D&D 5E 5th Edition has broken Bounded Accuracy

[Celtavian]

What I really want to know is why Hussar and a few others think you have all this time to try tactics it can save against on a dragon. I don't understand it. Have they really not been hit by a round of dragon actions? Or do they have a ton of magic items to resist things?

If a wizard or cleric with 45 to 60 hit points show his face around a dragon, it can ignore the martials and hammer the casters knocking them down in a single round, possibly killing them outright if they close melee. Knocking someone unconscious is as bad as sticking a hold monster on them. They all hits get advantage and automatically critical hit causing a two missed death saves. The best tactic for the dragon is kill anyone that appears to be lightly armored and/or casting. They can do this by grabbing them up and taking them to an isolated location or if the initiative falls badly, knocking them down with a breath weapon followed by lair action, and single legendary hit causing three missed death saves. One dead, fly off, rinse and repeat while waiting for breath to recharge.

Don't even stay in range for them to attack. Take full cover between assaults out of reach of any of the characters without fly. The dragon doesn't care if the PCs tuck tail and run. It's won if they do that.

These tactics that say, "Use this spell. Use that spell." don't even take into account a round of failing. They seem to think if the dragon saves against Abjure Enemy they have plenty of time to try something else. If the dragon saves against Tasha's or resists Bigby's, plenty of time to try again. There isn't plenty of time. If your visible as a mage and you miss, guess where the dragon is coming. "Hello mage. How are you? I resisted what you do. Let's see if you can resist what I can do." It was rough. Dragon DPR is no joke if they are a deadly challenge to your party. PCs were dropping like flies. A cure wounds spell might get them back on their feet for a round. You just spent your action to keep a guy up for a round, the dragon brings him down again and maybe kills him.

White dragons are particularly nasty too with the 20 foot radius freezing fog. That fog really messed us up in difficult terrain. The AoE attack is nasty and the wall. Out of the dragons, a white dragon has some nasty lair actions.

 

[DaveDash]

I think for laughs this Friday night we will do some Dragon fights.

I'll get them to make a Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue party. First round they can try to hand axe an adult red Dragon to death while the Wizard tries Bigbys/telekensis. See if they can even survive. I'll be nice and let the fighter have access to returning hand axes.
Round 2 we'll do things per normal. Fly and Bless on the GMW fighter.

We will see how things turn out for round 1 and Henry Handaxe and his merry band of non-buffers.

 

[pemerton]

if you're significantly twisting the game to get that experience, you are playing in a way that is going to produce a much different play experience from most other tables. Even folks who pursue challenge-based gameplay out of D&D don't do it the same way. For instance, some make dungeon survival the challenge rather than lopsided combats.

<snip>

when you make pretty significant tweaks to the game - like laughing off encounter guidelines so you have a more binary challenge experience - you have to expect that to change your play experience relative to a group who does not. It then sort of introduces a caveat whenever you talk about your experience that someone who doesn't tweak the game like that doesn't have.

<snip>

I don't think it's controversial to say that D&D 5e wasn't built to give people who seek success in massively unbalanced encounters a satisfying experience. That doesn't seem to be among its design goals. It's not an asymmetric skirmish game. It doesn't bill itself that way. If it was meant to be played that way, you'd see different rules in place. If that's what you're seeking out of the game, you'll have to expect that you're going to have a distorted experience relative to a group whose changes are less significant.

I agree that [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION]'s experiences probably aren't typical - as in, aren't particularly representative of the play experiences of the median 5e player.

I don't think this is about distortion or twisting, though. Clearly D&D, including its 5e iteration, is intended to provide mechanically and tactically challenging combats. It's just that Celtavian's group is sufficiently hard core in this style of play that they have to push the system limits to achieve this.

I remember some old 4e threads where you expressed disbelief at the number of encounters (including Level +3 or more encounters) that my 4e group could deal with between extended rests. Celtavian's descriptions of his group's style don't seem that alien to me.

What they do bring out, though, is a possible salient difference between 4e and 5e . 4e uses multiple dimensions of monster/NPC strength (level, plus minion/standard/elite/solo), and has a relatively strict approach to tiered abilities (so low-level PCs won't encounter large amounts of fly that they lack the resources to deal with); whereas 5e's combination of bounded accuracy with a unitary measure of monster/NPC strength (CR) means that in a tough encounter for N-level PCs, the enemies might have capabilities (eg flight) that are hard for N-level PCs to deal with.

When it comes to martial melee characters, this issue is perhaps further compounded by the comparative non-epicness of high level 5e compared to high level 4e, combines with a predominantly at-will resources suite. For instance, when Celtavian talks about the difficulties of a martial PC closing across difficult terrain, I think of the 6th level encounter power Mighty Sprint, which the dwarf fighter PC in my game uses to deal with this problem; or of the 10th level utility power Winter's Arrival that the paladin uses (allowing teleportation next to a marked target).

I think that if you have to regularly shatter the encounter guidelines, your experience is going to be significantly different from a group following the RAW more closely.

