D&D 5E (2014) 15 Petty Reasons I Won't Buy 5e

[Bluenose]

+1 to hit and damage? They increase the damage of one party member by about 8% or so....the math is more complicated than that, but it's a rough estimate. Which means the damage output of one party member in 5 goes up 8%. Which means the entire damage output goes up about 2%(assuming the party member is question does about 25% of the group's output). Which means that for every 100 damage the party would have done, they now do 102.

I don't think that's a good estimate. It's hard to estimate how much +1 to damage increases effective damage, but it seems likely to be closer to 10% than 5%. A longsword and 18 Strength gives an average of 8.5 damage per hit, increasing to 9.5 with it being +1 - that's 11%. That multiplies by the accuracy increase, which if it's treated as 5% means 16% more damage overall. Once the whole party has that, and based on the adventures they've published it's likely that three or four characters in a party of five will by around level five, that's not as small an increase as you suggest. And it only compounds as you get more magic items, less damage taken through armour, etc.

 

[pemerton]

The way the dice roll even slightly will probably be a much bigger driver than +1 weapons

This doesn't really make sense to me. Unless the dice are biased, over time they will tend towards the expected average. With a +1 weapon that expected average is higher.

1 pip on a d20 = 5%.....

so roughly a
Common magic item +1 = +5% to your die roll..
Worse case... a +2 bonus = a +10% to your die roll.

Not a huge mathematical variance

+1 to hit and damage? They increase the damage of one party member by about 8% or so....the math is more complicated than that, but it's a rough estimate.

Your rough estimate is wrong. It's about 20% for a +1 weapon (maths below).

It's not though just one +5% on to hit rolls, it's other bonuses too. Damage rolls, less affected by creatures that resist non-magical attacks, higher AC form magic armour/shields, and I imagien a variety of other effects - D&D magic has always been good at that. And incidentally, I dispute that it's a 5% increase in accuracy. An increase from hitting 50% of the time to hitting 55% of the time mean you hit 10% more often - 50 to 55 - and as the target number increases each point on your bonus becomes more valuable.

In the playtest, a lot of creatures like orcs, goblins, warriors, etc seem to have ACs from 12 to 16. To hit, at 1st level, is +2 from proficiency +3 (let's say) from strength. For +5 overall, or a chance to hit between 70% and 50%. A +1 is therefore +1/14 to +1/10 increase in hits.

Damage seems to be 1d8+3 or 1d12+3 (the bonus is from STR). That's an average of 7.5 or 9.5. With a +1 it becomes 8.5 or 10.5.

The overall expected output vs AC 12 goes from 5.25 (d8 weapon) or 6.65 (d12 weapon) to 6.375 (ie more than +20%) or 7.875 (ie a bit over 18%).

The overall expected output vs AC 16 goes from 3.75 (d8 weapon) or 4.75 (d12 weapon) to 4.675 (nearly 25%) or 5.775 (well over 20%).

I think that increases in damage output of around 20% per attack will be noticeable in play.

That's all just presentation. "100% percent more" makes it sound like a lot, but it's still just a mere 20th of your rolls. Not a big deal.

You're still playing games with ratios. Yes, 1/10 is double the output of 1/20. It's still 1/10.

Of all your d20 rolls, 1 in 10 will be a success that would have been a failure without the item.

And if you're dealing an average of 10 damage on a hit, that's another +1 to damage. Before we actually apply the damage bonus from the weapon. I don't think that will be invisible in play.

Both 3E and 4e contain feats that grant no bonus to hit but a +2 bonus to damage. Those sorts of feats are fairly popular, because they give a noticeable increase in character damage output: around +25% for a character with 16 STR wielding a longsword.

More generally - it can't be true both that magic weapons give you an advantage in play, and that they make no difference in play.

