Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7202721" data-attributes="member: 996">That does seem unfair.  How would Zapp know anything about Mike's gross motor coordination? 5e's meant to evoke past editions, and past edition have approached attacks in a few very different ways.  5e does a fine job, with regards to saves, of evoking the classic game at low level and 3e at it's least broken.  But, while it makes PCs amazingly resilient in terms of hps relative to 1e, it also makes them much more vulnerable to failed saves.  That's in keeping with 3e, which was whack-tastic-crazy-broken in the favor of save-DC-optimizing Tier 1 casters - which is maybe not the best thing to be in keeping with, if you're aiming for a broader range of styles & feels.Some sort of better-saves-module, especially something that'd help at higher levels, would not have been unreasonable. In games that aren't 5e, I suppose the point is to allow 'player skill' (strategy, system mastery, et al) to overcome the random element of the die roll.In 5e, there's no point, as the DM would just narrate failure rather than setting a DC that high. This point has been made, and, while 5e pushed the resolution of some former save-or-die effects to using hps instead of or as well as saves, it has not eliminated save-or-else effects that bypass hps, leaving save bonus as the only indicator of increasing ability to resist with level. The basic effect, that all saves improve with level, is trivially implementable in 5e, by simply adding proficiency to all saves, just as casters add it to all their DCs.  Stats would still swing that by 6 points (from -1 for a dump stat of 8, or lower in random generation, to +5 for a 20).  The more nuanced approach of advancing at different rates, that was the norm in the TSR era would be slightly trickier to implement.  You could have two tiers of save advancement, one full proficiency, one half or prof-2, for instance.  And/or you could add 'expertise' in some saves... It's been a trend, anyway.  Starting in 3.0, save DCs started scaling, and at least some saves started scaling more slowly, creating a net greater vulnerability as characters leveled.  (Even 4e, which didn't use saves, as such, used non-AC defenses that, as 'treadmill'-like as 4e generally was, would tend to fall behind due to the need to focus on primary & secondary stats by class.) Lovely for casters optimizing their spells' DCs, pretty sucky for everyone else.   In games that aren't 5e, I suppose the point is to allow 'player skill' (strategy, system mastery, et al) to overcome the random element of the die roll.In 5e, there's no point, as the DM would just narrate failure rather than setting a DC that high. This point has been made, and, while 5e pushed the resolution of some former save-or-die effects to using hps instead of or as well as saves, it has not eliminated save-or-else effects that bypass hps, leaving save bonus as the only indicator of increasing ability to resist with level. The basic effect, that all saves improve with level, is trivially implementable in 5e, by simply adding proficiency to all saves, just as casters add it to all their DCs.  Stats would still swing that by 6 points (from -1 for a dump stat of 8, or lower in random generation, to +5 for a 20).  The more nuanced approach of advancing at different rates, that was the norm in the TSR era would be slightly trickier to implement.  You could have two tiers of save advancement, one full proficiency, one half or prof-2, for instance.  And/or you could add 'expertise' in some saves... It's been a trend, anyway.  Starting in 3.0, save DCs started scaling, and at least some saves started scaling more slowly, creating a net greater vulnerability as characters leveled.  (Even 4e, which didn't use saves, as such, used non-AC defenses that, as 'treadmill'-like as 4e generally was, would tend to fall behind due to the need to focus on primary & secondary stats by class.)  5e, which has returned to the classic game in so many other ways, has more or less stuck to that trend, as it has with the related-seeming trend of removing restrictions, risks, & limitations from spellcasting, and giving casting to more classes....</blockquote>

Verification