D&D 5E L&L 8/19/13: The Final Countdown

[Cadence]

Ack! Debating the merits/flaws of 4e as an RPG is veering off-topic for this thread and will blow the whole thing up. Stop.... please.... for all our sanity...

Something on the importance of WotC a more careful job in how they write up the explanations in their game rules, and how first impressions are important to new product launches might be interesting though.

Anyway...

I would love to do away with 3e style skills, for about a half dozen different reasons. Unfortunately +0 to +5 is not enough of a differentiator between "average, nothing special one way or the other" and "OMG best in the world", and the only way to make it so stat checks work without something like 3e's skills, or a proficiency system to provide another modifier, is to create a different resolution mechanic for noncombat stat checks and combat checks.

+0 to +5 seems huge for some things. For baseball would the difference between a +0 and +5 be the difference between batting .150 and batting .400? In basketball, the difference between being a 65% free throw shooter and a 90%?

Would it be better to have a few base kind of rolls depending on how variable the activity was? (One poker hand versus trying to break the other person, chess versus monopoly). 5d4-2 would be really annoying to roll though if we wanted to extend down the d20 - 3d6 pathfway.

 

[TwoSix]

Please re-read what I wrote, I did not say that you could not roleplay with 4e, what I said was, it's not great for roleplaying. Big difference. And part of the problem was something I find otherwise very complimentary...it's the only edition of D&D where roleplaying is not necessary to have fun, because the mechanics are fun. And that fun gets in the way of another kind of fun. This might not be the case for every one, but it appears to be the case for enough people that "4e doesn't feel like a roleplaying game." is a pretty common statement. I disagree; it does feel like a roleplaying game, it just feels like a better tactical skirmish game.

4e is indisputably better as a tactical miniature game than any other edition of D&D.

4e is no worse as a roleplaying game than any other version of D&D, and may be somewhat better, depending on one's opinion of varying skill systems.

4e is indisputably worse as a game of resource management and strategic deployment of non-combat related effects. I fully agree that for many D&D players, this is the core element that makes D&D feel like D&D.

There you go, the 4e edition war in as non-partisan a fashion as I can muster. And I agree with you, Salamandyr, that continuing to support the 4e paradigm, even if it has to be rebranded, would be a strong move on WotC's part.

 

[Salamandyr]

Ack! Debating the merits/flaws of 4e as an RPG is veering off-topic for this thread and will blow the whole thing up. Stop.... please.... for all our sanity...

Agreed. I'm a little sorry I wrote it, or at least injected it into this thread. Since it's already garnered responses I won't erase it, but I'm not going to respond or comment on any comments about it, and try to get the thread back to what it's supposed to be about.

+0 to +5 seems huge for some things. For baseball would the difference between a +0 and +5 be the difference between batting .150 and batting .400? In basketball, the difference between being a 65% free throw shooter and a 90%?

Would it be better to have a few base kind of rolls depending on how variable the activity was? (One poker hand versus trying to break the other person, chess versus monopoly). 5d4-2 would be really annoying to roll though if we wanted to extend down the d20 - 3d6 pathfway.

In your above two examples, though, you're talking about the difference between a highly trained athlete who is not a good hitter (a pitcher maybe), and a slugger--not between a guy who's maybe played some pick up softball sometime and Mark McGuire. That difference winds up being much larger than a 25% difference.*

A lot of the things that characters will be making stat checks for are a lot simpler than that. Say lifting a big rock or knocking down a big door. If I (strength 10 or thereabouts) have any chance at all, then someone with a strength of 14 (a highly trained athlete or someone who works out a lot) should have a VERY good chance, not just a 10% better chance.* And someone who competes in strongman competitions and regularly wins them (strength 20) should be able to lift or knock down whatever I have a chance to pick up or knock down, with an impunity that verges on 100% success.

*I realize the 10% & 25% aren't mathematically accurate, and are dependent on the actual DC, but this was a pretty good short hand.

 

[Manabarbs]

I'd be interested in hearing more in-depth what the playtest results turned up, although I understand the reasons for not wanting to overshare that (both from a PR standpoint and from a "let's not give away our market research for free" standpoint). The five statements in the article seem like mostly meaningless platitudes that I feel like pretty much any player could have just told you before the playtest started, at least in general terms. Additionally, they don't even seem totally borne out by the playtest itself; while it's easy to say that people prefer simplicity, and it's hopefully not contentious to say that unnecessarily complexity isn't desirable, simplicity is far from a sacred value, if the playtest itself is any indication. One of the most obvious and blatant examples of them changing something during the playtest in response to its incredibly negative reception is the fighter. The fighter's "simple" early design was so poorly received that they explicitly called it out as something they were changing in response to feedback, and they changed it very quickly.

 

[Salamandyr]

One thing I question is how really useful the playtests were for specific things. It seems like a lot of people got very worked up about what, to me, were inconsequentialities than over major mechanical issues.

