D&D (2024) Is Combat Tedious on Purpose?

[tetrasodium]

It's an opportunity to shift from grinding to more impactful and meaningful combat and to develop more meaningful uses for treasure.

"you're the GM, you fix it" does not automatically make treasure "more meaningful". If anything it raises the bar on successfully making any form of treasure into something meaningful because every single one of those "more meaningful" options was already an option to use on top of all of the mechanical needs served by magic items & treasure→gold. Without the needs once present it's impossible to leverage mechanical need as a spark to bootstrap the hook needed to entice a player into buying into the attached things like the narrative story or plot uses that were so "meaningful" that they didn't even rate high enough for you to name them.

The 5e method results in the GM presenting something with one of those "meaningful" uses & the player tossing it aside as trash or blackmailing the GM into making it mechanically better just to consider keeping it despite the GM having zero margin to even give any mechanical boon in the first place. That gets worse & worse over the course of acampaign as efforts to create "meaningful" uses are cast aside to terminate the effort in making that "meaningful" use into something actually mreaningul or used to leverage more & more power.

 

[Lanefan]

Xp if you play with xp. If you don't ( most people i know don't and have switched to milestones ages ago), no loss there.

In your opinion. Big loss there, in mine.

Loot is also insignificant, at least in 5e, if you can't buy magic items.

One of 5e's stupider rules, that.

We don't do fumbles. Nat 1 - you miss. I find weapons breaking and such to boring and they don't add up anything significant (i couldn't be bother to track durability of items). Also, at some point, gear becomes either magical or things like mithral/adamantium.

Two things here:

First, magic items can break as well (though they get a save, where mundane gear doesn't).

Second, fumbles - which normally occur on average 1 out of 120 rolls (nat 1/d20 followed by nat 1/d6) - can do far more than just break weapons etc. The two other most common outcomes are hurting someone you don't want to hurt (self or friend) and dropping or throwing your weapon.

Last session the party sailed their boat to a pirate island and anchored for the night in a bay well clear of the pirate town. Other than the existence of the town and what they could glean from an aerial scout they know nothing about the place. During the night my happy little wandering-monster dice pulled an encounter, so four marine ghouls (a.k.a. seaghouls) crawled on board and attacked.

The resulting combat was a triviality for this rather powerful group, but even then it was worth playing through for a series of reasons:

--- a "weapon thrown" fumble almost certainly means the weapon goes "splash", and good luck getting it back if there's more seaghouls in the bay
--- it served to alert the PCs to the potential presence of other undead on and around the island (which they hadn't expected)
--- it pointed out the mechanical drawbacks of 9* combatants all trying to fight on a fairly small ship with no room to move

* - 5 PCs and 4 ghouls; the 6th PC slept below-decks through the whole thing. (which is IMO a strong argument for using xp: the sleeper doesn't get any for this encounter)

Second,

I handwave only if it's certain the PC's will win, but it will take time. It's like chess. You can see the opponent is gonna win in 3-4-5 turns, no matter what you do. You can eatiher play it out for the sake of playing, or you tip the king and shake hand.

I still play those losing chess positions (with which I'm all too familiar!) out to the bitter end.

Since we are very limited with time to play (3-3.5h top for entire session, including at least half an hour to just catch up and socialize), i'll rather tip the king and go on with something else.

The way I see it, sure any one session might be short but there's always more sessions.

 

[Incenjucar]

"you're the GM, you fix it" does not automatically make treasure "more meaningful". If anything it raises the bar on successfully making any form of treasure into something meaningful because every single one of those "more meaningful" options was already an option to use on top of all of the mechanical needs served by magic items & treasure→gold. Without the needs once present it's impossible to leverage mechanical need as a spark to bootstrap the hook needed to entice a player into buying into the attached things like the narrative story or plot uses that were so "meaningful" that they didn't even rate high enough for you to name them.

The 5e method results in the GM presenting something with one of those "meaningful" uses & the player tossing it aside as trash or blackmailing the GM into making it mechanically better just to consider keeping it despite the GM having zero margin to even give any mechanical boon in the first place. That gets worse & worse over the course of acampaign as efforts to create "meaningful" uses are cast aside to terminate the effort in making that "meaningful" use into something actually mreaningul or used to leverage more & more power.