<snip>

by running encounters in that fashion, you distort your gameplay experience when compared to someone who runs them more closely to the rules, and so your experience isn't the experience of the rules, they're the experience of your own group's tweak on the rules.

I don't really agree with this. Everyone is playing with his/her own group's tweak on the rules. Celtavian has emphasised, for instance, that his group uses points buy, WotC modules, etc - that's hewing close to some of the norms of the game. I don't know of any reason to think that the departure from encounter building guidelines is introducing any greater variation into the table experience than differences across tables in magic items gained.

I would like some of these concerns possibly addressed by the game designers because my players prefer to follow the rules in the book. It's like pulling teeth to limit to GWM and Sharpshooter without an official change.

Mearls and Crawford should be open to these types of changes if the player-base proves that a particular feat or rule is causing problems with the core game assumptions using both math and experience. That is what we have done with a few of these things. I'm hoping they get addressed in some fashion. So when someone says, "It's not really a problem" and uses their own very far away from Core rule assmptions game, I don't want Mearls and Crawford to think that the problems using the rules mostly as written in the Core Books are fine. Because they aren't. They should be willing to do a little clean up to make things consistent across the game and help us DMs whose players want official rulings before we change something like Sharpshooter (this is the worst offender) being far too powerful compared to other forms of martial combat.

I don't agree with this either. From WotC's point of view, the issue isn't who's playing "core" and who's playing "tweak". The issue of errata is a commercial matter, not a purity-of-core-experience matter. If only a small minority of hardcore players, playing at high levels, encounter the sorts of issues that you have, then WotC has no significant incentive to devote effort to resolving them. They'll be more worried about things going wrong in those hundreds and hundreds of 1st to 6th level games played by people with only modest amounts of system mastery.

The Barbarian was able to land melee hits on the dragon using a greatsword and high jumps because, per the written module and map, the ceiling was 30ft high and the dragon occupied a 15x15' cube, meaning the barbarian could, according to the rules for High Jumping, hit it with a high jump on a running start thanks to his character height (a 7 foot reghed barbarian) and high strength score (18).

To me, this doesn't so much show that melee martial PCs are viable against flying enemies, as show that if you stick a flyer inside a relatively shallow-ceilinged space then many of its advantages of flying are negated.

 

[Celtavian]

I think for laughs this Friday night we will do some Dragon fights.

I'll get them to make a Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue party. First round they can try to hand axe an adult red Dragon to death while the Wizard tries Bigbys/telekensis. See if they can even survive. I'll be nice and let the fighter have access to returning hand axes.
Round 2 we'll do things per normal. Fly and Bless on the GMW fighter.

We will see how things turn out for round 1 and Henry Handaxe and his merry band of non-buffers.

I would like to see that. I'm thinking in excess of 80% failure rate for a party of str-based throwers. Since I can't account for saving throw luck, not sure what the failure rate would be for alternate spell uses. Completely dependent on saves. I'm still thinking close to 80 since LR will resist quite a bit and casting will put the casters in attack range allowing the dragon to kill the casters. Once it kills the casters, it has pretty much won the battle and can fly off, heal up, come back and kill Henry Handaxe with complete ease without plot armor provided by the DM.




postscript: This is not the 99% death rate I was talking about for a 6th level party facing an adult dragon in its lair if anyone starts a side tangent on that I said 99% in another post. Completely different circumstances.

 

[DaveDash]

I would like to see that. I'm thinking in excess of 80% failure rate for a party of str-based throwers. Since I can't account for saving throw luck, not sure what the failure rate would be for alternate spell uses. Completely dependent on saves. I'm still thinking close to 80 since LR will resist quite a bit and casting will put the casters in attack range allowing the dragon to kill the casters. Once it kills the casters, it has pretty much won the battle and can fly off, heal up, come back and kill Henry Handaxe with complete ease without plot armor provided by the DM.




postscript: This is not the 99% death rate I was talking about for a 6th level party facing an adult dragon in its lair if anyone starts a side tangent on that I said 99% in another post. Completely different circumstances.

Yeah I'm pretty sure they're screwed in Fight 1, unless the Dragon gets super unlucky. I don't plan on going close to Henry Handaxe, and lair actions combined with breath weapon will force them to spread out. I'll post round by round (including dice rolls) what happens anyway.

Hmmm, I'm thinking level 12 maybe?

 

[Celtavian]

I agree that [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION]'s experiences probably aren't typical - as in, aren't particularly representative of the play experiences of the median 5e player.

I don't think this is about distortion or twisting, though. Clearly D&D, including its 5e iteration, is intended to provide mechanically and tactically challenging combats. It's just that Celtavian's group is sufficiently hard core in this style of play that they have to push the system limits to achieve this.

When we play a new game system, we start with the core rules and assumptions. We run the recommended module mostly as is. We like to test the core rules and assumptions to see how the game works. So for this particular campaign, we were playing pretty close to core with no house rules and only the optional feat rules. That's why I made a point to say "Core" We make changes once we determine how the core rules work.

