D&D 5E Is 5E Special

Parmandur

Book-Friend
I'm sure I don't know. It's not my job to figure out what those should be. It's the job of the people asking us to pay $50 a book (or is it $60 now?) for their rules, while telling us that Champion and Banneret are supposed to be equal to Paladins and Wizards and Bards.


Mostly because of how people refuse to let them do anything interesting (likely because many put too much emphasis on using spells to do interesting things). Though the excessively high DCs and abandoning the concept of Skill Challenges are also major contributors.


Whereas I found 4e delightful in this regard. The Fighter is emphatically not magical; no Fighter power can do anything actually supernatural. The closest things were absolutely people hunting for something to get offended by; Come And Get It is incredibly tame (as in... it's literally an assault on someone's pride, and missing the attack roll literally means your insults failed to land. There nothing remotely supernatural about it, people were just desperate for anything they could find to validate their false claim that 4e had turned Fighters into Wizards.)

Uh...no, they don't. Bards get extra skills (and can get even more extra skills.) Clerics have several ways to get extra skills. Warlocks too. Wizards and Druids IIRC are the only full casters which don't have baked-in extra skill sources (will have to check some of the more recent subclasses), and Druid gets Wild Shape which already gives enormous skill-obviating powers.


Howso? Where is the flaw in my logic? The effect of hold person is to paralyze an enemy. Within two or three levels of getting hold person, most characters are getting their first cantrip damage boost or Extra Attack, so characters are typically doing at least 12 damage per round with basic attacks (accounting for misses and crits, at the typical 60% hit rate) WITHOUT advantage. Add in the damage the monster cannot deal because it is paralyzed for at least the one round (if the spell lands at all, which it usually will), and I cannot see how anyone could rate hold person as only 3d10 equivalent (that is, ~16.5 damage), the equivalent of a moderately high-damage Fighter's average damage (again, counting hit rate and crits) for a single round of attacks.

If you factor in that melee attacks will have advantage against the target, then a single decent-damage (1d8+3) melee character can deal 19 points of damage across two attacks, again accounting for hit rate (boosted by advantage to 84%) and crit rate (9.75%, which I subtracted from the hit rate to ensure no double-counting.) Meaning having literally just one character with Extra Attack 1 (so a Fighter, Barbarian, Paladin, Ranger, Monk, dual-wielding Rogue, certain types of Bard or Warlock, possibly some others I've missed) you can outstrip the alleged damage equivalent of hold person. Hell, that's literally the same as claiming that hold person is equivalent to a CANTRIP at level 11 (when fire bolt becomes 3d10.) I think that pretty clearly demonstrates the faults in this claim.

I will, of course, look up the claimed equivalency numbers later today to get a better understanding of exactly what the designers claimed. But unless you're actually willing to engage with my argument, as opposed to just saying essentially "you're wrong," I don't think there's much more to be said on this front.
I'm not really disagreeing with any logic, but progivsl judgements. You assume that the Spell values cannot be accurate because you can think of some use cases. But they do have that numerical value, which works in practice. Use that information, or ignore it. It still there.
 

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Spellcasters after a challenging day should be rung out of spell slots. If theybare not, sure, it won't be balanced, because they don't feel the burn.
Ok, but 5E's design, including official adventures, makes it so that basically never happens at higher levels (it does happen at level 1-5 with regularity). So there's clearly some kind of problem with 5E's design. Personally I believe that problem is that Full Casters have too many spell slots, but it could be something else is at the root.

