Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

First of all, thanks [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] for collecting this. I generally avoid Twitter because, frankly, it's full of a$$holes.

That aside: this is an interesting way of looking at it, and underscores the difference in design philosophies between the WotC team and the Paizo team. There is a lot of room for both philosophies of design, and I don't think there is any reason for fans of one to be hostile to fans of the other, but those differences do matter. There are ways in which I like the prescriptive elements of 3.x era games (I like set skill difficulty lists, for example) but I tend to run by the seat of my pants and the effects of my beer, so a fast and loose and forgiving version like 5E really enables me running a game the way I like to.

 

[Numidius]

In many respects 5E tried to keep this logic in the form of bounded accuracy by making level adjustments on success down. So unlike 4E where there was a fairly relentless level-based scaling, 5E tries to keep large degrees of scaling to hit points and class features, and keep most bonuses within a smaller operating range overall.

However, the areas I'm talking about---save DCs for some monsters and, especially, skill bonuses for some characters---they just blew it. We haven't talked about it much in this thread, but IMO the skill system has more problems than saves, which I think could be handled by keeping most save DCs below 20 and just making some of the boss monsters tougher in other ways than cranking up save DCs, although the fact that the gap between strong saves and weak saves gets extremely wide even by level 10 is a bit of a problem.

Expertise itself is fine if you use it to become good at a skill you're ordinarily not supposed to be. For example, the Wisdom 10 Rogue who uses Expertise to rock out Perception is not going to be too crazy. The final ability will be on par with other characters who are just proficient in an ordinary way and have a strong stat. However, when Expertise is used to, say, boost Thieves' Tools, essentially no lock or trap is much of a barrier to that character without heavy contrivance. Nor is it often perceived as worth it for any other character to pursue having proficiency in that. Yes I could triple lock everything and make sure every encounter involving a lock has some kind of countdown timer that means the rogue is always under time pressure or present dilemmas that push someone else to have to make those rolls... or I could take the path of least resistance and DC creep. I'd simply be better off without doing that and making Expertise cool some other way.

If you want a really simple fix, just making Expertise grant Advantage instead of doubling the proficiency bonus would rein in the numbers. It would be undeniably useful and clearly make the character more effective than normal due to making a low roll less likely. There may be other ways to make use of this, too. If more skill checks were like skill challenges, i.e. requiring a few successes to fully complete, the character rolling with Advantage could tally up successes on both dice, meaning that tasks could be accomplished more quickly.

Example:Using just Expertise = Advantage here. Louvin Lightfinger, thief extraordinaire, has Expertise with Thieves Tools. He's picking a lock in the workshop of Gnimbly Gnob the Gnomish jeweler. He has a bonus of +7 (18 Dex, proficiency of +3). The fairly complex lock has a DC of 15 and requires 3 successes to pick and a failure represents the lock being stuck permanently. He rolls 18 and 18 on the first two dice, a success. This takes a minute. The next minute he rolls a 2 and 11. He breathes a sigh of relief that he's rolling two dice and can ignore that 2....

I'm sure there are holes in this---I mean I just thought of it at the moment so it'd need testing and calibration---but it represents Expertise not as a quantitative difference simply by making the numbers higher (and thus tempting the DM into DC creep to boost up perceived challenge) but by making a more qualitative difference. Here Expertise means you're much more reliable than someone with just ordinary proficiency. The big thing is that Advantage has relatively limited impact in that it does not allow you to roll above what you could ordinarily accomplish, while still being undeniably beneficial.




As I've said many times, 4E had many good ideas. I think some of them ended up being taken too far. For instance, it was too relentlessly game balanced for my taste. I felt when I ran it, especially, the constant and heavy hand of the designer, which I did not like. I enjoyed playing 4E much more than running it, which I found an exercise in frustration as I am not the sort of person who adapts myself to someone else's vision. It also seemed to bring out the rules lawyer in players, even ones who'd not been especially rules lawyer-y before.

But all that aside, 4E had a number of good ideas and WotC kept a number of them in 5E, though in some cases I'm not sure they did it as well as they could in some spots.

Has anyone already suggested to roll all of adv/disadv-dice, instead of cancelling them out, to have a more bell-like probabily curve?
Like: with two adv and one disadv dice, roll all 4 and keep the second highest...

 

[pemerton]

Speaking of level drain, how about Storm's story arc? (Paul Smith penciler? The duel vs Cyclops for leadership...)

Now you're talking! My partner doesn't read many comics, but has read Lifedeath and some of the consequences. We're waiting for a version of the Storm/Forge arc to appear in the movie version!

