D&D 5E L&L December 16th Can you feel it?

[Stalker0]

Well, yes, exactly.

I did think 4e was perhaps on the right lines with its "Bloodied" marker - which perhaps could have been connected to a -1 penalty to certain rolls or something.

Having said that, I'd be very wary of introducing anything that looks like a "death spiral" to D&D - unrealistic as it is, the fact that hit points don't have such a thing built in probably makes for a better game.

I agree on both counts. I really liked the addition of the bloodied condition to the game. Both mechanically because it added a change midway in a creature's lifespan, and the flavor it invokes (I can say a creature is "bloodied" to let my players know how hurt something is...without having to go "he's a little hurt, or a lot hurt").

I would be fine if bloodied was reintroduced in 5e and used more aggressively. For example, you could say that injury poison only works on bloodied targets to massage that commonly cited flavor problem.

That said, I completely agree that a death spiral is not appropriate to Dnd. It is perfectly fine for games that try to model combat more realistically and are generally gritty in nature...but dnd at its baseline is neither realistic nor gritty. Characters are expected to somewhat throw themselves into the jaws of death time and time again....and for that model HP works very well.

 

[dmgorgon]

I actually found that backstab wasn't really a kill shot in 2e either. A lot of people played it wrong, but the rule itself said to apply the multiplier to only the die roll itself, not any modifiers. So, when using a 1d4 dagger a x5 multiplier made a roll of a 2 into 10 damage. If it was a +5 dagger with a 10 strength, you'd do a total of 15 damage. A fighter with an 18/00 strength with a +5 longsword who rolled a 2 on damage was doing 13 damage.

If you were fighting a significant threat, 15 damage was not killing them outright. If you multiplied strength mods and magic weapon bonus by the backstab multiplier, it often did kill in one hit. But just as often the Wizard was doing more damage with a fireball.

There's a reason MMORPGs(and 3e and 4e D&D) made rogues into a DPS character, they realized that the rogue's shtick was so small as to be insignificant in most games. When you walk down a hallway filled with 10 doors and there is a combat encounter behind all 10 of them, the rogue spends about 30 seconds each checking them for traps and disarming. The rest of the party spends 20 minutes fighting each combat encounter.

It's not very fun being the guy who plays the game for 30 seconds every 20 minutes.

Also, one shot kills aren't very much fun for anyone. So that's not the best option either.

I think the main reason MMORPG's redesigned the rogue and made him the DPS guy is because video games can't handle the kind of detailed and open ended interaction a PnP game can provide. In my game the rogue might take centre stage for a while. The party might might need him to gather information, scout, or even steal the ring the guard captain. Sometimes the rogue and another stealthy party member would venture off on their own little side quest within the campaign session. So yes, in my game there are times when the combat focused characters get to shine and there are other times when the non-combat characters get to shine. It's essentially spotlight play.

On the other hand, if you reduce the game to a combat game (and that's really all video games can do) then yes you have the problem of the non-combat focused rogue being of no value to the party. Of course, D&D isn't a combat game, well.. at least not the version that I play. In addition, picking locks and disabling traps isn't the core theme of all rogues and it certainly shouldn't be something that defines the rogue class at all.

 

[I'm A Banana]

That said, I completely agree that a death spiral is not appropriate to Dnd. It is perfectly fine for games that try to model combat more realistically and are generally gritty in nature...but dnd at its baseline is neither realistic nor gritty. Characters are expected to somewhat throw themselves into the jaws of death time and time again....and for that model HP works very well.

I feel like this bears repeating, because it gets at the "feel" (the character/player psychological harmony) I'm looking for from HP. In a lot of conversations where I advocate for HP-as-"meaty", a counterpoint often arises that I should really want some sort of death spiral mechanic to help model bodily injury and wear and tear.

But I don't want alternate injury mechanics because I want all the daring and toughness of a mythic fantasy hero. HP works great like that. It encourages the player and the character to both soldier on in dangerous situations because they are still performing at full capacity. When I say I'd like HP to be meaty, I'm not saying I want an injury mechanic. I'm saying that HP, to me, is the injury mechanic. I want sprained ankles and torn ligaments and mild concussions to be HP. That plays right into the "feel" of a heroic character who has taken some wounds: "I'm a little hurt. Can't keep doing this all day and expect to breathe tomorrow. Better be careful if I'm going to keep stabbin' goblins."