Re: Proficiency, did you find out where in the PHB or DMG it says the DM can tell players they can't roll unless they have proficiency? This is an open question if others know the answer.
 



payn

He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
Re: Proficiency, did you find out where in the PHB or DMG it says the DM can tell players they can't roll unless they have proficiency? This is an open question if others know the answer.
Also, curious. This was brought up frequently for PF2, which has a much more nuanced skill system.
 

doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
It is difficult to answer the question without making a comparison, to demonstrate what I consider to be broad latitude and depth to skills. So, with that said, my experience with a well-done "skills are broad and powerful" thing has come from 4e. In 4e, Religion can be used to do things like improvise a prayer that will help a spirit find rest, communicate with presences that normally cannot be directly observed, or ritually purify someone so they can enter an area of dark powers without becoming tainted (all of these being examples from games I have played.) Arcana isn't just knowledge about magical things--it can be used to change the parameters of an existing enchantment, temporarily suspend or even rewrite the wards that would normally set off an alarm if you pass through a door, leave a secret magical message that can only be found by a designated recipient, or jury-rig an artificer's abandoned experiment so it will work...for now, anyway. (Most of these are, likewise, things that have actually happened in a game I was playing.)

I have never seen a 5e DM willing to allow anything like that. Religion is exclusively for determining whether you know information about a belief system (often cults, but general religious-knowledge stuff too) or the beings revered by such systems (deities, angels, etc.) Arcana is exclusively for whether you can identify an item or a spell or the like. And, from what I can tell, that's pretty much what the game itself says those skills do
Some of that I can see not allowing, sure. There are spells that do the very magical thing the skill would be doing, after all.

But most of that is just DMs not understanding the skill system well enough, in a way that I haven’t seen even with new DMs.
Skills can do a tremendous amount, and that's on the DM, not the rules.
Though the advice in the core books could use another few editing passes.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
Re: Proficiency, did you find out where in the PHB or DMG it says the DM can tell players they can't roll unless they have proficiency? This is an open question if others know the answer.
The DMG section about setting DCs says to just say no if a player cannot possibly do something. By the context of what they have pit in Adventures, they meant to include gatomg by Proficiency there, because they frequently throw in "any character trained in X can attempt a DC 15 Y" challenges.
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
I'll just say this.

When the 5e public playtest ended, fighters still had a skill bonus in 2 of it's 3 subclasses. There were skill manuevers And the one that didn't, the gladiator,had a special flavor that not having a skill bonus was odd.

The designers took out fighter skill bonuses after the playtest was over. They didn't playtest the no-skills fighter again publically.

Then in TCOE, they added skill Maneuvers back in.

This proves that 5e more or less got lucky that D&D streams and D&D YouTube became a thing, GOT became popular, and modern media stopped mocking nerds and geeks hard.
 

Yes, some people were way overexaggerating and making false claim.
But there were others who gave it a try and genuinely felt that those powers rubbed them the wrong way.

Making such blanket statements about people who say something you disagree with is disingenious.
100% some people didn't like it. I even know some of them that played a bit and dipped saying "Yeah not for me"
You know what I run into a lot though... people who just parrot the same 1 or 2 complaints (some of them don't make senses even) and can't even tell you that they played.

I disagree with a lot of people about 2e. I disagree with a lot of people about 3/3.5. Only once and this was 20 years ago give or take did ANY of those people just parrot some vague dislike and claim WotC destroyed D&D.

so no suprise... I have strong feelings on 4e and some people disagree. I even AGREE with some of the complaints about 4e... I can understand (but not agree with) some too. The problem is it became 'cool to hate 4e' and some complaints got memeified...

in my own split group back in 2010 at a Con I had to call one of my good friends out because while complaining about 4e he claimed to have tried it a lot... and stole one of my stories but changed it a bit to fit his narrative. "Dude, you play pathfinder, and you weren't in that game." got him quite flustered even though at the time I was trying to be neutral in the edition wars.

I don't want to litigate what is and what isn't an individual argument (hence why I have no details in this post) but BOTH sides need to realize that Yes some people really tried it and dislike or even hate it... but there are also people who just use memes and don't have anything to add but 'not D&D'.
 

I'm not really disagreeing with any logic, but progivsl judgements. You assume that the Spell values cannot be accurate because you can think of some use cases. But they do have that numerical value, which works in practice. Use that information, or ignore it. It still there.
all we have is you (and some creator) say it is able to break down to a damage rating... BUT i see no proof just a very loose 'trust us it works'
 

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