Fair. Treasure being worthless is fairly unique to 5E so I've not spent any thought on it, but generally I'd point to 2E which was chock full of investment opportunities. Are Bastions not proving a good gold sink?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In your opinion. Big loss there, in mine.

If I may, what is this big loss? XP has always come across as an awful lot of bookkeeping in any game I've played in, old-school or not. That's part of why "milestone" levelling has become so popular. (And, note, "milestone" doesn't have to mean "everything is on rails, you get XP when you reach the next station"--you could just as easily award progress based on the hexes players have travelled through, with more dangerous hexes counting as greater rewards, e.g. it takes 6 easy hexes, 3 medium hexes, or 2 hard hexes to level up.) I'm genuinely curious what the benefit is that justifies the bean-counting--especially since bean-counting is one of the things a lot of old-school players dislike about contemporary game design.

One of 5e's stupider rules, that.

Sure, but it naturally arises from two things that, I believe, you would consider to be good things. If you do, then you may wish to reflect on what implications that has. Specifically, those two things were:
1. Magic items are purely optional and never need to appear in any game, ever, period, end of discussion, and
2. Players should not think "with their character sheet" (an annoying and dismissive insult, but it's the argument people make), but instead with their environment

The natural consequence of these two game design goals is that players collect a vast amount of treasure with jack squat to spend it on. People cheered at the removal of "magic item marts", but that's by far the most compelling thing for PCs to spend their money on, because...y'know...magic items are cool as hell, AND they make you better at Not Dying while on adventures. And the second-most-valuable thing for them to spend money on is...things they can put on their character sheets, like training, mundane tools/equipment, and property.

(I know nothing of 5.5e's "Bastions" so I cannot comment on whether they address this issue or not...but I suspect they do not.)

Two things here:

First, magic items can break as well (though they get a save, where mundane gear doesn't).

Not really a meaningful rebuttal when the poster in question already said they find weapon-breakage dull and annoying rather than exciting and tension-raising. And, I fear, that's how a lot of people view it. A broken weapon isn't a looming threat to fear, it's annoying tedium that solely exists to take away your fun and force you to suffer dull, boring stuff simply because, statistically speaking, 1/120 events happen 1/120th of the time on average and you make a hell of a lot more than 120 attack rolls in a character's lifetime. (As in, a Fighter in 5e ought to be making that many attack rolls, bare minimum, per level.)

Second, fumbles - which normally occur on average 1 out of 120 rolls (nat 1/d20 followed by nat 1/d6) - can do far more than just break weapons etc. The two other most common outcomes are hurting someone you don't want to hurt (self or friend) and dropping or throwing your weapon.

And, again, these consequences? Most people don't find these exciting. They don't feel a thrill every time they risk potentially hurting a friend. They just feel frustrated and annoyed when The Dice Spirits decide that, today, instead of being a competent warrior who fights with cleverness and quickness and mighty thews, they're an incompetent rube who can't manage to stick the pointy end in the right gorram target! And this belief is reasonable. If an actual fencer (whether competitive or actual blood sport) injured herself 1/120 times she made a flèche, she would not be considered a competent fencer--and would almost surely go into significant training and practice to eliminate such a ridiculously high rate of stupid, dangerous consequences.

The problem--I think!--is that you see adventurers as being...not exactly "incompetent", but prone to failure, and because they are adventurers, when they fail, they fail spectacularly. That's not how most players today see the game; they see adventurers as competent in their core area of expertise (e.g. Fighters in melee combat, spellcasters with spellcasting, Rangers with tracking and wilderness survival, etc.), and reasonably capable even in other areas. As a result, even a failure rate of 1/120 is fantastically too high, especially when the consequences of that failure are severely harmful to one's own PC or one's allies.

--- a "weapon thrown" fumble almost certainly means the weapon goes "splash", and good luck getting it back if there's more seaghouls in the bay
--- it served to alert the PCs to the potential presence of other undead on and around the island (which they hadn't expected)
--- it pointed out the mechanical drawbacks of 9* combatants all trying to fight on a fairly small ship with no room to move

Conversely: Most players today would see that first consequence as "HA! HA! I stole your cool weapon, and now you have NOTHING!" It isn't fun or exciting or thrilling or dread-inducing, it's just frustration, pure and simple, and they just...don't want to deal with that. That is, most people do want to feel they are legitimately challenged, but "the dice said you threw your sword in the ocean and now it's just Gone Forever" doesn't feel like a legitimate challenge. It feels like Random Bull$#!†. There's no legitimate challenge in Random Bull$#!†, it's just a frustrating thing that happens to you out of the blue and which you genuinely can't do anything, at all, about. And, to be clear, that doesn't mean failure can't happen, it totally can! But when the failure is a purely random bolt from the blue, rather than an actual bad choice on the player's part, it doesn't feel like failure. It feels like a capricious jerk is messing with you.

