Favorite Flanking Fixes in Five-E?

[FieserMoep]

Advantage gets you something around ~3,3 and reduces you deviation by ~1 while it increases the odds of rolling your critical range too (4,75% if you only crit on a 20).

 

[ad_hoc]

5e is designed to make 'flanking' very easy. Characters are free to move around enemies.

An example of tactical movement in 5e that is important is keeping soft and ranged characters safe and hitting the enemy's.

Positioning is still very important.

 

[Charlaquin]

Personally, if I wanted to emphasize tactical positioning in 5e, I would use facing, rather than flanking. The facing rules in the DMG are not too complex, but make the positioning required to gain Advantage a bit more particular.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Rogues already get a lot out of Flanking. Wolf Totem Barbarians also help others they are flanking with.

I find that is sufficient for Flanking bonuses in my game.

Edit: soaking up a reaction attack (form sentinel or PAM) is also a bonus of flanking.

 

[CleverNickName]

I set up the spreadsheet to do straight comparisons between two "rolls" and averages the difference between the two, as if you were throwing two d20s at once. (It does not differentiate between which roll is "first" so there is no + or - value.) And [MENTION=6919650]FieserMoep[/MENTION] makes a very good point: if 5% of the time is 100% success...and you get two attempts to hit that 5%...it is even more advantageous to get Advantage. (sorry)

Math and statistics are awesome. I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.

 

[Mistwell]

Maybe I'm doing it wrong; help me check my spreadsheet.
Column 1 picks a number between 1 and 20 (inclusive).
Column 2 picks another number between 1 and 20 (inclusive).
Column 3 chooses the minimum value between the two.
Column 4 chooses the maximum value between the two.
Column 5 determines the difference between min and max.
I copy that across 10,000 rows, and average the results in Column 5. It gives me 6.6.

It involves where most target numbers clump around. You can see some of it briefly here.

 

[CleverNickName]

I think I would spend some time thinking about why I really want there to be a mechanical bonus to flanking in the first place and then see if that reveals something more basic I'm seeking from the game (such as more tactical options or whatever). At that point, other ideas to satisfy that need may present themselves, ideas that are better than the variant rule in the DMG or anything similar.

This really does hit the heart of the matter. I have no idea why so many of the players want there to be a mechanical bonus to flanking in the first place. At a guess: they prefer D&D to be more of a combat simulation or a board game, and less of an RPG.

I could take them or leave these rules, personally, but I'm not a melee character (I'm a laser cleric; I have my own balance issues to deal with).

 

[FieserMoep]

The Flanking rules nerf monsters with pack tactics, benefit parties with plenty front liners and punish those that have abilities generating otherwise quite rare advantage.
The moment you start to swarm your PCs with mooks that suddenly all have advantage might make em cry when random Milita Guy 3 laughs at that plate armor.

 

[CleverNickName]

It involves where most target numbers clump around. You can see some of it briefly here.

I remember this from a while ago. His spreadsheet measures the average value of a d20 roll with advantage...not the straight difference between two rolls. In other words, his spreadsheet rolls two dice, and then records the value of the higher dice. He does this a million times, and gets the average result of that higher value. He does that for the lowest as well. Then he subtracts the average low from the average high, to get an average difference. The problem is, he uses average results instead of real numbers, and average results are approximations. And subtracting one approximation from another approximation only compounds the error. (Roll however many times you like, you will never see an instance where the difference between Roll 1 and Roll 2 is 13.825, but that's the number he uses.)

How much difference does it make? Not a whole lot. My spreadsheet predicts 6.63, and his predicts 6.65 (the difference between +3.325 and -3.325).

The part about it amounting to a flat +4 or +5 more art than science, though. (From that page: "Most of the time, D&D tends to set things up so that you need somewhere between a 7 and a 14 to succeed on a task unless it’s trivially easy or ridiculously hard....For target die rolls that are reasonably close to the middle of the range, advantage or disadvantage is about the same as having a plus or minus 4 or 5 to your die roll.") That's...not really a calculation.

Forgive me, I'm passionate about math and statistics and I could do this all day. (And I'm still not convinced that my math is perfect. But I'm getting off-topic, sorry if I bored anyone.) (EDIT: My math was, indeed, wrong. I should learn to trust my gut more often. See the threads below for more crunchy statistical goodness.) Back to the topic at hand:

Even if the difference is only +4 (I mean +3), that is still very high, especially for the comparatively low ACs of 5E. It's a higher to-hit bonus than a legendary magical weapon has. Based on the math, I would say that our complaints of it being overpowered are well defended. But that's okay. Some people enjoy a high-power game, and they should be able to have one. (shrug) It's just not our bag.

 

[Blue]

in 4e you got a +2 bonus to hit Personally that seems to small to me. Ever tried to fight two people at once. It ain't like the movies I will tell you that. I thank advantage is actually more realistic

But D&D is a heroic action game, not a realistic one. Something like Riddle of Steel was very good at showing that. D&D, where a hero is expected to wade through goblins, not so much.