D&D 5E Let's Talk About Chapter 9 of the DMG

[tetrasodium]

.

• Proficiency dice This is actually a pretty good rule that works well to put value on the ability mod portion of a skill check while bringing back the ability to use magic items that add+N to a skill, we settled on working them akin to how the brutal weapon property worked in 4e Personally we found the best way to handle expertise with these is to allow the proficiency die(not the d20) to be rolled with advantage rather than doubling it. The usual (dis)advantage on a d20 falls outside this rule & is unmodified in how it applies to the d20.

• I'd considered this, but it's a pretty strong nerf to expertise. This is another one of those cascading effects (the need to rebalance the rogue).

To a degree it can be, but not to the extent that it might seem because the die is already doubled

Advantage on a proficiency die is much closer to double expertise with regular proficiency bonus than double proficiency dice

• Ability check proficiency: While I've not used it in d&d, it's effectively a less developed version of the same as the skill system used in fate freeport & similar to the overly stripped down fate accelerated(FAE is designed more for storyboarding than fate type ttrpg). I did use that for one or two games before the group asked to go back to fate's normal skills. It's a disaster & results in everyone acting in bizzare MrBean/inspector Clouseau-like ways trying to to weirdly apply skills in situations they have no place in. In short, it's a mess & huge headache for the GM.

Not really getting this issue at all. I've used the same system with Casles and Crusades (and to some extent with 13th Age) and never had any issues at all. D&D is, at this point pretty clear about what can and can't be done with ability scores. (With the biggest issue being Int vs Wis). FAE is deliberately vauge and I wouldn't want to touch it.

I've never played castles & crusades or 13th age, but mixing d&d's absolutes with the vagueness of Ability check proficiency was just a mess of encouraged munchkinism when I tried it.

• Personality trait proficiency: Ugh, this reeks of the old school trait/flaw tables where you pick some defects that will never nder any circumstances affect your character & gain cool stuff except without the possability of the gm ever using it against you.

This one is just awful, I agree. I would have said that the main benefit of these subsystems is that they make clear that proficiency is just a hack and it's easy to chop and change the skills and tools in a multitude of ways...except I guess they don't achieve that, because noone anywhere seems to have taken up the opportunity and run with it.

I think a lot of the reason for why boils down to some mix wotc dropping the ball here

They went out of their way to change from skill checks to ability checks then wrote everything else as if they were still skill checks unless you used a variant rule instead on top of writing 175-180 in a way that makes it looks like skills are hard coded to specific abilities. It certainly doesn't help that the race/background/class/sometimes archetype way of getting skills combined with an overly compressed skill selection makes it difficult to make changes with skills.

I've never understood the hate for 4E's healing surges/13th Age's recoveries. If anything they put limits on characters' capabilities, more than the standard D&D system does. However this only works if the system interacts with magical healing. As this system does not, and leaves all the real work to the GM, it is uselss as written.

my 4e experience is pretty limited, but it's no secret that hate & surges were two words that went together dp there is no way wotc could not have forgotten it regardless of why people hated them. The bolded bit is indeed the kinds of problems present in so much of dmg ch9 where x might work great if Y but the rule is unfinished so that's on the gm.

 

[Don Durito]

They went out of their way to change from skill checks to ability checks then wrote everything else as if they were still skill checks unless you used a variant rule instead on top of writing 175-180 in a way that makes it looks like skills are hard coded to specific abilities. It certainly doesn't help that the race/background/class/sometimes archetype way of getting skills combined with an overly compressed skill selection makes it difficult to make changes with skills.

Yes. It's pretty inconsistent as written. They seemed to approach it with a kind of old school spirit but then decided that skills had become too much of sacred cow to get rid of.

But I actually think stripping away the skills removes that inconsistency.

The table on page 237 is reasonably clear about what you use each ability score for. Without skils you don't have any vagueness of things like possibly rolling Strength for Intimidate to muddy the waters. (Unless you read back from the skill system - but that just reintroduces problems).

5E only makes sense if ability scores are the things that are fixed and proficiencies are the things that can be moved around. After all the abilty scores are the only things that have fixed and clear uses.

So the Fighter should probably not be rolling Strength (Intimidate). But it makes perfect sense for the Fighter to use his Charisma (Weapon Proficiency with a longsword) if he pulls off some kind of intimidating flourish, or if you're using background proficiency maybe his background (Circus Strongman) + his Charisma modifier.

