Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9505157" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Running back for a couple quotes like this. My problem with this presentation is that it leaves out a really, really important element that (for example) Dungeon World makes explicit: uncertainty alone isn't enough. It needs to be uncertain and interesting. If you as DM simply cannot think of an interesting consequence for failure, don't roll. If you can't think of an interesting consequence for success, don't roll. Uncertainty is a necessary condition, but it's not sufficient.Except that that described thing isn't--and never was--what "bounded accuracy" was about. It was never about making the top end accessible even at low levels. It was about making the bottom end remain useful. The designers themselves were always very explicit about that. One of the very few actual design goals they clearly articulated and which could be demonstrably tested. And, on that subject, we can do the demonstration the other way. There are absolutely monsters that a 1st-level character is helpless to fight, with only a 5% or 10% chance to hit etc. So if the goal of "bounded accuracy" was to make it so low-level characters could meaningfully threaten high-level monsters, it failed miserably; but as that was never the goal, it's not really relevant.See, here's your problem. You've assumed, IMO quite wrongly, that DMs would never do that because it would be boring. The actual practice couldn't be further from the truth at many tables. Doesn't matter that the text doesn't oblige it. Tons of DMs do.And to be clear, it isn't just combat where this is a problem. Skills in 5e--which explicitly tell DMs NOT to run it like this!--are done in a similar fashion, run much more similarly to how they worked in 3e, despite having a skill system that is closest (not really THAT close, but certainly closest) to 4e's. Skills are treated as incredibly hyper-narrow things, the DCs are so frequently sky-high to do anything remotely useful or interesting, and the old scourges of things like iterative probability ("Roll for stealth....every single turn") and single-failure conditions ("if anyone fails this group check, the group fails") are back in full force. I consider myself profoundly lucky to have a 5e DM that uses reasonable DCs and takes a wide view on what skills are actually capable of.Even in places where the books explicitly reject doing things in ways that are mostly just dull, frustrating, or boring for everyone involved including the DM, many DMs still choose to do it that way anyway. I genuinely cannot explain this phenomenon. I've tried, and always come up empty. I cannot fathom it.Personally, I think the example is more than a little wrong due to stacking together many things that won't actually be available every game, let alone every check. You've also misconstrued Reliable Talent as +10 to +20, when it's actually +0 50% of the time (any roll higher than 9), and anywhere between +1 and +9 the remaining 50% (any roll from 9 down to 1.) Bardic Inspiration depends on specifically having a Bard; Psi-Boosted Knack depends on you yourself being not just a Rogue but a specific kind of Rogue.Kicking those out as being too situational (at least guidance is a cantrip several classes/subclasses can learn) and fixing your incorrect statement regarding reliable talent drops the top end by a whopping ~22 points, down from allegedly +52 to "merely" +30. Which, I admit, is still extremely high! But let us not pretend it is that ridiculous in anything but the rarest of cases. I may be a vociferous critic of 5e, but I'm not going to build an argument against it on something like this.Of course it is. That's why people love getting crits, for example, but hate getting snake-eyes crits. (One of the reasons why 4e's simpler, faster crit rules never should have been abandoned.) It's why it feels good to level up; you are literally making the number go up. That doesn't mean absolutely everyone is drawn into RPGs-in-general for this. But it is, unquestionably, the reason that RPGs have dominated numerous markets, both at the tabletop and on the computer. Lots and lots of people just really like seeing Number Go Up. Hell, this fact is openly exploited by mobile game developers to entrap people and get them to spend more money!Yes...? I explicitly was arguing that not only is that the case, but 5e has doubled down on them, because the designers very intentionally made HP scaling the primary axis of character growth and monster threat potential. Monsters have to gain a lot more health to be scary, and players have to deal a lot more damage as they level in order to have any chance of victory. That environment is positively ideal for fostering the dull and disappointing "fat sack of HP" monster design problem that D&D has struggled with for years.Oh, I'll grant you that it's simple. Its simplicity is precisely what makes it inelegant. Like a sledgehammer.</blockquote>

Verification