D&D 5E Is 5e "Easy Mode?"

[dave2008]

Cannot even imagine that.

Yep, we've been doing it that way since the 80's. Only one other player has even bothered to buy a book. Otherwise I own them all and they are at my house. Every once and a while someone takes their character sheet home, but that has happened maybe a dozen times in 30 years.

So why do you care that we complain about the NOT really modular variant rules do not service me or @tetrasodium whom they seem to have been designed for.

I don't care if you complain, I just enjoy the discussion - gives me something to do!

However, I think it is clear the rules are not for you or @tetrasodium. If they were for you, they would have a lot more detail. If they were for you, they would contain more of what you want, but they clearly don't - so how could they be for you?

Instead, I think they are for looser and more free-style groups and DMs like me. They are points of inspiration, and that is all I want.

 

[Garthanos]

Flanking was part of a collection of rules, you just said that. So, we need to look at a collection of rules.

You missed why they part of a collection? See the collection has a purpose. The individual rule helps fulfill that purpose.

The point of flanking always was that if you achieved optimal positioning, it became easier to hit an opponent (which advantage gives us) and it was the other rules which made the movement more difficult and gave other advantages.

That to me is mixing up what flanking does with its purpose which is as part of a .collection with a purpose of making positioning more important its not really very good stand alone.

Oh and I already acknowledged that the 5e Healing Surge did do the purpose they defined for it. They might have mentioned that if you have fewer larger battles in a day this allows one to offset the defensive impact of that.

I think that they could have even mentioned or added another variant rule for offsetting short rest characters offensive fade if you get down to regular 2 or fewer battles a day or the like.

 

[Garthanos]

Instead, I think they are for looser and more free-style groups and DMs like me. They are points of inspiration, and that is all I want.

The skeleton has no meat and makes me do too much work... oh just do a bunch of work its easy honest (if you do not care like my players) and it will have meat... sigh

 

[Garthanos]

For 2 real years we've been on a 'doom' clock.

Ack...

 

[Garthanos]

That is how I did it in 1e, and that is what I am comfortable doing it now.

I hacked and hacked at 1e trying to make new magic systems deciding 1 minute rounds had no vividness and so on ... finally came to the conclusion other systems gave me more out of the box and moved on. Til 4e brought me back to the table (yes i did keep checking in on an mildly testing it though )

 

[dave2008]

The skeleton has no meat and makes me do too much work... oh just do a bunch of work and it will have meat... sigh

No, unfortunately is not for you. You should just ignore it. Feel free to complain all you want if it makes you feel better, but it is not going to change what it is already on the page. Maybe eventually they will come out with substantial variant rules for changing the play style, but I wouldn't count on it, they are doing to well without catering to your tastes. Now, if PF2e takes a large chunk of their buisness, maybe they would look into making an "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 5e" and you, @tetrasodium , and @CapnZapp could be happy. But again, I wouldn't count on it.

It is however, the perfect amount of meat for me. Its like a well cooked short-rib, and I just needs a dash of salt to top it off.

 

[dave2008]

I hacked and hacked at 1e trying to make new magic systems deciding 1 minute rounds had no vividness and so on ... finally came to the conclusion other systems gave me more out of the box and moved on. Til 4e brought me back to the table (yes i did keep checking in on an mildly testing it though )

I don't know what you are talking about with regard to 1e, but 4e is the game that brought us back to the table again too. Love that edition and we keep bringing more an more of it into our 5e game (experimenting with powers right now).

 

[tetrasodium]

I have to tell you you are completely wrong here. They are a threat, and a rather serious one. Sure, maybe they can't prevent you from casting, but getting hit by four different archers for 1d6+2 means about 20 damage on average. That's still 1/5 of the average health of a 10th level fighter. A mid-level mage might just drop from that.

That's 4 dc10 checks for concentration not one higher dc check. even if it was one attack for 20 damage it's still not even dc11 until 22 damage. You just admitted my point about how something needs to be cable of acting as a credible solo encounter in order to have any meaningful chance of interrupting with a readied action. Without opportunity attacks, the battlefield ether needs to look like the defense line at the superbowl or the party can just walk right past everything careful not to come within 5 feet & go beat down the archers who are not getting an AoO if they try to pop alice on the battlefield with their readied action. If the archers are capable of acting as a credible solo encounter... what the heck kind of crazy slog are you picturing?

Mages still have low hp and AC, making protection items valuable.

No mages do not have just "low hp". Mages have maxhp-1 plus an absorption shield of maxhp-1 & that absorbtion shield is fully recovered with even a single point of healing.

Plink damage still gives you a concentration save, I've seen plenty of people fail the DC 10 check if they are getting attacked enough

Remember when you talked about how alice would optimize her skills in 3.5 to have a 75% chance f making the defensive casting check? Unlike in 3.5 when there were a ton of casteriffic feats other than combat caster, 5e is pretty lacking in that array of selection. Warcaster or resilient con make that dc fairly trivial.