EDIT: Following on from [MENTION=49017]Bluenose[/MENTION]'s post above, the higher the other bonuses on the character the less a +1 weapon will contribute - eg prof gains, stat gains etc. But "fewer buffs" is meant to be a catchcry of the edition; and at higher level typical enemy ACs will increase at least a bit, I think, soaking up some of those prof gains.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I don't think that's a good estimate. It's hard to estimate how much +1 to damage increases effective damage, but it seems likely to be closer to 10% than 5%. A longsword and 18 Strength gives an average of 8.5 damage per hit, increasing to 9.5 with it being +1 - that's 11%. That multiplies by the accuracy increase, which if it's treated as 5% means 16% more damage overall. Once the whole party has that, and based on the adventures they've published it's likely that three or four characters in a party of five will by around level five, that's not as small an increase as you suggest. And it only compounds as you get more magic items, less damage taken through armour, etc.

Here's the deal though. You don't hit with every attack. You miss with a bunch of them. So, let's say you hit 50% of the time. The numbers I was using were that someone with a greatsword and 20 strength would do 12 damage on average. 13 with the sword. That's an 8% increase. I was assuming the party would hand the sword to a max strength fighter who does the most damage.

However, the percentage increase is not really an important number. A +1 bonus to someone who only does 1d4 damage per around is a 40% increase. If they needed 20s to hit than with the increase in accuracy it is a 180% increase in overall damage. But that number is irrelevant. That doesn't increase the party's damage 180%. It doesn't make the monsters that much easier to defeat. The 3.5 damage that now happens once in every 10 rounds is not going to make any difference to the fight at all. Or to the campaign at all.

In fact, if we assume the party does about 10 damage each for 4 other party members plus this loser who can't hit anything and does nearly no damage, it means that in 10 rounds, the party does 400 points of damage(and would have done 401.25 damage if this guy didn't have the +1 weapon) and this character now does 3.5 damage. That means that the weapon has increased the damage output of the party by 0.56%

Let's say they do the smart thing and give it to the BEST party member. Let's assume before the weapon they get +7 to hit and need to hit AC 12. They do 2d6+5(12) points of damage normally. The rest of the party does 10 damage a piece like before. That means that before the magic weapon the party did 496 damage in 10 rounds. After the magic weapon they now do 510.5 in 10 rounds. Which is an increase of 2.92%.

If we assume the rest of the party is worse and only does 5 damage a round then it is 296 damage to 310.5. Which is a 4.98% increase.

Let's assume they are all really bad and do only 1 damage a round except for this min-maxed fighter. 136 initial damage vs 150.0 after the weapon. That's a 10.66% increase in overall damage.

However, despite the 11% increase in damage, it still only lets them do about 1.4 more damage per round. Which let's them kill an extra Zombie(9 hp) every 6.4 rounds or so that they couldn't have without the weapon. In other words, in 6 rounds they could have killed 9 zombies without the weapon. With the weapon, they can kill 10. And that's assuming an almost best case scenario for how much the weapon helps the party.

As the monster's hitpoints increase, the weapon helps less and less since 1.4 extra damage per round matters less when you are attempting to reduce 50 hitpoints than it does when you are trying to reduce 10. Since only damage that reduces an enemy to 0 matters, and it would take 30+ rounds for that extra damage to reduce one of the new enemies to 0. Extra attacks help to balance this effect out. However, a Fighter gets 4 attacks at max level(4 times more extra damage) but most 1st level monsters are around 10 hitpoints while 20th level ones are around 200. 20 times more hitpoints. So, as you go up levels your weapon increases your power less and less.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Being very atypical for me and ignoring the math for a second, I have to say, based on experiences of 2E, I am very skeptical of people who claim that having a +1 or +2 weapon won't make a noticeable difference to a character's performance, because it sure as hell did back then.

Plus I think you are dreaming if you don't think that there will be +3 items in the game. I'll be unsurprised if there are +4, though I suspect they will leave +5 to artifacts, if they include it at all.

Obviously there don't have to be +3 items in YOUR game though!

