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

[AnotherGuy]

This is why non-proficiency as disadvantage is better.

This is exactly one of the rules I made for D&D fantasy-heartbreaker.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not sure it is fair to describe it as handcuffs.

Specialisation mechanics are commonly viewed as breaking BA.
Magical Items are commonly viewed as breaking BA.

But both of those are still sticking to the design goals.

Expertise doubles Proficiency. Turning your +3 into a +6 still keeps you in the Bounds of the expected target DC.
After Expertise is not Mastery which gives you 3X Prof. It's the mechanics that turn you low rolls into 10. Still withing the bounds

And the design goal is that magic items are optional. WOTC openly says that magic items break BA and are not factored into math.

And that is my point. With Bounded Accuracy, Magic Item Independence, Optional Feats, No New Classes, and No Skill Mastery/Grandmastery, WOTC cut out many of the fiddly bits from the core game that designers use to change up the game and sell more future product.

The only core official fiddly bits WOTC left themselves that all players and DMs uses with are damage, HP, races, and subclasses.

If the goal was to let a DM use a goblin as a threat to a level 5 PC, they didn't need BA for that. There are magic items, feats, traits, roles, etc that they could have used. However WOTC made all of that optional.

And it was unnecessary. A goblin could hit and damage in a meaningful way a level 5 PC in every older edition.

If they wanted a goblin to be a threat to a level 12 PC, there was always options. Magic, tactical rules, STR potions, leader effects, etc. A adult dragon isn't siccing his naked kobold thralls on the Realm's 2nd Best Knight unaided.

But WOTC wanted to cater to the LOTR Fanboys who wanted to sic unskilled orc and goblins with no tactics nor magic support on PCs for 15 levels.

D&D with no base magic assumption? (That's crazy in foreign language)

 

[Guest 7037866]

But I don't think there's more we can say to one another that is productive.

I agree.

Your characterization of the half-level bonus is simply dead wrong and I'm not convinced that discussing it further will lead to any positive outcome for anyone.

Well, you're entitled to think it is dead wrong, but it isn't "wrong". There is no right or wrong, just opinions.

Precisely. Further: Does you playing golf have any impact on your ability to survive from one day to the next? I should think that if it did, then even if you never reached PGA levels, you'd still get better than you were as an absolute novice who didn't know a 5-wood from a 5-iron.

So, since you decided to respond to someone else concerning I a conversation involving me, I'll take the liberty to respond to this.

Survival isn't an issue. It is simply whether infrequent, occassional use of a skill, even when given "pointers", would make me appreciably better at that skill (by that, I mean a +1 improvement). Of course, it won't IMO.

Golf was a covient example. I've been playing for decades, but only have time to get out for a round a couple times a year. When I do get to play, I play with people who are definitely proficient, who do give me frequent pointers, which help a little, but don't really make me better in the long run.

This is why I mentioned I prefer using group checks in such instances. The better PCs in the group can "help" (via those pointers) the worse one by carrying the group check to success. And if the worse PC happens to get lucky, so much the better.

There, done.

This is exactly one of the rules I made for D&D fantasy-heartbreaker.

Yep!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If the intended function is to sell units then obviously that function can't be playtested until after release, where the buying public's reaction will be both playtest and payoff simultaneously.

That's not a function of the rules. That's not a thing the rules DO. It is a consequence that follows after design is finished. Rules do not cause success; they are one of the factors which feeds into it. You cannot design success; you can merely make a design with the intent and hope that it succeeds.

I disgaree; and say that - if and when done - this consideration of such rules is in fact very much a part of design; though maybe not a part much desired by the designers.

Again: it is not. It is not part of:

• Defining some gameplay-concept as valuable
• Setting an evaluation metric to measure the rule's functionality, and (if relevant) the breadth of acceptable results
• Drafting a rule which implements the defined value
• Playtesting and collecting data
• Reviewing and rewriting the rule as needed
• Repeating the previous two steps until the desired function is achieved, or you determine that the initial concept was unworkable

At no point does "financial success" enter into any part of this process. But this is, emphatically, what design is.

Instead, success is factored in before and after this process. Before it, it is part of learning about your audience and determining what things are worthy of being valued as elements of gameplay. Much like, for example, one should do market research when designing a new car, so that the initial values which feed into the design process are ones likely to actually catch customer interest. But those things are not design goals; they are customer values. And then, of course, after the design is implemented for customer use, success obviously comes in based on sales/usage/etc.

If something can be designed with intent to fail (which is, I think, incontrovertible) then it can be designed with intent to succeed.

