D&D 5E Assumptions about character creation

[EzekielRaiden]

Where to me the frustration of failing at stuff - even occasionally to the point of having to abandon the adventure and find something else - is just part of the game.

Again, you seem to be reading me as saying, "I never want to fail ever." That isn't what I've said, and I've repeatedly stated the opposite. I just want a mixture that is more favorable than a goddamn roulette wheel.

I suppose the question becomes one of how great a divergence from the norm one is willing to accept. In my case, I'll accept 'slight' but could live with 'none'.

Out of curiosity, then, how do you feel about the quoted and image-capped stuff from the 1e PHB above? The stuff Gygax himself wrote about needing some 15s (aka needing some actual bonuses) in order to survive?

You're off on this one: many otherwise-right-handed people bat left in baseball or shoot left in hockey. (in hockey, finding players who shoot right for certain positions can be a challenge, as most shoot left)

Er...that's...not what I was talking about. About 10% of people are left-handed overall. Specifically in interactive sports, and not JUST baseball, most of them (hence why I mentioned tennis...), the ratio of "using left hand dominantly" is closer to 50/50. Whatever the reason--even if the person in question is normally right-hand dominant--it would be incorrect and lead to errors if you presumed that dominant-handedness has the same distribution in that group as it does in the overall population. That is just one, singular, example of how a relevant statistic can be radically different among a group of people who share a common divergence from society at large. Such differences can be subtle, profound, or anywhere between.

What you're pointing out here is IMO a failing of how 5e handles checks - too easy for an expert to fail and also too easy for a non-expert to succeed

Okay, but you're talking in a thread about 5e, and making broad-stroke assertions. If you always meant to talk about something four editions gone, it would be a lot easier to get your point (and save a lot of pointless replying) if you specified that sooner.

Yes, I always presume that...but then, I've been in more or less the same group since I started. We also turn over characters fairly quickly, particularly at low level, as our games tend to be (by modern standards) hella lethal; so there's little point in getting married to a concept* as chances are strong that it won't make it to its third adventure anyway.

Then you should be aware that these things are not how most people play D&D anymore. It is not, at all, bad to play this way. But it is atypical to play this way now, and speaking of rules design as though everyone not only can, not only does, but should play this way will lead to exactly the kind of discussion we're having now.

And, you're on about 'watching it evolve' again, where my expectation is that - unless my luck runs consistently hot - I'm far more likely to watch it die. My main hope is that I can somehow make that death entertaining and memorable.

See, Lanefan, here's a critical problem: My desired system is compatible with your interests, but your desired system isn't compatible with mine.

A system where things can evolve can still be pushed hard enough that death occurs often and can be entertaining and memorable. But a system where death is frequent (whether or not it is entertaining and memorable) prevents evolution from occurring in the first place. Using an actual biology analogy: you need selection pressure to permit evolution, and sometimes selection pressure does rise high enough that things just die rather than having the time to evolve. But if death rates are consistently extremely high, evolution can never take place because things don't live long enough to reproduce at all.

If one of us has a design strategy that can, if massaged, accommodate both interests, while the other has a design strategy that can only accommodate one interest, which strategy is better for us to use?

If your life situation has you bouncing from one town to another every year or two, I can't offer much by way of suggestion.

I deal with severe social anxiety and have reasons why travelling around the city where I live (even with its reasonably good public transit) isn't ideal. All of my gaming experiences have been over the internet, pretty much by necessity.

You might be pleasantly surprised.

Unlikely. I have played actual, legit old-school D&D (well, Labyrinth Lord). It wasn't my cup of tea. The lethality, the mercenary attitude, the cavalier disregard...it gets to me. It feels, not so much "painful," as "wearying" I guess. I derive far too little joy from it to consider it a pleasant activity.

Yes - that's the 'slight' special-ness I was referring to above.

So...I'm really confused. You're okay with +2s (since 3e's minimum rolling rules guarantee characters with at least a 14 in their highest stat), but not +3s? A single extra plus is enough to take you from, "Ah, that's slightly special," to "Holy mother of mercy, how can anyone relate to this person?!"? Because...uh...that's an opinion I can't relate to.

Here we differ hugely, as I see the game as very luck-based and prefer if the setting tries to simulate its own reality at the very least.