* - 5 PCs and 4 ghouls; the 6th PC slept below-decks through the whole thing. (which is IMO a strong argument for using xp: the sleeper doesn't get any for this encounter)

IMO, it's a strong argument for "why the hell would someone sleep through a battle on a ship that they absolutely should hear???"

I still play those losing chess positions (with which I'm all too familiar!) out to the bitter end.

Okay. You should understand that a lot of people, when they see that sort of thing, decide it isn't worth it to bother. It's just annoying tedium for an inevitable result. When failure is genuinely inevitable, most people disengage. Just because you don't, doesn't mean things should be designed in such a way that absolutely everyone MUST go through all the motions even when they are obviously and inevitably 100% pointless.

The way I see it, sure any one session might be short but there's always more sessions.

Unfortunately, this really isn't true for a lot of groups, and when time is precious (as it so often is!), it's wise to try to make the most of it that you can. Having lost my father a little while back, I am more keenly aware than ever that...yeah, it really is the case that you should make the most of what time you have.

 

[James Gasik]

Given that critical hits aren't by themselves all that fantastic in modern D&D (oh wow, I get to do another die of damage!)*, I don't really see how critical fumbles balance anything out.

*Yeah, yeah, Paladins and Rogues can get huge mileage out of a critical hit, but most characters don't.

Especially since the DM will score more critical hits on the players than they likely ever do against monsters. And that the critical hits of monsters in modern D&D are likely going to be way more damaging than those of the players.

It doesn't help that being higher level gives you no protection from fumbles. In fact, your chances might go up as you get more attacks per turn!

Fortunately, if I ever sat at a table where the DM insisted on a critical fumble rule, I'd just probably play a caster and avoid making attack rolls, lol.

Though in all fairness, in my current 5e game, the players have earned the dubious privilege of being blessed by the Trickster god, and so any time they roll a '1' or a '20' on an attack or save, they roll on a Chaos chart, where half the results are good, and the other half are....well let's just say maybe something good, maybe something bad. Who knows?!

Even though the players groan about it, when I asked if they wanted to purge themselves of this "boon", they decided not to- the fact that it makes rolling a 1 still potentially exciting instead being a waste of time apparently outweighs randomly switching spots with an enemy or causing everyone to fall prone due to a localized earth tremor, lol.

 

[Lanefan]

Long essay warning, lots to cover in this one...

If I may, what is this big loss? XP has always come across as an awful lot of bookkeeping in any game I've played in, old-school or not. That's part of why "milestone" levelling has become so popular. (And, note, "milestone" doesn't have to mean "everything is on rails, you get XP when you reach the next station"--you could just as easily award progress based on the hexes players have travelled through, with more dangerous hexes counting as greater rewards, e.g. it takes 6 easy hexes, 3 medium hexes, or 2 hard hexes to level up.) I'm genuinely curious what the benefit is that justifies the bean-counting--especially since bean-counting is one of the things a lot of old-school players dislike about contemporary game design.

Anything that forces all the PCs to level at the same time regardless of what they've actually done in the fiction or contributed to the party's success is for me a complete non-starter. The main (and deal-making) benefit of xp is the ability to granularize each character's advancement rate based on what it actually does both in the short-term and the long. The characters who participate, who get involved, and who are lucky (see '***' below) enough to survive get more xp than those who don't do these things.

Yes this eventually results in uneven advancement and different levels within the party, but so do a lot of other factors; to the point where keeping everyone the same level isn't something I care about in the least.

Sure, but it naturally arises from two things that, I believe, you would consider to be good things. If you do, then you may wish to reflect on what implications that has. Specifically, those two things were:
1. Magic items are purely optional and never need to appear in any game, ever, period, end of discussion, and
2. Players should not think "with their character sheet" (an annoying and dismissive insult, but it's the argument people make), but instead with their environment

Magic items are theoretically optional, sure, but I've neither seen nor heard of a game that didn't have them.

