Scaling of attacks and defenses.

[RangerWickett]

I want to be better able to hit things at high level.

And I can, because I deal more damage. I might make a successful attack roll just as often, but my attacks will be more deadly and take foes out more quickly.

I want to be able to better defend myself at high level.

And I can. When my opponent hits me, I've got more HP to make sure that he only grazes me.

I love flat math. For now. I'll see how it works in actual play.

 

[Wightbred]

Definitely flat math avoids unnecessary escalation where both sides go up. By keeping HP as the only change, it also helps the DM to judge the threats of monsters more easily as they level up.

I also think increasing HP is pointless, but I accept this is pretty radical for most people and won't happen in 5e. I've found if you need to feel like your character is getting better moving the world (monsters HP and damage down) is actually pretty simple (as 4e minions showed us) and much easier on the players and even the DM. Which is more interesting:
- I totally do more damage now and have more HP so I am awesome; or
- I killed that goblin easier than ever so I guess I am getting awesome. But can I take on a Dragon yet?

 

[B.T.]

The problem to me is that the pc have bigger numbers but it don't matter because the monster have bigger numbers to, so to me this bigger numbers are useless.

This is how D&D has always worked. Players get more HP, monsters do more damage. Monsters get better AC, players get a better attack bonus. It also supposes that the players never fight anything that is a lower-level than they are.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Definitely time to scale back on the scaling. 3e made high-level characters way, way too good at too many things. It makes no sense for a character to have almost a 100% chance better of succeeding at every meaningful action than his low-level counterpart.

4e cut back the numbers, but extended them to every action, not just trained ones, meaning that the game is very balanced if everyone is the same level but gets nonsensical if you consider characters of different levels.

I think slower and more selective scaling is definitely the way to go.

 

[jadrax]

This is how D&D has always worked.

That is no guarantee of quality, though.

 

[Wightbred]

This is how D&D has always worked.

That is no guarantee of quality, though.

I wish they would, but I really don't think people will accept the alternatives on this one. Increasing maths is too fundamental a part of the previous games for Wizards to sell the alternative and have any hope of uniting fans of previous editions.

 

[Stalker0]

Well, one of their goals appears to be that monsters are useful at a much higher range of levels. One of the examples was that a couple of Orcs might be a challenge for 1st level characters, but a 10th level character might still be afraid of 40 Orcs.

I actually like the idea of reduced scaling. That said, there are other ways to allow orcs to compete with higher level players...such as mob type rules.

For example:

1) Whenever a character has 3+ enemies adjacent to him, he suffers a -2 to defenses.
2) A character with 4+ enemies adjacent to him has disadvantage on all attacks.


These rules can allow the swarm benefit of lots of monsters to overcome the bonuses the players have acquired.

But again its one idea, I personally have no issue with very slow scaling, as long as players get more interesting abilities to use as they go along.

 

[nnms]

OMG! I LOVE low to no scaling!

I can't believe I didn't realise the playtest used it until reading this thread

I agree with you on this one. It's one of my favorite things about the playtest so far. Hopefully once they add some modularity to give me something I'm interested in testing, I'll give it another go.