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

[Chaosmancer]

The fact that it is only a dc10 check with 10.5 being average for a d20 is incredibly relevant & shows that making a dc10 check is trivial as you felt was oh so important when you talked at length about Alice's chance to make a dc15 efensive casting check. The point is that it's an easy check.

It is an easier check, yes. But not a trivial check.

And considering that it looks like similar checks in 3.5 could get to the point of an automatic success, then yes, I think it is important to point out.

Level 18, if Alice in 5e has not increased her con or taken warcaster (very possible if she instead focused on getting more cantrips, increasing intelligence and dex, ect) She still has a +2 versus a DC 10 check from taking a single point of damage.

Level 18 in 3.5, even if I assume you only increase to half you allowed skill ranks in concentration and kept the same +2 in con (which would be odd with the sheer number of Ability Score Improvements possible) that same 1 point of damage could be a check as low as 17 or 18 (1st or 2nd level spell) with a mod of +12. If I assume you actually kept most of your skill ranks in the "save the spell skill" then it could easily be a +22.

If you are talking about mages who actually build to defend against it, 3.5 mages had is a lot easier on the Concentration check roll, unless they were being hit "like a truck"

Your confusion over the absorption shield built into 5e indicates a poor understanding of 5e's rules. If you are legitimately confused rather than putting on an act

Right, so you ignore death saves and only care about death from massive damage? My group tends to get worried about a character before they even reach 0 hp, so yes, low hp is still a thing. No "absorption shields" (frankly, I don't even use the death from massive damage rules, too much work at the table. People generally just say "I'm down" and I move on, we don't check and see how far in the negatives they fell)

I was under the impression that you have some experience with 5e, perhaps I was mistaken,

Nope not mistaken, I just call HP, you know, HP not "maxhp-1 plus an absorption shield of maxhp-1 & that absorption shield is fully recovered with even a single point of healing"

In fact, if you had just called it death from massive damage, I'd have known instantly what you were talking about.

The idea of just putting hurdlesonto the battlefield to make up for the fact that wotc screwed the pooch and provided tactical rules that are anything but on dmg251/252 after neglecting to include them in the phb ignores the fact that such things are far less reactive & require significantly more effort on the part of a gm to make up for that dropped ball.

Auras are not a solution to the lack of AoOs or tactical combat.

A damage aura makes attacking something in melee painful & unless very powerful has very little impact on someone looking to walk or dash past the offesive line in football terms. That you would suggest thetrog aura in this situation seems to indicate that you have no idea what it does

That literally has zero effect after one round, gives a very good chance of simply ignoring it the rest of the fight, & is nowhere near being able to provide the sort of threat that goes with AoOs with tactical combat present in older versions.

Then why did you bring up auras if you didn't want to talk about auras?

I'm stumped. You said "You really don't need to be very careful about auras/aoos/etc " So I mentioned auras. If you don't want to talk about them, don't put them in your list.

I do know what trogs do, and what the poisoned condition is.

But, if you don't want to have conversation about auras because they are pointless and people can just walk right through them while avoiding the monster... okay. Have fun with that?

I'm also not sure how difficult terrain is so taxing on the DM to use, seems pretty easy to me. Same with elevation. Seems like it is real easy to understand and implement. Can also do things like walls, barricades ect. All of this can deal with the fact that your melee line likes to charge straight for the back of your enemies and abandon everyone else to the whims of your monsters.

Players in 5e do not need to be careful of provoking AoOs while moving around the battlefield because they changed to A ranged attacks while threatened by melee rather than a wide array of skills abilities and actions & B retreat from an opponent without disengaging rather than move from one threatened square without taking a 5 foot step/shifting to allow the use of your full movement. "Someone could be careful about it" is not the same as "There are mechanical reasons why it is important to be careful about them"

Yes, you don't like AoO's. I get it. I'd also say with the lists you create of all the problems with it, you have 85% of the work done to fix it.

