D&D General Explain Bounded Accuracy to Me (As if I Was Five)

[Minigiant]

This makes me wonder about the disconnect between the progression math and the player psychology.

Number Go Up is tried and true game design for progression, but what if D&D focused a bit more on horizontal growth instead of vertical growth? That is, you get new abilities that are about the same power level more than you get new abilities that are more powerful. For the fighter, it's like you get more magic weapons, but each weapon is still only adding 1d8 damage. More magic armor, but it's adding resistances or giving new ways to impose disadvantage on the attack rolls. Same power level, just more options for it.

Maybe we still have the Number Go Up, but it's big jumps. You get an entire tier or 5 levels at a time or something that really makes you feel like you're part of a new world. Your resistances become immunities, for instance. Your 1d8's become 2d10's. But then maybe you plateau there for a few levels. And you don't get those just from XP accumulation, but from big, momentous events. Like, if these could tie to resolving a PC's personal conflicts you could be very Shonen about it, where having an emotional breakthrough suddenly lets you punch out the villain who was beyond your ability just a few minutes ago. Or you could tie it to treasure for a dungeon crawl vibe (it's not just a +1 sword, it's a +5 sword!). Or you can tie it to slaying monsters for a bit of that old XP-for-killing-monsters vibe, but it'd be like, SLAYING A DRAGON or DESTROYING A LICH, not just bopping your 5th orc on the head.

I wonder if that would allow DMs to give progression when it "felt right" (like when the party was getting bored), rather than linking it tightly to play time. You could speed run a 1-20 game in like 4 encounters.

I guess the central idea I'm exploring there is, how important is vertical progression, especially over time, and especially in comparison to horizontal progression? Does Number need to Go Up as incrementally or as consistently as it does? Is there better or worse rates? Does it vary between groups? 5e today has a pretty well-assumed pace, and some built-in vertical/horizontal transitions...is it working well? Could it work better or be more flexible or more impactful?

Horizontal growth requires reevaluation of the 4 classic classes and their offshoots.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Total tangent, but it would be a pretty cool game (albeit radically different) if fighter types got hit point and damage upgrades as they leveled, but mage-types just didn't. They would have to rely on their spells (like shield, or counterspell, or energy immunity, or some other spells that would have to be added) just to be able to take a hit, or contribute some damage.

In practice, that isn't all that off from what happened with OD&D mages. Not that their hit points didn't go up, but at the levels they were operating, it was still chronically too low to help much by itself (25 hit points at 10th level just wasn't going to slow down the things you fought at tenth level much).

 

[DEFCON 1]

While having too many forms of various bonus is bad, Advantage/Disadvantage has proven that there are weaknesses with having effectively none, too.

That is, now, all you do is grub until you have Advantage and then you stop thinking about it. It's no longer even remotely tactical--just do whatever it takes to get Advantage, then stop caring. Moreover, because Advantage is both the weapon of first resort and last resort, it gets handed out like candy (a think I bitterly predicted before 5e was even properly published), meaning there's even less caring than before. And you can't meaningfully introduce mechanics that interfere with or modify Advantage, because they'd be massively OP (consider Elven Accuracy, inarguably one of the most powerful combat feats in all of 5e, and arguably the second-best general feat, after Lucky...which is cut from effectively the same cloth!)

I get that folks hate having to add up a bunch of stuff each and every time they want to do something, that it feels like doing your taxes just to get a single roll out. I really do get that, and 3e (and to a lesser extent 4e) had problems with having a few too many, too....particulate bonuses. But 5e has absolutely swung too far in the other direction, flattening any possibility of depth or interesting mechanical interactions and discouraging players from actually thinking about, and engaging with, their environment beyond a token effort.

I do agree with you that I don't think the game would be appreciably more difficult to play were the rules to include a few more variations in bonuses/penalties. Even if the game chose to allow multiple Advantages and Disadvantages to stack, and the game expanded the +2 / +5 bonus from Cover to be used in a few more situations (besides just AC)... you could probably reach a nice spot of variance but ease-of-use that you are advocating for.

That being said... I also think it would be rather easy for a DM that wanted these additions to the modifier game to just add them to the game themselves right now, even without WotC doing it. The stacking of Adv/Disad wouldn't even need the DM to think up new things... they just count the number of Advantages found as per the standard rules and roll a d20 for each, and subtract a d20 for every Disadvantage that came up too. That way the players would be able to "look" for Advantages continuously as you point out and no longer just sit back (and the DM can throw more Disads out there too.)

Might be great for some DMs, might be easily ignorable for others. Which is the hallmark of a 5E design rule.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do agree with you that I don't think the game would be appreciably more difficult to play were the rules to include a few more variations in bonuses/penalties. Even if the game chose to allow multiple Advantages and Disadvantages to stack, and the game expanded the +2 / +5 bonus from Cover to be used in a few more situations (besides just AC)... you could probably reach a nice spot of variance but ease-of-use that you are advocating for.

That being said... I also think it would be rather easy for a DM that wanted these additions to the modifier game to just add them to the game themselves right now, even without WotC doing it. The stacking of Adv/Disad wouldn't even need the DM to think up new things... they just count the number of Advantages found as per the standard rules and roll a d20 for each, and subtract a d20 for every Disadvantage that came up too. That way the players would be able to "look" for Advantages continuously as you point out and no longer just sit back (and the DM can throw more Disads out there too.)

Might be great for some DMs, might be easily ignorable for others. Which is the hallmark of a 5E design rule.

That's not too dissimilar to how SotDL/SotWW Banes and Boons work, except they use D6's instead of D20's (in part because you never need more than a 25 target number).

