D&D General How would you redo 4e?

[AbdulAlhazred]

As in, the players roll to attack vs. the foe's defenses, and when the attack is returned, the player rolls their defenses against the foe's attack score as DC?

That's how my game works, and you can roll any appropriate kind of check.

 

[Voidmoji]

Voidmoji said:
As in, the players roll to attack vs. the foe's defenses, and when the attack is returned, the player rolls their defenses against the foe's attack score as DC?

Precisely.

I like how you think. This is what I do in my game. It is not a fully Players Roll Everything game, but they do roll against fixed DCs for most actions, including combat. I like giving that agency to the players.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I like how you think. This is what I do in my game. It is not a fully Players Roll Everything game, but they do roll against fixed DCs for most actions, including combat. I like giving that agency to the players.

I agree. In my game you roll defense (and attacks) with a skill, so it uses the same success ladder as skill checks.

Better success means more of the potential damage of the attack is negated, potentially down to 0, though usually you take some fatigue from most attacks.

You have a toughness score, and a fatigue limit equal to 3x toughness, and the numbers mean that you can take a lot of partial hits, or a few solid hits, but not both, without being knocked out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree. In my game you roll defense (and attacks) with a skill, so it uses the same success ladder as skill checks.

Better success means more of the potential damage of the attack is negated, potentially down to 0, though usually you take some fatigue from most attacks.

You have a toughness score, and a fatigue limit equal to 3x toughness, and the numbers mean that you can take a lot of partial hits, or a few solid hits, but not both, without being knocked out.

I've stuck fairly close to the overall pattern of 4e, HP and HS (but they are more generally Power Points) with defenses being an 'active' thing where you can use any relevant skill/power (but I am still working on exactly how to decide which ones can be used defensively and against which sorts of attacks). I was thinking maybe FORT, REF, and WILL are keywords, like every attack you take has one of these, and then you pick from the stuff you can roll whichever ones have the same keyword and defend with that.

 

[Undrave]

Well I have a frighteningly complex google sheet which does Monte Carlo analysis of all combat engine parameters. What you are saying is partially true, but damage per attack matters. Beyond that, the idea that the nature of combat and value of each sort of equipment or technique/tactic needs to be relatively static from 1 to 30 is not something I am wedded to. But still my game certainly has magic armor, it's just that gargantuan dragons don't worry about armor much! That's a nice feature of the design.

Oh man I didn't think of the multi attack thing... that makes armor granting DR an extremely complex beast that I'm not comfortable tackling... It sounds cool but I'm not sure if its worth it at this point.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh man I didn't think of the multi attack thing... that makes armor granting DR an extremely complex beast that I'm not comfortable tackling... It sounds cool but I'm not sure if its worth it at this point.

Well, since my game is a rewrite, I just don't really do multi-attacks, at least not as "this is a power, it does many attacks on a single target." Not to say they are totally non-existent, but more rare.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Considering it's both doubly inaccurate (it's neither particularly bounded, nor particularly about accuracy) and directly responsible for at least a solid chunk of the frustrations actual 5e fans have with 5e combats, yeah, I fully agree.

I think bounded accuracy works as desired. So no actual fans are not frustrated.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think bounded accuracy works as desired. So no actual fans are not frustrated.

Plenty are. They talk about it on this very forum.

For a handful of examples:

Saving throws not scaling. (As I said, "bounded accuracy" isn't actually about accuracy.) Plenty of people consider this a pretty serious hole in the rules, to the point that it's one of the most common house-rules in 5e to either give people more saving throw proficiencies, or outright making it so you get half proficiency to all non-proficient saving throws (effectively, "Jack of All (Saving) Throws.")

Monster HP inflation. (Again: not an accuracy issue.) Lots of people complain about how 5e monsters are just huge bags of hit points you have to chew through and which don't really do anything other than that. But that's, very literally, exactly what WotC promised us when they proposed "bounded accuracy." They would give us monsters that scaled in difficulty primarily through how much HP they had and (to a lesser extent) how much damage they could deal, with little to no change in their hit rates and AC. That 5e monsters are kind of dull is a widely-held criticism even by actual 5e fans.