As to this post, I have no idea what you mean by A, and it sounds like in B you are getting hit either way.

And yes, I see as getting hit by an essentially free attack as being a reason to be careful about attacks of opportunity. Did every AoO from 3.5 come with the rider of Sentinel that they stopped your movement? They've always just been an attack right? So I don't get why you seem to think getting attacked is something not to care about.

It doesn't matter if what you did is tactically sound or not in regards to the fact that 5e didn't bother to include tools for the gm to invoke those sort of emotional moments during combat without excessive effort, railroading, and/or homebrew on the GM's part.

Why do you assume that? I've had other moments like this in 5e. I've invoked moments like this in 5e. I only mentioned this one because it involved opportunity attacks and was last night.

On my play by post game we had a harrowing arena fighter where our barbarian and rogue took on a solo battlemaster with a magic sword. That was all RAW and even more engaging. I'm not sure I'd call statting up a battlemaster as "excessive effort" and considering they jumped into the pit, definitely not railroading.

If I stopped and thought about it, I could probably come up with dozens more examples. Just because you think the game does not provide the tools doesn't mean you are right.

when talking about changing how standard action spells worked in 3.5 to work like 1 round action spells worked being a possible change that one could make... the fact that conjure elemental takes minute (TEN rounds) irrelevant because the amount of work needed to apply such a thing as broadly as discussed would require absurd amounts of system rework. The fact that the spell takes one minute to cast was never in question

Then you missed my entire point. So I'll state it again.

You mentioned a massive list of spells that were full round actions. Anti-Life Shield was one.

I was pointing out that she would not cast a spell like that if she was hoping to catch everyone off guard. You know, because it took a full round and would let everyone react to attack her and try and disrupt the spell.

Just like she wouldn't cast Conjure Elemental in 5e, because it takes a minute to cast.

See, when you want to catch everyone off guard, you cast a fast spell. Not a slow spell. Like one that takes a full round, or one that takes a minute.

The focus on AoOs is important because they were part of a collection of rules that worked together as a system to form tactical combat & wotc ignored the role they played within that larger system in the name of simplification in 5e. You can't simply add them back in as a trivial change because that system needs to touch & interacts with too many other parts of the game itself in order to function as a whole

you have repeatedly listed dozens of things that would need to change if you added back in AoO's the way you want them.

It seems to me like you know everything you would need to change. You just don't want to actually do it.

And, I don't believe WoTC ignored anything. They made an entire game. You won't even attempt to alter a pre-made game. I think that can speak to the level of difficulty and number of interactions they had to deal with.

You misunderstand. The original exchange was that casters were "low hp" so.. When it was pointed out that casters had their current hp minus one plus that much again there was faux confusion. A player with one hit point can be hit for their full hp minus one point & be back in business after getting healed for "any" amount of health. That was the reason for showing the section on instant death & incapacitation.

I'm sorry that the term "low hp" as in "they have low hp" somehow was supposed to show that they also have to deal with the death by massive damage rule.

They still have one of the lowest hp totals in the game. And I would hope if I asked a player with whose wizard has 36 hp "how much hp do you have" they wouldn't answer "72 if I get a single point of healing and 37 every time after that"

Because the answer is 36 hp, that is how much they have. Everything else is an interaction with the rules for dying.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Sure I want flanking to have a price its like here is a strategic game component like spells without a spell slot limit see that's perfect right?

What sort of price should you have for standing behind someone? Actually, what sort of price should you pay for someone else moving is alsoa good question, because both people benefit from flanking.

See, your example misses the point. Because spells have a spell slot limit because each spell is a discrete instance of effects. Spell slots limit how many times you can call upon the effect in question.

Flanking describes a state of being, "When you are flanking, which means in these positions, this happens" you can't attach a price to that. You need to put the price in the area where that state of being becomes possible. which is moving and attacks of opportunity and facing.