I've never tried that in a RPG. I think the closest I've come in mechanical terms was when the PCs confronted Torog and destroyed his Soul Abattoir, the invoker/wizard was the one who had to make the choice as to who would get the flow of underdark souls freed from Torog's control: the Raven Queen (his notional mistress) or Vecna (with whom he had dallied a bit, and who possessed the PC's imp - which had the Eye of Vecna implanted in it - to insist on getting the souls). The PC chose the Raven Queen; Vecna shut down his imp, which remained non-functional until the PCs were able to defeat an Aspect of Vecna and the affected PC, aided by the paladin of the Raven Queen in the party, created a ward over the Aspect to sever Vecna's connection to his eye, allowing the imp to come back to life. (In play terms I think it was probably two or three sessions.)

20+ years ago, running Rolemaster, we had a different version of that sort of thing. It was an all-wizard party, around 20th level. Most of the PCs had strong meditation skill to expedite rapid recovery of spell points, but one of the PCs had been built with super-strong perceptoin and social, which had left him weak on meditation. So when he found himself unable to keep up with the meditators, he used his social skills and underworld contacts to get access to a spell-recovery-enhancing drug (Hugar) instead. And subsequently became addicted, spent all his money, was unable to renew the lease on his urban compound, etc. Generally hit rock-bottom, compounded by some non-Hugar related incidents like being pushed to his death (necessitating subsequent Lifegiving) off a conjured flying platform (the RM equivalent of the Silver Surfer's board) when another PC's summoned demon went out of control.

It reached a nadir when the character, out on a mission and out of spell points and out of Hugar went into a withdrawal-induced mental and physical collapse. Only to be rescued by a NPC valley elf who (for various subplot-related reasons) had been following the PCs. The revived PC was grateful, and also - given his uber social skills - very personable and he and the elf fell for one another. He kicked the Hugar habit, found new meaning in life, helped the elf break free of servitude to the Mage of the Valley (this PC himself had been born into slavery and freed himself from servitude) and in the process recruited a strong new wizard (shapechanger and enchanter) into the party.

And then, out on a mission, the same other PC lost control of another summoned demon and this time it cut the elf in half with its demonic two-handed sword. And healing elves in RM is not an easy matter, especially if you're still broke because you spent all your money on Hugar and are still trying to pay off your debts.

Needless to say, more self-destructive behaviour on the part of this PC ensued . . .

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

How big a problem is this? If the 10th+ level thief can bypass all ordinary locks and traps, is the game going to break?

If it was limited to just that, of course not, but the hand of DC creep is in other areas of the game, too.

To me it looks like putting the opening of locks into the same category as the ritual magic of a spell-caster of similar level. Is there an aspect to it that I've missed? Or am I getting the maths wrong?

I wouldn't do this with everything, it's just an example. But what doing something like this would provide is a way to make a lot of the non-combat (exploration, social) aspects more interesting than you can do with just a binary success/fail system where the only boost to a character is by making their numbers higher.

4E had that with skill challenges, but the way the designers built it they tried to force all players to participate. Or at least that's how they were often interpreted. I found it led to absurdities such as the barbarian doing pushups to impress the king in a social encounter.

So basically I'm suggesting (a) keeping numbers lower to respect bounded accuracy and (b) make more use of things that function in a way similar to the good aspects of skill challenges (i.e., requiring X successes before Y failures) without the bad aspects.

I don't fully get this, except as a comment that you didn't like the design. I look at 5e and see the "heavy hand of the designers" ie the system won't balance without a fairly action-packed "adventuring day". Which is one of the reasons I'm not very enthusiastic about it.

Sure. As I've said before and this isn't something we need to rehash, I wasn't a giant fan of the "let's throw out the cosmology, abandon the alignment system as weird as the old one was, change most of the names, introduce all sorts of weird races, etc." that happened with 4E. 4E had a lot of good ideas that I think went too far and drifted into the uncanny valley/dungeon of game design. I'm not saying other people were wrong to like 4E but I think uncanniness combined with D&D generally being the only game in town go a long way to explaining why many people had the reaction they did.

But with regards to the heavy hand of the designer, IMO one of the worst aspects of the 5E design is precisely the rest system and the degree to which different characters are dependent on it, so I'm with you there.

The main thing is that I feel more free in 5E to move things around, switch out abilities or powers, and I generally have a much better intuitive feel for it than I ever did with 4E. It feels and runs much more like prior versions of D&D. A 4E class is pretty intricately constructed and a 4E monster, as you noted elsewhere, requires a good bit of pre-planning. A 5E class is generally a fairly well laid out chassis with some customization. In addition, 5E is much less level banded than 4E was due to bounded accuracy. You can still viably use much lower CR threats.

 

[Sadras]

IMO a lot of it is the rest mechanic: A good night's sleep and it's all better!

