D&D 5E Pages from the PHB

[Halivar]

With that out of the way, do we want to discuss how fighters who miss their attack rolls fail to contribute to the party next?

Depending on the build, between zero and Str-mod damage.

 

[Lanefan]

Again mashing a few posts together...

Hasn't helped us yet. Knowing what enemies we are up against simply lets us know their names before we roll for initiative. The last couple of times someone has insisted on scouting ahead(and succeeded) the results have been:

"Alright, I scouted ahead. There are 6 Orcs in the next room."
"6 Orcs? Alright...let's go into the room and kill them."

That's not much of a scouting report. If I'm a character in that party (and assuming we're low leve thus 6 Orcs present a challenge to us) I'm asking you:

Are they alert?
Awake?
Armed?
What do they have for armour, if anything?
How big is the room?
How many exits?
How close are the Orcs to any of said exits?
Where are the Orcs in the room, and are they in a close group or spread out?
Do they have any obvious alarm bell or gong?
etc.

That's assuming the scouting ahead is successful. In my experience it normally isn't. Either the rogue/thief fails their stealth checks and cause the enemies in the next room to come storming out to kill them OR this happens:
"You scout ahead. You reach a door."
"A door, I listen to it."
"You don't hear anything behind it."
"Alright, I open the door."
"Behind it are 6 Orcs, who now clearly see the door has been opened. You may have made your stealth check, but you can only do that while you have cover or concealment. The door is clearly visible to them and they see it opening."
"Roll for initiative. Everyone else in the group is surprised except for you since they can't see the Orcs, so they can't act during the surprise round."
"The enemies win initiative. They all fire arrows at you. 5 of them hit doing...38 points of damage."
"Yep...that's me dead."

These Orcs *all* just happened to have bows nocked and ready to fire as soon as the door opened, even though they didn't hear you coming? Sounds a bit harsh from here...

Maybe you do, but there hasn't been official fumble rules in the game since 1e. Even then the fumble rules were an optional table in Dragon Magazine. I'm not a huge fan of fumble rules for the exact same reason which I explain a bit more above.

1e, or a variant, is what I play and run; and we've had fumble rules for way over 30 years now. I believe there's now a fumble option in PF as well (but I could be wrong), I'm pretty sure there was one in 3.x also but it was probably third-party.

Honestly, I can't remember what it was, given the number of years since I last played 2e. However, if I only had a 60 or 70 percent chance to succeed and I knew I was going to fall to my death...I'd very likely choose not to use it. After all, the rest of the party likely couldn't follow and it wasn't wise to split the party. Better to search for another way. If the DM wanted us to get there, he'd let us find another way.

The rest of the party could follow you just fine once you got to the top and lowered a rope to them! And if your climbing was that suspect they might also stretch out a blanket or something for you as a safety net... (still can't understand how your climbing could be that bad...you must have been using a choose-where-your-skill-upgrades-go option and never put anything into climbing)

Lan-"next time just get your strongest fighter to throw you over the wall - it's easier"-efan

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Ah. You had one of THOSE DMs! I did too (and I also played the thief).

I've had about 10 of those DMs. My original group had 12 people in it and almost all of them DMed a game. We voted each week on which game to play in. Sometimes we'd switch 2-3 times in one session. All the DMs felt this way about the rules.

Even after that group fell apart, I've had numerous DMs since then and they've all felt similarly. Everyone felt that the Rogue scouting ahead was splitting the party. It meant playing a game just for one member of the party while everyone else watched him constantly make rolls to stealth, search for traps, listen, look for hidden enemies, and pick locks. It was boring for almost everyone involved.

Plus, as I said, it was considered splitting the party. As the axiom goes, you NEVER split the party. Most of our DMs were of the same mind: It's unlikely you'll die as long as you don't do anything stupid. Splitting the party was considered stupid and doing so meant the DM felt justified in killing the person who did so. As much because getting spotted when you were on your own meant fighting an encounter designed for 6 people by yourself as deterrent to avoid having to constantly run solo scenes with the rogue.

The problem with thief-characters is that you need a DM who allows thieves to be successful, even in failure. There are lots of DMs who treat thief skills as "glory or death" with no middle ground. You disarm the trap or you fall into it. You scout up and get negligible info or you are seen and shot. You climb or fall to your death. Hell, my DM made it so that if you fail your PP roll, you are caught no matter what (that's not how detection works in the PHB). Then he wondered why everyone really quickly played Fighter-or-Mage/Thieves...

To me, it isn't that at all. It's that all the thief skills are solo skills. You almost never need to pick someone's pockets unless you are trying to steal extra money for yourself. You can climb walls, but no one else can so no one can follow you most of the time. You can hide and move silently but no one else can so doing so means splitting the party. Which is why, in our groups, basically the only skill people put points into was Find and Remove Traps. Because it was the only group friendly skill.