The "training doesn't matter" problem, that is, skills feeling incredibly arbitrary. Because, with "bounded accuracy," skill bonuses start small and rarely become very large. A character with Expertise and a maxed primary stat only gets +15, the maximum possible without magic items. That means they have a 20% chance to fail a DC20 check, something merely "hard," while a completely untrained rube with just a little bit of natural talent (say, +2 modifier) has a 15% chance to succeed at that very same task. The difference between the most talentless hack and the creme de la creme is only 16 points, and this cashes out as a shocking number of embarrassing failures and inexplicable successes. If 5e's designers had allowed more flexibility with their numbers and bonuses, this could have easily been avoided.

The flaws of the "magic items aren't required" claim. When AC is so static, sure, you don't "need" the items in the sense that they don't make the difference between being able to hit at all or not...but that was mostly not true in prior editions either, and 5e still has the "immune to non-magical weapons" thing so that aspect is false too. Instead, magic weapons become incredibly sought after because they're practically the only way to improve your chance to hit....which makes DMs even more miserly with items than they were before 5e, when it was supposed to be the "you can have items or not have items, it'll be fine either way!"

Bounded accuracy really did directly lead to a significant chunk of problems people complain about fairly regularly. These aren't one-off grumbles, they're commonly-encountered issues today, often requiring house-rule patches or strict DM policies to address. (And no, it is not the case that the problem isn't a problem if you can house-rule it away. The Oberoni fallacy remains a fallacy.)

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Plenty are. They talk about it on this very forum.

For a handful of examples:

Saving throws not scaling. (As I said, "bounded accuracy" isn't actually about accuracy.) Plenty of people consider this a pretty serious hole in the rules, to the point that it's one of the most common house-rules in 5e to either give people more saving throw proficiencies, or outright making it so you get half proficiency to all non-proficient saving throws (effectively, "Jack of All (Saving) Throws.")

Monster HP inflation. (Again: not an accuracy issue.) Lots of people complain about how 5e monsters are just huge bags of hit points you have to chew through and which don't really do anything other than that. But that's, very literally, exactly what WotC promised us when they proposed "bounded accuracy." They would give us monsters that scaled in difficulty primarily through how much HP they had and (to a lesser extent) how much damage they could deal, with little to no change in their hit rates and AC. That 5e monsters are kind of dull is a widely-held criticism even by actual 5e fans.

The "training doesn't matter" problem, that is, skills feeling incredibly arbitrary. Because, with "bounded accuracy," skill bonuses start small and rarely become very large. A character with Expertise and a maxed primary stat only gets +15, the maximum possible without magic items. That means they have a 20% chance to fail a DC20 check, something merely "hard," while a completely untrained rube with just a little bit of natural talent (say, +2 modifier) has a 15% chance to succeed at that very same task. The difference between the most talentless hack and the creme de la creme is only 16 points, and this cashes out as a shocking number of embarrassing failures and inexplicable successes. If 5e's designers had allowed more flexibility with their numbers and bonuses, this could have easily been avoided.

The flaws of the "magic items aren't required" claim. When AC is so static, sure, you don't "need" the items in the sense that they don't make the difference between being able to hit at all or not...but that was mostly not true in prior editions either, and 5e still has the "immune to non-magical weapons" thing so that aspect is false too. Instead, magic weapons become incredibly sought after because they're practically the only way to improve your chance to hit....which makes DMs even more miserly with items than they were before 5e, when it was supposed to be the "you can have items or not have items, it'll be fine either way!"

Bounded accuracy really did directly lead to a significant chunk of problems people complain about fairly regularly. These aren't one-off grumbles, they're commonly-encountered issues today, often requiring house-rule patches or strict DM policies to address. (And no, it is not the case that the problem isn't a problem if you can house-rule it away. The Oberoni fallacy remains a fallacy.)

Oh macaroni fallacy... again. No. Not a problem with saving throws in general. Works as intended. No need to fix.

Some spells don't work with that system however.
Saving throws in 5e are inheritors of the duration mechanic of 4e. Asummptions in encounter builiding is that everyone fails their save.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Asummptions in encounter builiding is that everyone fails their save.

I'm...not sure I buy the idea that 5e encounters expect that characters consistently fail their saves.

Not when there are things like the intellect devourer.