This I believe is the biggest stumbling block of 5e: The Rest Mechanic.
There was a large thread here on Enworld about it with various posters coming up with some amazingly good ideas on how to tweak and adjust it to suit a particular purpose or style of play. I compiled them all in a pdf and now use a variation of one. It is critically important the DM finds out early which rest mechanic works best for him/her to assist in the preparation of adventures and pacing.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Skill checks - I really don't want the expert-lockpick PC to be unable to pick locks! Locks open up game content! In fact I lean towards PCs being able to pretty much always succed in their areas of expertise, just as they almost always win combat.

Yeah, I want them to succeed, too, but I don't want it to be trivial and even more I want to respect bounded accuracy. I mean, most people don't enjoy cakewalk combat after combat where the PCs just wipe the opposition without any challenge.

And to be 100% clear, I would NOT run every lock (or whatever) as a mini skill challenge. Most locks wouldn't be that. I'd only want to use it for something that's supposed to be difficult.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Has anyone already suggested to roll all of adv/disadv-dice, instead of cancelling them out, to have a more bell-like probabily curve?
Like: with two adv and one disadv dice, roll all 4 and keep the second highest...

I haven't but I think the stats would be a bit tricky and would ultimately converge on 10 pretty fast. WotC was trying to cut down on how much thought the DM had to put into advantage and disadvantage when dealing with stacking effects, which I wholeheartedly endorse, but I also don't think we need to fear them nearly so much and could probably make more use of them.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

This I believe is the biggest stumbling block of 5e: The Rest Mechanic.
There was a large thread here on Enworld about it with various posters coming up with some amazingly good ideas on how to tweak and adjust it to suit a particular purpose or style of play. I compiled them all in a pdf and now use a variation of one. It is critically important the DM finds out early which rest mechanic works best for him/her to assist in the preparation of adventures and pacing.

Can you post a link to this PDF?

Yes, IMO the rest mechanic is... messy. Among other things, it induces pointless inter-party friction that's fundamentally focused on something induced by the rules as opposed to in-game fiction. "Sorcerer: What kind of arcane wimp needs a short rest? Warlock: ...Me?"

 

[pemerton]

4E had that with skill challenges, but the way the designers built it they tried to force all players to participate. Or at least that's how they were often interpreted. I found it led to absurdities such as the barbarian doing pushups to impress the king in a social encounter.

Frankly, with that sort of thing the absurdity is in the GM who accepted that as a viable action declaration. The way you impress a king (absent rather unusual circumstances) is to talk to him: so the barbarian who wants to impress a king should be making a Diplomacy check like anyone else would!

Participation by other characters is how I manage high bonuses on the Sage of Ages in my 4e game. But participation by other characters is - in my experience - not very hard to achieve. How do you get a wizard PC to participate in combat? Threaten something the player cares about (either the wizard him-/herself, or perhaps some other party member the wizard is committed to defending).

How do you get the player of the barbarian to particiapte in the attempt to talk to the king? Threaten something the player cares about - this can be as easy as having the king ask the barbarian to tell him (the king) something about his/her (the barbarian's) valiant exploits. Is the player of the barbarian going to refuse to talk? Then an automatic failure is notched up, as the king clearly won't be impressed by that!

No one thinks it's unfair to engage a wizard PC in melee; but for some reason there seems to be some idea that it's unfair to frame the barbarian into a situation where s/he has to talk to get what s/he wants. Personally, I don't understand this way of thinking.

 

[Aldarc]

Or maybe the Barbarian supplies their Nature skill to convince the king that CAMPAIGN ISSUE exists by noting how nature is all out-of-whack and what these signs may portend.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Frankly, with that sort of thing the absurdity is in the GM who accepted that as a viable action declaration. The way you impress a king (absent rather unusual circumstances) is to talk to him: so the barbarian who wants to impress a king should be making a Diplomacy check like anyone else would! <snip>

True, but this makes my point about why having skill bonuses inflate dramatically and DCs go up correspondingly is a problem. If the DC is set to challenge the face character with a massive bonus no matter what the barbarian does he notches a failure, unless the DM pushes the DCs around.

This is why many skill challenges were written the way they were. I understand what they were trying to do but often felt that, at least the way they were implemented in play (and I played with three or four different DMs, so it wasn't just one) they tried to force participation and often turned into a situation of "guess which skill applies here". It's a good idea and I think they were trying to implement something cool but got caught by the relentless growth of bonuses.

No one thinks it's unfair to engage a wizard PC in melee; but for some reason there seems to be some idea that it's unfair to frame the barbarian into a situation where s/he has to talk to get what s/he wants. Personally, I don't understand this way of thinking.

This isn't a straight on comparison. The social system works very differently than combat in most games. Combat does some damage and the wizard doesn't have to just sit there in melee but has various abilities to escape or do something. In the social system, most non-social characters essentially have no ability at all, certainly in higher levels.