This is why it would have been helpful to give examples of what a Hard, Very Hard, or Nearly Impossible skill check would be...designers who purposefully avoid the "common sense" math trap and help the DM figure out the difference between Hard and Very Hard. For DMs who know better than everyone else, they can just ignore those examples. It's something I would expect in a book that is designed to help me run a game.
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D&D 4E Where was 4e headed before it was canned?
- Thread starter vivsavage
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This is why it would have been helpful to give examples of what a Hard, Very Hard, or Nearly Impossible skill check would be...designers who purposefully avoid the "common sense" math trap and help the DM figure out the difference between Hard and Very Hard. For DMs who know better than everyone else, they can just ignore those examples. It's something I would expect in a book that is designed to help me run a game.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
The ability in 4e is a Trained Acrobat only ability if your ally was trained you could indeed do a help action in 4e. But doing a help action while your ally is falling.... is not generally on the table (a DM could easily make exception if both are acrobats and the ally was adjacent when falling)
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There's an additional wrinkle that's specific to 5e, I suppose, and that's the replacement of numerical modifiers with advantage or disadvantage. Since that's the default bonus/penalty, I could see it further restricting cool maneuver attempts.
Example: My lightweight fighter is up against a bruiser. Cinematically, the hero in this circumstance typically tries to outmaneuver the foe, using his greater agility, etc. Buying into this, I want to try a classic move, wherein my character somersaults over the foe to then strike at his back.
It's the middle of combat, so having a long discussion about the different ways to interpret this is gauche; the DM needs to come up with a ruling. She assigns a DC to an Acrobatics (or should it be Athletics...) and if the player pulls it off, they get a bonus, which in the 5e game defaults to Advantage.
As soon as the fighter hits 5th level, this maneuver (even with a reasonable DC) is not worth it, unless the DM allows the full compliment of attacks after the somersault (which I have not seen, and I've seen the maneuver attempted more than a few times). The penalty for failing the Acrobatics check would be...advantage on attacks against you? The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic, streamlined as it is, lends itself to boxing in a bit more than at first blush. Maybe that's a fair trade for not tracking modifiers, though.
Imaro
Legend
Are you kidding? Only one person (ok 2 if you count kid Bran climbing along the castle walls...but we know that doesn't last long) in GoT with very specialized training does anything approaching parcour and that's Arya. So pretty easy here without some kind of training that justifies it like Acrobatics or being a Rogue... you can't even try it. Furthermore, even with her training, Arya is rarely seen doing things I would considered parcour (thus a hard difficulty for it's baseline) and certainly nowhere near the level of feats seen in Wuxia...this is pretty simple IMO.
Now the fact that you as a player may be thinking because you have acrobatics or are a rogue you should be swinging from chandeliers with ease and somersaulting from building rooftops without breaking a sweat doesn't make my feelings or DC's wrong it means your expectations and mine aren't aligning and we should probably discuss why a game whose tropes and themes are pulled from GoT (as opposed to Ninja Scroll) invokes those expectations for you?
I don't agree with this.
The only point of resemblance that I see is the need for judgement. Beyond that I don't see any resemblance at all. In 5e D&D there is the need to maintain some sort of in-ficiton relationship between magic and non-magic, and the need to maintain the integrity of the resource system, and the need to have some sense of probabilities to ensure that the difficulty is verisimiltudinous. These are the break points for the system (as it has been articulated by various posters in this thread who are advocating for its freeform character).
None of those sorts of pressures operate in Cthulhu Dark. It has no break points in this sense.
Which is one reason why I find the idea of 5e = freeform extremely odd.
A more complex system than Cthulh Dark but still one which is far more freeform than 5e in part because of the lack of break point issues is Prince Valiant.
In Cthulhu Dark nothing turns on this. Different tables can set that dial differently and nothing will matter. Whereas in 5e, because of the above-mentioned break points, it matters a great deal.
4e's solution is DCs-by-level. In the context of skill challenges this includes advice on the distribution of hard and medium and easy DCs within a skill challenge of a given complexity.
It's not as elegant as (say) HeroQuest revised but it's quite different from 5e.
In my 4e game I remember one occasion where the ranger, who could safely fall super-far with good Acrobatics and a Safewing Amulet, dove over a cliff to catch the invoker/wizard who'd been pushed over it.
This was easy to resolve in 4e. I've got no idea how it would be resolved in 5e - are there rules for using a DEX check to reduce falling damage?
But anyway, I think this is the sort of thing @Garthanos had in mind.
Hussar
Legend
missing my point. My point is that parcour isn't supernatural at all.It is very much within the realm of the possible. So, in a "realistic" GoT style game, why can't I do it? Your default answer is no. Why? it's not like I'm doing anything magical.
See this? This right here? this is the Wall of DM that we slam into when we have to deal with the "DM's Gut Feeling".
Hussar
Legend
I think the idea is to catch them and then cushion their fall so that they do not take damage. 5e has no mechanics to express this at all. 4e did since acrobatics could be used to reduce fall damage.
Here's a 5e rules question that I can't find the answer to. Does forced movement into a dangerous area grant a new saving throw? And, if so, what is the DC? Or is that a 4e ism that's stuck in my brain?
Here's a 5e rules question that I can't find the answer to. Does forced movement into a dangerous area grant a new saving throw? And, if so, what is the DC? Or is that a 4e ism that's stuck in my brain?
Imaro
Legend
But we aren't doing a realism based game we are doing one with themes, inspirations, and tropes from GoT (if not don't confuse the issue by using GoT because it's not based around realism). When we look to that media as the inspiration...the main characters doing parcour easily and often doesn't fit the tropes themes, style or genre plain and simple.
EDIT: I'm also curious but is parcour something the average person can do without training? If not I'm still unclear on what the argument would be to allow it without training in acrobatics or a similar skill (or having a class that would have knowledge or usage of it) even in a realistic setting not based on GoT?
Can you explain to me why easy and often performed parcour fits the source we are drawing from...
EDIT: If not, we aren't running into a GM wall, we are running into a plyer who isn't buying into the tropes, genre, mood, etc of the game they've agreed to play wall. They want to play a gonzo kitchen sink realism inspired game not one drawing on GoT.
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