Vaalingrade
Legend
It didn't. It had mathematically sound (after MMIII) design and a good philosophy concerning advancement.I wasn't even aware that 4e HAD bounded accuracy.
D&D (2024) Rogue's Been in an Awkward Place, And This Survey Might Be Our Last Chance to Let WotC Know.
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James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
So my current group often has to four-man content. We have a Monk, a Ranger, a Wizard, and a Cleric. We routinely fight multiple foes in the adventure we're on (Scarlet Citadel by Kobold Press). Our Cleric usually has a lot better things to do than swing his warhammer or fire off a sacred flame just so he can have a healing word available in case someone goes down- and more than once, the person to go down has been him.
We have potions, my Healer Feat, the Ranger's Cure Wounds, and the Monk's Mercy healing. All of which are woefully inadequate to keep someone up once they fall down. Thus our tactics usually revolve around keeping anyone from dropping in the first place.
Now I'll grant, because it's a mega dungeon, normal encounter design is kind of thrown out the window- we can (usually) find a place to hole up after a harrowing encounter, and most of them are very tough battles that require strategy and luck. So maybe if you're running the mythical 6-8 encounter days, this strategy works.
But my experience with 5e has been with AL, where it's usually better to end the encounter ASAP than worry about bringing up one guy who'll just fall down again, and it behooves you to build the toughest characters possible, or home games where nobody has the time for that, and typical sessions have 2-3 combats and we rarely have the "you encounter 4 orcs in a room" style encounters.
We have potions, my Healer Feat, the Ranger's Cure Wounds, and the Monk's Mercy healing. All of which are woefully inadequate to keep someone up once they fall down. Thus our tactics usually revolve around keeping anyone from dropping in the first place.
Now I'll grant, because it's a mega dungeon, normal encounter design is kind of thrown out the window- we can (usually) find a place to hole up after a harrowing encounter, and most of them are very tough battles that require strategy and luck. So maybe if you're running the mythical 6-8 encounter days, this strategy works.
But my experience with 5e has been with AL, where it's usually better to end the encounter ASAP than worry about bringing up one guy who'll just fall down again, and it behooves you to build the toughest characters possible, or home games where nobody has the time for that, and typical sessions have 2-3 combats and we rarely have the "you encounter 4 orcs in a room" style encounters.
Horwath
Legend
if you remove +1/2 per level bonus to everything, it has.I wasn't even aware that 4e HAD bounded accuracy.
It was a functional philosophy but it wasn't to my taste. Killing minions was quite fun though.
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
4e is the first edition to even have game engine whose "math" could be critiqued.
The 4e math is tight, and even the later corrections are finetuning rather than fixing.
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
I like the 5e bounded accuracy. It feels more real. The concept of a town army going after a dragon wouldnt even be thinkable in 3e but can happen in 5e.
The only frustration with the boundedness is the narrow amount of bonuses available between best and worst. Example, it is difficult to quantify the different kinds of armor in any detail, or award bonuses for individual pieces of armor, or layering armors. But maybe with regard to armor, vague abstractions of Light Armor versus Heavy Armor, maybe with a Medium, are a better design approach anyway.
Overall, especially in the context of a d20, bounded accuracy works great.
The only frustration with the boundedness is the narrow amount of bonuses available between best and worst. Example, it is difficult to quantify the different kinds of armor in any detail, or award bonuses for individual pieces of armor, or layering armors. But maybe with regard to armor, vague abstractions of Light Armor versus Heavy Armor, maybe with a Medium, are a better design approach anyway.
Overall, especially in the context of a d20, bounded accuracy works great.
It's still not"thinkable" because it would be boring as heck for everyone at the table.
Even if you split off the fact that we are talking about a game and focus only on the fiction of that scenario it still doesn't add up. A dragon is not like a bear or pack of whatever real world animals that a town might be responsible for handling with local resources. Nation state level threats should be addressed by nation state level forces. Bounded accuracy causes problems by twisting the world fiction in knots in order to pretend that a party of high level murder hobos known as player characters are just regular joes who should be treated as such but immediately switch to treating them like nation state level movers and shakers the instant thet it's convenient to the PCs
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
300 arrows firing into the Dragon every round, plus 300 Magic Missiles, other spells, and endless cantrips, isnt nothing.
5e needs to figure out an appealing way to make mass combat work anyway. Ideally, it oscillates between closeups of meaningful actions of individual characters and aerial views of the battle checks in the aggregate.
I expect a town of about a 1000 citizens to supply about a third of ablebodied combatants in an exigent circumstance − whether the combatants are Martial, Arcane, Primal, Psionic, or Divine.
Once the player characters are level 13 and higher, they are unambiguously superheroes.
Even at level 9, they are Batman.
The NPCs that populate the setting can and should treat the PCs as such. Likewise any NPCs that are comparable to the PCs in prowess.
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad
You're supposed to use the disengage action and get the heck out of there and go to ranged attacks or healing potions or whatever to get yourself out of trouble once the cleric casts Healing Word to rescue you. Not sit there mixing it up until you get knocked down again.
And if you died before the Healing Word, that's what Revivify is for.
Eh it's not uncommon to have one person as a tank and the others with lower ACs focused on range. It however is not common that it plays out as you describe. Particularly as the game progresses to mid to high levels, hitting your saves becomes a more frequent issue than hitting your AC.
Dragons generally have intelligence and wisdom equal or better than most humanoids. Why would they let them get pelted by hundreds of arrows when they could do the spoiler?