The 5e rule that disallows magic item commerce completely ignores what would logically happen in the fiction on a fairly common basis even between two PCs: I've got a magic item I don't need, you have a need for it and are willing to pay me for it in cash or barter.

In the session I just played earlier tonight, my character Lanefan swapped magic items with another PC - Lan's sitting out the next mission (as player I'll be running a different character) but he owns a sword that the field group will probably find hella useful given the mission they're going on. And so, I loaned my sword to one of the field team and in return asked for one of his magic swords as collateral in case he breaks or loses mine.

By 5e RAW this transaction would not be allowed (though in play I can't imagine a DM banning it at the table). Hence, stupid rule.

The natural consequence of these two game design goals is that players collect a vast amount of treasure with jack squat to spend it on. People cheered at the removal of "magic item marts", but that's by far the most compelling thing for PCs to spend their money on, because...y'know...magic items are cool as hell, AND they make you better at Not Dying while on adventures. And the second-most-valuable thing for them to spend money on is...things they can put on their character sheets, like training, mundane tools/equipment, and property.

(I know nothing of 5.5e's "Bastions" so I cannot comment on whether they address this issue or not...but I suspect they do not.)

Frm what I've heard of Bastions it sounds like a decent attempt, but I haven't looked at the fine print.

That said, given that IME most adventurers don't have a full-time home but instead are wanderers in a strange land, the only things to spend money on are, as you put it, "things to put on your character sheet". And I'm fine with that, given as the character sheet represents the whole of the character including its possessions.

Some players get more creative than others, and some make sure their characters have (or buy, or build) a home for themselves and-or their party; and as both player and DM I love this stuff! The problems can then arise if-when the DM starts messing with that; in the game I play in we'd been building up our company base for years until three sessions ago when a threat against our base that we couldn;t (yet) deal with forced us to scatter like ants out of an anthill.

Not really a meaningful rebuttal when the poster in question already said they find weapon-breakage dull and annoying rather than exciting and tension-raising. And, I fear, that's how a lot of people view it. A broken weapon isn't a looming threat to fear, it's annoying tedium that solely exists to take away your fun and force you to suffer dull, boring stuff simply because, statistically speaking, 1/120 events happen 1/120th of the time on average and you make a hell of a lot more than 120 attack rolls in a character's lifetime. (As in, a Fighter in 5e ought to be making that many attack rolls, bare minimum, per level.)

To me, magic items and important mundane gear are very much an easy come, easy go economy. Besides, something's gotta keep the artificers in business!

But yes, fumbles happen. Fact o' life.

And, again, these consequences? Most people don't find these exciting. They don't feel a thrill every time they risk potentially hurting a friend. They just feel frustrated and annoyed when The Dice Spirits decide that, today, instead of being a competent warrior who fights with cleverness and quickness and mighty thews, they're an incompetent rube who can't manage to stick the pointy end in the right gorram target! And this belief is reasonable. If an actual fencer (whether competitive or actual blood sport) injured herself 1/120 times she made a flèche, she would not be considered a competent fencer--and would almost surely go into significant training and practice to eliminate such a ridiculously high rate of stupid, dangerous consequences.

The problem--I think!--is that you see adventurers as being...not exactly "incompetent", but prone to failure, and because they are adventurers, when they fail, they fail spectacularly. That's not how most players today see the game; they see adventurers as competent in their core area of expertise (e.g. Fighters in melee combat, spellcasters with spellcasting, Rangers with tracking and wilderness survival, etc.), and reasonably capable even in other areas. As a result, even a failure rate of 1/120 is fantastically too high, especially when the consequences of that failure are severely harmful to one's own PC or one's allies.

Potentially severely harmful, most commonly only mildly harmful if that. And yes, I do see adventurers as being prone to failure now and then; and yes, some of their failures might be spectacular (just like some of their successes).