Again: if I wanted a roulette wheel, I'd go to a casino. Being probabilistic and being ToTaLlY rAnDoM bRo!1!1 are not at all the same thing, and having some degree of control over what risks you take is thoroughly precedented in D&D even all the way back to OD&D. It's not a crap shoot--and asking for it to be, indeed, saying that's how it should be for everyone, is DEFINITELY going to ruin the fun for a LOT of people.

Though this general idea has been present since 1e or earlier, I've never bought in.<example snip>

Okay so...now you're not even playing 1e as described. You're inventing this whole other D&D that never actually existed, where your views are validated by the rules? And you think everyone should be expected to play that way?

I think I'm deeply misunderstanding your point here, because as presented this...is a pretty surprising statement.

When you leave the 'slightly's in there I can get behind this. It's when adventurers are automatically assumed to be hugely above the norm I get annoyed - see for example the tremendous degree of difference between a 1st-level character and a commoner in 4e.

"Tremendous"? Really? Let's take a look at an actual level 1 "commoner-type" creature. There is no such thing properly in 4e (the only things like a "commoner" proper are minions, which are explicitly only 1/4th of a typical creature anyway), so I'm looking at the level 1 Human Street Entertainer. If that doesn't meet your standards, well, I'm sorry, there aren't very many options for an ordinary village humanoid at creature level 1. The Entertainer has 29 HP (slightly less than a high-Con Defender, more than most middling-Con characters), AC 15 (lowish but not horrible), slightly weak non-AC defenses (12/14/13). It has a d8+4 basic attack (+6 to hit vs AC), all of which is typical for a 1st level character with an 18 in their primary attack stat and a +2 proficiency weapon.

Not really seeing where this "tremendous" gap is. Yes, if you compare a minion creature to a PC, you'll see a gap, but that's pretty clearly not an apples-to-apples comparison!

You're forgetting the roll-under mechanic in early editions, which made stats rather important.

Not forgetting. I'm consciously ignoring a mechanic D&D hasn't used for twenty years, in part because it is highly counter-intuitive for many people (that "low" results are good for this specific thing, and "high" results are good for most everything else--initiative, damage dealt, saving throws). Again, this is a thread about 5e, and you have been speaking in very generic and sweeping terms until very recently.

 

[Maxperson]

Never got too high of levels maybe 8th is the highest but even then I wasnt giving out tons of magic items and they were steamrolling pretty much everything.

Once more than 1 PC has a magic weapon(assuming weapon users), encounters become very, very easy. In my next campaign I'm going to require magic weapons to have a plus to hit in order to harm those creatures. That way I can hand out some cool magic weapons without totally making the game a cake walk.

 

[Maxperson]

Personally I dont really bother with EL's or CR's because as you said they dont seem to hold up. I think it would be better to just remove the CR if its that flawed. I know the few times I did use wither systems seemed like it was a waste of time.

Same here. With EL, either I'm okay with the power level, in which case go for it, or I'm not, in which case you aren't playing it. CR was just so borked that I ignored it and just looked for how monsters compared to the group's abilities and items.

 

[Charlaquin]

It probably should work that way for consistencies sake.

Or even better like WFRP and you roll your race on a percentage table based on how common they are.

If we insist on rolling ability scores, why are we even letting people choose their race?

Who’s we? I don’t insist on rolling ability scores. I allow it. I also occasionally enjoy doing it.

 

[Maxperson]

Out of curiosity....if you feel that stats are fairly irrelevant to the mechanics of a PC (and I agree with you on this)....then why the hard line against stat buy versus rolling for you as stated earlier?

Because I like the variance of rolling. It also makes the character seem more organic. You don't get to pick your stats. You're born with them and learn your talents. Plus when you use arrays or point buy, the numbers tend to be very similar across all characters, which just bugs me.

Also, the prime stats are important. When I say that a bunch of high stats don't really matter, it's because the third through sixth stats on the sheet tend to not mean much to the PC. An extra +1 or +2 in those categories isn't going to break anything.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's assuming they get the same rolls, but in the scenario I presented the gnome rolls a 12.

What the gnome rolled and what the orc rolled have no relation to how good a choice the race was for the class. The orc may happen to be a better wizard than the gnome, but that happenstance is unrelated to their race. If that player had decided to play a gnome instead, they would be an even better wizard.

