As usual, I tagged this for 2024, but it applies equally to 2014 and presumably to your 5e-alike of choice, as long as it has advantage and disadvantage.
Much digital ink (should that be many pixels…?) has been spilled on the problems with advantage/disadvantage stacking. While advantage and disadvantage is in many ways an elegant fix to the endless parade of + or - 1 or 2 modifiers of 3e and 4e, but to many, it felt like a slight overcorrection. If you have a single source of advantage, it cancels out all sources of disadvantage, and vice versa. This has the unfortunate side-effect of discouraging players from seeking out creative avenues for gaining advantage as long as they have one reliable way to gain it, which made the optional flanking rules feel overpowered in 2014, and in 2024 the Vex Mastery property has a similar problem. And that’s not even to mention weirdness like everyone rolling normally inside the radius of a darkness spell because you can’t see the monsters and they can’t see you, so you all have both advantage and disadvantage against each other. Some folks are happy to resolve this issue simply by counting instances of advantage and disadvantage, and having them cancel out 1 for 1 instead of being strictly on/off like in RAW, while for others, this brings back too much of the fiddliness of counting individual 1 or 2 point modifiers. Personally, I have always fallen into the latter category, but I have wished there was a way to address these issues that didn’t sacrifice the elegance of binary advantage/disadvantage.
Well, I think I’ve come up with a solution, and credit where credit is due: I’m stealing the idea almost directly from Brennan Lee Mulligan (so Dimension 20 fans, apologies in advance if this idea is old news to you). Brennan has used this mechanic on only a few occasions so far in Critical Role and hasn’t called it by a specific name there, but I’m given to understand that in some of his other campaigns, he has used this mechanic and called it “rolling with emphasis.” The idea is, similar to how a d20 test can have advantage or disadvantage, it can also have emphasis; when you make a d20 test with emphasis, you roll twice and instead of taking the higher or lower result, you take the result that is farthest from 10. Brennan apparently uses this to up the stakes on a roll, increasing the chances that it either succeed or fail in a big way, favoring extremes. So, my thinking is, rather than using this mechanic entirely at DM discretion to spice up a roll, why not use it specifically when a d20 test has both advantage and disadvantage?
So, my proposal is simple: when a d20 test would have both advantage and disadvantage, it loses both and has emphasis instead. If a d20 test would have emphasis but gains advantage or disadvantage, it loses emphasis and gains that modifier instead. This preserves the benefit of only having to track what status a roll has instead of counting instances of each status, but by adding a third status, a roll can shift between the three without any bean-counting needed. It also fixes the “everyone rolls normally in darkness” problem, without having to carve out blindness as a special exception to advantage/disadvantage stacking where disadvantage trumps advantage. Instead, in darkness everyone is likely to either miss by a wide margin, or to hit very directly, because attackers don’t know where to aim, but defenders also don’t know where attacks are coming from. So if an attack hits, it’s probably going to be a direct hit, but anything else is probably going to be a complete whiff.
What do you all think? Fun idea? Terrible idea? Something you’ve already been doing for years? Let me know.