I don't need some floating modifiers to represent a hero that has taken some wounds but keeps on fighting. The fact that a knight with a shattered ankle is going to be hobbling and more vulnerable are, for me, represented in the mechanics by the fact that she's not at full HP anymore. The effects of that on the PC are subsumed within the HP mechanic for me, and the fact that this doesn't affect a combatant until they're at 0 hp is a feature, not a bug: they're fantasy heroes, after all, they can press on through that sprained ankle.

The functional effect that this sprained ankle has on your fighting ability is that ultimately, you're at bigger risk of getting killed. That's HP.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I think the main reason MMORPG's redesigned the rogue and made him the DPS guy is because video games can't handle the kind of detailed and open ended interaction a PnP game can provide. In my game the rogue might take centre stage for a while. The party might might need him to gather information, scout, or even steal the ring the guard captain. Sometimes the rogue and another stealthy party member would venture off on their own little side quest within the campaign session. So yes, in my game there are times when the combat focused characters get to shine and there are other times when the non-combat characters get to shine. It's essentially spotlight play.

This does happen sometimes. I agree, it is one reason that MMOs had to give the Rogue a combat focus. Because in an MMO there are no non-combat aspects of the game, per se. As a party, you all need to contribute to a fight, because if you don't, then you aren't needed.

Then again, I can speak from experience when I say that the exact same problem existed in D&D depending on the content of the adventure. Unless you went out of your way to make the adventure have non-combat aspects that involved the Rogue, then they didn't get anymore spotlight time than anyone else.

So, in many people's games the non-combat Thief was already an issue. In our group it was, no one would play a single classed Thief on purpose in 2e. MMOs just discovered that everyone had a combat role except the Thief. So when battle started everyone has something to do except the Thief.

On the other hand, if you reduce the game to a combat game (and that's really all video games can do) then yes you have the problem of the non-combat focused rogue being of no value to the party. Of course, D&D isn't a combat game, well.. at least not the version that I play. In addition, picking locks and disabling traps isn't the core theme of all rogues and it certainly shouldn't be something that defines the rogue class at all.

Here's the problem: Let me go over a series of adventures I've played.

1) Demon kidnaps us all and sends us to the Nine Hells in a labyrinth he specifically designed to test us filled with traps and monsters. The Thief was useful for disarming and finding the traps...and that was it.

2) We need to find an ancient artifact that was hidden away by a powerful wizard hundreds of years ago. We found a clue to opening the dungeon in a previous adventure and go in. Inside are: a bunch of mindless undead intent on killing us, an ooze who wants to devour us, and a summoned elemental conjured to protect the treasure. The Rogue was useful for...well, nothing. There were no traps for him to disarm, no one to steal from. The undead had lifesense and couldn't be tricked by sneaking past them. The ooze had tremorsense. The elemental was summoned magically when someone stepped anywhere in the room. This adventure took 5 hours. It would be 5 hours of really boring play for a Rogue without combat ability(Which it was. It got the player so frustrated that he retired his character and came back as a Druid).

3) The church asked us to recover some artifacts from a thousand years ago that were recently unearthed by some explorers. All of them ended up dead except one who ended up insane. We went into a tunnel filled with evil trappings of a dark god. Inside we find a bunch of creatures who have taken up residence in the tunnels, they attack us. We find some clues about what the caves were used for and eventually find the artifacts we're looking for an head back. Along the way, we find out that a bunch of Orcs have attacked and plundered the town we came though on the way in. We decide to track down the Orcs. We find their camp. The Rogue sneaks in and tells us how many of them there are. We then attack their camp in an epic battle that lasts nearly 4 hours. This entire series of events: roleplaying the getting the party together, going into the cave, finding the items and saving the kidnapped townspeople takes 4 5-hour long sessions. During this time the only "special" thing the Rogue has done was scout the Orc camp for about 30 seconds and searched for and found a couple of traps.