But that intent-to-fail is not a design goal. It is prior to the design process: intentionally choosing unwise design goals, frittering away design time, intentionally using bad metrics or collecting bogus data, etc. It is philosophically entirely prior to the actual process of design. Certainly, someone with an intent to fail will willingly and intentionally choose to design badly, and this will likely mean that their design goals are bad (albeit perhaps superficially good; usually one must be careful to appear to do good design while actually doing bad design, if one's intent is to fail.)

Intent is much, much, much too broad. It covers far too many things which are simply not part of the process of design qua design. "Design goal" is far more specific than that: it is something you are specifically doing, as part of the process of design, to implement some functionality that the rules themselves perform or do. "Succeed" is not a functionality of the rules; it is a thing one hopes that will happen once the rules are actually out and about. But it is not actually a function performed by the rules.

Like...consider a hydroelectric turbine. There is no part of its design which has the function of "save lives." Nothing the generator does is involved in life-saving; its functions do include safety of those operating it, and it likely has various measures to prevent accidents or disasters, but it is not at any point a device whose function is to save lives.

And yet! That very hydroelectric turbine will most likely provide at least some of the electricity used to power a hospital at some point. Which means that one of the effects of designing a high-quality, widely-used hydroelectric turbine is that lives will be saved. The designer may even intend that such a thing happen as a result of the use of this device. (Certainly, I imagine many such designers today will be thinking about climate change, and thus have at least some intent of mitigating its effects through providing clean energy.) But that intent has absolutely jack-all to deal with the design goals of a hydroelectric turbine.

"Intent" covers both downstream effects you hope to have, and design goals while you are in the process of design. The word does in fact refer to both. But pretending that that means ALL intents are precisely the same as design goals is like saying that every rectangle is a rhombus. Sometimes--rarely--a rectangle IS a rhombus, at which point we usually call it a "square." But most rectangles are not rhombi and most rhombi are not rectangles. Most downstream-final-product-intents that designers have are not design goals, and most design goals are not downstream-final-product-intents.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Survival isn't an issue.

Yes, it is. It provides an enormous incentive to actually get better. Which was the whole point why I referenced it.

If you don't like "survival," consider something like "job performance." Imagine that you would get a 5% pay raise--permanently--if you manage to improve your golf game by some amount. I don't play golf so I don't know what would be a good metric here. This isn't a matter of "you must become PGA-level," just like..."if you can get within 10 shots of par, we will raise your pay permanently."

Do you think that under these circumstances, you would continue to have absolutely zero change in your skill, definitely always forever?

Because that literally is an incentive for player characters to get better at all sorts of random stuff. It will, quite literally, help them succeed more. Survival is one aspect of success. Getting paid more often (and better) is another. Achieving personal goals is a third. Etc., etc., etc.

It is genuinely ridiculous to argue that a person who repeatedly risks life and limb on such activities, whose career is actively driven by activities such as this, and whose deeply-held life goals are bound up in such activities, would have absolutely no growth whatsoever, full stop, nothing will ever more be said. That doesn't mean they'll get GOOD at it. They won't, unless they're actively trying to--and we represent that with things like feats, and training/proficiency, and multiclassing, etc. But passive learning IS a thing. To argue it isn't is simply a falsehood. That's not how the world works, and pedagogical science backs me up on this.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It is genuinely ridiculous to argue that a person who repeatedly risks life and limb on such activities, whose career is actively driven by activities such as this, and whose deeply-held life goals are bound up in such activities, would have absolutely no growth whatsoever, full stop, nothing will ever more be said. That doesn't mean they'll get GOOD at it. They won't, unless they're actively trying to--and we represent that with things like feats, and training/proficiency, and multiclassing, etc. But passive learning IS a thing. To argue it isn't is simply a falsehood. That's not how the world works, and pedagogical science backs me up on this.

But in 4e amount of that passive learning is utterly insane, and overwhelms the actual training threefold. Like I said:

Already by tenth level the level bonus catches up with the training bonus. A tenth level character is as good at everything than a first level character at their trained skills. A 30th level character is as good at everything than a 20th level character at their trained skills. By standards of normalish people the high or even medium level characters are insanely skilled, overwhelmingly better at literally any skill than mundane people who have trained that skill. That is just bizarre to me.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But in 4e amount of that passive learning is utterly insane, and overwhelms the actual training threefold. Like I said:

Because it is an abstraction. Also, this ignores ability scores, which are almost as important as training--and also become more important than training around that point.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Because it is an abstraction.

Yeah, a bad one.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah, a bad one.

Nope. You can keep saying that all you like, that doesn't make it true.

 

[Horwath]

But passive learning IS a thing. To argue it isn't is simply a falsehood. That's not how the world works, and pedagogical science backs me up on this.

I see "passive" learning only as increase of ability scores, that affects the whole field.

any skill increase should be direct, separate purchase of character "build points"