D&D 5E Justin Alexander's review of Shattered Obelisk is pretty scathing

[Micah Sweet]

Well they aren't going to do so without a setting product, so that won't happen until they write such a product. And when they do release such a product, the setting goes live on DMs Guild. Why do you want Wizards to be the ones to make the mechanical updates if upon release, it is open to 3rd Parties, and you prefer 3rd parties do it anyway? Do you value Wizards design? Or do you want them to create something, so competition can try to respond with their own variants?

Are there Wizards designs that you find are superior to 3rd party designs?

Not really no.

I'd like them to release the rest of their settings to the Guild, because I do believe 3pp do better work in that area.

And yeah, people do unfortunately tend to respond to WotC, so I guess we have to wait sometimes for them to release a product so others can make better versions of it.

Of course, in my ideal world WotC wouldn't have the unjust oversized influence and privilege over the industry they currently enjoy. Not a fan of officialdom where ever it comes from.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

Not really no.

I'd like them to release the rest of their settings to the Guild, because I do believe 3pp do better work in that area.

And yeah, people do unfortunately tend to respond to WotC, so I guess we have to wait sometimes for them to release a product so others can make better versions of it.

Of course, in my ideal world WotC wouldn't have the unjust oversized influence and privilege over the industry they currently enjoy. Not a fan of officialdom where ever it comes from.

So in your perfect world, there is no IP? Because Wizards only has JUST influence over their IP. Any privilege they get from the public is given freely by the public. If the public loves them more than you do, that doesn't make the public wrong. I don't think there is anything unjust about that.

Even then, they share their IP when they are ready, and have written their own baseline setting to set the updated tone and theme. I do believe they should develop and update their IP to be more diverse and culturally respectful before giving it to the public to play in. For instance, Dark Sun is problematic, and shouldn't be published exactly as it was back in the day, if they ever do. The Known World of Mystara has so many real-world-inspired realms that can be considered inappropriate, so that may need a cultural pass. If the themes of an old setting cannot properly be reimagined faithfully with respect, it doesn't get remade.

However, the mechanical aspect of creatures and rules objects from those realms can be repurposed in any non-setting specific product. There is nothing stopping a 3rd Party creator from recreating the Wizards Spell Compendium in 5E-format, redacting proprietary campaign setting themes. Or recreating the monsters in the various Monstrous Compendium folios from 2E. The lore shouldn't be important to you, just the mechanical aspects, right?

Can you give an example of a remaining mechanical rule that can only be published if Wizards publishes a setting first? Eberron Dragonmarks are public now. FR Specialty Priests like those from the 2E Faiths and Avatars line are fine if someone wanted. What else?

 

[MerricB]

One aspect about scaling DCs is that the challenges for higher-level characters should be tougher, because otherwise it'd be lower-level characters doing it! You set DCs in relation to the level of the characters you're designing for, but within the world they'd be the same if a lower-level party came by.

Yes, this is a superior lock. It's harder to pick. Deal with it.

When I design adventures, I try to include lower-level challenges so the players get a sense of how far they've come. But they can only be used in moderation. Most of the challenges need to actually challenge the players and their characters!

Where the disconnect comes is when the world situation doesn't change, but the DC does, and that you should avoid.

"It is a DC 10 to jump this pit". "It is a DC 20 to jump this identical pit."

But one of the major aspects of D&D's bounded accuracy is that you're talking about a much tighter range of DCs, because the bonuses remain (mostly) within tighter limits.

A first level character has bonuses that range from -1 to +7 at the extreme.
A twentieth level character has bonuses that range from -1 to +17 at the extreme. (Roughly. There are magics that add a little more on).

But this breaks down further:

Non-proficient: -1 to +5.
Proficient: +1 to +11.
Expertise: +3 to +17.

That non-proficient bonus? That's not going to change. So, if you're dealing with a group check (a majority of PCs must succeed), you should always be setting DCs with that bonus in mind UNLESS you want the players to often fail.

When you're talking about a task that a single character does, is it meant to challenge the average non-proficient character, the proficient character, or the (rare) expertise character. You probably shouldn't be challenging that last unless, once again, you want the character to fail.