I realize this is a bit ridiculous, but I think it illustrates a point that I'm not making very well, but it has to do with randomness, which is why I brought up insurance.
It's a bit like the butterfly effect. We can imagine a white room scenario where a player makes a choice of race and then rolls the same set of scores no matter what they chose, but in reality the different circumstances involved in making a different choice would have untold minor effects on the die roll such that you could never repeat the experiment the same way twice.

No. That’s not how randomness works. Your choice of race is completely, totally, 100% unrelated to the results you roll on the dice. The only effect your choice of race has on your primary ability score is the fixed bonus it adds. Therefore, the race with the higher bonus in the stat you want to have higher is the better choice, regardless of whether you roll the dice before or after making that choice. You can look at it as insurance if you want; in fact that’s a pretty accurate analogy. But the fact of the matter is, choosing a race that boosts your primary ability will result in a higher score in that ability than choosing a race that doesn’t. Period.

Because it results in scores that regularly fall 2 or 3 points above or below the average, rolling for scores interjects randomness which outweighs the bonuses from race,

Sure, it “outweighs” the bonus from race in the sense that the result of the die roll can have a greater impact on the resulting score than the +2. But since the cap is 2 above the maximum possible roll, the total score will always be higher with a +2 than without it.

so sure a race that compliments your class offers a modicum of insurance against one or two bad die rolls, but like insurance, much of the time you don't end up needing it, and when you do it often isn't enough.

This is where the insurance analogy breaks down. Unlike insurance, +2 in your primary ability score is always useful. Again, the result of the die roll may have a greater impact than the +2, but the +2 is never without impact.

You might as well just play the race/class combination you want to instead of thinking you have to choose something optimal.

You don’t have to choose something optimal. But many players like to and I think the fact that the design can force those players to have to choose between playing something optimal or playing the race/class combination they want is a design flaw.

I don't get into a lot of discussions about mechanics, but a thread I started a while ago about medium armor comes to mind. The assumption of many of the participants in that thread that the game is balanced around optimal race/class combinations made the conversation nearly impossible for me to have with them, and I didn't have the time or energy to hash it out with them, so I gave up. I found Jeremy Crawford's recent comment that the game is not balanced around racial ASI's vindicating to some extent, and it resonates with what has always been an obvious (to me) feature of 5E's design: every race goes with every class.

There’s some conflicting information about what the game is “balanced around” coming from different members of the design team. Taking what has been said about the game’s underlying assumptions in its totality, along with some thorough analysis of the system math, I think it is clear that there are indeed some assumptions going into the design. If you start with 16 in your primary score, increase to 18 at 4th level and 20 at 8th level, and the DM follows the guidelines in the DMG about awarding treasure hordes or the guidelines in Xanathar’s Guide about parceling our magic items, the expected result is that you will have a 65% chance of hitting monsters with average AC for your level’s CR, at all levels. If Jeremy Crawford is earnestly claiming that the game isn’t “balanced around” those assumptions, I can only assume that he has a different understanding of what “balanced around” means than I do.

I suspect he is suggesting that the game is intentionally designed such that, even if these assumptions are not met, you will still have a reasonable chance of victory over the course of a typical adventuring day. That would be consistent with some other things the designers have said about the way the game’s math is designed. In my opinion, that doesn’t mean the game isn’t balanced around that 65% accuracy benchmark. It just means the game is designed in such a way that 65% accuracy is not necessary for the PCs to be successful.

 

[R_J_K75]

Same here. With EL, either I'm okay with the power level, in which case go for it, or I'm not, in which case you aren't playing it. CR was just so borked that I ignored it and just looked for how monsters compared to the group's abilities and items.

For me it comes down to as a DM I want to challenge my players and their characters. I don't pay attention to CRs, I create encounters I think will be fun to run and for the players to engage in. If its way over their abilities to overcome, (I believe there is no such thing if the players are creative enough) I'll give them an out, if they don't figure that out or don't take and end up dead then so be it. That's why I don't give much thought into a campaign beyond the session Im going to run anymore because its almost impossible to measure character and monsters power let alone balance them to create an evenly matched battle.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That doesn’t actually address the issue, it just shifts what stat we’re talking about. If you want to make a cleric that focuses on con over wis, that’s great! I’m glad that’s an option for you. But also, that choice limits what races are going to be optimal for your build too. As long as races have fixed ability score increases, orc will always be a better race choice for this high-con cleric of yours than elf.

