blogger on 5e: no-roll-to-hit-rationale

[Nifft]

I also have to say, after reading his "tactical thinking" section, that I'm really, really, REALLY surprised to see a rpg player rewriting the stereotypical snooty eurogamer screed against random game elements. RPG players and snooty eurogamers who don't understand that controlling random elements constitutes legitimate strategic gameplay are two groups that generally don't mix. The former is usually even unaware of the latter's existence.

You mean snooty eurogamers are real?

"I was unaware!", -- N

 

[Cadfan]

You mean snooty eurogamers are real?

"I was unaware!", -- N

I'd be a card carrying member in their little club if it weren't for my enjoyment of games like Dominion, and my willingness to play Agricola without card drafting variant rules.

 

[Cadfan]

Also, I posted my full thoughts in his comment thread.

I think this essay is poorly reasoned.
1. The section that details what counts as involved versus uninvolved in the game is inconsistent. At first you're speaking as if being involved is paying attention and trying to accomplish things by rolling dice. But then you elide over to the position that being involved is payint attention and ACCOMPLISHING things by rolling dice. This is a nontrivial shift in perspective.
2. Risk is not incompatible with tactical reasoning. Learning to control, account for, and manipulate random factors is a legitimate form of tactical logic, and it has been for years. I sentence you to penance playing Bridge with your grandmother until you learn the error of your ways. You'll know you've learned your lesson when you stop losing to her superior tactical reasoning in a game of chance.
3. Its true that overly "swingy" randomization can make tactical reasoning less worthwhile and can leave new players in particular with a potential unexpected defeat, souring them on the game. This is not a question of absolutes, it is a question of degree. The needs of new players are best addressed through the design of adventures intended for new players, and perhaps the design of level 1 characters. The need to avoid swinginess on the whole does not necessarily mean that miss chances should be eliminated- it just means that combat shouldn't be swingy. You can have swingy combat without the potential to miss, as long as you have success and failure and the possibility of either occurring.
4. I have no argument with the redundancy approach, save that what appears to be redundant can be useful in adding granularity, and granularity helps in adding diversity of options.
5. Complexity is a non starter. It is true that a great deal goes into your to-hit roll. However, most of it occurs behind the scenes, before the session, resulting in you writing "Warhammer: +11, 1d10+6" on your character sheet. What really matters in terms of usability is math that occurs at the tabletop, which is relatively simple in the present edition. Situational modifiers are few and far between, and are added in very slowly over the course of many levels. After each level up that changes situational math, you can expect there to be about 10 encounters before the next level up- which may not change the situational math at all. That's around 50+ iterations of making attack rolls per level. The relatively simple math of 4e should be learnable in that timeframe.
So... ultimately, your reasoning is not persuasive. There are games out there that use unified mechanics without a separate attack and damage roll. They work just fine. Does D&D need such a system? Maybe, I certainly don't think that such a change would be inherently bad. But would such a change give the benefits you expect? Not likely. Unified mechanics can be swingy and baffling to new players. They can destroy your cunning tactical plans with the unexpected fall of a die. They can be math-intensive. They can take a long time to resolve. And they have some of their own, unique flaws. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush- while bashing someone with a hammer might work with a system of armor as damage reduction and the only die roll being how well you hit, something like an arrow might not fit as well. The reduced granularity might awkwardly force the two together. Would it necessarily? I can't know without knowing the actual system proposed. But its yet another concern.

 

[Nork]

One issue is that I've sat at enough tables where I quite honestly believe that some of the players attached self worth to their ability to roll a die. It has happened enough that I would not be surprised at all if it was not a decently sized demographic.

When they roll the dice and the outcome says 'you did not accomplish anything at all', they freak out. God forbid if they roll a 1.

With half damage powers, or even hitting and rolling low on the damage, they don't seem to take it nearly as hard.

So, can I see Wizards making adjustments to the game mechanics to be more appealing to this type of gamer? Especially when the gamers who don't seem to fit into this demographic don't really seem to be especially invested in the issue? Yea, I can. If I don't have to roll to hit in 5e, and it makes other people feel better, then 'sure whatever'.

Especially since the only demographic that I think would actually be truly upset about the change would be the people who HATE change, and well, its 5e, so they would already be furious, thereby making their opinion on the matter meaningless.

 

[Jack7]

We've used this basic method for some time, though not every hit is successful (it depends on who you are battling and what the situation is - with man to man fights a hit can still miss with hand held weapons or even projectiles, or you can turn aside a blow with a shield, which is really a hit, but totally ineffective in most cases so it is a miss in effect), and players can if they wish revert to the dice (as in standard D&D - but they have to accept the results if they play that method).

Armor modifies not hit or miss in close combat but effectiveness in mitigating successful attacks, causing deflections, etc.

It really speeds up some fights but you are still left with the problems regarding who hits first, or how many times, etc, though we have a system for that.

I like the article because it brings up a number of interesting points and ideas. Not sure I'd follow the same procedures, but I like the basic concepts.

For a while I was playing with the idea of a system that involved a level based dice pool and a number of associated manuevers. The player would roll their dice pool BEFORE they acted and then could spend their successes on different actions. It gets you an automatic hit but a random level of success each turn.

Yeah Gall developed a combat technique and work using that same basic method. I thought it was pretty good.
I think fighting monsters, especially big ones or ones with really unusual attack modes would be a different matter than fighting man to man combats (which are basically predictable, all men are pretty much capable of the same types of attacks, it is degree of efficiency that makes the difference in how effective they are - few men can do something that any other man couldn't do properly trained).

