D&D 5E "The problem with 5e" is the best feature - advantage

[DEFCON 1]

The reason why I don't stack Advantage is because trying to get multiple versions of it does one thing that I don't want to see... which is slow the game down.

Whether it's a whole heap of +1s and +2s from the 3EPF games... or multiple Advantages in 5E... they both result in the same thing: Players spend inordinate amounts of time looking for and discussing with the other players all the different ways to gain and milk the bonuses. If there was a list of 50 ways to get Advantage and having multiple ones stacked... we'd see every player spend their turn running down the giant list trying to find all the different ones to try and grab. All just to make it more likely you hit on your turn (and/or crit on your turn.) But the game already make the chance to hit quite generous, so the need to make it more and more likely seems unnecessary to me.

Personally, I don't see that as engaging with the world... I see that as one more sheet of paper the players have their faces buried in. Now granted... other players play the game differently, and for them... maybe looking at a sheet of mechanical bonuses for narrative events is their way to do so. I just don't happen to agree.

For me... "engaging with the world" means acting narratively with what the story presents... making character choices that make sense in reaction to what is happen. And all that occurs without any mechanical bonus or motivation.

The character runs and dives behind the stone wall as the arrows rain down upon them because it makes sense to do so... NOT because "I get a +2 bonus to AC". Or the players says "My character is going to leap off the ledge onto the back of the hill giant" because that just seems like a cool move to make, NOT because if they do that then they know it will count as an Advantage.

As opposed to a player on their turn who says "Okay, so I need to get Advantage on this attack, so let's see... I'm going to do this thing here. And I can get a second Advantage if you cast this spell on me. And the third Advantage I can get if I flank, so let me move my mini over here. Oh! And if I do this action I can get a fourth Advantage! So let me do that! Am I missing anything else? Is there any other Advantage available to me right now? Anyone? No? Okay, well them let me roll 5d20 for my attack." That to me is actually "engaging with the board game", not "engaging with the world".

But as well all know... many of the players of D&D consider the board game the most important part of D&D (which is cool, and I don't begrudge them that). I just don't think that way and don't find the game to be as fun when thinking that way.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The issue is that in 5e, virtually every ability is something you get from your class and level. You gain a level, you get new abilities on a nice little schedule. You take a feat, that's what the player wanted. You gain a level in a class, it's what the player wanted. If you're playing a Battlemaster Fighter who made it to level 15 in Dungeon of the Mad Mage and you compare them to a Battlemaster Fighter who made it to level 15 in Descent to Avernus, what exactly do they do differently? The answer: Basically nothing. You picked the ancestry, you picked the background, you picked the class, you picked the feats, you picked the attributes, etc.

The real answer: Far more than any AD&D character. First you aren't a generic cookie cutter fighter with utterly vanilla abilities. Second you're comparing a fighter to a battlemaster fighter. Given that there are ten official fighter subclasses then you're comparing one fighter in ten to all fighters.

Then there's the fighting style. In AD&D after about level 4 Swords Were The Best Weapons. There were two basic viable paths for melee - greatsword and longsword with one having a higher AC and the other doing more damage. Thrilling. Meanwhile by comparison in 5e has multiple different styles; the polearm, the greatweapon, and sword and board are all viable in their own right. (Two Weapon isn't really in either system).

The core fighter feats of Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, Sentinel, Heavy Armour Master, Crusher (and to a lesser extent Piercer and Slasher), and Martial Adept all change what you do from round to round - and that's if you don't get something like observant or actor.

And then two battlemaster fighters can do things very differently. One might be going for debuffs like Menacing Attack and Trip, one for hits like Precision Attack and Riposte, and more. The maneuver one comes close to spamming another might not use at all.

Compare this to, say, 1e/2e AD&D. Sure, on it's face, what every character can do comes from the class and level. Indeed, at level 1 you certainly do have identical characters. However, it doesn't take very long before your character finds meaningful magic items.

The big thing 5e (and late 4e) have done with their approach to magic items is removed almost all the vanilla junk. I'm sorry, but a +2 sword is not a meaningful magic item. Meanwhile you still get magic items in 5e. The number is reduced - but what is particularly

In earlier editions, your character's abilities was determined not by what you could select at the beginning of the game, but by what your individual character actually accomplished. You have the ability to knock down doors easily because you found that. You have a story behind how your PC came into possession of these fantastic abilities.

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't true.

You claim that Bob, your largely mechanics free fighter is given some sort of personality and distinctiveness by the fact his magic items are what he himself has done. But then Bob dies and he's replaced in the party by Boc. The party needs a fighter to hold the front lines so they give Boc all Bob's kit. Then after a couple of adventures Boc dies and is replaced by Bod who gets his kit.

Bob went through the Demonweb Pits and gained his equipment from there. Boc took that and then replaced some of his equipment in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Bod is now carrying the equipment from both. Does this somehow mean that Bod has been through both the Demonweb Pits and the Dungeon of the Mad Mage?

