D&D 5E How Often Should Advantage Be Granted?

[Crothian]

Advantage so far doesn't seem as powerful as people think. I like to reward good role playing a description so I do give advantage some time when players do this. I do prefer to have the players spend their inspiration though when they role play getting into some advantageous situation.

 

[delericho]

My inclination is to be fairly stingy with granting advantage (except where the rules specifcally grant it), but to be quite generous with Inspiration. That way, if the players want advantage then they can probably get it, but they have to weigh that against potentially not having it later.

(That said, I'm also toying with removing the Inspiration mechanic as written, and instead giving each player 3 Inspiration Points at the start of the session to use as they see fit. Whether I do this or not will depend on whether I do indeed grant Inspiration 'enough' or if I find myself forgetting.)

 

[KarinsDad]

Our players played LMoP for a 7 hour session. From this, they learned that surprise is huge. So with our new campaign, we have 2 PCs with 16 Dex, 3 with 14 Dex, and 1 with 12 Dex. Also, 3 or 4 of the PCs took stealth.

With these new PCs, we just played our first 8 hour session of HotDQ yesterday.

Since surprise is so powerful, the players reacted by creating PCs that could take advantage of it. We went through HotDQ and since it was nighttime, almost all of the encounters the PCs had surprise (2 encounters, they only had surprise over some of the NPCs, 5 encounters, we had full surprise). In that same timeframe, 1 PC went unconscious twice, another got seriously damaged twice, and a third got about half damaged. The other three PCs took little or no damage. In 7 encounters. Granted, the PC fighter is fairly heavily optimized with Heavy Weapon Master, but even so, the DM told me that these were 2 easy 3 medium, and 2 hard. I was running a Wizard who never once cast a first level spell (other than Mage Armor) and never did more than 4 points of damage (at least 8 of them were a 1 damage on the roll, the players were laughing so hard every time I rolled a 1, yet again). Even with my PC being mostly ineffective, surprise made these encounters a bit of a joke. Even when we were outnumbered (2 encounters outnumbered, 2 the same number, 3 fewer foes), it hardly mattered.


Anecdotal, sure. But, the same applies to Advantage. If you allow the players to use it frequently, then encounters start becoming a lot easier.


My take is to use advantage when the rules state to do so, otherwise, do not.

If the DM wants to give a player a bonus, it should be +2, not advantage. The same with disadvantage. Give -2, not disadvantage. JMO.

 

[Crothian]

Sounds like the players played intelligently and put together a group of characters with a solid strategy in mind. I think that is great. Good planning making battles easier is something I would want to encourage.

 

[jrowland]

I am ok with narrative advantage as long as it's not obvious cheese. I do tend to use a skill check in most cases of narrative advantage and it uses a move or action as it sees fit. I am also ok with narrative disadvantage. And of course, the main caveat: Whats good for the PCs is good for the Monsters. Constantly "throwing sand in their eyes" will result in monsters doing the same. My regular players know me well enough to not constantly spam that "button".

In many cases, I can just as easily narrate Dis to someones Adv and visa versa, so if I really don't want it, I can stop it "narratively". But it most cases, I feel its easier to just add a few more monsters if things are too easy due to lots of advantage.

Sat night we started HotDQ. A player used his Glaive sideways to try and knock down 3 kobolds at once. I called it an opposed STR check and the Kobolds had ADV to their rolls (due to three vs 1) while he had DIS to his roll (improvised attack against more than 1 target). In this case, ADV didn't Counter DIS (it does when ADV and DIS apply to same roll...here we have two separate rolls). Amazingly enough he succeeded vs 2 of the kobolds. It encouraged him to try again. This time against 2 cultists (there were three, but I ruled he couldn't position the glaive to get 3 like the smalller kobolds) and he had surprise. In this case, since he had surprise and was coming at their backs, I had him try a stealth check (failed, he wears heavy armor) to give himself ADV to counter his DIS. He only managed to piss off three cultists.

I think he'll try it again, and I know he is in cahoots with the Bard to grant him inspiration etc for future rolls, but I am ok with it. At some point it won't really be worth the effort and he will be better served just killing kobolds, but for now its a nice narrative "cool" move he and the other players like.

As long as we're having fun, right?

 

[Psikerlord#]

Our players played LMoP for a 7 hour session. From this, they learned that surprise is huge. So with our new campaign, we have 2 PCs with 16 Dex, 3 with 14 Dex, and 1 with 12 Dex. Also, 3 or 4 of the PCs took stealth.

With these new PCs, we just played our first 8 hour session of HotDQ yesterday.

Since surprise is so powerful, the players reacted by creating PCs that could take advantage of it. We went through HotDQ and since it was nighttime, almost all of the encounters the PCs had surprise (2 encounters, they only had surprise over some of the NPCs, 5 encounters, we had full surprise). In that same timeframe, 1 PC went unconscious twice, another got seriously damaged twice, and a third got about half damaged. The other three PCs took little or no damage. In 7 encounters. Granted, the PC fighter is fairly heavily optimized with Heavy Weapon Master, but even so, the DM told me that these were 2 easy 3 medium, and 2 hard. I was running a Wizard who never once cast a first level spell (other than Mage Armor) and never did more than 4 points of damage (at least 8 of them were a 1 damage on the roll, the players were laughing so hard every time I rolled a 1, yet again). Even with my PC being mostly ineffective, surprise made these encounters a bit of a joke. Even when we were outnumbered (2 encounters outnumbered, 2 the same number, 3 fewer foes), it hardly mattered.


Anecdotal, sure. But, the same applies to Advantage. If you allow the players to use it frequently, then encounters start becoming a lot easier.


My take is to use advantage when the rules state to do so, otherwise, do not.

If the DM wants to give a player a bonus, it should be +2, not advantage. The same with disadvantage. Give -2, not disadvantage. JMO.

I like the idea of having options up my sleeve, so sometimes a +2 or -2 might be appropriate, other times full adv or disad. I very much like the idea a few others have suggested about doing something tricky more than once in the same combat will have disad on the later attempts as it becomes predictable. This gels well with the halfling peekaboo tactic also suffering disad on stealth checks after the first time, consistent with Mearls tweeted suggestion.

 

[KarinsDad]

I like the idea of having options up my sleeve, so sometimes a +2 or -2 might be appropriate, other times full adv or disad. I very much like the idea a few others have suggested about doing something tricky more than once in the same combat will have disad on the later attempts as it becomes predictable. This gels well with the halfling peekaboo tactic also suffering disad on stealth checks after the first time, consistent with Mearls tweeted suggestion.

Given this suggestion, if I were to do this (which I probably would not since I think that the DM is being punitive for no good reason), I would start out with a -2 penalty for a round or two before finally going to the -5 of disadvantage.

I find it odd that so many DMs allow options in the game and shortly after the players discover these options, the DMs think that the players are overdoing it and want to start putting restrictions on the very things that they themselves allowed in the game.

If the DM does not go out of his way to reward non-standardized player behavior and expectations, then he doesn't have to go out of his way to punish non-standardized behavior that he himself had encouraged rewarded.


Advantage and Disadvantage are too large to be handing out right and left.