D&D 5E How to Break 5E

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Pickles III]

Didn't read the whole thread because, let's be honest, aint nobody got time for that.

Anyway, to subject of the thread... breaking 5e. It's always funny to me how players tend to think they have broken the system. There are a few real points worth mentioning. First, players (especially min maxers) seem to triumphantly boast about how good their character is. How it can kill X in a few hits or whatever. I find this funny because it's like they are applying computer rpg logic with tabletop intent. Let me spell this out clearly. You can not win. I don't care how powerful your character is I assure you I can kill him at any given time since I am the DM. Your character can be snuffed from existence with out a moment of thought. I'm not saying I would do that as a DM, but it needs to be made clear that the DM is in control....

Which leads me into my next point. Since your character is vastly meaningless compared to the DM the next step down is comparison to your fellow party members. So I can only assume you want to completely outshine those characters with your mary sue character. If this is the case what's the point of playing the game? It's clearly collaborative story telling if you want to outshine everyone then why should the other players stick around if they are useless? I wuoldn't blame them either, there's only so much marginalization someone can take until they just don't give a **** about the game. I don't understand why a min - maxer would choose to go down this route if it's inevitably going to lead into party decay.

I guess I just don't get the appeal.

Noone here is suggesting any of that and at the risk of putting words into Zardnaar mouthh e is highlighting issues to be aware of as a DM, presumably to preempt them in some way.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The -5/+10 was just faaar too "win"; at level 4 she has +9 to hit and +9 damage; the Feat as is would mean "only" +4 to hit (with pretty much never rolling to hit at Disadvantage or with any penalty due to cover or concealment), and her damage would jump to +19!

Something is odd about your elf. If she rolled an 18 for Dex and therefore had Dex 20 as an elf, and took archery style on top, the best she could do without magic items is +9 to hit, +5 to damage. With Sharpshooter that's +4 to hit, +15 to damage. I suspect you're adding the proficiency bonus and the archery bonus to damage as well as to hit. Is that a deliberate house rule or a mistake?

Sharpshooter doesn't negate disadvantage from your target dropping prone.

 

[Mephista]

I find it amusing that Zard considers short-rest based classes to be game breaking. As if everyone must adhere to a long-rest paradigm. Makes me wonder about some people's assumptions of the game.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is all fine and dandy, but how do you actually do it in practice?

I mean, this isn't the first time I've read stuff like "Resting should be a hard decision the party makes"...

...but there's absolutely no game mechanic to make it so.

It's all dumped in the lap of the adventure designer or DM.

One hour short rests make it a hard decision. It doesn't always trigger something in the system (though I know LMoP at least has a random encounter mechanism, and the DMG talks at significant length about how you might want to use random encounters), but it does give the DM a chance to have the enemies react to the actions of the party or to change the conditions in the world. This makes the one hour rest better than the 5-minute rest from 4e or the "as long as it takes to poke someone with a want of Cure Light Wounds about 20 times" from 3e.

That there is no automatic system is in the 5e spirit of big tent modularity - the game allows for random encounters, but doesn't force any particular mechanic, leaving it up to the DM. This way, you can get a diversity of approaches. If you WANT resting to be a hard decision, you introduce things to make it so, and if you don't, you don't need to. Not every rest needs to be a hard decision!

What, exactly, in 5E's design makes it "encourage[] the game to be about more than a string of very difficult encounters"...? (I honestly don't see it!)

An emphasis on adventuring days rather than individual encounters. Each encounter in 5e is one part of a larger whole, and can be difficult or easy depending on many wildly variable circumstances, from ambushes to clever spell use to a net and an Action Surge. While you can cram a day's worth of XP into one big knock-down, drag-out struggle, you can also break it up and let the size of the encounter flow depending on the story. The big boss LMoP battle in my game, for instance, was two encounters rather than one, thanks to the party taking a daily rest in the middle of a dungeon.

Or to put it more broadly: the game is set up so that playing it this way falls within its expectations rather than violating its expectations (as would be the case with 4e hacks that did similar things - like my once-upon-a-campaign house rule of "there are no healing surges, just add the HP those would contain to your max HP")

If you're talking about pressing on despite being low on spells and hit points, I don't see how this edition differs from any other in that there really isn't any mechanical support that actually encourages you to actually do that.

