D&D 5E Has D&D Combat Always Been Slow?

I think the CR system is lowballed anyway. Even without magic items the low end of deadly is barely hard.

tetrasodium said:

Bounded accuracy pegged to the spherical cow of a game with no feats & no magic items is not exactly a good thing because the result is a magic item budget of zero for the gm to play with over the course of an entire campaign before the system breaks down is less than zero due to feats. Your talking about preserving a bit of theorycrafted design that is the embodiment of garbage in garbage out because something is correcting some of the bad inputs.

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Bounded accuracy takes magic items into account. Its why the items are +2 for rare items and not +10 or +15.

But I think you're claiming overall that Bounded Accuracy is the problem in and of itself. I disagree. Bounded Accuracy is what keeps me and my players coming back to 5e because it doesn't involve the dramatic power curves I typically dislike in videogames.

Some people enjoy a scaling system similar to Final Fantasy or Disgaea where level 1 characters can do 50-100 damage and you reach the damage cap of 999999 somewhere mid-adventure. Others prefer Paper Mario scaling where 20 damage is massive closer to the endgame.

But ultimately, I don't think bounded accuracy is anymore at fault for a slow encounter than any other scaling system.

A 5th-level fighter does an average of 22 damage per hit and has a to-hit of +7. Hill Giants are beefy brutes with 105 HP and 13 AC at CR 5. Assuming a 75% chance to hit the hill giant, the fighter does a DPR of 16.5. Now, if you assume the other 3 adventurers are of equal combat power of this barebones fighter, they're doing an average DPR of 66 damage per round.

On average, this beefy CR 5 creature gets taken down by a level 5 party within 2 turns. Any deviations are caused by different combat potential between combatants or the randomness of dice.

By "different combat potential," I mean if a wizard is bent on getting the Giant debilitated rather than doing the expected damage or the cleric taking a turn to heal but also if a player decided to have their most important stats as their lower ones for "roleplay" purposes.

6ENow! said:

I think this combined with advantage for flanking would be too much, but you can always try it out and see how it feels.

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I wouldn't do both for flanking.

The +N bonus would be a flanking thing.

Advantage/Disadvantage would be used for situational modifiers (i.e. prone, poor lighting, etc).

Edit: Regarding your comments on magic.

I read through your comments about how damage interacts with lower HP creatures.
I have a few rough ideas concerning how to scale damage-on-a-save differently, but I'm not sure how to sketch them out yet.

That being said, to reign things in a little, what would it be like to go back to non-infinite cantrips?
- Perhaps something like (spellcasting mod + proficiency bonus) free cantrips per day, with that limit being refreshed by spending a hit die (?)

...rough idea off the top of my head. I don't currently have any solid idea about how that would influence play.

Asisreo said:

Bounded accuracy takes magic items into account. Its why the items are +2 for rare items and not +10 or +15.

But I think you're claiming overall that Bounded Accuracy is the problem in and of itself. I disagree. Bounded Accuracy is what keeps me and my players coming back to 5e because it doesn't involve the dramatic power curves I typically dislike in videogames.

Some people enjoy a scaling system similar to Final Fantasy or Disgaea where level 1 characters can do 50-100 damage and you reach the damage cap of 999999 somewhere mid-adventure. Others prefer Paper Mario scaling where 20 damage is massive closer to the endgame.

But ultimately, I don't think bounded accuracy is anymore at fault for a slow encounter than any other scaling system.

A 5th-level fighter does an average of 22 damage per hit and has a to-hit of +7. Hill Giants are beefy brutes with 105 HP and 13 AC at CR 5. Assuming a 75% chance to hit the hill giant, the fighter does a DPR of 16.5. Now, if you assume the other 3 adventurers are of equal combat power of this barebones fighter, they're doing an average DPR of 66 damage per round.

On average, this beefy CR 5 creature gets taken down by a level 5 party within 2 turns. Any deviations are caused by different combat potential between combatants or the randomness of dice.

By "different combat potential," I mean if a wizard is bent on getting the Giant debilitated rather than doing the expected damage or the cleric taking a turn to heal but also if a player decided to have their most important stats as their lower ones for "roleplay" purposes.

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5e does not have baked in expectations that a pc will have +n stuff by a given level like past estimates . D&d uses plus one to plus three items not plus ten plus fifteen or any of the other completely absurd comparisons you make to claim ba considers magic items but thst doesn't change the fact that ba does not bake in a magic item budget for the gm to play in over the campaign as past editions did.

el-remmen said:

It might also be that terms like "area denial" and "zone of control" are not in my normal gaming vocabulary. I think about higher ground, clear shots, crowded conditions, ducking behind cover, environmental hazards - and while I know those overlap and the former is a way to describe some of that stuff in strategic game terms, me and my groups tend to examine things on an immersive level.

