D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Pedantic]

Explicated?
Have you checked out BRP or GURPs they're pretty skill-centric.

Not what I mean. I want the game to write out all the skill specific actions and attendant DCs, without reference to a scaling difficulty by level or generic DC table.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Not what I mean. I want the game to write out all the skill specific actions and attendant DCs, without recorded to a scaling difficulty by level or generic DC table.

Well "all" seems excessive and probably impossible, but yes, there should be specific examples.

 

[Thomas Shey]

True, just like 4e is a bad game for me. But I never expect anyone to advocate for preferences they don't share.

I'll absolutely defend preferences I don't have, because I consider it the only honest thing to do. The only time I won't is if someone seems to want it to be the only way something is done.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, that's a counterfactual that's not necessarily true

That's kinda the point. There were many factors that led to 4e not meeting it's goals, and the decision by slivers of the fanbase to nerdrage relentlessly against it until they'd made the on-line community so toxic WotC feared the IP was being damaged, was certainly one of them.

Another alt.history of 4e could be: 4e was released, but no one felt it was worth their time to go into full nerdrage in response to it, and just kept playing 3.5 and TSR/OSR D&D, while other ongoing players, and a host of new players blythely adopted 4e... Paizo released PF1 and, under a nominally-different company, 4e adventure paths, and did well for themselves selling to new and old players alike. A tad idylic, perhaps, maybe the GSL would have to go, too, for it to work......

 

[Scribe]

If you actually follow the rules, it should also be quite easy to get advantage on a check, just have anyone else in the party contribute to the conversation. That, and of course, the DCs are just a general guideline not a hard-and-fast rule. I don't see what the issue is.

If I had to summarize.

1. Some feel its unclear what is Easy/Moderate/Hard.
2. Some feel the DC's are too difficult to achieve.
3. Some feel that unless one is optimized for it, that there is not enough consistency in success. See 2.

Now, lets pretend we chop that 5 off of each DC. So that you know, the Fighter/Barb with a 14 Cha can have a chance at playing the social game.

Lets pretend that the DC's are based around that level of assumption. 14, Prof, Easy is a DC5, etc.

What happens to the game when people with system mastery and optimization, who are going to bring all the features of the game to bear, from Expertise to Guidance, and Stat optimization, what happens when they play the game that is 'designed under that assumption'.

Well good sir I can hear it now. "The game is so easy, lol!"

 

[SteveC]

So, we know that 14 (+2) Prof (+2) at level 1 - Moderate (DC 15) = 50% ya?

"Well thats too hard Scribe." OK, so you chop that down to the 'easy' DC of 10, and 'easy' becomes 5, which you...can now only fail on a natural 1 which seems...poor but whatever, thats how we are adjusting things.

So now Easy is so trivially done, why bother?

Good question. It was WotC itself that described an even chance as being 65%, so I see this as being too high DC. The other point is that you're basically assuming near the best case scenario as a 50% chance. That's going to only be worse with characters closer to the norm.

And outside of feats, you're never going to get any better at skills that are outside of your area of focus. Unless you're gaining proficiency and increasing the ability score, this is never going to get any better.

Personally, I think having an easy check at DC 5 means that a character with proficiency and good stat doesn't even need to roll that check (remember, 1s aren't an automatic failure on skill checks). I'm okay with that. A starting character with proficiency and a 16 stat (+5 total bonus) is 80% likely to make an average (DC 10) check, and again, I'm okay with that.

If we start to include advantage + guidance for every check, that is something I might want to revisit. Given how D&D works, and how static these numbers are unless it's your specialty, higher chances of success aren't a problem for me. I'm sure others have a different opinion (of course!)

My whole point is that if you're only looking at the best characters for DCs, you're making anything less just bad. Maybe that's okay, but D&D is not a fail forward situation, so especially for new DMs, failing a check means you can't do something. And all too often that means you close off adventure options. And unless characters make what I'd call unusual character options in their ASI's, this never gets any better.

Now with a system like PbtA where you can have more nuance to check results, I think this is less of an issue. But that's not D&D.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That's kinda the point. There were many factors that led to 4e not meeting it's goals, and the decision by slivers of the fanbase to nerdrage relentlessly against it until they'd made the on-line community so toxic WotC feared the IP was being damaged, was certainly one of them.

Another alt.history of 4e could be: 4e was released, but no one felt it was worth their time to go into full nerdrage in response to it, and just kept playing 3.5 and TSR/OSR D&D, while other ongoing players, and a host of new players blythely adopted 4e... Paizo released PF1 and, under a nominally-different company, 4e adventure paths, and did well for themselves selling to new and old players alike. A tad idylic, perhaps, maybe the GSL would have to go, too, for it to work......