Also, our DM didn't make traps go off immediately when you failed. He found it was much more fun to say "No, you don't find any traps" then when you open the door, cause everyone to fall in a pit who was standing back while you searched "just in case".

As for the multiclassing. We did that because none of the thief's abilities were useful in combat. So, you needed a combat class to go with your non-combat class.

Back to the WM point: if we're talking 2e Wild Mages for a second, bear in mind how a wild-surge triggers. A wild mage rolled his level variance (which was a d20) and if the variance number was bold, it triggered a surge. At any given level, there was only ONE bold number on the table. That is a 5% chance of triggering a surge, well in line with the chance of a high-level thief failing a skill roll (all skill rolls over 95% fail, regardless of thief percentage) or a fighter "always missing" on a natural 1. So if your wild-mage was constantly fireballing the party, its because he roughly was rolling critical fumbles every spell cast.

My point wasn't that 5% of the time they fail to contribute. It's that 5% of the time they risk causing real harm to their own party in a way that no other class does. Plus, compared to a normal wizard whose spells succeed 100% of the time, they fail 5% more often for no real benefit(in fact, a large portion of the time, they were were casting at lower level than a normal wizard in exchange for that 5% chance of failure).

With that out of the way, do we want to discuss how fighters who miss their attack rolls fail to contribute to the party next?

See above. It isn't that they are failing to contribute, it's that they are doing damage to their own party or causing ill effects to them. The fighter rolling a one does the same thing as if they rolled a 2-8 most of the time.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Again mashing a few posts together...
That's not much of a scouting report. If I'm a character in that party (and assuming we're low leve thus 6 Orcs present a challenge to us) I'm asking you:

Are they alert?
Awake?
Armed?
What do they have for armour, if anything?
How big is the room?
How many exits?
How close are the Orcs to any of said exits?
Where are the Orcs in the room, and are they in a close group or spread out?
Do they have any obvious alarm bell or gong?
etc.

Most of those things just don't need to be known. In my experience, they just don't matter.

Even if they are awake, alert, armed, wearing heavy armor, staring at the door we are going to come through and have an alarm bell within reaching distance that will not factor into our decision to burst open the door and attack. If they are asleep, we might attempt to open the door quietly...before killing them all. But most of the information will be relayed to us in the boxed text when the door is open and we'll start planning our tactics from that point onward. It's not like our group would ever purposefully avoid a room because of the circumstances of that room. If there were lots of them, we'd rely on luck to get us through. If there was an alarm, we'd try to kill the one beside the alarm quickly. If we didn't get to them in time...oh well, that just means more XP will come streaming into the room.

Even if we got back a super detailed report of the kind you were talking about, it would go like this.
"So, the room is 30x30. There are 6 Orcs. They all have Bows and are watching the door we are going to come through. One has an alarm bell. There are 2 other entrances to the room. 2 of them are standing beside each entrance to the room."
"So...we open the door and kill them then? And we just watched you roll dice for 10 minutes in order to discover that information. What a waste of time."

These Orcs *all* just happened to have bows nocked and ready to fire as soon as the door opened, even though they didn't hear you coming? Sounds a bit harsh from here...

It depends on the edition in question, but in 3e for instance, having a bow in hand means that you can load an arrow as a free action and fire as your action during the surprise round. It's been a while, but in 2e you could similarly load and fire a bow as your action for the round. Ditto for 4e.

1e, or a variant, is what I play and run; and we've had fumble rules for way over 30 years now. I believe there's now a fumble option in PF as well (but I could be wrong), I'm pretty sure there was one in 3.x also but it was probably third-party.

Yeah, it's never been an official rule in any edition of D&D. It was an optional rule a couple of times. But, as I mention in a post above, the 2e Combat and Tactics book had an entire page dedicated to why having fumble rules was a bad idea and why they didn't include them.

Though I didn't really need that page to tell me that. We played with the fumble rules from Dragon Magazine for a while. I hated it every time. People were constantly dropping their sword, hitting themselves in the face and accidentally cutting off their friend's arms. Attacking was an effort in futility because your friends were nearly as dangerous as the enemies.

The rest of the party could follow you just fine once you got to the top and lowered a rope to them! And if your climbing was that suspect they might also stretch out a blanket or something for you as a safety net... (still can't understand how your climbing could be that bad...you must have been using a choose-where-your-skill-upgrades-go option and never put anything into climbing)

In 2e, you got to choose where your skill points went into. Almost all of them went into find and remove traps because it was the important one. Climb Walls was kind of an ambiguous skill. Some of our DMs would allow everyone to climb walls because it was kind of silly that only Thieves could. So the skill wasn't very useful in those games. Even when it was useful, you'd almost never run into a wall you NEEDED to climb. Half the time it would split the party, the other half of the time it would just be a "Keep rolling until you succeed. You get up the wall and lower a rope down to the others, they get up to."