I know them, and played them some, but they seem more to me like "skill contests". Because you have on cold strategy facing an another one, and the brightest guy of the moment wins.

But then again you're forgetting mistakes. Most games, and many real life combats are resolved not through skill versus skill, but through skill and execution versus failure to execute, or mistake made by opponent during execution. Successful strategy often depends as much upon what the other guy does wrong or does poorly as what you do right. You capitalize upon and exploit both your owns strengths and his weaknesses or failings.

The most brilliant commander or combatant can be beaten by his own failings in understanding the situation he faces. And such mistakes and failings of execution are the real life equivalents of random friction introduced by chance machines, like dice. For instance in a real combat you try and strike the opponent in the chest, he turns as you stab forcing you to over-reach and so you graze his armor (he still struck but to little effect) while he has in the meantime forced you open so that he may coutnerstrike to a vital organ. It's not hit or miss, it's the tactical maneuver of forcing you to reposition so that he can coutnerstrike with a potentially lethal blow. So you hit your opponent, but made the mistake in doing so of striking in such a way as to give real and perhaps deadly advantage to your opponent. You took the rook but put yourself in checkmate at the same time.

I do agree though that as some are seeming to imply he meant, but I don't think he is, that eliminating all chance from in-game combat through a mechanical method like dice tends to lessen tension in some respects. It's not really true because other elements like skill and level and so forth mitigate the die rolls and odds so heavily that there is usually very little real chance or probability in-game, relatively speaking, except at very low character levels or in certain special situations. Nevertheless the dice give the illusion that chance is a real and practical element even in the long run of a combatant's career, when it reality the longer you live and thus more you advance the less chance becomes a real and practical element. The very act of living longer, advancing, gaining hit points, etc, all work to disable the true effectiveness of randomness in the game. Only the illusion of such is preserved through dice roll. But the very system of advancement kills randomness, the more you advance, the more likely you are to advance. (Unless you are consistently facing enemies more dangerous and lethal than you and unfortunately the modern ideal and obsession I'd say of "game balance" also kills that factor. If not then character death would be a far more usual circumstance than it is, when the game is designed with the opposite effect in mind, monster death, character survival.)

But that illusion (that it is the dice which spell death or life and thus provide danger-tension) is a very real psychological force, because it impels a real psychological state of anticipate tension.

I personally think, and given our experience, that this is more than compensated for by other elements, such as not knowing who you are fighting (not giving obvious clues as to the skills and real capabilities of your opponents, keeping opponent capabilities obscured), damage elements (feeling the tension of the hit/miss reaction is the most obvious element in current D&D structure, but feeling the tension of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of strike would be the replacement tension in this different and article suggested type of system), fighting monsters (which I think would be really different and we often use dice for to give the illusion that monsters can do totally unexpected and lethal things that you could easily see coming or counter with most human and humanoid opponents, but couldn't with them. As a matter of fact the way we play often makes monsters seem far more dangerous because they are much harder to anticipate and counter in combat, they become "super-randomized" danger machines. They don't fight like men at all.

Whereas in the current system they are in effect, just like another human, only bigger and with Special Forces type weapons and attacks. But in a general sense of combat effectiveness as far as randomness goes they are simply big humans, or sometimes tanks or machines. But they are not "monstery" in terms of randomness, dangerousness, lethality, and unpredictability, which to me is what makes monsters really monstrous. That they are not like men at all, and so alien and unpredictable.

Nevertheless all that being said I think the dice do tend to project the illusion, real or not as determined by things like level, of randomness and therefore add a certain level of in-game tension.

That could easily be replaced by different types and elements of tension, but it is what most people are used to in D&D. They (players) sort of instinctively associate the supposed randomness of the dice with that tension. In a way playing the game in that way trains you to think in that very manner. Or in other words the very tools we use often determine, at least to some extent, how we think about solving the problem.

And I'm not against dice or other types of randomizing devices or artifacts.

It's just that I know that in D&D, and in many other games, they don't really work the way they seem to at first glance.

Well, I gotta go.
interesting article and thread Xech.

 

[Leatherhead]

At which point is it a game any longer ?

At the point where it has no rules, obviously.

I came into this thread expecting discussion on how to use cards instead of dice. But I can say that I dislike mechanics where every attack deals damage, as it leads to the requirement for a heal-bot, and requiring someone to play a heal-bot isn't fun.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Do people believe this is really a possibility? Not rolling dice for attacks?

We've got a new edition of D&D, lets incorporate fringe mechanics from indie games nobody plays that go against what D&D has always been and build the whole game around them.

The Edition War for this would be nuclear.

 

[Doodles]

I'm saddened by the possibility this blogger might be right.

I wouldn't like such a game.

 

[ggroy]

<satire mode on>

By the time 6E D&D is around, there will only be one die rolling mechanic left:
- Roll a d20.
- If the roll is greater than or equal to the DC, it happens.
- If the roll is less than the DC, it doesn't happen.
- Rolling a 1 is an automatic critical failure.

DC
- 2 for trivial task (optional)
- 5 for simple task.
- 10 for moderate task.
- 15 for difficult task.
- 20 for almost-impossible task.

Rolling a 20 is a critical success, for tasks which are not almost-impossible.

The PHB + DMG and adventure modules, only have to define whether a task (ie. combat situation, skill check, skill challenge, etc ...) is trivial, simple, moderate, difficult, or almost-impossible.

<satire mode off>

 

[Zelligars Apprentice]

People are, I think, missing the point.

My reaction to the blog article:

It is a hilarious satire, and a scathing commentary on the design direction of 4E.

The fact that people are taking this seriously just makes me shake my head and wonder.