Conversely: Most players today would see that first consequence as "HA! HA! I stole your cool weapon, and now you have NOTHING!" It isn't fun or exciting or thrilling or dread-inducing, it's just frustration, pure and simple, and they just...don't want to deal with that. That is, most people do want to feel they are legitimately challenged, but "the dice said you threw your sword in the ocean and now it's just Gone Forever" doesn't feel like a legitimate challenge. It feels like Random Bull$#!†. There's no legitimate challenge in Random Bull$#!†, it's just a frustrating thing that happens to you out of the blue and which you genuinely can't do anything, at all, about. And, to be clear, that doesn't mean failure can't happen, it totally can! But when the failure is a purely random bolt from the blue, rather than an actual bad choice on the player's part, it doesn't feel like failure. It feels like a capricious jerk is messing with you.

*** (from above) Exactly. It's random. That's the point. D&D is, at its deepest root, a game of more-or-less-managed luck and randomness, and sometimes that randomness really does leap up and bite you where you don't want to be bit. In 4e and (even more so) 5e the designers have done what they can to squash that randomness out, IMO to the game's considerable detriment, by reducing swinginess and increasing predictability.

If it wasn't a game of luck, it wouldn't use dice.

IMO, it's a strong argument for "why the hell would someone sleep through a battle on a ship that they absolutely should hear???"

Again, pure random chance.

Whenever a party gets attacked during a rest (in this case, it came at about 2 a.m.), the characters on watch are always awake but anyone off watch gets a roll to see how deeply asleep they are, repeated each round if they don't wake up. In this particular case, of the four off-watch characters one rolled nat 20 meaning she was in fact lying there awake and could act immediately. Two others were asleep but woke up quickly, they joined in for the second round and the combat was finished halfway through round three. The last guy, however, rolled awful; he finally woke up just after the combat ended having missed the whole thing - the others joked he'd been dreaming about combat (he's a Fighter-Cleric) and told him to go back to sleep.

Conveniently, however, (and by sheer random luck, again) the sleeper's player wasn't at the session anyway, so no worries about anyone having to sit out.

Okay. You should understand that a lot of people, when they see that sort of thing, decide it isn't worth it to bother. It's just annoying tedium for an inevitable result. When failure is genuinely inevitable, most people disengage. Just because you don't, doesn't mean things should be designed in such a way that absolutely everyone MUST go through all the motions even when they are obviously and inevitably 100% pointless.

That's just it: I don't see it as inevitably pointless. The winning chess player might make a huge mistake (I've been on both sides of this!); just as the winning side in a one-sided combat might mess it up or the losing side might get hella hot with their rolls and turn things around. Never say never.

Unfortunately, this really isn't true for a lot of groups, and when time is precious (as it so often is!), it's wise to try to make the most of it that you can. Having lost my father a little while back, I am more keenly aware than ever that...yeah, it really is the case that you should make the most of what time you have.

Sorry for your loss; having lost my dad and stepmother over the last few years, I can relate.

That said, unless something tragic happens like someone in the group getting a terminal diagnosis there's always going to be more sessions, and more after that. For myself, I'd like to think I've got 20-30 years in me yet; time enough for a whole lot o' D&D sessions meaning I'm not yet to the point of wanting to hurry things up that much.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

D&D is, at its deepest root, a game of more-or-less-managed luck and randomness

This is the fundamental disagreement.

A lot of people do not view it this way. At all. Not even slightly. So unless you're able to meet them halfway on this point, there will always be friction.

Most people do not view D&D as being pretty much pure randomness that you just ride until you get thrown off, then ride again. Most people view it as attempting to cultivate some kind of experience. What specific experience varies, a lot! But it's still trying to grasp at some experience, not just throwing you to the dice-wolves and calling it done.

That's just it: I don't see it as inevitably pointless.

But sometimes, it objectively, unequivocally is. Relying on your opponent making a stupid mistake is not a victorious strategy.

 

[Lanefan]

Given that critical hits aren't by themselves all that fantastic in modern D&D (oh wow, I get to do another die of damage!)*, I don't really see how critical fumbles balance anything out.

Fair enough. Our confirmed criticals can get pretty spectacular (add all the damage up and then multiply the total by 2, 3, or 4 depending on your confirm roll), and if the damage already carries a multiplier from a "slayer" weapon or a Thief's backstrike, it all stacks.

For the time being, our all-time damage record is held by a third-string character of mine (but who is rapidly moving up the ranks!); a Thief who rocked 240 points into some poor schlub on a quad-critical backstrike.

Especially since the DM will score more critical hits on the players than they likely ever do against monsters.

