D&D 5E DNDNext Commentary on Arstechnica

[Obryn]

I mean, if "you need to roll a 16 or better to hit its low defense!" was this incredibly game-breaking, and needed all this rigamarole to compensate for it,I don't know why they even allowed invisibility to have that "-5 to certain attack rolls" effect in the first place. Why include an option with such a tremendous distortion effect on the game?

Well, because it's not supposed to be an always-on sort of deal. I can't think of any monsters off the top of my head that have that feature.

Blindness is an incredibly strong Control effect. Invisibility is an immensely strong defensive boost. When you make invisibility a permanent feature of a monster, you're taking the monster math and twisting it into knots. You're essentially giving it a +5 bonus to all its defenses vs. most attacks.

Personally, I think any system that requires such deep system mastery and encyclopedic knowledge to play "right" that a group that's been doing it weekly since about 2009 (~450 hours, give or take) is still at significant risk of messing it up is WORSE than a system that simply didn't forsee each interaction of all its hundreds of moving parts and occasionally fails to produce an expedient combat result.

And either way, you've got a problem with the system. With the usual caveats of not everyone, not always, and maybe not you personally. But WotC, probably.

I agree that there are moving parts which can synergize in unforseen ways. I'd hazard to guess that early on in 4e's release, there were a heck of a lot of these. That's a hazard of any complex system and one of the reasons 4e errata was being pushed out so regularly. I disagree that potential synergy in a complex system is a flaw in and of itself. I further disagree that there's a potential system out there where a DM will be unable to make mistakes.

And finally I am just not agreeing that this specific case of an always-invisible flying opponent requires deep system mastery.

-O