But you can't have both parts be fluid in a game like 5e that aims to present fixed challenges.

 

[Don Durito]

my 4e experience is pretty limited, but it's no secret that hate & surges were two words that went together dp there is no way wotc could not have forgotten it regardless of why people hated them. The bolded bit is indeed the kinds of problems present in so much of dmg ch9 where x might work great if Y but the rule is unfinished so that's on the gm.

Like I said, I don't think it makes much sense. For one, I think people don't really understand that in 4E and 13th Age it is not extra healing on top of magical healing. They represent your capacity for healing, magical or otherwise. What's more they become a resource that can be utilised (fatigued from pushing overland - lose a healing surge, fall off a bridge into icy cold water - lose a healing surge - struck by a life draining undead lose healing surge), so that you don't need to faff around with a whole layer of exhausting rules. You can also use it at a daily resource, so if a player wants to pull off a particularly difficult stunt, and you want to both give it its due, but also have it cost something real - make them spend a healing surge.

I think an argument can be made that they somewhat reduce the specialness of magical healing - if that's important to you, but when used correctly, they make the game more gritty, not less - it doesn't matter how many magical healing potions you dragged with from town. When you're done, you're done. And they become a way to unify the effects of damage, and fatigue and other conditions into a single trackable system that can be felt.

But of course the 5E version really is just extra free healing with no cost or trade off.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yes. It's pretty inconsistent as written. They seemed to approach it with a kind of old school spirit but then decided that skills had become too much of sacred cow to get rid of.

But I actually think stripping away the skills removes that inconsistency.

The table on page 237 is reasonably clear about what you use each ability score for. Without skils you don't have any vagueness of things like possibly rolling Strength for Intimidate to muddy the waters. (Unless you read back from the skill system - but that just reintroduces problems).

5E only makes sense if ability scores are the things that are fixed and proficiencies are the things that can be moved around. After all the abilty scores are the only things that have fixed and clear uses.

So the Fighter should probably not be rolling Strength (Intimidate). But it makes perfect sense for the Fighter to use his Charisma (Weapon Proficiency with a longsword) if he pulls off some kind of intimidating flourish, or if you're using background proficiency maybe his background (Circus Strongman) + his Charisma modifier.

But you can't have both parts be fluid in a game like 5e that aims to present fixed challenges.

I as a GM can figure it out easily enough, especially having run fate for a couple years... but that's not always so true for my players given how that particular ball got dropped, it winds up being confusing rto players & requires us to be on the same page with regards to what a hypothetical str(stealth) wis(stealth) int(stealth) or cha(stealth) check should be. I may look at those and see various applications of social engineering

Spoiler: like so

• str(stealth): "We know that There are a lot of laborers bringing heavy stuff into town, can I carry one of those boxes o get past the guards using strength?" We gotta sneak into the city & most of us are wanted for that thing we did...
• Con(stealth): "we need to do a stakeout or whatever, can I use con(stealth) to last through it posing as a magewright looking busy all day long across the street?" We gotta know when security changes shifts
• int(stealth): "I want to take the results of yesterday's 'survey' to come in with the right looking tools & spend 8 hours triangulating the coordinates of the vault so we can teleport inside later"
• wis(stealth):"I want to dazzle the clerk with arcane treknobabble about the building's enchantments me & maybe my team coming out to do an integrity survey on so the magewrights can bring all the right components to maintain the wards"... sure we are going around looking for the vault the whole time, but you know
• cha(stealth): "I'm gonna walk right in with a huge thing of flowers for the boss Carol & get lost on the way to the bathroom... for six hours... in a closet..."

I just chose the skill at random & quickly rattled off ways it could apply to the other stats... Meanwhile bob might have completely different ideas causing us to needlessly but heads or causing him to just resist ever asking

 

[Asisreo]

I find you are only sort of right. We don't track it because in realistic terms, it really doesn't matter.

Let us take a Rogue, with 10 str and 10 con (important for food). They can carry 150 lbs with no problem.

Studded Leather Armor, Rapier, 3 daggers, Shortbow, Quiver and 40 arrows = 23 lbs
Thieves Tools, 10 days of rations, waterskin= 27 lbs
3 healer's kits, lantern, 5 flasks of oil = 16 lbs

That is 66 lbs right there, and lasts for 4 weeks of travel (you only need to eat once every 3 days) assuming you can find water every day.