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm kind of a critic of skill systems in general, so to me a system that is ranked more by tiers is a little appealing to me. But I think that "you can't get much use out of another +1" isn't a great way to stop people from investing another +1, in part because of how immensely satisfying Number Go Up is.

I prefer the 5e method of limiting the things that can give you +1. Advantage/Disadvantage is a wonderful inoculation against that.

I think that you might be missing (or forgetting) the depth that was once there. Take a wizard as one of the easier examples for showing it.

First you had take ten and take 20, each had their own requirements before a player could choose to take 10/20 while each had their own hurdles to meet and downsides to eat. At a certain point the wizard realizes that their skill in arcana:CommonsubtypeA & a rcana:CommonsubtypeB was good enough to get critical time sensitive details like resist/vuln/immune and/or strongest/weakest save often enough that there is more value in falling off fewer makeshift bridges and climbing trees or similar common circumstances without doing it while imitating a backpack than they would from being able to offhand adventure level plot points like the details of $creature society or various esoteric niche factoids the GM will need to make up on the spot because discovering them might be more interesting. Actually being good enough at those more common circumstances took more than a plus one and felt like progress.

A DC like "43: Track a goblin that passed over hard rocks a week ago, and it snowed yesterday" wasn't there to show a thing people might actually be likely to see often enough to invest to that point goblinslayer level of obsession.... It was there to provide an example of why the GM wasn't cheating anyone when Bob only gets enough clues to let the players continue the adventure with an optimistic quiver of knowledge to work from from. The skill system in 5e is so stunted for bounded accuracy that the players feel they are being robbed and can point to it in the phb when the equivalent roll (reliable talent on 6 +6+5+guidance+advantage) only provides a vague arrow that leads to more adventure

Part of me loves how easy weapons are to re-flavor now, but sameyness is definitely the cost. Do we want weapon selection to matter or not? 5e says "not really." Sounds like the 2024 version is going to have more to say on this, at least a bit.

There were dozens of not hundreds of base weapons printed across the spectrum of dimple martial and exotic during 3.x, refluffing them was never difficult or particularly contentious unless the "refluff" was more like "mechanical improvement" as the katana almost always was any time a new one was printed somewhere

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, until your 4th Wizard dies in turn 1 because you physically couldn't escape fast enough. Which is precisely the "rocket tag" problem--and was one of the most serious combat faults of 3.X (including PF1e), e.g. why Initiative could effectively determine the entirety of a combat's outcome, why SoD/SoS were such a huge issue (whoever fails a save first Just Loses), etc.

If this were instead a tactical battle game, e.g. something like the tactical battle environment from the Age of Wonders series, then such rules are perfectly copacetic. It's fine to have your hella-squishy mage be absolutely eaten for lunch if it gets caught off-sides. That's not the entirety of your personal contribution to combat; indeed, it's rarely more than 20% of your contribution.

But when literally the entirety of your ability to play is in a "one single bad decision and you're now sitting there bored for at least 20 minutes," that's a pretty big problem. Some people most assuredly enjoy such stakes. A lot of people really, really don't.

This is why, as was the case in the grand old days of D&D, wizards need the protection of fighter-types, either fellow PCs or henchmen and mercenaries.

Also worth noting: unless your argument is about popularity, appeals to popularity (or its lack) don't actually strengthen the argument, and are in fact orthogonal to it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Horizontal growth requires reevaluation of the 4 classic classes and their offshoots.

Awesome! Let's do it!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is why, as was the case in the grand old days of D&D, wizards need the protection of fighter-types, either fellow PCs or henchmen and mercenaries.

Also worth noting: unless your argument is about popularity, appeals to popularity (or its lack) don't actually strengthen the argument, and are in fact orthogonal to it.

My point was that it wouldn't fly today. It's a game experience you can design for, certainly. But like a hardcore full-loot PVP MMO, you'd be chasing a very small (but dedicated) fan base niche with an expensive, difficult project that may not earn meaningful returns.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Awesome! Let's do it!

Best of luck. Any time you touch the overwhelming power and versatility of Wizards, you get vocal, nasty condemnation.

 

[CreamCloud0]

While having too many forms of various bonus is bad, Advantage/Disadvantage has proven that there are weaknesses with having effectively none, too.

That is, now, all you do is grub until you have Advantage and then you stop thinking about it. It's no longer even remotely tactical--just do whatever it takes to get Advantage, then stop caring. Moreover, because Advantage is both the weapon of first resort and last resort, it gets handed out like candy (a think I bitterly predicted before 5e was even properly published), meaning there's even less caring than before. And you can't meaningfully introduce mechanics that interfere with or modify Advantage, because they'd be massively OP (consider Elven Accuracy, inarguably one of the most powerful combat feats in all of 5e, and arguably the second-best general feat, after Lucky...which is cut from effectively the same cloth!)

I get that folks hate having to add up a bunch of stuff each and every time they want to do something, that it feels like doing your taxes just to get a single roll out. I really do get that, and 3e (and to a lesser extent 4e) had problems with having a few too many, too....particulate bonuses. But 5e has absolutely swung too far in the other direction, flattening any possibility of depth or interesting mechanical interactions and discouraging players from actually thinking about, and engaging with, their environment beyond a token effort.

i wonder if you could have a small array of 'bonus types' that you can only have one of each, so you can still strategise about aquiring different bonuses but the total number of potential numbers you're adding is capped so the stacking doesn't get too stupid and you don't have 12 different +1s, 2s and 3s to add.
so for example you'd have:
your inherent flat bonus (PB/expertise+Modifier)
an external flat bonus (pass without trace, aura of protection)
a rolled dice bonus (bardic inspiration, bless)
and adv/dis