And that definitely is a feature rather than a bug to me! Some races being better for some classes is a bit unfortunate, but races favouring certain builds and thus doing things differently whilst still being (roughly) equally effective is exactly the situation the rules should produce.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, you seem to be reading me as saying, "I never want to fail ever." That isn't what I've said, and I've repeatedly stated the opposite. I just want a mixture that is more favorable than a goddamn roulette wheel.

Perhaps, but what you've been saying certainly comes across as your having a distaste for failure. Roulette wheels, if you simply bet red-black, are a tad under 50-50 (I forget if there's one place or two on the wheel that is neither colour); which means success is almost as frequent as failure. Given as adventuring is generally fraught with danger and sees characters undertaking some pretty risky stuff, a baseline chance of success (before modifiers) of just under 50-50 ain't so bad.

Out of curiosity, then, how do you feel about the quoted and image-capped stuff from the 1e PHB above? The stuff Gygax himself wrote about needing some 15s (aka needing some actual bonuses) in order to survive?

I see it as a guideline rather than a hard rule. I then look at the pre-gen characters given in various adventure modules (some of which he authored) and find not many of them have two 15s and quite a few don't even have one, which kinda backs up my 'guideline' stance.

I certainly don't allow players to re-roll just because they don't get two 15s. My re-roll rules are simple: if the average of the six stats you rolled is less than 10.0 OR if no stat is higher than 13, you have the option of starting over before going any further with char-gen. This is actually pretty close to what 3e had, despite pre-dating 3e by about 10 years.

Okay, but you're talking in a thread about 5e, and making broad-stroke assertions. If you always meant to talk about something four editions gone, it would be a lot easier to get your point (and save a lot of pointless replying) if you specified that sooner.

I'm talking in a thread about D&D, about a subject (character creation) relevant to all editions.

Then you should be aware that these things are not how most people play D&D anymore. It is not, at all, bad to play this way. But it is atypical to play this way now, and speaking of rules design as though everyone not only can, not only does, but should play this way will lead to exactly the kind of discussion we're having now.

Yeah, I'm still going to fight the good fight regardless...

See, Lanefan, here's a critical problem: My desired system is compatible with your interests, but your desired system isn't compatible with mine.

A system where things can evolve can still be pushed hard enough that death occurs often and can be entertaining and memorable. But a system where death is frequent (whether or not it is entertaining and memorable) prevents evolution from occurring in the first place.

Perhaps surprisingly, no it doesn't. The evolution occurs via different methods and (almost always) takes longer, but it still happens. Many characters die or retire or for some other reason don't last; but some do last, and those are both the result and cause of evolution.

That said, I see the evolution of the party as a whole as being far more important in the long run than the development of any one character.

If one of us has a design strategy that can, if massaged, accommodate both interests, while the other has a design strategy that can only accommodate one interest, which strategy is better for us to use?

Ah, but they can both accommodate both interests - they just need to be massaged in odifferent directions in order to do so.

Unlikely. I have played actual, legit old-school D&D (well, Labyrinth Lord). It wasn't my cup of tea. The lethality, the mercenary attitude, the cavalier disregard...it gets to me. It feels, not so much "painful," as "wearying" I guess. I derive far too little joy from it to consider it a pleasant activity.

Where I suppose one could almost say I'm to some extent in it for just those things: the mercenary attitude, the cavalier disregard, all the things I can't do or be in reality. It never gets old.

So...I'm really confused. You're okay with +2s (since 3e's minimum rolling rules guarantee characters with at least a 14 in their highest stat), but not +3s? A single extra plus is enough to take you from, "Ah, that's slightly special," to "Holy mother of mercy, how can anyone relate to this person?!"? Because...uh...that's an opinion I can't relate to.

Not sure where this comes from.

My usual metric is the average of the six stats. Using straight 3d6 it's 10.5; using 4d6k3 it's about 12.2 or 12.3, which is higher but (in 1e anyway) not enough to affect bonuses or penalties*. And if someone's lucky enough to get a set of rolls averaging higher than 16.0 (yes, I've seen this rolled right in front of me) then have at it**. But I also want there to be a chance for someone to start with 15-10-10-10-10-6 (one of the longest-lasting and most successful PCs in my current campaign started with about this - I'm sure on the 15 and the 6, not so sure about the 10s).