Because that is what you are claiming it would mean. In reality of course Bod is shown very clearly by this example to be a blank slate of a character, made interesting only by what he wears and what he holds, two things that are only partly due to their history. And because Bod is clearly a blank slate, it shows up just how much of a blank slate Bob and Boc both were. For that matter if Bob gets mugged, his items stolen, and chained to an oar of a slaving ship does that also take away his personality?

Your magic items are not a track record of what the character has done. They are a track record of what the party has done. And it gets confused with the character when characters are functionally immortal. And the fighter is in your model nothing but a walking trophy cabinet with all the woodenness implied. (And no, I'm not saying that trophies are a bad thing. I'm just saying they aren't a substitute for a personality).

Before you say "But you could have an almost identical fighter in 5e" the situations are very different. In the old school case there has been one decision made - to be a fighter. In the 5e case the player has chosen to first play a fighter, then a battlemaster, then chosen identical feats, and even identical battlemaster maneuvers. Rather than just picking the same class you've made

Still, the very idea that you could have a character "build" before you even begin playing the game and you would have a reasonable expectation of having those exact abilities when you reached high level and nothing else of consequence is almost anathema to 20th century D&D.

Thank goodness we aren't in the 20th Century. With editions that are running TSR into the ground.

Of course if you were playing 20th Century D&D using the rules as written you would have an expectation of having a literal castle and small army when you reached high level. Once again with stuff substituting for a personality.

In other words, it's a way to backdoor complain that in-game rewards in 5e are godawful. That magic items have been so deprecated and depowered in the name of not giving out too much power that they can feel like they're barely worth carrying with you. Like finding that +0 longsword really does feel kind of like finding a silver dagger used to.

If you're just going to invent bad magic items then no wonder you have a problem. A +0 longsword isn't per se a thing. And a silver dagger still felt better than the tedium of a +1 weapon because it actually did something rather than just added to the dice as nothing more than a stopgap until you found something bigger.

Even worse, there's no clear purpose for all this gold you're finding. You might find 10,000 gp, but once you've got full plate armor what exactly is it good for? You're not bringing hirelings. You can't buy items. There's no benefit to hoarding gold. Most PCs should retire by level 5 or 6.

This I actually agree with.

 

[Vaalingrade]

If I ran 5e, I'd have Advantage/Disadvantage give +2/-2 and stack. Done. Math is not so hard or so onerous that the game should be as afraid of it as it is.

Things are still streamlined as there's no outlier numbers, just 2's.

Doesn't help with the fact that this 'streamlining' has hogged basically all the design space in buffs and debuffs, but limited design space is apparently part of the point.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The reason why I don't stack Advantage is because trying to get multiple versions of it does one thing that I don't want to see... which is slow the game down.

Whether it's a whole heap of +1s and +2s from the 3EPF games... or multiple Advantages in 5E... they both result in the same thing: Players spend inordinate amounts of time looking for and discussing with the other players all the different ways to gain and milk the bonuses.

To me stacking advantages are good if they do any of a few things:
1: Cast a stronger light on the local specifics of the gameworld.
2: Promote risk taking and thus excitement or otherwise change what you'd do
3: Promote teamwork and party cohesion.

Flanking, for example, I consider an excellent bonus. It's all about the specific positioning in the setting. It takes two people. And in most cases someone's going to have to go deeper into the enemy lines than they normally would, so there's a risk involved (unless you can walk round the enemy and back in one move...). The conversation "Bob? Can you distract him by going there so I can shank him" I actively consider a good thing.

Prone's another good example. It's immediately relevant to the gameworld, and when someone knocks an enemy prone it's more so one of their friends can follow up than so they can.

A good third case would be the 4e classic "Tim the Enchanter wants to squash all the goblins under a summon bigger fish. Can we push those wolves so they'll also end up underneath it as well?" Again this promotes teamwork, works with what's going on in the world, and changes the character's actions based on what's going on in the world.

Table crosstalk as you work as a team to set things up for each other and change what you'd do to work together better rather than in isolation is IMO good. Hunting your character sheet for conditional modifiers (and I'm not saying that 4e was short of those) is IMO not because it pulls you away from the gameworld and the party.

 

[Undrave]

You don't need to find the higher grounds. You don't need to flank the giant. Just get advantage by doing one thing and you're good. And a lot of classes have ways to easily give themselves or others advantage. So you don't need to engage with the world as much! Just show up, and get ready to rumble!

So... how do we fix this?

First, Advantage is not a 2nd d20 roll. It's a +1d6 bonus. This is roughly the same as advantage (advantage is equivalent to +5 if you have 50% chance of hitting. If your chances are very low or very high, the impact is less. So +1d6 is roughly equivalent).

Second advantages stack - you could get more than a d6. But for things not to get completely crazy, (good or bad: disadvantage stacks too!), the extra D6 don't add, it's a "take the highest roll". So if you have advantage from 3 sources, one source of disadvantage, roll the 1d6 twice, take the best, and add this to your 1d20 roll. So if you have a lot of advantages, the bonus will approach +6 - so engaging with the world to make a fight go easier on you and harder on the enemy is worth doing.

Am I on to something?