 

[Halivar]

More generally - it can't be true both that magic weapons give you an advantage in play, and that they make no difference in play.

The argument isn't whether it has an effect; it's whether that effect is so hugely enormous that it can't be anything but broken.

And I say not in the least.

 

[pemerton]

The argument isn't whether it has an effect; it's whether that effect is so hugely enormous that it can't be anything but broken.

I didn't read anyone as saying that it will be broken. What I saw was comments that it will affect resolution, and it would be nice to have encounter-building advice that accounts for that.

Personally, I think the biggest issue is that getting bigger numbers isn't necessarily more fun. Under certain circumstances it just makes the game - or, at least, those parts of the game that are affected by those numbers - more boring, because the players are no longer mechanically challenged. I think it is helpful to have GM advice to help deal with this issue.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I didn't read anyone as saying that it will be broken. What I saw was comments that it will affect resolution, and it would be nice to have encounter-building advice that accounts for that.

Personally, I think the biggest issue is that getting bigger numbers isn't necessarily more fun. Under certain circumstances it just makes the game - or, at least, those parts of the game that are affected by those numbers - more boring, because the players are no longer mechanically challenged. I think it is helpful to have GM advice to help deal with this issue.

I definitely hope they have some decent advice on what they believe the impact of certain items or values of item (as +X armour or weapons) have on combat. It seems to me that, based on 2E experience, a melee combatant with a +2 armour and weapon is going to perform, in combat, significantly better, like measurably, encounter-affectingly better, than one without those things.

As for bigger numbers not always being more fun - that's certainly true. Nowhere is it more obviously true than monster HP, either, where it's very easy to design a game such that monsters are extremely tedious/annoying to kill unless the PCs are optimized.

Still, whilst I don't hold +X items as a sacred cow, I would say that, at this point, they're really part of the stylistic heritage of D&D, and one of the first things someone who is casually familiar with D&D might mention (before, say, Alignment, for example), so they probably should be in the game. I'd actually be slightly happier with 5E if they were definitely including the traditional +1 to +5 range of items and just offering good guidance as to how to beef up encounters appropriately if the PCs have those, rather than this apparent policy of "Well, keep it to +3 or below and hope the boat doesn't rock too much!".

 

[ThirdWizard]

Plus I think you are dreaming if you don't think that there will be +3 items in the game. I'll be unsurprised if there are +4, though I suspect they will leave +5 to artifacts, if they include it at all.

From what I have read online (so grain of salt time!), +3 weapons will be reserved for artifact level items.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

From what I have read online (so grain of salt time!), +3 weapons will be reserved for artifact level items.

That definitely was not true in the October playtest, which included a boatload of magic items. There we had plenty of +3 items, including most of the rarer, more powerful weapons (Dwarven Thrower, Defender Sword, Holy Avenger, Vorpal Sword, Staff of Striking, Rod of Lordly Might). None of the armour was +3 AC, but they only had five armours and there was no suggestion that +3 was "artifact only", but rather a very clear suggestion that +3 was "rare and powerful items only". The sort of stuff one didn't usually start finding in 2E until past level 10, generally, sometimes far past that.

So if they changed that to artifact only, it was after last October and represents, imho, a pretty serious change.

 

[Lwaxy]

Hmm.. do my petty reasons have to be related to the product at all?

If so:

There is still about all the stuff I dislike in former editions, including the still-too-Vancian magic, +X items, human ability bonuses--- continue list for a bit.

I already house ruled it all into oblivion, but that of course means I can just add whatever I find cool in 5e if I haven't already. But.. but that would mean additional work. And time for the players to memorize stuff. So I think my petty reason would be that 5e is not exactly, completely like I'd houserule D&D. I think it can't be pettier than that.


If it does not have to be about the product then my reason is that I spent so much money on Pathfinder and other stuff that I am not sure I could buy 5e anytime soon. Which of course is totally WotC's fault for releasing everything so soon.