4) A mysterious benefactor asked us to go to a mysterious manor house and bring him back an item that we'd know when we saw it. As we approached it, a strange mist started appearing it and out of it came monsters. We fought them off and made it to the house. It appears as if some dark force has taken residence there are ghosts keep taunting us. Also 4 hags appear to live there and have been kidnapping people. We had to fight and kill them. They(or someone) also seems to have a Chimera chained in the courtyard that tried to kill us. I'm currently playing the Rogue and I haven't used a single Rogue skill since the adventure started. I have been fighting like crazy, however. Luckily, I'm playing a D&D Next Rogue whose actually good at fighting.

 

[Derren]

Let me go over a series of adventures I've played.

Do you play anything other than dungeon crawls? If yes, how about you share some of those episodes with us to see if there too the rogue is totally useless or might actually shine more than the others?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

When the game moves at a brisk pace from one situation to another, you can get away with some rather unbalanced stuff. Slow that pace down, and the players of the "shine brightly less often" characters can get bored out of their minds very quickly.

I agree that this helps to mitigate it, though not eliminate it. During 2e our battles took 5-20 minutes on average. During 3e and 4e, they took 60-90 minutes.

However, during 2e we still noticed the problem. Players still refused to play Thieves without multiclassing into something that could fight. It just became a point of contention that caused people to retire their characters entirely in 3e when they felt their character wasn't combat capable. This didn't just affect Rogues. Pretty much anyone who felt like they weren't contributing in combat dropped their character for a new one after a session or two.

Back in 2e, we made all sorts of mistakes though that we've learned from: Splitting the party into 3 different groups, each of which needed to be run separately happened too often and you'd need to wait hours before the DM would get back to resolving your part of the adventure. We were used to D&D being a large amount of waiting until you could do something.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Do you play anything other than dungeon crawls? If yes, how about you share some of those episodes with us to see if there too the rogue is totally useless or might actually shine more than the others?

I do. Though they are fairly rare. All adventures can inevitably be boiled down to dungeon crawls. Let me think, it's been a long time since I've seen a pure non-dungeon crawl.

1) Alright, there's one adventure where we had to collect these stolen items for this guy. We asked around the city to see who might have stolen them. We all split up and came back with some information. We followed the information to a guy who was a fence. He didn't have them but we had to beat his body guard in an arm wrestling competition before he'd tell us that. He told us about another fence who might have them. We were attacked on the road by some brigands. We found the fence and asked him if he had them. He lied and said he didn't. Our Ranger spotted the location on his shelves where they used to be and our Fighter intimidated him into telling us the truth: He'd already sold them to a guy. We got directions to his shoe store.

We went inside, but there was no one there. We found a secret door behind the counter and went into the basement where we were attacked by the guy and his henchmen who were all wererats. We beat them and recovered the items.

The rogue didn't do anything special in that adventure either. I mean, nothing the rest of us couldn't have done without him. Which is rather ironic given the adventure was about tracking down thieves and you'd think he'd have an advantage.

2) The adventurers want to get into a mercenary band so the captain of the band tells them that if he can solve a bunch of the small problems brought to their band lately that he doesn't have time for, he'll let them in. The tasks are:

-Track down a shipment of illegal wood(since logging rights belong to someone else) in a warehouse and seize it. The shipment is guarded by a bunch of well armed smugglers who are prepared for an attack. This requires breaking into the warehouse and killing the smugglers so that the shipment of wood can be picked up.

-Find a shell for a blacksmith to make a hand guard for a sword from a nearby cave. The blacksmith normally employs children to collect them but they recently came back screaming in terror from the last trip. There are monsters who have taken up residence in the cave since it connects to the sewers. They need to kill them to get a shell.

-Get a shipment out of customs where it's been stuck since a rival business person reported to the authorities that it contained necromantic supplies. The merchant doesn't care how they get the shipment, but he needs it right away. This mostly requires roleplaying with the customs agents and convincing them to release the shipments by proving that the merchant has been framed. Optionally, you could sneak in and find the evidence instead of convincing the agents.

I've personally ran this adventure 10 times and I can tell you that most groups didn't even have a Rogue and completed it fine. When there was a Rogue in the group, it didn't significantly affect the adventure. They might have sneaked in instead of trying for Diplomacy. But the difference was really once roll maybe two in the entire adventure. Luckily, this was a 4e adventure so the Rogues were perfectly combat capable and didn't have to worry about that.