Level Up (A5E) Minor Advantage and Minor Disadvantage

[jmucchiello]

He's making it so you roll both dice at once. Rather than one die then maybe a second die, which is slower.

 

[tetrasodium]

He's making it so you roll both dice at once. Rather than one die then maybe a second die, which is slower.

Player: "Red die is primary" rolls 2d20
dice:result
is basically the same speed & I've seen players spend more time on reasonably warming the die pre-roll without slowing the game than it takes to say that & every kobold moon druid I've ever seen eventually starts doing it by default IME. You can already roll both at once, but doing that or not isn't the problem with advantage so much as the fact that it leans so hard into being Maslow's Hammer in 5e.

 

[commandercrud]

This seems like an overly complicated replacement for a simple +1, maybe +2.

 

[Horwath]

This seems like an overly complicated replacement for a simple +1, maybe +2.

true, but point of advantage/disadvantage system(and this addition) is that you raise/lower average roll, but do not increase/decrease maximum/minimum possible roll.

If you have +5 bonus, no matter how much d20s you roll and take higher/lower, you are still bound by max of 25 and min of 6.

 

[NotAYakk]

The point of advantage/disadvantage was to be a simple, fun, significant, mathematically quick, non-stacking bonus.

It is fun, because rolling 2 dice is fun.

It is significant.

It is quick; finding the max/min is much, much faster than adding an additional bonus to your known modifier (no, really, it is; I am multiple standard deviations better than the norm at mental math, and adding additional modifiers eats time; it doesn't always feel like time to the person doing it, because they are doing it, but it can to everyone else.).

It is non-stacking, which is an intentional lesson learned from 3e, where you could break things by repeatedly stacking more and more modifiers.

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Lesser advantage/disadvantage, for it to have a purpose, needs to be bounded in stacking. It permits modifiers that are smaller than the advantage bonus, which lets some limited amount of stacking take place.

The result still needs to be somewhat significant and it has to be quick.

The "it has the same min/max" is not really that important to how it plays out. Especially with most people (in my experience) playing "natural 20 just works" and "natural 1 just fails", it isn't in effect bounded anyhow.

 

[tetrasodium]

true, but point of advantage/disadvantage system(and this addition) is that you raise/lower average roll, but do not increase/decrease maximum/minimum possible roll.

If you have +5 bonus, no matter how much d20s you roll and take higher/lower, you are still bound by max of 25 and min of 6.

That may be, but there are times when having other options are vital to things like character growth & campaign progression.