D&D 5E Critiquing the System

[Don Durito]

What bounded accuracy did was put skills, attacks and saving throws on the same progression.

There's a cerain elegance in doing that - but it turns out doing so is problematic as attack roles and saving throws determine gradual steps toward success and failure in combat which balance out, whereas skills are more often a simple binary.

There's a lot of attempts to impose elegance without really thinking through the consequences well in 5e.

Like the use of saves for all the stats - there's a certain theoretical elegance which didn't translate all that well in practice.

Another example is the use of Advantage/Disadvantage - it's a simple elegant mechanic which would be brilliant for a simpler game* - but it's so limited that when you look closely it's telling all the things it can't cover. It should be used for skills, but that would mean anyone who can get advantage from any source is as good as the skilled character - it should be granted by spells like Bless or by bardic inspiration - but again - that would make these abilities useless to anyone who already has a source of advantage. So the attempt to keep the mechanic simple leads to needless complication elsewhere (compare the iteration of the idea in Shadow of a Demon Lord - where Boons and Banes can stack, but with diminishing returns and therefore can cover all of the previously mentioned functions - and they can also be spent on maneuvers like superiority dice. In other words, a slightly more complicated appearing mechanic is actually much simpler in practice).

*which is why it's so ripe for stealing for OSR games.

 

[DND_Reborn]

FWIW we allow advantages and disadvantages to stack from multiple sources. After 3 or 4 d20s, the effect is negligible really, so I don't know why WotC decided to not have them stack.

That is an excellent observation, @Don Durito , since skills are thought of as binary. But, they really aren't; that is just the way most tables play them IME. They are more akin to how saves work. Sure, many instances are binary, but if there is no real consequence for failure, you can try again and again until you get it. Consider two examples: jumping a crevice and picking a lock on a normal door. If you fail the jump, you fall, possibly taking damage and maybe dying! If you fail on the lock, you can keep working on it until you pick it (assuming no trap, etc.). If a 20 + your modifier makes the DC, it is simply a matter of time.

Saving throws are most often binary as well. Sure, occasionally you have a save that you retry on failure until you succeed, but many aren't that way. I can't be certain of the breakdown, TBH, but I think it is in favor of the single-roll variety.

So, how would players feel if combat was binary as well? Roll once and win or lose? I don't think many would like it personally.

I think one issue is the nat 1 and nat 20. For attacks, they are always either misses or hits, respectively. But nothing exists in the rules for those on skill checks and saves. They explicitly aren't supported! Of course, many tables house-rule nat 1 and 20 apply to skill checks and saves as well (I know I always have). Still, I find it odd the WotC purposely choose to exclude them when it comes to skill checks and saves...

For me, and I've posted threads before on the subject, so I'll say my piece and be brief: experience should trump everything else. Proficiency from levels should outweigh ability scores in every aspect of the game by two to one. We play with max proficiency at +8 currently, and cap ability at 19 (+4) unless you take our feat, Raising the Bar, which allows a 20 and thus a +5. The point is the 6-point difference between levels 1 and 18 makes more sense to us and works better than a 4-point difference. Is it a big difference? No, but it is there, and I often toy with raising max prof to +11 or 12, but that would require more drastic changes elsewhere while +8 is sufficient but doesn't unbalance things IME.

 

[Argyle King]

For myself (and others that have spoken up) this is something we don't like about BA. I want level to matter more. Even in 1E if you allow a 20 to always hit, mobs are still a threat and always were. BA didn't change much in that respect IMO. What BA did more was nerf AC. Without magic items, AC is more or less capped around 20 to 22 maybe. If you take away magic items from 1E, your AC won't get much below 0.

I prefer for level to matter less (but a version of D&D which approached level the way I'd prefer likely wouldn't look like D&D at all). I had thought that was Bounded Accuracy's goal, but -in my mind- it turned out to mean something very different in 5E than I thought it meant. I'm not sure that I'd agree on the AC views; I've founding building a character which can virtually never be hit is fairly easy in 5E.

One of my games has a straight wizard who has arcana expertise. Something that happened in our last session was that he was talked to about a highly specialized & advanced form of manipulating ambient planar energies via eldritch machine by what was the lead engineer & inventor of the tech. I asked him to give me an arcana check figuring I'd use it as a basis of how well he understood it. This was his exact response at the table "Well I rolled a 2... +8 for expertise+5 int that's 15... wait no I have an inspiration, I'm going to use that for...13+5+8 so 26". That says nothing about the AT/Sorc rogue with expertise in history & stealth. It completely destroys bounded accuracy

In your example, the player needed to roll.

 

[ChaosOS]

Re: advantage/disadvantage stacking. It's not the issue of it being too good, but a matter of cognitive load. Right now as soon as you name one source of each you're done thinking about a roll. Is that better? Eh. Is it new player friendly? Absolutely.

 

[Don Durito]

Re: advantage/disadvantage stacking. It's not the issue of it being too good, but a matter of cognitive load. Right now as soon as you name one source of each you're done thinking about a roll. Is that better? Eh. Is it new player friendly? Absolutely.