Look, you can keep beating the same dead point, but I can go an pull up the 3.5 rules for flanking and post them here, and I'm sure they are just as simple as the 5e rules are. What you are wanting is not in the flanking rules, because you want a cost to set up flanking and it isn't going to exist in the rules that tell you what happens after you set it up.

It's not really a situation of "making it less likely to fail." It's about building suspense and tension.

Consider this, comparing the mechanics):
DM: Make a Perception check.
Player: Crap, a 7.
The floor suddenly drops below you and you fall into a pit, landing on several spikes for 11 piercing damage. Make a Constitution save.
Player: 17
DM: You feel a slight burning, probably poison, but it doesn't cause any other effects.

or

DM: The floor suddenly drops, a pit trap? Roll percentile dice.
Player: Crap, I hope I make it. 37.
DM: You tried to leap free, but the floor dropped out too quickly. Roll a d6 to see if you land on any spikes.
Player: Spikes? Ugh. OK, A 4.
DM: You manage to rotate enough to land between two of the spikes, they glisten slightly with a thick black substance.
Player: Probably poison. Whew, that was close.

The first one is quick and doesn't build any suspense. Also, failure to detect the pit always results in damage. This is the 5e mechanic in the updated ToH.

The second one is the original mechanic. It builds more suspense, especially since players know that poison is save or die. Now they know there are pit traps with poison.

Yes, they expected traps, and are probably taking precautions. But this still increases the tension (in my opinion) because it highlights that the traps are likely to be deadly. This is also the opening of the adventure, letting you know that the adventure is likely to be deadly.

In 5e, how deadly is it? What does it tell you about the rest of the adventure? There are traps, and poison. Yeah, as long as we don't take too much damage in a single hit, we can expend Hit Dice, or stop and rest if we need to.

I'm not sure entirely what point this is supposed to make. I've got no idea what the current ToH did or didn't do.

But, let's take things a step at a time. 1) We already knew traps were in the dungeon, so having us encounter a trap doesn't tell us anything new.

Moving on to 2) What was the point of the trap, to show that poison existed on the trap? Or to show that the trap is likely to be deadly?

Let us assume it is the second. In that case, we don't need an instant death poison. After all, the point isn't to kill the player right? So, on the 5e example, instead of no damage, how about they take 23 poison damage. On a successful save meaning that the failed save would have been 46.

Most players I know would crap their pants at that. Is it recoverable? Yes. But that is fine. The point isn't to give them something unrecoverable, the point is to give them something dangerous. And this is dangerous. Also, perfectly within RAW. I just made it Purple Worm Venom.

It also gives them a gauge. They can tell if it is "deadly enough we might survive" or "everyone will die why are we doing this". With the other option... well, one wrong move and you die is pretty extreme.

I'm not saying this is a perfect design, and I know that not everybody will like this approach to playing. But the mechanics in both of these cases in the original are building the suspense in a way that is missing in many of the mechanics of 5e.

Again, to each their own. But I've built off this approach for decades, and my players over the years have loved it. And I think the reason why is that it's often very difficult to make the players fear for the lives of their PCs. And it's become harder to do that over the years as the power level of the PCs have increased.

Again, I'm not saying one approach is better than another. They are simply different approaches to adventure design and mechanics, and provide a different feel and play experience. Different groups will like different approaches.

This is a point I can agree with. I just find that I do fine with a middle ground between "You are safe" and "you are dead". Because it doesn't build tension to kill people. It builds tension to hurt them.

 

[Garthanos]

What sort of price should you have for standing behind someone? Actually, what sort of price should you pay for someone else moving is also a good question, because both people benefit from flanking.

A price to pay to obtain a beneficial position how do you make obtaining the benefit have a price well that is why increasing opportunity attacks were brought up its a risk price like spending hit points on obtaining that position.

 

[Chaosmancer]

A price to pay to obtain a beneficial position how do you make obtaining the benefit have a price well that is why increasing opportunity attacks were brought up its a risk price like spending hit points on obtaining that position.

