D&D 5E Quick Question on AC and Proficiency bonus

[abirdcall]

The issue is compounded because I am playing a hill dwarf rogue. My highest ability score is Wis at 16, the Con and Dex both at 14. We have a war domain cleric with an AC of 20, a greatweapon fighter presumably around 18, and a bard at 14 or so. So half the party has lower AC than the goblins.

I'm testing the system to see how mandatory it is to max out Dex as a rogue. I have a fallback plan where I'd instead e a mountain dwarf and use Strength to attack - despite being a rogue, I don't put a high priority on Stealth. That would give me even worse AC now for a better AC later, but I think I need a finesse weapon to sneak attack, so thats a problem.

I do have an amazing +7 Perception at 1st level.

About the treadmill effect, I see it as a definite problem and I am excited to see it gone - to what degree it is gone we'll see as we proceed.

As a side not, we're now trying 5E instead of moving to PF2. PF2 seems to have so many 4E and 5E-isms in it I decided to try the real thing first.

Check out your 5th level Rogue ability.

1/round you can halve the damage you take from an attack.

Then at 6th level you take half/no damage from Dex save effects instead of full/half.

That is on top of your HP which are going up every level.

(Btw, a good place to look at balance is 5th level. Tier 1, levels 1-4, are considered apprentice tier. The experience table is designed to make the majority of the game occur in Tier 2, levels 5-10. Characters should have their basic things at 5th level, 7th at the latest.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

Goblins shouldn't stop being a threat because you're experienced.

Maybe not /just/ because you're experienced. But, that was certainly the case in the classic game, from '74 through 1999...

They just stop being a threat in small numbers. No amount of CR 1 Goblins are a threat to level 10 PCs in 4e, so the game just never sends them against you anymore. Instead the Goblins you meet are just magically always your peers.

While you could do that in 3e or 4e - 3e made it easy to level up old enemies by, well, literally giving them class levels, and 4e's math was straightforward enough you could dial any creature up or down. A 3e 20th-level Goblin Warrior with no particularly interesting magic items was just going to be hitting you (4 times a round, if he stood relatively still), and would take a bit to beat down, but was otherwise uninteresting. But only because that's what the DM made him. (You could do the same thing in 5e, really, just make a goblin NPC Champion Fighter.) 4e was a little different. Monsters and PC were different, didn't use the same rules, and EL was relative to the PCs. So an ordinary goblin might be a level 1 or 2 'standard' skirimisher, but the same goblin (same 100 xp value) to a newly-paragon party of 11th level (or, really, any party much above 5th) could be statted as a level 9 or 10 "Minion" skirmisher. Putt hundreds of them together into a unit ("swarm") and you can take them to a much higher level-equivalency. Of course, you could also, as in 3e, imagine a single goblin simply being higher level, just like the PCs, though if you used the DMG method of giving him a class & level, he'd be an Elite with a few more, presumably more interesting, powers than the ordinary goblin.

I don't think a couple of town guards are in any way capable

Early on, numbers were run, and, yeah, a hundred fairly ordinary archers could generate the DPR against high AC to hypothetically kill a dragon. There were many ways it could go wrong, dragon fear not least among them, though.

But, in basic stats, until you bring AE magic & the like into it, being outnumbered tells /very/ heavily in 5e, thanks to BA.

of what you suggest and the Master shouldn't even be rolling a check if its something a novice could easily do. That is on the DM to decide if a check is even needed and what the DC is, if a check is even required. Masters might have a DC 10 for a task that a Novice has it at DC 20.

The basic "play loop" is such a powerful DM tool, it's a real mistake to overlook it and cut straight to hypothetical checks.

 

[Salthorae]

Early on, numbers were run, and, yeah, a hundred fairly ordinary archers could generate the DPR against high AC to hypothetically kill a dragon. There were many ways it could go wrong, dragon fear not least among them, though.