Yeah. But the point I was making is that the cognitive load is still there; it's just hidden because it's not attached to Advantage/Disadvantage. The cognitive load is there in all the different rules that are needed because Advantage and Disadvantage don't stack.

This is something that get's missed in the praise for Advantage/Disadvantage because it's not seen as connected.

In Shadow of a Demon Lord, the cognitive load is higher initially because instead of rolling a D20 to add or subtract a D6 and they stack, so that if you have multiple boons or banes you add or subtract the highest D6. However, this reduces the cognitive load of learning new rules, because many more of them interact with the same basic system. Eg if you have a relevant background on a roll, add a boon. A Cleric gives you the equivalent of Bardic Inspiration? Spend a boon. You want to try a maneuver? Spend a boon.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Yeah. But the point I was making is that the cognitive load is still there; it's just hidden because it's not attached to Advantage/Disadvantage. The cognitive load is there in all the different rules that are needed because Advantage and Disadvantage don't stack.

It's like five sentences.

If multiple situations affect a roll and each one grants advantage or imposes disadvantage on it, you don't roll more than one additional d20. If two favorable situations grant advantage, for example, you still roll only one additional d20.

If circumstances cause a roll to have both advantage and disadvantage, you are considered to have neither of them, and you roll one d20. This is true even if multiple circumstances impose disadvantage and only one grants advantage or vice versa. In such a situation, you have neither advantage nor disadvantage.

That's it. That's the entirety of the rules about not stacking advantage and disadvantage. It would take longer to explain how stacking them works, particularly because you still need to explain that when you have equal advantage and disadvantage then you roll normally.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Neither. Mobs have always been a threat if you play a nat 20 always hits. They always have been, always will be, 5E did nothing new in that respect IMO.

OK then, 5e did a better job of modelling the kinds of lesser foes heroes routinely wade through, while keeping them relevant to gameplay via BA, than 3e & the TSR era eds did with the nat 20 rule. (Though, of course, games like Feng Shui and GURPS: Cinematic had done even better with mook/popcorn rules some 20 years prior.)

It matters a lot more than with skills, which is what we were discussing. Not spells, not hp, skills... or more precisely proficiency really. 5E contracted too much.

Skills are just a lot less important in 5e than spells or hps.

People talk about the treadmill effect between ever increasing bonuses and targets, attacks and AC, etc. but it was never an issue in the limited 3E I played so I don't get why people were so against it.

There were really more issues with the "numbers porn" of 3e. One was that monster AC and many skill DCs or contested checks scaled as fast as PC bonuses did, creating the illusion of the treadmill. But there was all the times you fell off that treadmill. If you were a poor-BAB class, monsters the fighter or paladin could still miss at high level might be almost untouchable, to you. If you were cross-classing or not even putting ranks in a skill, it was worse: tasks that might be outright impossible for you might still be auto successes for the expert. Then there were 'static DCs' the opposite of the treadmill, like Diplomacy which let an optimized "diplomancer" turn any creature that would listen from hostile to helpful. And Poor saves, which fell behind the scaling of monster save DCs.
4e fixed all those issues, except the illusion of the treadmill, which only made that illusion more pervasive.

So 5e just made the numbers smaller.

. Right now as soon as you name one source of each you're done thinking about a roll. Is that better? Eh. Is it new player friendly?

It's unintuitive that it's no longer of any value to do something to give an ally advantage to an attack if a Druid has cast Faerie Fire, but not if the Cleric has cast Bless, or that, since you already have disadvantage, being blinded isn't an issue.
It's not hard to explain, and simple enough to resolve, but, no not new-player friendly, exactly.

 

[DND_Reborn]

So 5e just made the numbers smaller.

Sure, and as I have said repeatedly... too small. But, luckily anyone can make D&D their own game so we'll just keep adjusting things until they fit how we want to play.

 

[Nebulous]

You couldn't have echoed my thoughts in a better manner. I still maintain that 4e is an AWESOME set of rules for a tactical combat wargame. The issue is that its pretty crap for a role-playing game. Doubly (or triply) so for a game that doesn't emphasize combat.

The thing about its feel (that you might not be able to put your finger on) is that all of the spells (which are now powers) have a very distinct codified description of what they do that allows 0 wiggle room for the GM to interpret. Once again good for a tactics boardgame, but bad for a roleplaying game.

I agree, the codification and details of 4e as a tactical squad based wargame are fantastic. It just failed to me as a good RPG.

 

[Don Durito]

It's like five sentences.



That's it. That's the entirety of the rules about not stacking advantage and disadvantage. It would take longer to explain how stacking them works, particularly because you still need to explain that when you have equal advantage and disadvantage then you roll normally.

Well yes in isolation advantage and disadvantage are very simple. I've said that twice already.

If they stacked, or used a rule like the boons and banes is Shadow of a Demon Lord. You would have a rule with slightly more initial complexity. I said this in the very post you responded to.

Obvious point is obvious.

Go back and read the post again. Clearly you're completely missing the point.

The fact that you felt the need to state the obvious should really have clued you in to that.