D&D 5E (2024) First playtest thread! One D&D Character Origins.

[Krachek]

Yup, now PCs grapple the same way monsters have been doing it this whole time. Good change, in my opinion.

Also makes Monk able to grapple and shove with their dex unarmed attacks.

 

[Horwath]

crit no longer doubles sneak attack?
As rogues and assassing were not bad enough...

Maybe assassin will get the feature that sneak attack also crits, or something.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I wonder what the 3pp that don't have there own version of a PHB are talking about today

Probably about how their business plans are ruined.

 

[Parmandur]

I think they mean the DM side can still use adventures but players have to upgrade as a whole table or stay back in old PHB.

Nah, these can be mixed and matched: we are already doing it, since as Crawford confirmed the Monsteof the Multiverse options are made alongside these.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

How bad Now or Still "One D&D Compatible" will look on the cover?

I meant how they are adjusting races and backgrounds... if they are worried about OTHER things being on the change block as well.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Doing this in my head, and typing on my phone, while walking the puppy early in the morning.

If you reroll ones, and have to keep the new result, then when computing the average you are replacing the ones with the old average. I.e. for a d4 tge average expected result is ( ( 1 + 2 + 3 + 4)/4 + 2 + 3 + 4)/4, or (2.5 + 2 + 3 + 4)/4. Looks to be like that increases the average expected result by 1.5/4, or 0.375. The general pattern is an increase of (AVG-1)/4. So 2.5/4 for d6, 3.5/4 for d8, etc.

But wait! Although smaller dice get a smaller increase, we really care about the percent increase. That’s ((AVG-1)/D)/AVG which… I’m having trouble simplifying in my head.

Let’s see, replace both averages with D / 2 + 0.5, because we want to solve for D, and…we have a quadratic. (See? There was a use for those after all!) I’ll finish this when I can sit down.

EDIT: Oh, duh, there’s a simpler way: the increase is (D - 1)/2D, which gets larger with larger values of D.

So re-rolling 1s is more advantageous for larger dice. But not by much.

Unless I made a mistake.

The "formally correct" way--that is, the one which correctly captures all the statistics with no simplification--is that you need to expand out each result into the number of faces on the die, and then replace the N faces that show 1 with [1,...,N]. With d4, that looks like this: d{1,2,3,4,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4}. Alternatively, you can think of it as becoming an N^2 sided die, where you have a single 1, and then the remaining values appear N+1 times. You'll get the same average value if you just enter 1d{(N+1)/2,2,3,...,N} but you won't get the same overall statistical behavior.

Having crunched those numbers, I can now say that the ceiling of the change appears to be 0.5, as noted above. That is, we get:

d4 average improves from 2.5 to 2.88; SD falls from 1.12 to 0.93
d6 average improves from 3.5 to 3.92; SD falls from 1.71 to 1.48
d8 average improves from 4.5 to 4.94; SD falls from 2.29 to 2.05
d10 average improves from 5.5 to 5.95; SD falls from 2.87 to 2.62
d12 average improves from 6.5 to 6.96; SD falls from 3.45 to 3.19

It's rather tedious to calculate anything beyond d12 and pretty much irrelevant so I'm not going to do the full, formal numbers for any higher die values (and sure as heck not d20). If you like data visualization, you can look at plots for these with this AnyDice program.

But we can certainly say that, while the increase in the average always goes up, it pretty well appears to be bounded from above by 0.5, and thus the percentage increase is always lower for larger dice. This might not be true for broader ranges, e.g. if you could reroll 1 or 2 this way, the benefit might grow rather than shrink. (We could imagine, frex, if every value less than the average could be rerolled once, then the average benefit surely should not shrink with higher die values.)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

crit no longer doubles sneak attack?
As rogues and assassing were not bad enough...

Maybe assassin will get the feature that sneak attack also crits, or something.

maybe built into Assassinate, cause that is a MAJOR downgrade for assassin.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I advocate for their removal. I think people should just get feats at those levels.

Omg we agree on something.

 

[Ixal]

The real issue is that the mere +2 most races get is not enough to matter.

A CON 16 dwarf isn't that much tougher than s CON 14 human. Not to the point that fans hype it up. If they have an beer drinking contest, the dwarf can lose if they roll a 10 and the elf rolls a 12.

If D&D is too scared to give core races +8 to ability scores from race, then the +2 is just not worth the secondary hassles. Because mechanically, it doesn't match the fluff.

And yet players refuse to miss out on this +2 and complain endlessly that racial ASI prevents them from playing non optimal race/class combinations.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I think they mean the DM side can still use adventures but players have to upgrade as a whole table or stay back in old PHB.

yeah I think backwards compatible means "for DMs that want to put in the work it isn't 'THAT much' work" not "yeah people will sit at tables with the 2014phb and 2024phb and not even notice.