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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 8795793" data-attributes="member: 6787650">It's meaningful if the game system allows you to interact with potential bonuses and penalties. Let's take Sharpshooter/GWM for example. What's a fair penalty to give someone in exchange for roughly doubling their damage on a hit, e.g. by shooting someone in the neck instead of the torso? How about a penalty that for a normal person cuts their chances of hitting by MORE than 50%, so that you need to be fairly expert to take advantage? The raw % is less important here than whether it halves or quarters your chances of hitting.Dungeon Fantasy RPG and GURPS take enormous advantage of optional situational modifiers like this, whether it's about targeting vitals or choosing what ground to fight on (e.g. +1 or +2 bonus to your defense for being on high ground is tactically significant) or what equipment to carry, what range to fight at, etc. What I got out of the OP is that merely flipping D&D 5E to run on 3d6 will not give you that much benefit because 5E hasn't done the necessary work to make manipulating penalties and bonuses interesting. E.g. you'll never spend any mental effort trying to determine whether you should drop your Blur spell in order to maximize your chance of successfully Disintegrating a vampire, or if it's more advantageous in the long run to keep your Blur up and just live with a 25% higher chance that the spell is wasted. 5E simply doesn't give you the option.Information that doesn't affect any decisions is wasted, so having nicely-scaling difficulty modifiers doesn't matter as much in 5E. Actually SS/GWM is the only example I can think of where the size of a penalty does matter; there are also a few corner cases like archery duels involving monks or high-AC PCs where choosing to impose disadvantage on everybody is an interesting option. But for the most part 5E isn't a game of manipulating probability.</blockquote>

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