Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AlexofBarbaria" data-source="post: 9556478" data-attributes="member: 7035226">Right but that doesn't matter for our purposes. My example with 10 damage holds whether it was save and take none/fail and take 10, or save and take 10/fail and take 20 (the 10 being the extra 10 damage in this case). It also holds for any bad status effect happening on a failed save because we can quantify them with arbitrary units (e.g. Dazed is worth 30 badness points, Confused is 50, etc.)The basic idea is just this asymmetry between sliding towards auto-miss and auto-hit (whether for attack rolls or saves). Each step is worth proportionally more when sliding towards miss than hit. Hitting every time isn't game-changing; it's only slightly better than hitting almost all of the time. Missing every time is a game-changer because now your attack is worthless.So at the level of a system's basic math, it's totally fine for offensive stats to diverge with level between characters/classes. But we should be very careful about allowing defensive stats to diverge. My theory is the 3e designers didn't properly recognize Save Bonus as a defensive stat.Fair point that the actual impact of this depends on how bad it is to fail a save. However this certainly does scale with level; in fact in 1e-3e I'd say it outpaces level. Fireball does another d6 damage each level while being cheaper to cast, the status effects on a failed save proceed from falling asleep to being held to being disintegrated, etc. The whole high level Rocket Tag phenomenon testifies to this.I disagree, I think this was a poor place to start <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I think the math would be much improved with two changes:1) the Save Bonus difference should start at +3/-3 and converge to 1/-1 at level 20. This in fact would be a close approximation of the 2e Save vs. Spells progressions. The Warrior and Wizard start out at 5 points difference (17 and 12) and close to 0 (6 and 6) at level 17.2) The baseline should be more like 1.5 x PC level than at-level, taking into account the party tends to fight above their weight. Tying Save DCs to CR instead of level/HD certainly makes sense and helps, as long as CR is an accurate measure.Agree with all of this. 1e/2e saves do become a titch too high at high levels. 5e does do a lot to solve the Rocket Tag problem as you say, by nerfing high level spells/effects and/or making them more expensive. Would have been much easier (and IMO more flavorful) to simply bring the underlying math closer to 1e/2e.Even in 3e? I haven't played high level 5e myself (I've gone back to 1e/OSR) but by all accounts the issue is not as bad, even though saves still diverge, because the effects of failed saves have been toned down considerably. I consider that a less flavorful and less elegant solution than just going back to the 2e math (kind of like crippling your engine to make a flat tire safer instead of just fixing the tire), but that leans into personal preference.Glad you liked it! I agree the 1e/2e saves scale just a bit too quickly. The context of OP is I'm working on my personal AD&D 3 that tries to bring just the d20 + bonus vs. DC core mechanic back to 2e while hewing much more closely to the existing math than 3e did. Will be posting more about that in the old D&D forum shortly.Does it not? I haven't looked into 6e at all. 5e has diverging saving throws (2 progress according to the proficiency bonus for each class). Does it work differently in 6e?</blockquote>

Verification