Ok, sure... I'd think it'd be more like thousands because of the dragon fear, but sure Assuming something as tough as a dragon but without that fear effect, yes I could see hundreds of mooks being able to do it given enough time.

I'm not sure that's a problem for me though.

I'm also not sure that I have a problem with the opposite concept of heroes still being threatened by an Orc warband just because they're 20th level fighters.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

That is on the DM to decide if a check is even needed and what the DC is, if a check is even required. Masters might have a DC 10 for a task that a Novice has it at DC 20.

We know when a check is called for, because the bonus to the check is within 20 points of the DC. Any other solution is inconsistent.

If your DM is assigning a different DC to two different characters, based solely on the fact that one is supposed to be much more skilled than the other, then they recognize that the math in the book is insufficient to generate a plausible narrative. They're essentially introducing a house rule to patch over how terrible the mechanics are in the book. While that's certainly preferable to just going ahead with the garbage mechanics that they gave us, it doesn't let the designers off the hook for introducing such a bad system to begin with.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think a couple of town guards are in any way capable of what you suggest and the Master shouldn't even be rolling a check if its something a novice could easily do. That is on the DM to decide if a check is even needed and what the DC is, if a check is even required. Masters might have a DC 10 for a task that a Novice has it at DC 20.

That's kind of completely not how D&D works, though. Like, you're welcome to run it that way, and I'm sympathetic to running it that way, but that is absolutely not RAW or RAI. Particularly not the different DCs. DCs, in D&D, are not set "to the character". That would make for a completely different, wildly different system.

So basically you're literally ignoring the rules, and using DM fiat to plaster a pretty obviously wonky issue that is the direct result of using a d20 for these rolls, combined with having a relatively small bonus to the roll (even for the "master"). Again, I'm sympathetic to that, but claiming that somehow "proves Saelorn wrong" is absolute and total arrant nonsense.

Yes, if you ignore the rules, and use DM fiat, you can fix almost any issue with any system. But that's what you're going to have to do.

The reality is that isn't much of an issue in an actual play, though, simply because in 5E (and indeed most versions of D&D except 3.XE/PF), this scenario just doesn't come up very much. 5E particularly makes it very unlikely due to the "Working Together" rules, which means the master almost certainly has someone else in the party helping him, which means he's making the check with Advantage.

But please don't tell people the system isn't wonky here. This is a specific issue with all systems that use a d20 and a small bonus as the main roll.

We know when a check is called for, because the bonus to the check is within 20 points of the DC. Any other solution is inconsistent.

Whilst they're obviously papering over a hole and claiming there is no hole, which is ludicrous, it's not true to say anything with 20 points warrants a check. I mean, you can run it that way, but that's also not really RAW or RAI - though less severely, because you're not making up rules, you're just overusing them.

The moderating factor is generally if something is fairly easy, you shouldn't require a check, even if it theoretically has a DC of 5 or 10 or whatever.

In reality, because of the way 5E works, and the Working Together rules, this is rarely an issue - but it's certainly an underlying flaw, and ignoring it or pretending it's not a flaw is pretty bloody silly. It's something that becomes obvious as a flaw the moment the players forget the Working Together rules and start making separate checks on something like Arcana - because of the high variance and low bonus, especially at lower levels, you'll frequently have a character who it seems it is um... unlikely... would know that who actually makes the check. The difference between 10 INT, no skill, and 16 INT, skill is only +5, so the odds of the other guy knowing rather than the wizard are actually pretty good. If D&D used 3d6 or something it'd be a completely different story, of course. But it doesn't. Which is cool. But we can't pretend the issue isn't there - it's just rarely a big deal.

 

[Charlaquin]

As a mechanic, the scaling bonus is invisible in one scenario, while remaining powerful and elegant in every other scenario.

Elegant is not the way I would describe a system where only a very narrow range of monster CRs can both hit you and be hit by you.

It's significantly better than the patchwork of half-baked ideas that we're suffering under in 5E.