The roll to forage for food and water is a DC 10 in most settings. A successful roll gives you 1d6+wis lbs of food and 1d6+wis gallons of water. So, a single character foraging can likely feed and water the entire party for at least a day.

The big, actual, problem with encumbrance? It is just irritating to track, and prevents you from carrying mundane tools and being clever. Mostly because the weights are insane for somethings. Trail rations weigh 1 lb? 20 caltrops weigh 2 lbs? Your clothing weighs 3 lbs?

But, if you actually track it or track ammuntion, you will quickly find that it is just bookkeeping for the sake of bookkeeping. 5 gold buys you 100 arrows, that is 100 attack rolls and only wieghs 5 lbs. If we assume 2 attacks a round, 3 rounds of combat, that is 16 combats before you need to spend another 5 gp. And, that actually leaves you an excess, and you could have looted other archers at some point for those 16 combats. Same with rations, same with water, same with healing kit charges.

So it quickly stops mattering enough to pay attention to, because other than running low on water, you can't really get overencumbered easily, or run out food with even a minor amount of attention paid to the rules.

I find that that is for the best too. It's meant to be out of the way because it detracts from the experience. Only when it matters does it matter. Now, that's not to say it will never matter, which is why I'd advise against saying you'll "houserule it away." But the fact that art objects don't have any weight to them, while also having the coins and gem weights listed, makes it obvious they don't really care about weight.

Now, it's been useful in that one of my players tried to carry around a whole chest with an 8 in strength and they learned they'd need a different approach to carrying which was a fun puzzle for them. (They used their infusion as an artificer to make a bag of holding and place everything they weren't immediately using inside while strapping the chest inside. I had the chest too big to fit in a 2 ft diameter hole).

If you really want weight to matter use the variant: Encumberance rules. Yes, they're annoying but so is fighting most monsters and the intent is to make carrying capacity matter. (It's funny because the variant is called encumberance. The real rule is actually just called carrying capacity but people are probably picking up the rule name from other editions. That or they wanna sound smart with big words.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And they become a way to unify the effects of damage, and fatigue and other conditions into a single trackable system that can be felt.

That's Hit Points, though. That's what Hit Points are supposed to do. They represent a number of abstract concepts, including damage, in a trackable way that's easy to understand.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

Resource management is a thing in D&D and anything that brings it back to the fore is a good thing IMO.

Yes, but there is resouce management and there is taking the mickey.
A 7 day rest for five characters at a modest inn is 28 GP (plus any money for feeding and stabling pack animals and pets). Note that you have to pay this - you can't be working at a job or otherwise earning income because those activities are not restful.
For a first or second level party, that's pretty much all the gold from one or two encounters.

And if you are in Barovia where everything is 10 to 100 times the PHB price…

 

[Don Durito]

7 days is just wierd. It's more than you need to recover from exhaustion, but it's not long enough to recover from serious injury.

 

[Helldritch]

Seven days rest does not fill in well in my mind. Too weird. I much prefer to spend HD to heal. It is more elegant and logical.

 

[Asisreo]

7 days is just wierd. It's more than you need to recover from exhaustion, but it's not long enough to recover from serious injury.

Healing in general is weird because of the disconnect between the abstract nature of hp vs the narrative many GM's use for combat.
HP loss mostly represents loss in luck and exhaustion for a character without heavily protective armor since surviving 50 hp worth of direct hits is comical for a rogue. Likewise, HP loss mostly represents actual meat points for thick hide creatures.
A giant toad can take a couple of meaty slices from a sword to take it down. A bandit captain, however, should only take one or two of them.

That's why I don't represent direct, bloody hits to players until they themselves become "bloodied" at around 50% hp. Before that, they're just taking scrapes and getting tired of dodging near-misses, after, they're holding onto their bleeding injury and gritting their teeth.
It's important that the "bloody injury" is something that makes sense in a long rest's time. It's 50% from being unconscious, not dead. A bludgeoning attack may give you a concussion, piercing may have nearly missed an artery and slashing may have cut a shallow but concerning slice near your neck. Even a 0-hp character shouldn't have an injury that's too hard for a person too survive, if they get attacked with over their max hp, though, it's safe to like decapitate them or whatever.