The mechanics are light and opt-in, which is probably smart. Though I would enjoy having more, I find the stuff that exists - light and flexible as it is - to be more than enough to be a breath of fresh air after 3e and 4e.

....and this is coming from a kid who basically started with 3e.

Adding in a ticking clock that forces you to extend the adventurig day is fine once in a while, but it does nothing to solve the issue more generally.

There's ways to do a "ticking clock" that aren't as kludgey, but 5e needn't rely on a ticking clock. A DM simply asking the question of "what happens during this next hour?" can be enough to make players wonder if they really want to give the DM a chance to ask that question.

As an aside, I find that this helps reduce the metagaming, as well. The question of "does my fat lazy halfling want to hang out in this dungeon for an hour not knowing what's behind that door to the north" is a question I've seen from players in 5e that I'd rarely see in 4e or 3e, where a few minutes and a few wand-waggles means that whatever is behind that door to the north isn't any more likely to come out than they were 5 minutes ago.

Contrast this to something like: "the party can't gain the benefits of a short rest until after completing at least two encounters, and the party can't gain the benefits of a long rest until after completing at least two short rests."

NOW YOURE TALKING.


Now suddenly D&D would be transformed into a game where resource depletion would be a real thing, regardless of story. Now the adventure would be freed from the yoke of having to provide rest constraints, and all this talk about how the game "should" do this and "should" do that would suddenly make sense!

Meta as hell, though. Not personally up my stream, and not up 5e's general "make sense in the world" stream, either.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Something is odd about your elf. If she rolled an 18 for Dex and therefore had Dex 20 as an elf, and took archery style on top, the best she could do without magic items is +9 to hit, +5 to damage. With Sharpshooter that's +4 to hit, +15 to damage. I suspect you're adding the proficiency bonus and the archery bonus to damage as well as to hit. Is that a deliberate house rule or a mistake?

Sharpshooter doesn't negate disadvantage from your target dropping prone.

Probably a mistake on my part. I don't have the character sheet and the character is "new" having only been played for the last two sessions (house rule: if your PC dies, you can make a new one at [average party level] - 2, maximum starting level of 3rd.; She started at third; I'm also very generous with XP right now because we all want to see how 5e starts to work when getting around 10th+). Anyway, yeah, I could very well be remembering what he said incorrectly. I do know that she does, indeed, have a 20 Dex. At any rate, +4/+15 for a 4th level character is way outclassing the other 4th level character(s) that didn't take such a feat. I told him we'll give our houserule of it a run and see if it works or not; adjusting it as needed.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Celtavian]

Hiya!



Probably a mistake on my part. I don't have the character sheet and the character is "new" having only been played for the last two sessions (house rule: if your PC dies, you can make a new one at [average party level] - 2, maximum starting level of 3rd.; She started at third; I'm also very generous with XP right now because we all want to see how 5e starts to work when getting around 10th+). Anyway, yeah, I could very well be remembering what he said incorrectly. I do know that she does, indeed, have a 20 Dex. At any rate, +4/+15 for a 4th level character is way outclassing the other 4th level character(s) that didn't take such a feat. I told him we'll give our houserule of it a run and see if it works or not; adjusting it as needed.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

The character is a drow ranger. She is likely getting hunter's mark and colossus slayer (if a hunter) as bonus damage. So you would have +15 (+10 sharpshooter and +5 dex) and +1d6 for hunter's mark for an average of +18 damage before weapon damage roll. Throw in Colossus Slayer and you have a +22 damage shot with the +18 damage shot. I run a ranger archer with Sharpshooter. They are quite nasty damage dealers.

 

[jrowland]

How to break 5E:


Have 1st level PCs encounter 10 Tiamats.


*drops mic*


PS: The DM can break anything. And often do. Including PCs trying to "break" the game.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[jodyjohnson]

But I fear such an edition of the game will never come to pass.

Sigh...

I believe that version (edition) of the game can come to pass. At the only table where it matters ... your own.

I see pretty clear indications that players know the way they want the rules to work at their table. And from there it is a very small step to making them the default at their table.

If one needs their perfect rules to be the rules for everyone, then I hope that never happens. We all want the rules to work differently. Being forced to house rule to get the exact game we want has been the only option for the last 40 years.

6th Edition isn't going to suddenly make that happen.