I'm not sure I buy this. If the DM does get more attacks than the aggregate of the players, it's more than cancelled out by the DM using fewer total spells. The odds of critting on any given attack should be the same for every participant, I would think.

And that the critical hits of monsters in modern D&D are likely going to be way more damaging than those of the players.

Can't speak to this.

It doesn't help that being higher level gives you no protection from fumbles. In fact, your chances might go up as you get more attacks per turn!

Fortunately, if I ever sat at a table where the DM insisted on a critical fumble rule, I'd just probably play a caster and avoid making attack rolls, lol.

Heh, you won't like this: I make casters roll to aim their area-effect spells; and you bet they can fumble with 'em!

And the chances of fumbling should in theory remain exactly the same as your level advances (ditto your chances of critting) on a per-attack basis. That the frequency of attacks (and fumbles, and crits) increases with level doesn't change the chance of occurrence on any given attack.

Though in all fairness, in my current 5e game, the players have earned the dubious privilege of being blessed by the Trickster god, and so any time they roll a '1' or a '20' on an attack or save, they roll on a Chaos chart, where half the results are good, and the other half are....well let's just say maybe something good, maybe something bad. Who knows?!

Even though the players groan about it, when I asked if they wanted to purge themselves of this "boon", they decided not to- the fact that it makes rolling a 1 still potentially exciting instead being a waste of time apparently outweighs randomly switching spots with an enemy or causing everyone to fall prone due to a localized earth tremor, lol.

When someone potentially triggers a wild magic surge in our crew, there's cheers for it to happen and groans if it doesn't. Players, I think, generally like chaos (and the resulting laughter and entertainment) considerably more than the designers want to give them credit for.

 

[Lanefan]

This is the fundamental disagreement.

A lot of people do not view it this way. At all. Not even slightly. So unless you're able to meet them halfway on this point, there will always be friction.

Most people do not view D&D as being pretty much pure randomness that you just ride until you get thrown off, then ride again. Most people view it as attempting to cultivate some kind of experience. What specific experience varies, a lot! But it's still trying to grasp at some experience, not just throwing you to the dice-wolves and calling it done.

When they take dice out of the game I'll agree with you...and then find something else to play. Till then, at the core it's a gambler's game.

But sometimes, it objectively, unequivocally is. Relying on your opponent making a stupid mistake is not a victorious strategy.

Going in, no it's not. But when you're sinking fast in an otherwise-hopeless position, it's the only chance you've got.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Anything that forces all the PCs to level at the same time regardless of what they've actually done in the fiction or contributed to the party's success is for me a complete non-starter. The main (and deal-making) benefit of xp is the ability to granularize each character's advancement rate based on what it actually does both in the short-term and the long. The characters who participate, who get involved, and who are lucky (see '***' below) enough to survive get more xp than those who don't do these things.

What sort of thing earns XP, and what doesn't?

The 5e rule that disallows magic item commerce completely ignores what would logically happen in the fiction on a fairly common basis even between two PCs: I've got a magic item I don't need, you have a need for it and are willing to pay me for it in cash or barter.

Hang on.
What rule is this?

In the session I just played earlier tonight, my character Lanefan swapped magic items with another PC - Lan's sitting out the next mission (as player I'll be running a different character) but he owns a sword that the field group will probably find hella useful given the mission they're going on. And so, I loaned my sword to one of the field team and in return asked for one of his magic swords as collateral in case he breaks or loses mine.

By 5e RAW this transaction would not be allowed (though in play I can't imagine a DM banning it at the table). Hence, stupid rule.

Why would this not be allowed?

But yes, fumbles happen. Fact o' life.

Potentially severely harmful, most commonly only mildly harmful if that. And yes, I do see adventurers as being prone to failure now and then; and yes, some of their failures might be spectacular (just like some of their successes).

And the chances of fumbling should in theory remain exactly the same as your level advances (ditto your chances of critting) on a per-attack basis. That the frequency of attacks (and fumbles, and crits) increases with level doesn't change the chance of occurrence on any given attack.

I think its the concept that a competent, trained combatant, in only a couple of minutes of fighting, is likely to have stabbed the comrade that they are fighting alongside at least once tends to be somewhat jarring to me.

Even worse, a highly skilled warrior stabs their friends more often than a rank novice.

Unless your name is Kharn the Betrayer, that seems ridiculous.