What Expertise generally should so is say "This skill matters to me; I almost always succeed at it". That +17? Doesn't come around much.

The vast majority of characters sit in -1 to +11.

When you compare these bonuses to the range in - say - 1st to 20th level characters in 3E, those bonuses go from -1 to +30 or more. It was wild how high they could get!

Cheers,
Merric

 

[pemerton]

It's not useless. Changing the DC as the characters level up makes levelling up pointless. Low level characters might struggle to climb a cliff, but they are not a serious obstacle to high level characters. They find different challenges.

Just to echo and expand a bit ofn @Clint_L and @EzekielRaiden:

No one in this thread is suggesting that the DC for the very same cliff, in the very same weather, climbed using the very same tools should change.

They are talking about a CR-equivalent for non-combat challenges. Just as CR (at least roughly) grades creatures/NPCs by their relative-to-level-degree-of-difficulty (which is a factor primarily of hp and damage, but also affected a bit by AC and special abilities), so EzekielRaiden is imagining the possibility of grading DCs by the relative-to-level-degree-of-difficulty.

This would - it is conjectured - make it easier for the GM to present different challenges that will suit the level of the PCs.

It seems to me the rebuttal of that conjecture doesn't consist in misconstruing it, but rather in @Hussar's point: namely, that in fact 5e already makes it pretty easy basically by choosing 10, 15 or 20 as the DC.

 

[pemerton]

Or you could let characters be awesome at the thing they're awesome at. Again, I point to Leverage. If you get Parker to a lock, she can pick it. If there's a laser grid, she can navigate through it or disable it. And that's just fine. If you want to challenge a character, challenge their weaker areas.

I don't think this advice is very applicable to 5e D&D combat: most 5e characters don't have combat as one of their weaker areas, but the game nevertheless sets out to make combat a challenge, and has fairly elaborate rules to this end (complex rules for turn-taking, and hit-and-damage, and resource depletion and recovery, etc).

If fighters were just allowed to be awesome at fighting, such that if you can get a fighter to a foe then that's that, 5e D&D would play very differently I think.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So in your perfect world, there is no IP? Because Wizards only has JUST influence over their IP. Any privilege they get from the public is given freely by the public. If the public loves them more than you do, that doesn't make the public wrong. I don't think there is anything unjust about that.

Even then, they share their IP when they are ready, and have written their own baseline setting to set the updated tone and theme. I do believe they should develop and update their IP to be more diverse and culturally respectful before giving it to the public to play in. For instance, Dark Sun is problematic, and shouldn't be published exactly as it was back in the day, if they ever do. The Known World of Mystara has so many real-world-inspired realms that can be considered inappropriate, so that may need a cultural pass. If the themes of an old setting cannot properly be reimagined faithfully with respect, it doesn't get remade.

However, the mechanical aspect of creatures and rules objects from those realms can be repurposed in any non-setting specific product. There is nothing stopping a 3rd Party creator from recreating the Wizards Spell Compendium in 5E-format, redacting proprietary campaign setting themes. Or recreating the monsters in the various Monstrous Compendium folios from 2E. The lore shouldn't be important to you, just the mechanical aspects, right?

Can you give an example of a remaining mechanical rule that can only be published if Wizards publishes a setting first? Eberron Dragonmarks are public now. FR Specialty Priests like those from the 2E Faiths and Avatars line are fine if someone wanted. What else?

I have no problem with any of those "problematic" issues you reference anyway, so we're not going to agree there (although I'm sure WotC does). I'm not a fan of the idea that something can be considered inappropriate, by someone, so we shouldn't do it. Games and fiction should be allowed to use what they want.

The lore is very important to me, but I don't trust WotC to treat it properly, with respect to the past of the IP they own. Ravenloft burned that trust right out of me. I have somewhat more respect for their mechanical work, although I still think 3pp usually does it better.

As I said, rules-wise I'm mostly looking for monsters, and maybe heritage and other player stuff to inspire my own work.

 

[pemerton]

They certainly can be mixed, but if your intent is to challenge both combat and noncombat abilities...

I don't see much evidence that 5e D&D, in its paradigmatic presentation, has this intent.