I imagine tactically we're not the median 5E player. But the rules we were using were the rule as written aka as designed. I think that is one of the things that makes these discussion odd from my perspective. I'm pointing out how certain mechanics work in real combat situations absent any house ruling and some are thinking our group isn't typical. I get it. There is no typical. But if you're playing the game as it is written, you're pretty much playing it as the designers intended.

I don't really agree with this. Everyone is playing with his/her own group's tweak on the rules. Celtavian has emphasised, for instance, that his group uses points buy, WotC modules, etc - that's hewing close to some of the norms of the game. I don't know of any reason to think that the departure from encounter building guidelines is introducing any greater variation into the table experience than differences across tables in magic items gained.

We've only started tweaking. We have about four or five house rules at the moment. 5E for the most part is well balanced and fun. We definitely want to keep it simple as that is part of the game's attraction. There are some goofy things we need to sort out. I think a tweaked game will suit our preferences.

I don't agree with this either. From WotC's point of view, the issue isn't who's playing "core" and who's playing "tweak". The issue of errata is a commercial matter, not a purity-of-core-experience matter. If only a small minority of hardcore players, playing at high levels, encounter the sorts of issues that you have, then WotC has no significant incentive to devote effort to resolving them. They'll be more worried about things going wrong in those hundreds and hundreds of 1st to 6th level games played by people with only modest amounts of system mastery.

Yep. So little high level support. Kills me since we like to play the game to high level. That's probably why we won't see any official changes to Sharpshooter or Great Weapon Mastery. Doesn't affect 1st through 6th level too much. Once again our group will be high level orphans. Though I don't imagine will be anywhere near as bad as 3E/Pathfinder.

To me, this doesn't so much show that melee martial PCs are viable against flying enemies, as show that if you stick a flyer inside a relatively shallow-ceilinged space then many of its advantages of flying are negated.

You just threw a bullseye on the dart board. Probably why our DM changed the terrain and room size. He hates (we all do really) stuff like dragons in 20 by 20 caves or 10 orcs in a 10 x 10 room or a huge monster in a 15 by 15 dump with nowhere to move. Such encounters are a waste of our time. A monster stuck in an area where it can't take advantage of its most powerful abilities should be a lower CR.

 

[KarinsDad]

There's a lot of discussion on this.

It seems like you only need to remove a few points from that "+10" to make the feat work; without any once per round restrictions or to remove the "power attack" aspect of the feat entirely.

When I suggested -5/+5 the math people shot that down as making the deal worthless. So perhaps -5/+8...

+8 damage has the same issues regardless. It still doesn't work.

It becomes +24 or +32 for mid to high level PCs. Even a 5th level PC can do +16 or +24 with this (+48 with a paralyzed Hold Person target).

+10 = +3D6. That's reasonable. That's the equivalent of a 5th level Rogue, but with the -5 to hit.
+24 = +7D6. That's not reasonable. That's the equivalent of a 13th level Rogue. Way worse if it is +48 or +64 with a Hold Person target.

JMO.


Once per round solves all of these issues. It becomes +10, +20 with a Hold Person target. Done. Once per turn allows a tiny bit more umph with OAs (which rarely happen, so it just adds fun into it without lack of balance).

These two feats as written are the CoDzilla of 5E, it's just a MeleeZilla instead. Trash them.

 

[Celtavian]

Yeah I'm pretty sure they're screwed in Round 1, unless the Dragon gets super unlucky. I don't plan on going close to Henry Handaxe, and lair actions combined with breath weapon will force them to spread out. I'll post round by round (including dice rolls) what happens anyway.

Hmmm, I'm thinking level 12 maybe?

Adult Red Dragon. CR 17. Four or five person party in its lair. I think that would be a fair test. Damn they have nasty lair actions.

 

[KarinsDad]

I think for laughs this Friday night we will do some Dragon fights.

I'll get them to make a Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue party. First round they can try to hand axe an adult red Dragon to death while the Wizard tries Bigbys/telekensis. See if they can even survive. I'll be nice and let the fighter have access to returning hand axes.
Round 2 we'll do things per normal. Fly and Bless on the GMW fighter.

We will see how things turn out for round 1 and Henry Handaxe and his merry band of non-buffers.

To be fair, the spell casters should try their best to bring the dragon to the ground. Otherwise, you are stacking the deck ahead of time and the exercise will illustrate nothing.

 

[DaveDash]

Adult Red Dragon. CR 17. Four or five person party in its lair. I think that would be a fair test. Damn they have nasty lair actions.

Yeah definitely a CR17 Adult Red, which actually gives them a little bit of an advantage due to Fire Shield (if the Wiz can get it cast in time).

But I'm thinking I'll make them level 12. It's just above deadly, a nice level due to ASI boost, lots of abilities online, and pretty much near the cap of where most 'normal' campaigns will reach.