made against friendly acquaintances. It's easier to convince your friends to do stuff, than it is to convince a stranger of the same stuff.

Yeah, that's substantively the same thing I was sayin': "being a friendly acquaintance" and "getting advantage on checks" are the same effect.

But they're still a friendly acquaintance, with all that entails. Sometimes, that might mean there is no check necessary (if the DM determines that the outcome of your action is not uncertain). Most likely, asking the guard if you can go look at the treasure would not have an uncertain outcome, and your friendly acquaintance would just remind you that they would lose their job and/or head if the king ever found out. (And since this is your friendly acquaintance, the guard would also assume that you should care about their safety and well-being.)

At least, that's my interpretation of how they expect it to play out. Ruling Not Rules, though, YMMV, etc.

There's probably some DM variance, but if, as a DM, you're letting people bypass skill checks by casting a spell, you're basically ramping up the power of that spell in most cases, and it's easy - and backed by RAW! - to rule consistent with a "magic should be helpful, but not generally an I Win Button" philosophy without changing the rules at all.

If you've got no issues ramping up that power, no harm!

If you're stealing the thunder from other players, time to start thinking about if police officers and security guards let their friends into sensitive areas unsupervised just because they're buddies.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One side seems to be arguing for exploration, sandbox type play while the other is arguing for scene framing play. Those are two different ways to play but in both you set a DC to a fiction and after that it doesn't change. In both, the DC is also relative to other DCs you have already assigned.

Agreed: 3.x (and, I think, 4e) described it as 'status quo' vs 'tailored' challenges. The correspondence* is obvious. ( but, I suppose you actually /could/ run a 'tailored' stand-box or 'status-quo' scene-framing. The former is a little less weird than the latter. You run your sandbox, but if the PCs decide to explore the lair of the Ancient Red Dragon at 1st level, they fight his little Kobold minions without arousing Big Red One's (pi) notice. If they go there at 15th, the Kobolds scatter and they fight the Dragon. Less intuitively, you could intentionally frame scenes in which the party is wildly over matched or faces no meaningful challenge from a 'foe.')


* Edit: apparently, not that obvious. Sandbox style + status-quo challenges would give you the standard-issue a priori world that the PCs explore at their own risk, while scene-framing + tailored gives you the standard-issue PC-centered narrative.