I am currently trying to dive deeper into the mechanics behind 5e. I was fascinated with PF2s structured approach in this regard and therefore wanted to see how my favorite system (5e) compares to it.
5e overall is a little bit harder to understand, mainly because the material is not always thoroughly informative on how the underlying mechanics are implemented. Therefore you have to resort to reverse engineering to understand the actually quite beautiful mechanics that 5e employs.
Example: The monster building tutorial as outlined in the DMG is superficial at best, when it comes to explaining the reasoning behind why certain things are the way they are. The AngryGM wrote a good article on this, where he goes past the DMG and uncovers what lies beyond Monster Building 201: The D&D Monster Dissection Lab
Obviously not all concepts in 5e need this sort of reverse engineering to understand and are quite self explanatory, such as Bounded Accuracy.
But I still have some things that I want to learn.
For instance: How does HP and damage scale? For players and for monsters. This should tell me how long it takes the party to kill an appropriate level monster on average. That will allow me to understand the resource draining mechanics better and improve my own encounter building.
The monster scaling is outlined in the DMG, unfortunately the infos for the player character side are lacking, I found some spreadsheets but they are not as conclusive as I wish them to be. Therefore I do not know how much damage a player will do on average, at a certain level, and I cant infer the average TTK that the creators of 5e envisioned. That TTK is needed to calculate how much damage a certain monster will deal to a character on average, hence the resource draining.
The obvious approach here would be to reverse engineer as mentioned beforehand, but I'd be surprised if nobody had ever thought about this before. However, I haven't really found anything in the net yet. That's why I am asking you guys. Do you have good materials on the underlying mechanics of 5e? Maybe even something that deals with resource draining and encounter building? Perhaps I have missed something.
5e overall is a little bit harder to understand, mainly because the material is not always thoroughly informative on how the underlying mechanics are implemented. Therefore you have to resort to reverse engineering to understand the actually quite beautiful mechanics that 5e employs.
Example: The monster building tutorial as outlined in the DMG is superficial at best, when it comes to explaining the reasoning behind why certain things are the way they are. The AngryGM wrote a good article on this, where he goes past the DMG and uncovers what lies beyond Monster Building 201: The D&D Monster Dissection Lab
Obviously not all concepts in 5e need this sort of reverse engineering to understand and are quite self explanatory, such as Bounded Accuracy.
But I still have some things that I want to learn.
For instance: How does HP and damage scale? For players and for monsters. This should tell me how long it takes the party to kill an appropriate level monster on average. That will allow me to understand the resource draining mechanics better and improve my own encounter building.
The monster scaling is outlined in the DMG, unfortunately the infos for the player character side are lacking, I found some spreadsheets but they are not as conclusive as I wish them to be. Therefore I do not know how much damage a player will do on average, at a certain level, and I cant infer the average TTK that the creators of 5e envisioned. That TTK is needed to calculate how much damage a certain monster will deal to a character on average, hence the resource draining.
The obvious approach here would be to reverse engineer as mentioned beforehand, but I'd be surprised if nobody had ever thought about this before. However, I haven't really found anything in the net yet. That's why I am asking you guys. Do you have good materials on the underlying mechanics of 5e? Maybe even something that deals with resource draining and encounter building? Perhaps I have missed something.
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