D&D General Explain Bounded Accuracy to Me (As if I Was Five)

[Minigiant]

Yep. I almost pointed out to him that 1e and 2e were exactly what he was describing as not D&D.

1e and 2e had the fastest accuracy of the official and unofficial editions.

That campaign didn't play like D&D. It played like all brujah VTM game without the political intrigue.

 

[Maxperson]

1e and 2e had the fastest accuracy of the official and unofficial editions.

That campaign didn't play like D&D. It played like all brujah VTM game without the political intrigue.

Not the fastest. 3e and 5e are higher. Maybe 4e, but I don't know because I never played it. It jumped periodically, but ACs are significantly higher to compensate.

An 8th level fighter in 3e had +8 from level and was virtually guaranteed +3 or +4 from strength, and +1 from weapon focus. That's +12 or +13 for pretty much every fighter. A 1e fighter had maaaaaybe +1 to hit from strength and +6(THAC0 of 14)from level, giving him +7 to hit from strength and level, which is just over half of the 3e fighter's accuracy. 5e builds in more accuracy than AD&D accuracy from the get go due to low ACs.

 

[ezo]

1e and 2e had the fastest accuracy of the official and unofficial editions.

Round and round... what goes around comes around.

Etc. etc. etc.

Not the fastest. 3e and 5e are higher. Maybe 4e, but I don't know because I never played it. It jumped periodically, but ACs are significantly higher to compensate.

An 8th level fighter in 3e had +8 from level and was virtually guaranteed +3 or +4 from strength, and +1 from weapon focus. That's +12 or +13 for pretty much every fighter. A 1e fighter had maaaaaybe +1 to hit from strength and +6(THAC0 of 14)from level, giving him +7 to hit from strength and level, which is just over half of the 3e fighter's accuracy. 5e builds in more accuracy than AD&D accuracy from the get go due to low ACs.

Yep. This stuff.

 

[Minigiant]

Okay. I found it. Wizards of the Coast

"The DM's monster roster expands, never contracts. Although low-level characters probably don't stack up well against higher-level monsters, thanks to the high hit points and high damage numbers of those monsters, as the characters gain levels, the lower-level monsters continue to be useful to the DM, just in greater numbers. While we might fight only four goblins at a time at 1st level, we might take on twelve of them at 5th level without breaking a sweat. Since the monsters don't lose the ability to hit the player characters—instead they take out a smaller percentage chunk of the characters' hit points—the DM can continue to increase the number of monsters instead of needing to design or find whole new monsters. Thus, the repertoire of monsters available for DMs to use in an adventure only increases over time, as new monsters become acceptable challenges and old monsters simply need to have their quantity increased."

It's a stupid design strategy. A 20th level group isn't 20 times more powerful than a 1st level group. If you need 5 goblins to challenge a 1st level group, 100 won't be enough to challenge a 20th level group. Who wants to slog through 500 or 1000 goblins at 20th level.

I feel that for 5e, WOTC oversampled some LOTR fanboy DMs who wanted to run low magic LOTR clone campaign of just orcs, goblins, and ogres for 15 levels with no magic items. Then warped the rules so that works.

 

[Minigiant]

Not the fastest. 3e and 5e are higher. Maybe 4e, but I don't know because I never played it. It jumped periodically, but ACs are significantly higher to compensate.

An 8th level fighter in 3e had +8 from level and was virtually guaranteed +3 or +4 from strength, and +1 from weapon focus. That's +12 or +13 for pretty much every fighter. A 1e fighter had maaaaaybe +1 to hit from strength and +6(THAC0 of 14)from level, giving him +7 to hit from strength and level, which is just over half of the 3e fighter's accuracy. 5e builds in more accuracy than AD&D accuracy from the get go due to low ACs.