Maybe. But you invest too much in nerdrage.

After all, there were people that nerdraged against 5e. Um... were? ARE people that nerdrage against 5e, still, for not being 4e. And yet, it seems to do okay. If something happens, there will be nerdrage. It's inevitable, like death, taxes, or any thread about Star Wars turning into an argument about TLJ and ROS.

But the difference is that 4e had a lot of different issues. As I wrote, the "nerdrage" wasn't some unexpected thing; it was entirely predictable, and, in fact, was predicted by designers of 4e. The "nerdrage" was so predictable that Paizo banked on it before 4e was even available to the public. As previously recounted, 4e was already a dead product within Hasbro by the time Essentials was released (Sept. 2010).

4e was a well-designed game, but at a certain point any reasonable observer would look at all the factors that happened to 4e and would realize that there was a single commonality of those factors. That doesn't make it a bad game, or poorly designed, or "not D&D" (whatever that means), but it does mean that it wasn't the right product for the market for the time.

 

[Oofta]

That's kinda the point. There were many factors that led to 4e not meeting it's goals, and the decision by slivers of the fanbase to nerdrage relentlessly against it until they'd made the on-line community so toxic WotC feared the IP was being damaged, was certainly one of them.

Another alt.history of 4e could be: 4e was released, but no one felt it was worth their time to go into full nerdrage in response to it, and just kept playing 3.5 and TSR/OSR D&D, while other ongoing players, and a host of new players blythely adopted 4e... Paizo released PF1 and, under a nominally-different company, 4e adventure paths, and did well for themselves selling to new and old players alike. A tad idylic, perhaps, maybe the GSL would have to go, too, for it to work......

If "nerdrage" on online forums was enough to cause radical changes to the system, I think 5E would qualify as well. Just look how many thread we have that are currently active or recent talking about all the supposed issues we have.

Just like 5E's success isn't solely because of Stranger Things (which was released 7 years ago, I rather doubt it's had much impact in the past half decade), 4E's end was not due to one thing. Yes, people complained about it, they complained about it because they didn't like the direction the game had taken. But there were many other issues as well that I'm not going to bother getting into.

In other words, if you don't want edition wars don't continuously fire salvos that will start one.

 

[Scribe]

Personally, I think having an easy check at DC 5 means that a character with proficiency and good stat doesn't even need to roll that check (remember, 1s aren't an automatic failure on skill checks). I'm okay with that. A starting character with proficiency and a 16 stat (+5 total bonus) is 80% likely to make an average (DC 10) check, and again, I'm okay with that.

And I think this is where we just diverge, and I think thats fine. I think the success rate on various things is already assumed to be too high, and that people should yes, have to optimize for it. If the assumptions are otherwise (Easy is a 5, etc) then it just trivializes the game for the optimizers, and thats even worse.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Now, lets pretend we chop that 5 off of each DC. So that you know, the Fighter/Barb with a 14 Cha can have a chance at playing the social game.
...
Well good sir I can hear it now. "The game is so easy, lol!"

So, that also just looks like the system is just a bit too limited to really handle a range of ability when it comes to skill checks. Between d20 linear distribution and BA's small bonuses, you're not able to have characters really bad at something, characters competent at it, and characters really good at it, all interacting reasonably with the available challenges. BA could work with a different core dice mechanic, like 3d6. And d20 has worked with much faster-scaling modifiers and larger differences among PC/monsters, in 3e and 4e (and, for attacks & saves, in the TSR era).

It's worth noting, considering the topic, that when 5e returned to the very powerful/versatile spellcasting of tradition, it did not stint on the range of power from cantrips to 9th level spells. But, at the same time, it adopted BA. Some

After all, there were people that nerdraged against 5e. Um... were? ARE people that nerdrage against 5e, still, for not being 4e.

Clearly, not to anything like the virulence and persistence they did 4e. There's no comparison whatsoever. The community isn't remotely toxic. The brand is safe, positively venerated.

There are legitimate complaints about 5e, sure. That's on an entirely different plane from the edition war.

As I wrote, the "nerdrage" wasn't some unexpected thing; it was entirely predictable, and, in fact, was predicted by designers of 4e.

You say that, as if it to excuse it. Like, faced with a balanced version of the game, long-time D&D fans had no choice but to devote themselves to rendering the community toxic.