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For me what language is immersive depends on who you are trying to immerse yourself as. A professional chef will use different language in the kitchen to a student who can't cook much beyond an egg cracked into ramen - and part of immersing as one rather than the other involves the difference between the two.

For combat and to take Lord of the Rings characters as a touchstone Frodo and Pippin are combat novices who absolutely would think in terms of "ducking behind cover" and "clear shots" but do not have a strategic sight of the battlefield. By contrast Aragorn and Legolas have both been warriors for a long time and both are pretty familiar with magic - and Aragorn is a leader while Legolas is a ranged fighter.

Being less overwhelmed by the combat and thinking in cleaner and more abstract and technical terms like "area denial" much of the time (it doesn't matter whether the orcs don't want to come that way because there's Legolas picking them off as they do or because the ground is a raging inferno, but you need to be thinking two steps ahead to avoid getting surrounded and some of that involves strategic streamlining) as well as ducking behind cover and clear shots is much more immersive for me for thinking like a veteran warrior who pays attention to the strategic situation.

So which am I normally playing as in D&D? By the time they hit about third level your average D&D character will have been involved in more than a dozen combat encounters. Aragorn was probably involved in about a dozen combat encounters in the entire combined Lord of the Rings - and the hobbits far fewer. Even before that first level fighter in oD&D was explicitly a veteran. D&D characters are almost all veterans at combat - and like veterans in any discipline they have jargon and patterns they see.

I therefore find it highly anti-immersive for D&D characters not to have specialised technical vocabularies for combat given the nature and experience of D&D characters and that combat is something they do often and that understanding can save their lives. If I were to isekai myself into D&D land I wouldn't have such an understanding until after I'd gained a few levels - but I'm not playing myself, I'm playing my character. And by third level my character is a combat veteran who should be seeing the battlefield from more than an immediate level and learning and developing jargon.

That the D&D jargon and specialised vocabulary doesn't necessarily match the real world equivalent isn't a major problem. If I was roleplaying as a professional chef (despite not knowing my way round the kitchen) I'd probably be completely messing up the use of words like "spatchcocking" and have accidentally invented two types of knife. But that would be one hell of a lot more immersive than roleplaying a professional chef while having to describe each step of the process of cooking the way I'd need to as a very very amateur cook, and to describe knives by length and edge shape.

To sum up immersion depends on who you are immersed as. I find having to see combat the way I would have, with only first order terms as described, seriously harmful to immersion as a D&D character rather than as myself in a D&D world. And just as in the kitchen the advanced technical vocabulary exists but I don't have to use it if RPing a novice even if I was a veteran.

tetrasodium said:

5e does not have baked in expectations that a pc will have +n stuff by a given level like past estimates . D&d uses plus one to plus three items not plus ten plus fifteen or any of the other completely absurd comparisons you make to claim ba considers magic items but thst doesn't change the fact that ba does not bake in a magic item budget for the gm to play in over the campaign as past editions did.

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DMG page 133 said:

Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0-4 table, eighteen rolls on the Challenge 5-10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11-16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table.

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XGtE said:

When you want to select an item as treasure for an encounter, the Magic Items Awarded by Rarity table serves as your item budget.

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The system not only knows the maximum bonus a party is likely to get by the end of each tier as a percent chance, they also literally have a budget that the DM can use to distribute the items.

Johnny3D3D said:

I wouldn't do both for flanking.

The +N bonus would be a flanking thing.

Advantage/Disadvantage would be used for situational modifiers (i.e. prone, poor lighting, etc).

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Ok, sorry, from the text it sounded more like you meant both were for flanking. Keeping them separate but available is fine. It basically is akin to allowing advantage to stack, which is what our group does anyway.

Johnny3D3D said:

Edit: Regarding your comments on magic.

I read through your comments about how damage interacts with lower HP creatures.
I have a few rough ideas concerning how to scale damage-on-a-save differently, but I'm not sure how to sketch them out yet.

That being said, to reign things in a little, what would it be like to go back to non-infinite cantrips?
- Perhaps something like (spellcasting mod + proficiency bonus) free cantrips per day, with that limit being refreshed by spending a hit die (?)

...rough idea off the top of my head. I don't currently have any solid idea about how that would influence play.

Click to expand...

I haven't seen any reason to scale back damage on cantrips. After all, a longsword still does a d8, why not have shocking grasp still do a d8?

But, if you want non-infinite cantrips, I would limit it to proficiency bonus in cantrips as this more follows the spell slot progression in the class tables. If you want to refresh it, allow it to refresh on a short rest?

Now, the biggest thing this will lead to is especially casters needed to resort to using weapons at times. The infinite cantrips was supposed to get rid of the crossbow-firing wizard scenario.