Yes. Exactly what I have been saying.

The problem isn't in the flanking rules. Those describe what happens when you get into position. Your issue is with the rules involving getting into that position.

 

[Garthanos]

Yes. Exactly what I have been saying.

The problem isn't in the flanking rules. Those describe what happens when you get into position. Your issue is with the rules involving getting into that position.

Sure but you don't by for example add a piece on a washing machine and watch it go thunk thunk thunk because its imbalanced the creator packages that piece with the other one that ahem flanks it so the machine whirs (slower but with more power maybe) or you might purchase them separately but the manual tells you to purchase the other to prevent that thunk thunk thunk noise or say without the other this will go thunk thunk thunk (which is ok in the game if you want the thunk thunk thunk but I find myself guessing and homebrewing something to avoid thunk thunk thunk like the designers thought I must want thunk thunk thunk - instead of a pointing to some price that balances the benefit.

OK I went insane with an clunky example

 

[Mistwell]

Popularity is useful for Andy when Bob gets a new job/has a kid/etc & needs to drop, because Andy can quickly find a replacement for Bob rather than spending months of actively working to bring in someone nearby enough with a compatible schedule. You see popularity getting skewered whenever there are complaints or criticism because ad populum tends to be deployed as a shield to deflect that criticism with a logic flow along the lines of "5e is the most popular edition ever & it works for me, just fix it if you don't like it">"It's not that simple to just fix it because X Y Z" >"works fine for me & millions of others, must be a problem with you or your gm skills" while dancing around the criticism.

It's not dancing around the criticism to say it works fine for millions of others. It's the heart of the issue. A good meaningful criticism is pointing out a fault or flaw in something which has meaning to participants. If an overwhelming majority of people don't think that thing is a fault or flaw or meaningful, it's not a good criticism. It's just substituting personal preference for judgement if something as flawed or not. That's not criticism - if you prefer X to Y, it's not a criticism that Y isn't X.

I am not telling you to fix 5e to be the right game for you, because I don't think you will like 5e even if you did house rule it sufficiently to match your preferences because the mere fact you house ruled it that much will overshadow the results. I think 5e just isn't the best choice of games for you. Which is not a bash. Being outside the majority isn't a bash. It's just a game, and not the one for you. So what? Why take that as an insult?

 

[Garthanos]

I saw a statistic once which indicated that if you add up all the world's religions the majority of the world believe in reincarnation.

Ad populum is saying then that simply must be true.

 

[Mistwell]

I saw a statistic once which indicated that if you add up all the world's religions the majority of the world believe in reincarnation.

Ad populum is saying then that simply must be true.

Saying t's popular isn't the same as saying it's "truth". If you were to ask "Does reincarnation make for a good element for a religion" the fact that most of the world's religions include that element is an indicator it does make for a good element in a religion.

Popularity, for a game that's for sale to the public, is in fact the indicator that something is successful and wanted. Not that it's some objective universal truth.

Also, and this is pretty relevant to life in general, it's really quite bad argumentation to cite Latin argumentation titles. It has no meaning unless you persuade people that argumentation is a good standard. Which is why you don't hear couples or friends or really anyone toss around those titles as if they win something for someone. They don't. Knowledge of them might help guide you towards a persuasive argument, but the key will always be to make the persuasive argument. Just repeating "ad populum" isn't the argument itself. You have to show why an appeal to popularity is actually a bad thing. You're not showing that. It's just getting you, from many people, a "yes, and?" response.

 

[Garthanos]

Saying t's popular isn't the same as saying it's "truth". If you were to ask "Does reincarnation make for a good element for a religion" the fact that most of the world's religions include that element is an indicator it does make for a good element in a religion.

If popular is your only goal and then yeh that makes it ahem a good element.

 

[Garthanos]

Unless the complaint is this is not popular than arguing but it is popular is a poor response.