I disagree.

Because it makes for a compelling narrative when the dragon-slaying heroes are defeated by goblins?

Y... Yes? The endless horde of ostensibly weak monsters overwhelming the individual strong hero is pretty classic, and I consider it a serious problem that it wasn’t possible until 4e, and 4e’s solution was pretty kludgy. 5e finally fixed it, by keeping target numbers within a fairly narrow range and letting accuracy bonuses be genuine bonuses.

Seriously, this is supposed to be a level-based game. Your level is supposed to actually mean something.

And it does. Plenty, in fact. It means you can survive hits from more powerful opponents, or more hits from weaker ones, and it means you can kill things in fewer hits (and/or you can land more hits in one go), and most importantly it means new cool things you can actually do instead of just doing the same things with bigger numbers (but the same actual probabilities).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Whilst they're obviously papering over a hole and claiming there is no hole, which is ludicrous, it's not true to say anything with 20 points warrants a check. I mean, you can run it that way, but that's also not really RAW or RAI - though less severely, because you're not making up rules, you're just overusing them.

If the DC is 13, and the DM says not to roll because your bonus would be +10, then they are arbitrarily determining the outcome in direct contradiction to the game mechanics. The game mechanics dictate that a roll is required whenever the outcome is uncertain, and we know that the outcome is uncertain because it's possible to roll above or below 13.

If the game falls apart when you try to apply the rules, then something has gone horribly wrong with the system.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If the game falls apart when you try to apply the rules, then something has gone horribly wrong with the system.

I'm pretty sure that at some point in the DMG it literally says not to roll on stuff that isn't dramatic and where failure is unlikely. I feel like I'm Goldilocks trying to arbitrate a dispute between some bears here or something. You want to go for an obviously ludicrous "always roll" scenario. The other two want to go for an outrageous and rules-vandalizing "just change the DC for different people!" scenario.

Both are awful and wrong.

EDITED because I quoted the wrong person.

5e finally fixed it, by keeping target numbers within a fairly narrow range and letting accuracy bonuses be genuine bonuses.

Fixed is an overstatement. 5E hasn't fixed the problems because they're basically impossible to fix. It has, however, considerably improved the situation, to the point where it's rarely an issue in actual play. This was also true in 4E, I note.

 

[Charlaquin]

It seems inevitable that, as you progress, there will be greater challenges that offer the same net difficulty as lesser ones did when you were less capable. The d20 makes that kinda inevitable, really. You might need a natural 13 at both 1st level and 20th, either because the DC has risen from 15 to 19 under 5e BA, or from 17 to 36 under 3e skill ranks.

Not so. Target numbers are fixed in 5e. An easy task is always DC 10 (when a check is required to resolve it), a medium task is always DC 15, a hard task is always DC 20, etc. A creature in chainmail always has AC 16, a creature in breastplate always has AC between 14 and 16 depending on its Dex, etc.

Whether the system is tuned to the point that you can remotely predict how difficult a later challenge might be is another question, entirely of course. At 20th, an utterly optimized 5e character might miss that DC 19 on a really bad roll, while a completely un-optimized one might make it, on, well, a natural 19 (they're still just barely 'on the die' is what I mean); conversely their 3e equivalents might be looking at auto-success for the optimized character and utter impossibility for the un-optimized one.

And that’s a problem?

If there's real progression going on, there really /should/ be a level that a past threat becomes no threat at all.

I strongly disagree.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm pretty sure that at some point in the DMG it literally says not to roll on stuff that isn't dramatic and where failure is unlikely. I feel like I'm Goldilocks trying to arbitrate a dispute between some bears here or something. You want to go for an obviously ludicrous "always roll" scenario. The other two want to go for an outrageous and rules-vandalizing "just change the DC for different people!" scenario.

Both are awful and wrong.

EDITED because I quoted the wrong person.

Thank you for playing the voice of reason. Your interpretation is consistent with my own reading of the rules.