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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6965339" data-attributes="member: 996">IDK, Jester Canuck's Alt, why did you post so heavily in 4e forums?  Seriously, Mr. Oblivion isn't warring against 5e, he's not trying to drag the whole hobby down and watch it burn, he's relating his experiences.Yeah, maybe it's a blog post, but I'm going to try to talk him into giving 5e a chance and maybe banging it into shape for himself.  It's the biggest strength of the edition, that you can make it your own, and "STFU" doesn't help anyone do that.Solution for him, sure - a solution that works well for virtually everyone on earth ;P - but a failure for 5e, which is trying to heal the rift in the fan base and striving to be 'for' fans of all past editions.  IIRC (from the WotC boards) Mr. Oblivion was rather put off by Essentials pulling back from 4e, so might still (no offense) be running on a bit of bitterness from that.Good question, and good suggestion.Not a good sign. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />  d20 is necessarily like that, though, isn't it?  You either hit the DC or not.  5e is tuned so the DC isn't exactly a fair coin-flip, it's more often 65% or so success (sadly, that includes /failing/ a save).5e's quite amenable to not being 5e anymore.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  "Make the game your own, and all."  Check out the job CapnZapp's doing on 5.1 in his series of threads... All true, and intentional, but not that hard to tune differently.  You can bring down both monster & PC damage - or make all your adjustments on the DM's side of the screen, bringing down monster damage and boosting their hps and/or damage-mitigation.  IMX, admittedly mostly low level, it's more like 60/40 or 70/30 it skews towards success, I suppose, in part, in support of the fast combat goal.Also a d20 thing. 3e addressed it by encouraging specialization and having very high DCs, so that, in a party designed to cover all the bases, likely only 1 or 2 would have a shot at any given non-trivial check.  4e and 5e rebelled against that and tried to keep everyone viable in most circumstances.  4e also addressed that & the other issues you brought up with structured Skill Challenges and group checks (which I've really just gotten more and more enthused about over the years).  SCs are gone, but group checks are, I'm pretty sure, in 5e somewhere.  Calling for a group check reduces the swinginess and the issue of 'somebody always rolls high' (when the system would otherwise imply one success is all that's needed) or 'somebody always rolls low' (when the system would otherwise imply that one failure blows it for the party - as in earlier-d20 stealth situations).  So, (1) lean heavily on group checks, they reduce swinginess and keep everyone involved.  One thing I've started doing recently is to call for a knowledge check (or when someone asks to make one - or, I hate this, rolls and calls it out grr....) if only one player rolls, it's pass/fail, if others pile on, it becomes a group check and, even if someone rolls high, if the majority don't succeed, they reach a wrong consensus.  :>and (2) If you must, build yourself something akin to the a Skill Challenge for more meaningful non-combat encounters.  You needn't share it with the players, just use it as a DMing tool to add some depth to the resolution.But it's so DM-dependent you can be pretty free with it.  Ah, that made some of the above gel for me.  I think you might find that re-tuning monsters for longer combats (in rounds, they should still resolve pretty quick) and adapting Skill Challenges (or at least making heavier use of group checks) might help a lot.  It's even something you can do from behind the screen without having to horribly violate AL conventions.Good Luck!</blockquote>

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