D&D 5E it appears to be very easy to break the game

[Hussar]

To me, the argument that it's "about the story" and not the mechanics is just lazy design. Basically, the designers are pushing poor games out the door with the hopes that the people running the game will have the time, energy and ability to fix the problems that they couldn't be bothered fixing in the first place.

Sure, you can have good times with poor games. But far more often you have collapsing games where the campaign implodes under the weight of piss poor rules that never get fixed.

I'd rather play a game where the developers were invested enough in the system to identify problems and fix them before they push the game out the door.

So, yeah, I get exactly where [MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION] is coming from. Expecting the players to fix your game is like expecting the passengers to fix the airplane. While true, no one dies when a campaign crashes and burns, I'm sick and tired of wasting my time with poorly developed games. Do it right, or don't bother.

 

[Dausuul]

Oh, for the love of Demogorgon, can we lay off the "not about the math" thing already? You're making a huge fuss about a brief, vague comment from a nameless dev, out of context, with no link or citation given. Quite frankly, I'm not surprised you're getting tetchy replies, because there's no possible answer to your arguments except to say "I need to see the source for that quote so I know who actually said what, in response to what."

I might add that in this entire thread I have seen exactly one person put forward an actual real rules exploit. That rules exploit relies on being a 15th-level multi-classed character with near-maxed scores in two non-attack stats. (Monk/rogue does not work by the rules, and the dual-wielding barbarian achieves a modest advantage that shrinks to insignificance by level 5.) Considering these are playtest rules, that's a pretty skimpy showing. I'm not saying 5E doesn't have its mechanical issues, but you are not making a strong case for the idea that the devs have just thrown balance and design rigor out the window.

 

[pemerton]

Oh, for the love of Demogorgon, can we lay off the "not about the math" thing already? You're making a huge fuss about a brief, vague comment from a nameless dev, out of context, with no link or citation given.

In my case, it makes me think of the Mearls column relatively late last year, in which he talked about "feel" having been achieved and sending the rules off to another team to bed down the maths.

I might add that in this entire thread I have seen exactly one person put forward an actual real rules exploit. That rules exploit relies on being a 15th-level multi-classed character with near-maxed scores in two non-attack stats. (Monk/rogue does not work by the rules, and the dual-wielding barbarian achieves a modest advantage that shrinks to insignificance by level 5.) Considering these are playtest rules, that's a pretty skimpy showing. I'm not saying 5E doesn't have its mechanical issues, but you are not making a strong case for the idea that the devs have just thrown balance and design rigor out the window.

I don't know anything about particular rules issues, other than the paladin/fighter one, and personally I'm not persuaded that's such a big deal.

My own inclination is to see a lot of the "feel over maths" comments from WotC as aimed more at marketing purposes than literally true. Some of the odd dice expressions for the spells and their scaling (eg 17d6 for Disintegrate - there's a nice round number!), for instance, suggest they are paying quite a bit of attention to damage output at least.

 

[Mistwell]

Well, because I like playing devil's advocate, I will try to break the game.

Bounded accuracy depends on AC not getting too high (Ac 28 seems fairly unhittable by anything other than a crit). Because attack bonuses are fairly fixed.

+1 Full Plate, with a base AC of 19 (19)
+1 Shield will add +3 (22)
The level 2 Druid/Ranger spell Barkskin will add +2 (24)
The 3rd level Wizard spell Haste will add +2 (26)
The 1st Level Cleric spell Shield of Faith will add +1 (27)
The 3rd Level Cleric spell Prayer will add +1 (28)
A Ring of Protection will add +1 if Attuned (29)
A Dusty Rose Prism Ioun Stone give +1 (30)
A Pale Green Prism Ioun Stone give +1 (31)
Mountain Dwarf +1 (32)
Fighter Defense ability +1 (33) (You could go with protection for forced disadvantage, which is better than a +1 AC on average, but it's only once per round).

So you can get up to an AC 33, with just +1 items. It's unclear to me if items will go to +2 or more, so obviously it could go higher.

I am not sure anything in the game can hit you at AC 33, baring a crit. A Balor, for example, has a +8 attack.

Now +6 of that is from spells, but +2 of it is from a Ranger spell, and Rangers get the Defense ability as well, so this character can be a Mountain Dwarf Ranger.

It wouldn't be hard to multi-class to get a couple of those, but even if you remove all the spell bonuses you don't cast yourself you're still looking at AC 29. And if you eliminate the Ioun Stone's, it's still 27. That's just your race bonus, your class bonus, the barkskin spell you cast on yourself (lasts up to an hour, 2nd level spell), +1 plate, +1 shield, and a ring of protection. I don't think that's too unusual by mid to high level. And yet, a friggen Balor demon would need to roll a 19 or better to hit you.

 

[Argyle King]

This sounds like your DM did not read the Zombie entry in the Beastiary very well. Zombies get "Zombie fortitude", which means frequently when you do enough damage to take them to 0 hit points, they don't actually go to 0 hit points and stay at 1 hit point.



This sounds like two problems.

First, there is a known issue (that they are working on) in balancing the monsters. With each update they updated the classes, but not the Beastiary much (they did one minor update to it). So, they know some of those monsters are off, and said they are tweaking it.