Or, it meant that you had a 30% chance to succeed and climbing meant falling 100 feet to your death. Overall, it just wasn't the best skill to have.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

No offense, but it sounds like your DM was a little lacking in imagination.

That DM was about 10 or 15 DMs, all of whom had the same opinion. One of which was me. I'm not sure what kind of imagination is necessary in order to describe the monsters in a room better.

Perhaps not only your DM.

Also, insulting people doesn't become less insulting simply because you put "no offense" in front of it.

 

[Agamon]

Hitcher has a point, if not expressed so well.

Personally, I try to reward player ingenuity and caution. For example, in the 5e game that I started recently, the PCs have played smart and scouted ahead in three of the four combat encounters so far. They've had surprise in two of them and had an idea what they were up against and discussed strategy in all three. One of them they would have likely been slaughtered by numbers if they had just burst into the clearing without scouting it first.

They've seen the benefit to their caution and continue to do it. I can guess that if the DM metaphorically waves the middle finger at his players when they try to be smart, then they probably won't bother.

 

[The Hitcher]

That DM was about 10 or 15 DMs, all of whom had the same opinion. One of which was me. I'm not sure what kind of imagination is necessary in order to describe the monsters in a room better.


Also, insulting people doesn't become less insulting simply because you put "no offense" in front of it.

I apologise. Got a little carried away there. Play the ball, not the man. What I meant to say was:

That style of play just feels so unimaginative and tedious to me. To be honest, just having a thief checking ahead all the time doesn't make it much better. Set up situations. Narrate scenes. Let the players attempt awesome stuff. If they fail, throw crazy twists at them.

I guess it's good that 5E is making the effort to support so many play-styles out of the box, huh? We all get to do it our own way.

 

[Morlock]

Hmm, the longer I look at that warlock, the more she looks like a trick-or-treater with a pumpkin bucket.

O...M...G. Her stature doesn't help allay that perception.

 

[Lanefan]

Most of those things just don't need to be known. In my experience, they just don't matter.

Even if they are awake, alert, armed, wearing heavy armor, staring at the door we are going to come through and have an alarm bell within reaching distance that will not factor into our decision to burst open the door and attack. If they are asleep, we might attempt to open the door quietly...before killing them all. But most of the information will be relayed to us in the boxed text when the door is open and we'll start planning our tactics from that point onward. It's not like our group would ever purposefully avoid a room because of the circumstances of that room.

Ah...that speaks to a certain (perfectly fine) playstyle of boot-down-the-door, in which scouting isn't all that relevant. Makes some sense now.

Even if we got back a super detailed report of the kind you were talking about, it would go like this.
"So, the room is 30x30. There are 6 Orcs. They all have Bows and are watching the door we are going to come through. One has an alarm bell. There are 2 other entrances to the room. 2 of them are standing beside each entrance to the room."
"So...we open the door and kill them then? And we just watched you roll dice for 10 minutes in order to discover that information. What a waste of time."

Where in other groups the response might very well be "So, let's find another way to approach such that we end up coming in through one of the doors they're not watching, and get the drop on them."

It depends on the edition in question, but in 3e for instance, having a bow in hand means that you can load an arrow as a free action and fire as your action during the surprise round. It's been a while, but in 2e you could similarly load and fire a bow as your action for the round. Ditto for 4e.

Even knowing they're armed with bows gives you an advantage in that if you *do* charge in pell-mell they're either going to be busy tossing those bows away to pull out melee weapons or they're going to be clobbering you with bows, either way giving you an advantage.

Though I didn't really need that page to tell me that. We played with the fumble rules from Dragon Magazine for a while. I hated it every time. People were constantly dropping their sword, hitting themselves in the face and accidentally cutting off their friend's arms. Attacking was an effort in futility because your friends were nearly as dangerous as the enemies.

Yep. And given how often these battles take place in closer quarters than they probably should, that's probably the way it should be.

In 2e, you got to choose where your skill points went into. Almost all of them went into find and remove traps because it was the important one. Climb Walls was kind of an ambiguous skill. Some of our DMs would allow everyone to climb walls because it was kind of silly that only Thieves could. So the skill wasn't very useful in those games. Even when it was useful, you'd almost never run into a wall you NEEDED to climb. Half the time it would split the party, the other half of the time it would just be a "Keep rolling until you succeed. You get up the wall and lower a rope down to the others, they get up to."

Or, it meant that you had a 30% chance to succeed and climbing meant falling 100 feet to your death. Overall, it just wasn't the best skill to have.

I'm used to 1e, where your skill levels in such things are baked in to your Thief level.

Climbing doesn't come up often but it can be very important when it does. (I just wrote a module, for example, that would be much much more difficult for a party that did not have anyone who could climb a cliff face)

Lanefan