Again

2e had 1/1, 2/3, 1/2, and 1/3 accuracy.
3e has 1/1, 3/4, and 1/2 accuracy.
4e everyone is 1/2.
5e everyone 1/4

 

[Maxperson]

Again

2e had 1/1, 2/3, 1/2, and 1/3 accuracy.
3e has 1/1, 3/4, and 1/2 accuracy.
4e everyone is 1/2.
5e everyone 1/4

That's deceptive. It's like saying your chances of heart attack are doubled if you eat peanuts!!!! You've doubled that .01% chance. I just showed you objectively that 3e was almost twice as fast and yet you try to tell my that doubling .01% is faster. It's not. The true accuracy of 3e was much faster, even if the fraction is not. There is more to accuracy than a fraction.

 

[ezo]

Again

2e had 1/1, 2/3, 1/2, and 1/3 accuracy.
3e has 1/1, 3/4, and 1/2 accuracy.
4e everyone is 1/2.
5e everyone 1/4

Accuracy isn't just your bonus to attacks, it is your bonus to attack in proportion to the AC you're trying to hit.

AD&D runs the gambit, beginning around 30-35% accuracy and culminating around 60-70% (or better, in Monty Haul games).
5E begins at 65% accuracy in typical cases, and stays around there for the most part to level 20.

In 5E, you are more likely to hit than you were in AD&D. So, 5E has better accuracy.
I'm not saying the "bonus" is higher in 5E vs. AD&D (although at low to mid levels it does), I'm talking about actual accuracy.

Now, if you want to discuss the ballooning of accuracy, then yes, in that sense AD&D improves much more, but it also started out at half that of 5E when it comes to accuracy. 5E doesn't balloon accuracy (as we know), it ballons hit points and damage (although less than hit points) as yourself and many of the rest of us have already acknowledged.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Okay. I found it. Wizards of the Coast

"The DM's monster roster expands, never contracts. Although low-level characters probably don't stack up well against higher-level monsters, thanks to the high hit points and high damage numbers of those monsters, as the characters gain levels, the lower-level monsters continue to be useful to the DM, just in greater numbers. While we might fight only four goblins at a time at 1st level, we might take on twelve of them at 5th level without breaking a sweat. Since the monsters don't lose the ability to hit the player characters—instead they take out a smaller percentage chunk of the characters' hit points—the DM can continue to increase the number of monsters instead of needing to design or find whole new monsters. Thus, the repertoire of monsters available for DMs to use in an adventure only increases over time, as new monsters become acceptable challenges and old monsters simply need to have their quantity increased."

It's a stupid design strategy. A 20th level group isn't 20 times more powerful than a 1st level group. If you need 5 goblins to challenge a 1st level group, 100 won't be enough to challenge a 20th level group. Who wants to slog through 500 or 1000 goblins at 20th level.

Just one of many reasons why I say 5e may have started with a lot of design ideas, but it had few to no actual design goals, and the further the design went along, the further it moved away from having them. Indeed, many of the design ideas it actually had ended up either not panning out, or getting aggressively eliminated before they could come into their own because of the ridiculous "if it doesn't please 70% of the fanbase immediately we can't use it" standard. (A standard, notably, they had to break once the playtest went private in the lead-up to publication, because they'd dithered for so long they no longer had the time to iterate anymore.) That's why they repeatedly went back to try to fix Ranger, because it wasn't up to par, and 5.5e is going back and addressing (IMO inadequately, but addressing nonetheless) other problematic elements like Berserkers and Champions, who have high usage rates but low satisfaction rates relative to the rest of the game.

And more than once, they got caught putting all their eggs in one basket (e.g. Specialties), only to have that fall through and leave them scrambling for an alternative, quietly ditching elements they'd actually spoken positively of before (like martial healing, which Mearls at one point tweeted would be in the game, and DMs who didn't like that could simply tell players they weren't allowed to take that option.)

I feel that for 5e, WOTC oversampled some LOTR fanboy DMs who wanted to run low magic LOTR clone campaign of just orcs, goblins, and ogres for 15 levels with no magic items. Then warped the rules so that works.