But the other issue is the guidelines for easy, normal, and difficult encounter are a bit tricky to figure out, but in general you should be facing things that are a bit tougher than you are, or their quantity should be higher than expected.



You can, but just one time per round. So one hit from your monk/rogue gets it, the others do not.



He dual wields with light weapons...was he using light weapons (both hands)?

The DM did read the zombie entry properly; the zombies failed their rolls.

And, yes, he was a Gnome Barbarian duel-wielding a whip and a dagger. To be fair, that particular example was from the previous packet. A few of the most glaring issues which allowed it to be broken were fixed, but some of the problems are still (seemingly) there. One of the guys at the table I'm usually with is currently playing a fighter/barbarian who is duel-wielding, and a few of the same problems are creeping in.


edit: I think you were asking if the current guy is using two light weapons. I am not sure, but I vaguely remember him saying he had found some sort of loophole around that. Something with a fighting style, background, or possibly even a third class he MCed into to make it work. As I said in an earlier post, I don't have the material in front of me, so I'm fuzzy on what exactly the details of his character are.

 

[Argyle King]

...also, for what it's worth, I'm not trying to suggest that the game is completely broken. It has simply been my perception from my own anecdotal evidence that the game appears to work very different in actual play than I believe is intended.

I did see a comment a few pages back that I agree with; that being that the game seems to have drifted from the vision that the early packets had into something that is more about "pew pew kewl powerz*"

*Cool powers are cool. I'm not suggesting to make the game less cool. However, I am started to see a few shades of why early 4E made me feel negative toward D&D; the story that the game was trying to tell and the story that the mechanics were trying to tell didn't seem to mesh very well. To be honest, at the end of the day, maybe I just need to accept that my interests and the game that D&D wants to be aren't as compatible as they were in the past. That's a different topic though.

I see a lot of people posting numbers which discredit my perception. I am willing to accept that my perception is wrong. I don't have solid numbers to support my anecdotal evidence. I can only say that something just doesn't seem right about how things play out. That's not the same as saying I don't enjoy the game. I have very much enjoyed the sessions I've been in. I'm simply not convinced that the mechanics of the game are something I feel confident about.

 

[Balesir]

...the story that the game was trying to tell and the story that the mechanics were trying to tell didn't seem to mesh very well.

Excuse me for butting into this shard of the ongoing style wars, but this snippet from the original poster's further explanation intrigued me: [MENTION=58416]Johnny3D3D[/MENTION], could you explain what you mean by "the story that the game was trying to tell"?

My own general view is that the mechanics are the game, for this purpose (i.e. "the game" is whatever the mechanics produce), but it would seem that you have a different view. That might help explain some differences of style/expectation, maybe. Is this, perhaps, similar to [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s described clash between the expectations engendered by the BD&D introduction and the actual rules that he experienced? Or something different?

 

[Sage Genesis]

It wouldn't be hard to multi-class to get a couple of those, but even if you remove all the spell bonuses you don't cast yourself you're still looking at AC 29. And if you eliminate the Ioun Stone's, it's still 27. That's just your race bonus, your class bonus, the barkskin spell you cast on yourself (lasts up to an hour, 2nd level spell), +1 plate, +1 shield, and a ring of protection. I don't think that's too unusual by mid to high level. And yet, a friggen Balor demon would need to roll a 19 or better to hit you.

Pretty impressive! Don't forget about taking two levels of Mage for the aura of melee-disadvantage and, if you're willing to abuse stacking unclarity, taking some levels in Fighter and Paladin so each of them takes a +1 AC due to defensive fighting style. (Which are almost certainly not intended to stack, but it nowhere says they don't stack either.)

I'm not exactly sure what a dwarven paladin/fighter/ranger/mage is supposed to be, mind you... Maybe he's the Moradin-tasked tunnel warden who clears out the goblin infestations and maintains the purity of the leylines that flow through the earth?

 

[Mistwell]

Pretty impressive! Don't forget about taking two levels of Mage for the aura of melee-disadvantage and, if you're willing to abuse stacking unclarity, taking some levels in Fighter and Paladin so each of them takes a +1 AC due to defensive fighting style. (Which are almost certainly not intended to stack, but it nowhere says they don't stack either.)

I'm not exactly sure what a dwarven paladin/fighter/ranger/mage is supposed to be, mind you... Maybe he's the Moradin-tasked tunnel warden who clears out the goblin infestations and maintains the purity of the leylines that flow through the earth?

Wow I hadn't even read that mage aura.

So a Mountain Dwarf Ranger 5/ Mage 2 with just three "normal" magic items (+1 armor, +1 shield, +1 ring of protection) is almost unhittable. Every dragon in the game would need to roll double natural 20s to hit them on a regular attack. And even if you happen to run into an even higher level creature like a Balor (which needs a 19 or 20 to hit, rolled twice due to disadvantage) you still have three Shield spells per day to cast (+4 to AC), which can be cast after you know they rolled a hit.

All this could be solved by simply adding some "this bonus does not stack with other bonuses to AC" clauses.

 

[steeldragons]

To paraphrase the [trite overused] urban idiom: "Breaker's gonna break."