D&D 5E Sneak Attack: optional or mandatory?

[Starfox]

What this thread seems to show pretty clearly is that D&D Next is not going to meet my preference of having robust choices for all character classes. Rather, the basic rules appear likely to be very basic, with a short list of choices, or no choices at all, for most class features, and the obvious plan of a huge array of later books that "add optional choices" (read: are required to have an array of choices and play, for example, the many Rogue concepts noted on this thread alone).

<soapbox>
If this is how things turn out, I don't really mind. Because in my opinion, what Next should be is an introductory game and (wishful thinking) a mass-market game. I'd much prefer a simple, easy-to-learn core game with few well-wrought, distinct options than some open-ended system. I want a game I can give as a xmas present to the children of my next-of-kin who ask me what a role-playing game is. I want a game I can play with minimal hassle at conventions. And I want Dungeons & Dragons to be that game, because the name has such a huge recognition factor.

Would I play that game myself? Probably a few times, but more likely than not I'd keep playing my own homebrew more. But I don't want this game to be about me - I want it to be about bringing new players into the hobby. That means it has to be playable even by us olf foxes, but it need not be the perfect game for each of us - something which is patently impossible anyway with all our diverse tastes.
</soapbox>

Ok, now that I got that off my chest, and more on topic, there is one thing I do NOT want. And that is for rogues to be able to trade some of their sneak attack dice for other abilities. It seems attractive at first; a rogue who can do some fancy stunt, but who does 4d6 sneak attack instead of 5d6 sneak attack. But this way lies madness - because now, the rogue has 2 abilities, neither if which is as good as the regular sneak attack. Trade another d6 for more abilities, and you add even more watered-down options. If there is something to be learned from the history of the DnD bard, it is that lots of poor abilities does not equate one good ability. The same can be seen with multiclassing. I am all for variants of classes, but this is not how to do it.

 

[N'raac]

If this is how things turn out, I don't really mind. Because in my opinion, what Next should be is an introductory game and (wishful thinking) a mass-market game. I'd much prefer a simple, easy-to-learn core game with few well-wrought, distinct options than some open-ended system. I want a game I can give as a xmas present to the children of my next-of-kin who ask me what a role-playing game is. I want a game I can play with minimal hassle at conventions. And I want Dungeons & Dragons to be that game, because the name has such a huge recognition factor.

I want the big game with lots of options catering to experienced gamers which is then distilled into an introductory game to lure in the mass market who, once hooked, can buy the full game.

 

[N'raac]

hmmm...that said, were I WoTC/Hasbro, I would most definitely value the market penetration of that mass market intro version over capturing the entirety of the dedicated RPG market, much less a bigger portion of it.

Begs the question why the playtest focuses on that little sub-market, though.

 

[Tuft]

The game is about big damn heroes going around killing things and taking their stuff,

In my personal opinion, I'd say that "Line'm up an' knock'em down" gets pretty boring after a while. D&D is so much more, and has to be much more. If all you want to do is kill monsters, then Descent is a much better board-game for that, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of computer games that delivers more fast-paced combat, not to mention stunning visual F/X.

Just the other night we finished a wonderful adventure in [MENTION=2303]Starfox[/MENTION] campaign - just running around a big country mansion, asking quirky NPC:s tricky questions, gathering evidence in various rooms, enticing the aid of some well-hidden monsters-in-disguise, all to find out "who stole the diamond necklace?". It was a *blast*, that stretched over two lovely eight-hour sessions!

And it was an old 1E D&D adventure, from the early years of the Dungeon magazine. Apparently, according to my DM, there were bunch of such quirky adventures during the early years of Dungeon... so that type of gameplay is old-style too...

But yes, I'm one of those players that do like to "Traipse through Fairy Rings and speak to the little people", or whatever the quote was.

 

[pemerton]

In much anime, the catalogue of heroes include many archetypes; the heir to the power of the universe, the monster, the mad scientist, the ultimate warrior, the cat-girl sneak-thief and so on. But there is also the ordinary girl - whose main ability is cooking. And this all works in a story, because half of it happens in a home environment, where cooking really is the most important skill of all. But a DM doen't have that kind of control over the story, the DM is not a director. The players themselves decide what scenes to put lots of time into. And most devote considerably more time to action than to cooking.

That's what the "princess warlord" build is for!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Then I'd say you did something unwise, spending a year making a dungeon before actually talking to your players and asking what they want to do. What if they get there and simply say, "Yeah, nice dungeon and all, but we're exploring the city and planning a caper at the wizards tower now"? You don't dictate what the players decide to do with their characters, you just adjudicate results. Why are you spending a year on something that dictates what your players will do?