I have often said things to the effect that calling the D&D Next surveys and polls low-quality would be insulting to low-quality statistics. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did absolutely nothing to check for whether the data they'd collected actually came from representative samples. (Given their "math is easy, feel is what's hard" attitude, I strongly suspect most WotC employees at the time viewed statistics as boring and pointless. It would help explain why several obvious mathematical issues--such as the ghoul surprise, where the issue with saving throws went unheeded by the designers up until it bit them in the ass, unexpectedly, during a live demonstration game--went completely overlooked until the designers literally couldn't look away.

 

[Maxperson]

Accuracy isn't just your bonus to attacks, it is your bonus to attack in proportion to the AC you're trying to hit.

AD&D runs the gambit, beginning around 30-35% accuracy and culminating around 60-70% (or better, in Monty Haul games).
5E begins at 65% accuracy in typical cases, and stays around there for the most part to level 20.

In 5E, you are more likely to hit than you were in AD&D. So, 5E has better accuracy.
I'm not saying the "bonus" is higher in 5E vs. AD&D (although at low to mid levels it does), I'm talking about actual accuracy.

Now, if you want to discuss the ballooning of accuracy, then yes, in that sense AD&D improves much more, but it also started out at half that of 5E when it comes to accuracy. 5E doesn't balloon accuracy (as we know), it ballons hit points and damage (although less than hit points) as yourself and many of the rest of us have already acknowledged.

I think 3e may even exceed AD&D. At least for the first two swings. By 20th level the bonuses rocked by the 3e fighter had virtually no miss chance on the first swing, and low miss chance on the second swing. The third swing is iffy and the last one usually missed. AD&D only really had 2 attacks, so looking at the 3e fighter's first two swings is where you should be.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Accuracy isn't just your bonus to attacks, it is your bonus to attack in proportion to the AC you're trying to hit.

AD&D runs the gambit, beginning around 30-35% accuracy and culminating around 60-70% (or better, in Monty Haul games).
5E begins at 65% accuracy in typical cases, and stays around there for the most part to level 20.

In 5E, you are more likely to hit than you were in AD&D. So, 5E has better accuracy.
I'm not saying the "bonus" is higher in 5E vs. AD&D (although at low to mid levels it does), I'm talking about actual accuracy.

Now, if you want to discuss the ballooning of accuracy, then yes, in that sense AD&D improves much more, but it also started out at half that of 5E when it comes to accuracy. 5E doesn't balloon accuracy (as we know), it ballons hit points and damage (although less than hit points) as yourself and many of the rest of us have already acknowledged.

Furthermore, "accuracy" isn't just your bonus to attack in proportion to the AC you're trying to hit.

It's also your bonus to skill usage in proportion to the skill DCs you're trying to hit, and any other parts of the system which express growth. And those parts have been compressed or flattened as well--but in ways that, frankly, kind of end up being the worst of both worlds.

A super-expert character is rolling with Advantage, Expertise, and a magical bonus or two (since magic is allowed to break the "no fiddly bonuses" rule whenever and wherever it feels like.) That's going to end up as something like (2d20k1)+12+5+1d4, or something to that effect, which is relatively likely to land in the 34+ range (as in, more than 50% of results are between 34 and 41), meaning stuff that's supposed to be damn near "going beyond the impossible". Yet Peter Paladin is rolling Stealth at the exact same 1d20 (with disadvantage)-1 that he was rolling back at level 1. An across-the-board nat-1 (a less than 1 in 1600 event) is identical to the Paladin rollng a crit.

So we still have the problem that a super-focused expert can achieve some stupidly high results...as in, comparable to what ultra-expert 4e characters could achieve, which the whole point was to get away from that, while at the same time these rules have created a situation where the Paladin not only sucks at stealth but gets progressively worse at it due to the party naturally focusing on tougher enemies over time.