Melee still wants to engage archers and deal with the other melee types to prevent them from targeting the back line.

Without any meaningful hurdles from moving around the battlefield beyond maybe one AoO if they come within reach of an enemy the archers need to be much tougher or numerous to pose any challenge to the party and the GM is still expeted to not just focus fire on squishiest to crunchiest. I'm not sure what your point here is.

And you still need to be careful about auras, AoO's ect.

You really don't need to be very careful about auras/aoos/etc in 5e because they were practically removed from the game. Every container no matter how mundane was given the super awesome ablity to grab what you want without provoking an AoO of the magical handy haversack. you no longer provoke an AoO by moving from one threatened square into another threatened square so using the football analogy can slingshot right around the linebacker & not be hindered until you step away to tackle the quarterback as you are tackling him.

Actually. Last night is a good example. My 4th level ranger was in a fight with some new monsters. I followed a group of fleeing monsters past an invisible wall and they turned to attack me. Luckily they missed half their attacks, only reducing me to a single hp.

I could have disengaged and ran, taking no attacks, but then they would have just followed me back out of the wall and finished me. So, I attacked at disadvantage with my bow, hoping to kill the single monster next to me so I could retreat, and hope enough of my allies had come back into the room to deal with the last monster. I had to burn a resource to succeed the roll, because I almost failed.

Now, I'm sure you can tell me all the things I did tactically wrong, all the ways that 3.5 would have been worse and my character would have died. But, it was an intense moment for my character. If I had failed that attack, I would have had to have risked the attack of opportunity. And if it had hit, with most of my allies not having seen the illusory wall, I would have likely died.

In fact, we took quite a few really nasty Attacks of Opportunity last session, because there was always a single monster we couldn't find a better way around. So, there are plenty of threats from AoO still around.

I'm not sure what this is an example of other than the fact that you felt safe chasing them down alone & splitting the party due to how forgiving 5e is to bad decisions like that. Also I'm not going to castigate you for the things you did wrong, I'm going to point out that you needed to go that far before reaching that "intense moment" & get that dramatic story. In past editions a GM could trigger that sort of intensity across the party with an encounter that does not require one player to do something that will be pretty unanimously agreed upon being a stupid decision if things fall on the wrong side of the razor's edge. Not only could they do that, they didn't need to bring a PC down to one freaking hit point to do it. Congrats on your experience, it's a shame that 5e is structured to require you to go that far before the GM can trigger such an experience.

My eyes were swimming for most of that, but let me see if I can tease out some actual points.

Looks like most of it doesn't matter because of the correction post, so I'll just move on to that.



Things she would obviously never do, so not going to discuss them.

She wouldn't cast "Conjure Elemental" (1 minute cast time in 5e) in the meeting either. Not if she wants a surprise attack

changing spells to one minute cast time is a gigantic disruption to balance. how do you intend to alter spells to account for a ten round casting time?

More importantly there is a mechanic the gm can draw from , as soon as alice said "I'm going to cast fireball" they could say "this is a civil meeting you are at, that's going to be a full round casting in order to get your wand readied & body positioned to begin and finish casting so $frenemy is probably going to just interrupt you by throwing his wine glass in your face."

A GM could even houserule that certain spells go from 1 action to 1 round at their table similar to all those threads we saw recently about removing offensive cantrips if they wanted the style of play we accidentally(maybe intentionally?) used back then.

Hmm, that bolded bit is interesting. Seems like you are saying you could houserule it to do what you feel is appropriate anyways.


5e DMs can do that too. Sure, we don't have different styles of casting speeds, but we do have initiative. And I have actually quite often seen a player pull a weapon or cast a spell at a tense negotiation, and then the guards and people we are negotiating with attacking. We then roll Inititiative to see who reacts faster. So, Alice could roll off against the frenemy. If she is faster, then she gets her spell. If the guards are faster, they charge her and start wailing on her with their swords, or shooting her with arrows. (I'm assuming this negotation is with someone important, and there is a reason that no one important goes to a meeting without at least two guards.)

And, we can even rule that her casting in this situation is a held action, so she has to make concentration checks or lose the spell, with the added bonus of knowing that if she wants to target the guards, she needs to target herself too.

And sure, maybe the wine glass won't be enough to break her concentration. Frenemy could just tackle her. But the point is, if you are okay changing the rules of 3.5 to make things less certain, then we can do the same to 5e.

You can houserule anything you want & it's a whole lot easier to houserule with fewer problems to apply something complex that exists in place of something els that exists. 5e DMs can not do that because the complex does not exist. You only need to compare the AoOs of past editions to 5e & look at the absurd flanking/facing section in the gm.