* - side note: that's something I quite like about 1e, that bonuses are bell-curved rather than linear like 3e-4e-5e.
** - the character with these rolls died in its (second ever?) combat.

Again: if I wanted a roulette wheel, I'd go to a casino. Being probabilistic and being ToTaLlY rAnDoM bRo!1!1 are not at all the same thing, and having some degree of control over what risks you take is thoroughly precedented in D&D even all the way back to OD&D. It's not a crap shoot--and asking for it to be, indeed, saying that's how it should be for everyone, is DEFINITELY going to ruin the fun for a LOT of people.

You have, and always have had, a great degree of control over what risks you decide to take. Do you try to climb that wall, or find another way around? Do you engage those Orcs in battle, or parlay with them, or turn and walk away? Do you try to pick that lock knowing it might be trapped, or do you get the party muscle to take a hammer to it? Do you accept Baron von Evil's invite to dinner and risk his throwing you in jail, or do you find the nearest ship and sail into the sunset? You always have a choice.

Once you commit to taking any of those risks, however, all you can do is try to mitigate the odds in your favour: in the end, if you're rolling dice it's still a crapshoot.

Okay so...now you're not even playing 1e as described. You're inventing this whole other D&D that never actually existed, where your views are validated by the rules? And you think everyone should be expected to play that way?

I think I'm deeply misunderstanding your point here, because as presented this...is a pretty surprising statement.

My point is that I see a typical adventuring PC as being an integral part of its game world, indistinguishable from an adventuring NPC and both having started as part of the general common population. I don't subscribe to the notion that PCs and NPCs are or should be 'built differently'; that an adventurer rolls 4d6k3 rather than 3d6 is a game-based concession to allow a bit more survivability.

"Tremendous"? Really? Let's take a look at an actual level 1 "commoner-type" creature. There is no such thing properly in 4e (the only things like a "commoner" proper are minions, which are explicitly only 1/4th of a typical creature anyway), so I'm looking at the level 1 Human Street Entertainer. If that doesn't meet your standards, well, I'm sorry, there aren't very many options for an ordinary village humanoid at creature level 1. The Entertainer has 29 HP (slightly less than a high-Con Defender, more than most middling-Con characters), AC 15 (lowish but not horrible), slightly weak non-AC defenses (12/14/13). It has a d8+4 basic attack (+6 to hit vs AC), all of which is typical for a 1st level character with an 18 in their primary attack stat and a +2 proficiency weapon.

Not really seeing where this "tremendous" gap is. Yes, if you compare a minion creature to a PC, you'll see a gap, but that's pretty clearly not an apples-to-apples comparison!

Don't get me started about minions.

Not sure where I saw it (must have been either in one of the first round of 4e books, as those are all I have, or in one of the 4e adventure modules I've got) but somewhere I read that, absent the presence of PCs which turn them into minions, a typical villager in 4e has something like 5 hit points and no useful proficiencies.

And I'm not talking about level 1 Entertainers (I don't even remember that being a class in 4e), I'm talking about level 0 non-adventurers.

Not forgetting. I'm consciously ignoring a mechanic D&D hasn't used for twenty years, in part because it is highly counter-intuitive for many people (that "low" results are good for this specific thing, and "high" results are good for most everything else--initiative, damage dealt, saving throws). Again, this is a thread about 5e, and you have been speaking in very generic and sweeping terms until very recently.

People lacking the intellectual flexibility to handle subtraction as well as addition, or low rolls being good sometimes and high rolls others, need not apply to play at my table.

And again, this thread deals with an edition-agnostic topic; meaning good ideas from any edition are fair game to toss in here.

 

[R_J_K75]

And again, this thread deals with an edition-agnostic topic; meaning good ideas from any edition are fair game to toss in here.

I agree. In practice if someone asks me what edition of D&D I'm playing I answer 5E, but in theory I run a mixture of all editions with the baseline being 5E. In all honesty I just make it up on the fly cause I cant remember which rules are from which edition anymore half the time. Really keeps the players on their toes. I was paging through the 1st and 2nd edition DMG a few weeks ago and thought how much the game has changed in some ways and those old rules can still have value at the game table and it'd be fun to revisit some.