For instance, it seemed like the major complaint about the warlock was whether or not the warts that appeared on a characters nose were permanent or not, or whether the d10 blast was too big or not, but I can't remember any commentary on whether it was fun, if the overall structure worked, and how it felt in context with the other classes. (to be fair, the sorcerer commentary did revolve a lot around feel).

The warlock and sorcerer were quickly pulled out of circulation, and we haven't seen anything similar since.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Agreed. I'm a little sorry I wrote it, or at least injected it into this thread. Since it's already garnered responses I won't erase it, but I'm not going to respond or comment on any comments about it, and try to get the thread back to what it's supposed to be about.



In your above two examples, though, you're talking about the difference between a highly trained athlete who is not a good hitter (a pitcher maybe), and a slugger--not between a guy who's maybe played some pick up softball sometime and Mark McGuire. That difference winds up being much larger than a 25% difference.*

A lot of the things that characters will be making stat checks for are a lot simpler than that. Say lifting a big rock or knocking down a big door. If I (strength 10 or thereabouts) have any chance at all, then someone with a strength of 14 (a highly trained athlete or someone who works out a lot) should have a VERY good chance, not just a 10% better chance.* And someone who competes in strongman competitions and regularly wins them (strength 20) should be able to lift or knock down whatever I have a chance to pick up or knock down, with an impunity that verges on 100% success.

*I realize the 10% & 25% aren't mathematically accurate, and are dependent on the actual DC, but this was a pretty good short hand.

I think weight lifting is a really bad example. Mostly because there is quite low variation in how much you can lift, so it's more of a "take 20" situation than a roll situation. In which case the str 14 guy beats the str 10 guy 100% of the time, just as you expect.

Now, if you want a better comparison, go with Tennis. If a player has a 55% chance of winning a single ball, he has something like a 99% chance to win a match. Modifiers don't have to be huge to make a huge difference.

I think that if you have +0 to +5 from stats and +0 to +5 from (skill) training you get a very big range of skillfulness from the total untalented noob to the talented expert. I think that with any bigger difference will result in situations like you have in 3e where characters that aren't trained and haven't got the stats for it have absolutely no chance. (Typically on spot checks). For me, it kinda breaks immersion.

In 3e you typically have 3-4 characters that can't see a monster before it's 10' away (+0 bonus at level 20) and 1-2 characters that can see it without rolling (+25 bonus at level 20).

I would rather have a party of 5 characters that had: +1, +3, +4, +7 and +10 in spot. Sure, it's one guy that is unobservant, but it's not the 75% of the party the whole time and there is actually a point in taking themes like jack-of-all-trades that give +2 bonus to all skills (that you don't have training in).

If you want to simulate stuff like weight lifting with rolls, divide it into several rolls, one for letting the weights go down, one for timing it, one for pushing up and one for stabilizing at the end of a push. That way you get the expected result for characters that are supposed to be noobs and experts.

 

[Salamandyr]

Blackbrrd, I'm not saying I want 3rd edition style skill differentiation (perish the thought...the skill bonus issue is the single worst thing about 3e, yes that includes fighter/wizard power disparity), just that there needs to be greater variation than between +0 and +5. Which you appear to agree with, since your variance in your example is between +0 and +10...a differentiation which seems about right to me, from a realism and game-ism standpoint.

WOTC's problem is that there is no way to get to the +0 to +10 variance without some kind of skill or proficiency system.

EDIT: and weight lifting is not something I want to accurately model...it's an example of something in game (like forcing open a door or holding a portcullis), where He Man should have a considerably more than 25% greater success rate than someone with only average strength.

If DC 15 is a "standard" test, for any task where someone with no special aptitude, but no special penalties either, (stat 10) has a 30% chance of success, then I think someone who is the greatest living exemplar of that particular attribute (stat 20) should have better than a 55% chance to succeed.

If the "greatest living exemplar" had a +10 (which is what I suggested in an earlier post) to his role, then the numbers come out right...80% success, leaving a small, but real chance of failure that keeps the game interesting, but leaves the character is actually good at the things he's designed to be good at.

 

[Ratskinner]

One thing I question is how really useful the playtests were for specific things. It seems like a lot of people got very worked up about what, to me, were inconsequentialities than over major mechanical issues.

Hard to say. I'm very confident that the posting public is a small sliver of the D&D-playing public. So I'd hate to speculate what the survey results might have been like from online discussions/rage. On the other hand, from my memory of the playtest surveys, I'm not sure how much about major mechanical issues was even on the table. However, since we know the playtest packets have not been strictly "the base game" its hard to say much about what the core mechanics are. (Well, hard to say anything interesting...I'm confident we well roll d20s for attacks.)

 

[Warbringer]

Skills is where the d20 concept breaks down because of its all or nothing ... "successes" is a better way to model these ... going back to the system [MENTION=63]RangerWickett[/MENTION] loves would be a step in the right direction (the +'s are ranks, and rank>=test is auto success, rank=test DC 15 test, rank<test DC20)

 

[Salamandyr]

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