Spoiler: here's the 4e version

Most importantly is that those movement related AoOs there are supplemented by abilities that themselves provoke or grant opportunity attacks when certain conditions occur (such as using the ability in question for an easy example). You can't simply add it to 5e because the abilities are different and designed to a different standard so you need to muddle through an endless cascade of one off houserules and newly built homebrew systems to account for edge case after edge case. Applying a rule from one thing to another similar thing is entirely different than building a homebrew 6e.

However, you can strip that down to 5e's " trigger ranged attacks for retreating without disengaging or making a ranged attack in melee range" with less page space & problems to fix than 5e devotes to not providing tactical combat with flanking & facing rules. That is so true that in the is 5e the easiest version thread someone spent pages arguing that 4e worked the same as 5e until presented with the rules. Once presented with the rules they shrugged it off & admitted they had been ignoring them without even noticing.

As I told Garthanos, this is nothing new. Changing rules has always affected other rules. It did in 3.5, it did in 2e, it did in Chainmail, it does in chess, it does in monopoly.

Yes, if you change the rules there will be ripple effects.

So deal with them. Other people have. In fact, I bet if you approached discussions like this with an attitude of "Okay, if I add in everyone getting an AoO every turn, I think it makes sentinel too powerful. Anybody have any thoughts on fixing that part?" or "I want spells to trigger opportunity attacks again, but there should be some exceptions. Do you think that full action melee spells should be exempt, or only bonus action spells?" you would get a much more positive response.

Instead you say "THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FIX, LOOK AT ALL THESE PROBLEMS AND THEY GUTTED 3.5 AND THERE IS NO WAY TO PUT IT BACK TOGETHER" and of course, no one tries to help you, because you are just ranting and declaring it unsalvageable.

It is not effective.

You only need to look at all the bad faith or bad service half baked variant rules presenting themselves as solutions to a gap in 5e's design to see why "just fix it(and design homebrew 6e)" is an absurd claim to make when even wotc made choices in design that left them not bothering

No, unfortunately is not for you. You should just ignore it. Feel free to complain all you want if it makes you feel better, but it is not going to change what it is already on the page. Maybe eventually they will come out with substantial variant rules for changing the play style, but I wouldn't count on it, they are doing to well without catering to your tastes. Now, if PF2e takes a large chunk of their buisness, maybe they would look into making an "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 5e" and you, @tetrasodium , and @CapnZapp could be happy. But again, I wouldn't count on it.

It is however, the perfect amount of meat for me. Its like a well cooked short-rib, and I just needs a dash of salt to top it off.

Your attempt at disimissing 5e's criticisms falls short and ignores both claims from wotc that they take this kinda thing into account as well as publishing history even within 5e alone.

 

[CapnZapp]

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yup and they effectively did not do that when they presented the rule in the DMG they presented a brick when it needs to have 2 others underneath to make it hold up the platform if you will. The purpose of the brick was being part of holding up a platform.

Then add the other bricks.

You have rules for flanking
You have rules for attacks of opportunity
You have rules for movement
You have rules for disengage which counters attacks of opportunity
You have rules for facing.

There is a structure here. If there is part of the structure that is not doing what you want, then start changing the structure. But, you can't look at one part that does exactly what they designed it to do and complain that nothing else exists. The other parts are there, if you want them to be more, make them more.

It sounds like your real issue is with movement and attacks of opportunity, so change those rules. Sure, it will have ripple effects, but then you just have to deal with those ripples.

Flanking does exactly what they designed it to do, give advantage to melee fighters who surround an enemy. If you want it to do something else, you need to redesign it.

Currently complaining the design goal of being modular was not really accomplished in a way that allows those who want to have even reasonable tactics to adapt it to their purpose without very large amounts of work.
But every criticism is met on here with ad populum... so I am not expecting better.

You know what though? I agree with you.

The game is not as modular as I expected it to be when they announced that design goal. I wish it was more modular.

If you want to complain that the rules aren't more modular, then complain about that. I'll agree with that, could have been more modular. But, you are complaining the rules aren't doing what they were designed to do, which I disagree with. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do, even if you think they could have done more or could have done it differently.

That to me is mixing up what flanking does with its purpose which is as part of a .collection with a purpose of making positioning more important its not really very good stand alone.

Yes, flanking in older editions was a bonus and it was also part of a larger ruleset about moving and positioning.

And it is the exact same in 5e. It is a bonus and is part of a larger ruleset dealing with movement and positioning.

But flanking alone in 3.5 or 4e didn't do anything except make it easier to hit the enemy. It was part of a larger ruleset, but those other rules were the other parts. So, flanking in this edition makes it easier to hit an enemy. If you want more, look to the other parts of the rule set.

Oh and I already acknowledged that the 5e Healing Surge did do the purpose they defined for it. They might have mentioned that if you have fewer larger battles in a day this allows one to offset the defensive impact of that.

I think that they could have even mentioned or added another variant rule for offsetting short rest characters offensive fade if you get down to regular 2 or fewer battles a day or the like.

They can't do everything man. Some of these effects you have to figure out on your own.