Let me ask you this: why scale back cantrips? If anything, I would be more inclined to reduce the auto-scaling damage of cantrips back to just mirror all the other classes with Extra Attack (who only get 2 attacks). The net effect would be to reduce them to 2 or more likely 3 dice of damage instead of 4, but it is minor adjustment and in considering it before I decided it wasn't really needed at all.

6ENow! said:

Ok, sorry, from the text it sounded more like you meant both were for flanking. Keeping them separate but available is fine. It basically is akin to allowing advantage to stack, which is what our group does anyway.


I haven't seen any reason to scale back damage on cantrips. After all, a longsword still does a d8, why not have shocking grasp still do a d8?

But, if you want non-infinite cantrips, I would limit it to proficiency bonus in cantrips as this more follows the spell slot progression in the class tables. If you want to refresh it, allow it to refresh on a short rest?

Now, the biggest thing this will lead to is especially casters needed to resort to using weapons at times. The infinite cantrips was supposed to get rid of the crossbow-firing wizard scenario.

Let me ask you this: why scale back cantrips? If anything, I would be more inclined to reduce the auto-scaling damage of cantrips back to just mirror all the other classes with Extra Attack (who only get 2 attacks). The net effect would be to reduce them to 2 or more likely 3 dice of damage instead of 4, but it is minor adjustment and in considering it before I decided it wasn't really needed at all.

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technically longsword does d8+strengthmod, with d8/d10 being average 4.5/5.5 you could almost say that a longword does 2d8 compared to a d8 cantrip like shocking grasp & in the hands of a fighter gets an extra 2d8 equivalent at the same levels a wizard gets abn extra 1d8 on that shocking grasp. Toss in a +1 +2 or +3 longsword and multiply the +n by the number of attacks while a +1/+2/+3 wand only applies once

6ENow! said:

Ok, sorry, from the text it sounded more like you meant both were for flanking. Keeping them separate but available is fine. It basically is akin to allowing advantage to stack, which is what our group does anyway.


I haven't seen any reason to scale back damage on cantrips. After all, a longsword still does a d8, why not have shocking grasp still do a d8?

But, if you want non-infinite cantrips, I would limit it to proficiency bonus in cantrips as this more follows the spell slot progression in the class tables. If you want to refresh it, allow it to refresh on a short rest?

Now, the biggest thing this will lead to is especially casters needed to resort to using weapons at times. The infinite cantrips was supposed to get rid of the crossbow-firing wizard scenario.

Let me ask you this: why scale back cantrips? If anything, I would be more inclined to reduce the auto-scaling damage of cantrips back to just mirror all the other classes with Extra Attack (who only get 2 attacks). The net effect would be to reduce them to 2 or more likely 3 dice of damage instead of 4, but it is minor adjustment and in considering it before I decided it wasn't really needed at all.

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It would be a playstyle preference for me. Sometimes, I feel as though magic is almost too prevalent in D&D. If there was a way to make it feel more special and not quite so readily available and everywhere, I'd prefer that.
(Which also requires rewriting a lot of other areas of the game, but I digress.)

However, I do see the reasoning for making cantrips easier to use. That's why I'd prefer Proficiency bonus + spellcasting mod (as opposed to only being prof mod).

Thematically, I like the idea of being able to spend HD to recharge slots because it can indicate the strain of trying to push beyond limits when necessary.

I'm not opposed to a recharge during short rests. I'd be okay with two options being available: either wait until a short rest or spend a HD (free action) during an encounter to refresh cantrip slots.

It's an off the top of my head idea. It's something I may play around with.

I've also been tinkering with having short rests, medium rests, and long rests. Short would be more 4E style: 5-10 minutes; medium would be similar to the current 1-hour 5E shorts; long would be as currently defined. I'm still working on sketching it out and defining the differences.

Asisreo said:

The system not only knows the maximum bonus a party is likely to get by the end of each tier as a percent chance, they also literally have a budget that the DM can use to distribute the items.

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I feel like I'm talking to a wall. The section you reference on xge135/136 has very little if anything to do with the topic of bounded accuracy being tuned to a garbage standard of no magic items & no feats not leaving room in the crunch to fit +N gear because it's still tuned to no feats & no magic items.
Take a cr5 creature like the cr5 large air elemental
xge says a party of 4 should be able to handle one of them.
In 5e it's 90hp & 15ac. a fighter who started with 15 strength & bumped it to 16 at 4 needs to roll a 10 to hit because +2 proficiency +3 from strength. in 5e that same cr5 size large air elemental is 60hp ac20where a fighter is going to have +4 from bab, +4 from 19 strength so needs to roll a 12 to hit which is why he probabably already has a +1 weapon & +2 strength item or should soon.