 

[billd91]

They certainly can be mixed, but if your intent is to challenge both combat and noncombat abilities...

I suppose it depends on what you consider a challenge and how long should something like picking a lock really be challenging in and of itself. Am I expected to assume a never-ending progression in lock technology will be in place as my group moves from fighting goblins to gnolls to drow to fire giants to pit fiends? Or is there a point where it no longer really makes sense for the locks to get any more diabolical in their intricacy or difficulty? Same with doors, cliffs, or any other inanimate obstacle? Should the locks and doors always get harder when the PCs get better at their jobs? If so, what's the point of getting better at those skills? Does it really feel like my wall-scaling rogue is improving if the narration of the wall shifts from being close set brick to seamless sheets of metal? It's the same pig, different lipstick. I think I might prefer an easier, less stressful pig.

 

[pemerton]

A fifth-level character with a total +4 bonus and but two sources of other bonus (doesn't have to be BI or guidance in specific, those are just easy examples) turns a so-called "nearly impossible" check into something trivial. Guidance is easy (all clerics and druids have it.) Getting even one other relatively minor random bonus isn't that hard either. An actual specialist (who, at level 5, may have a bonus as large as +11) would blow such a check out of the water.

A Rogue with Reliable Talent passes DC 20 checks without fail as soon as level 13 (min roll 10, +5 stat, +5 Prof). A Redemption Paladin gets effective Reliable Talent with Persuasion. Any character with Expertise and +4 to the relevant stat passes a DC 20 check 50% of the time at level 5. Add in any other useful sources of bonus (Advantage, bless, etc.) and such "impossible" checks become routine for specialists and highly achievable for even non-specialists (e.g. Prof but not a main stat).

I think this is intended to be a feature of 5e D&D, at least in its "core" or "paradigmatic" mode of play. Non-combat scenarios aren't intended to pose challenges that will be analogous, in terms of game play, to combat. They are to be "solved" by bringing the right spell or bringing the right skill expert.

So, if I am understanding correctly:

Ability scores cannot grow much, because that is too much math.
Also, class features and powers cannot grow too much, because we need to keep a short list of classes and feature creep is bad.
Defenses and accuracy cannot grow too much, because that leads to weak monsters ceasing to matter over time, and also too much math.
Now, HP (and thus damage) cannot grow too much, because that's boring.

What, exactly, is there left for character growth? HP doesn't go up, so damage can't either. Features can't go up because power creep. Defense/accuracy and base stats can't go up because too much math.

I don't think there is any lack of intelligence on your part. Even a genius cannot solve a contradiction. You're trying to remove the last form of vertical growth, and horizontal growth isn't going to be allowed to pick up the slack.

What else could grow as the character does? It sounds to me like what you want is characters who never really change.

It seems that these passages (and probably some others in the same essay) might be apposite:

character change potentially disrupts the current relationship among the components of the character. Options to fix the problem are generally unsatisfactory: (1) slow it down, and (2) permit only tiny changes. . . .

Starting characters tend to be very colorful and described by many terms and numbers, but relatively static: waiting for their hook, so to speak. . . .

Dice-based resolutions sometimes represent much noise and effort about not much effect, i.e., random factors tend not to deviate from expected results very much. Some games display a small range of possible Effect (i.e. damage rarely harms an opponent very much at a time), slight metagame adjustments to minimize extreme results, or a lot of offered strategies for the GM to soften or redirect the effects that occur.​

 

[pemerton]

I suppose it depends on what you consider a challenge and how long should something like picking a lock really be challenging in and of itself. Am I expected to assume a never-ending progression in lock technology will be in place as my group moves from fighting goblins to gnolls to drow to fire giants to pit fiends? Or is there a point where it no longer really makes sense for the locks to get any more diabolical in their intricacy or difficulty? Same with doors, cliffs, or any other inanimate obstacle? Should the locks and doors always get harder when the PCs get better at their jobs? If so, what's the point of getting better at those skills? Does it really feel like my wall-scaling rogue is improving if the narration of the wall shifts from being close set brick to seamless sheets of metal?

These questions can also, in principle, be asked about sword-fighting.