I will say, I think the game could benefit from divorcing advantage from the rules for teamwork. And there are probably some advantage-granting features that might be better as a bonus die, in the fashion of Bardic Inspiration. But for the most part, I think Advantage/Disadvantage is fantastic, and shouldn’t be messed with too much.

Could there be some other separate bonus that comes from interactions with the environment? In other words, Advantage comes from your character, Disadvantage from enemies, and ___ from the environment?

Simple: allow sources of advantage to stack. We do. We have no limit to the number of d20s you can roll if you have additional sources of advantage (or disadvantage). We treat them as +/- d20s, so three sources of advantage and one source of disadvantage nets two sources of advantage, or 3d20's rolled.

I think these are all interesting. Personally, I would like to see advantage granted by PCs (others or yourself) just don't stack, but you can stack other sources of advantage (the terrain) just so there is an incentive to interact with the environment.

Advantage that doesn’t stack encourages people to get stuck in.

Now what would be good is not stacking advantage, but allowing people to spend advantage to do more complicated things.

• Sacrifice advantage to be more precise with a hit - roll the weapon damage again and add it.
• Sacrifice advantage to knock the enemy prone or disarm them if you hit on the attack.
• Sacrifice advantage to move both of you 5 feet in one direction if you hit.
• Sacrifice advantage to give a friendly character within 5’ advantage instead.

That is also a really cool idea.

 

[Plaguescarred]

IIRC WoTC also said that they introduced (dis)advantage to limit the ammount of bonuses and penalties applying to rolls to reduce complexity as a way to simplify the game mechanic.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think these are all interesting. Personally, I would like to see advantage granted by PCs (others or yourself) just don't stack, but you can stack other sources of advantage (the terrain) just so there is an incentive to interact with the environment.

That seems easy enough to do. Just tag advantage with various types - tactical advantage, terrain advantage, equipment advantage, magical advantage, etc. and have different “types” of advantage stack. Only thing is, I feel like getting to roll additional d20s and pick the best result has diminishing returns. The first advantage is huge. The second advantage pretty much insures you’ll succeed on most rolls, unless the target number is very high. The fourth + advantage is more or less superfluous.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Table crosstalk as you work as a team to set things up for each other and change what you'd do to work together better rather than in isolation is IMO good. Hunting your character sheet for conditional modifiers (and I'm not saying that 4e was short of those) is IMO not because it pulls you away from the gameworld and the party.

Yep, those all make sense for the board game part of D&D. And for those of you who really enjoy the tactics of the D&D board game, finding ways to incentivize the engagement with the board game makes all the sense in the world.

I just know for me... the board game is merely an extension of the 'Yes, And' improv of creating our adventure. I don't need the board game to make 'Yes, And' and 'Yes, But' choices for us in our improvisation of the narrative... we just use it because it takes the decision out of our own hands to decide when the narrative should be working in our favor or when it should be a hindrance. It randomizes the positives and negatives our story can take, which makes for a more compelling and surprising story with all the ups and downs that come with it that we weren't expecting or planning for. But we use the board game for the randomization so long as the game is fun interesting to play and inspires our visualization and narration of what is happening in the story without getting in the way. But as soon the mechanics overtake the visualization and narration, we end up just talking in mechanical board game terms. And the more mechanics at hand for every player, the more time we need to spend talking with and about those mechanics and not the story. And that's when I think our table has lost "engaging with the world" and I know that the board game has gone too far.

 

[tetrasodium]

IIRC WoTC also said that they introduced (dis)advantage to limit the ammount of bonuses and penalties applying to rolls to reduce complexity as a way to simplify the game mechanic.

They may have said that, but the way the system works makes that more of an excuse for trying to force it as the one true mechanic for so many thigs. Take this example:

• +1 +2 or +3 from a magic weapon
• +1 +2 +3 +4 or +5 from an ability mod
• +1-6 from proficiency
• +1d4 from bless'+1d4 from bane(?)
• +a variable die from battlemaster maneuvers
• +a variable die from bardic inspiration
• +is there a fighting style that affects hitrate?
• +disadvantage from encumbered
• +advantage from flanking
• +things I'm almost certainly forgetting about

5e is built to hanndle all of that from the start

 

[DEFCON 1]

They may have said that, but the way the system works makes that more of an excuse for trying to force it as the one true mechanic for so many thigs. Take this example:

• +1 +2 or +3 from a magic weapon
• +1 +2 +3 +4 or +5 from an ability mod
• +1-6 from proficiency
• +1d4 from bless'+1d4 from bane(?)
• +a variable die from battlemaster maneuvers
• +a variable die from bardic inspiration
• +is there a fighting style that affects hitrate?
• +disadvantage from encumbered
• +advantage from flanking
• +things I'm almost certainly forgetting about

5e is built to hanndle all of that from the start

Yeah, but a lot of those are "always on", so you don't have to remember them. It was all the "add-on" bonuses you had to think of during your turn and add up new each and every time that slowed things down and that the Advantage system was meant to replace.

Bless, Superiority dice, Bardic inspiration, cover? Yes, all additional. But usually easy to know when you have it and thus very fast to add in, plus they only show up when you have the applicable class that uses it.