I'm running the game. When I start games, they start like this: "Hello everyone, I want to run a D&D game. I've got this cool dungeon that I've been writing up for the last year. I'll be a lot of fun for everyone to explore. Who wants to play?"

Then I start games with a background and setup that encourages going on the adventure I created. Something like "You are all seated around a table, talking to the Gnome who contacted you last week about a map he had found that leads to the Dungeon of Ultimate DOOM and about the artifact that he would like you to retrieve from inside. You were all out of work and out of luck so you all decided to show up and hear him out."

Sure, it's possible that one or two people decide to be difficult and abandon the adventure hook and set up entirely. But it's unlikely. And even if one or two people decide to wander off on their own as long as the majority of people agree, I can tell the one or two people that decided not to go that their characters have now left the game to go do their own thing and they can roll up new characters if they'd like. However, the rest of the group has decided to go on this adventure so if they object as PLAYERS to us playing this adventure...well, they should leave the group now.

Well, depends on hows it plays out. Why does the PC join the party, what are they trying to accomplish, what sorts of adventures do they want to go on? I can see a child character that starts out weak but learns as they go as having the potential to be a great PC. I imagine, if the party enters a dungeon and this PC wants to go along, they'd start as a scout (being small, and likely having skills hiding since they survived this long). So they'd sneak ahead spot the foes and terrain, report back, allowing the rest of the party to plan an ambush. Maybe the child would then taunt the foes, run away, have the foes chase her into the party's ambush. Seems like a lot of potential to contribute to the game.

Doesn't seem like they'd contribute that much. This entire scenario goes against so many D&D assumptions, I don't even know where to start.

Firstly, my first rule and the assumption of every adventure written for D&D, ever, is pretty much the same thing: "You are adventurers. Your primary job is solving dangerous problems for other people. You are the people everyone calls when Orcs attack a town, when the magic well starts glowing strangely and Ghosts come out of it, or when there is an item hidden in some out of the way dangerous place. Make up a character that reflects that. Imagine what skills your character should have to deal with these types of situations."

Either way, if we assume that isn't the case and "make up whatever characters you want" is the rule of the day. What gives this child the ability to hide and sneak well? Is there a class he's taking to give himself these skills without gaining combat skill at the same time? What happens the first time he scouts ahead and one of the enemies spots him and wins initiative? Does he just die? If so, does the player get frustrated by dying? Or does he just roll up another character who is a boy with no combat skills who scouts ahead? If so, what happens when that one dies the same way?

Uh, wow. No, it's not. There are tons of settings and adventures that involve political intrigue, or investigation, or capers, which involve no monsters. Monsters are just one possible aspect of the game. Those are not requirements for D&D, they're just one thing it can do.

I appreciate that your games, that's what you focus on. Please appreciate that not everyone does that, certainly not all the time.

That's correct. Not everyone focuses on it. But it's what D&D does. Name a single published adventure in any edition of D&D that can be entirely accomplished without a single fight(or at least the possibility of a fight if the party makes one bad stealth roll or wrong decision). Heck, name one that didn't assume an average of at least one fight a day. Most of them involved an average of 5-10 fights a day.

There are adventures that INVOLVE all those things, yes. None of them can be accomplished without pulling out weapons and killing things.

I freely admit that some people have taken the D&D rules and said "Hey, I like these rules, but what if the game wasn't about fighting at all and instead was about something else. I'm going to run that game." I bet it is even fun and was so much fun that they continued to use the D&D rules to run that game for years.

And that guy was saying you cannot run a bard/something not related to a bard (level 2 total character) in a Pathfinder Society game, which is objectively false. This idea that you need to run a highly combat optimized character or else you cannot play in Pathfinder Society games is false. It's up to the player to do what they find fun and hopefully effective. But the day you start eliminating new players from joining a public game because you feel they didn't optimize their character enough, is the day Pathfinder Society starts dying a slow death as new players get driven away from the game. Pathfinder Society isn't a "Non-Optimized Characters Need Not Apply" group event.

It's structure is almost identical to Living Greyhawk. Living Greyhawk became like this very quickly. Each time our group of players for LG came close to dying and there was someone sub-optimal in our group, everyone would spend the next week complaining to them about it. They would be offered every suggestion in the book to improve their character so that no one died next week. If they didn't change their characters and take the advice, they'd be publicly shamed over and over again about how bad their character was.

No one wanted to die. Monsters were super hard and a misstep would cause someone to die.

Naw, other way around. You make the character you want to play, and you make sure to talk to your DM about how to fit that character in. DM controls the world, the player controls the PC. The DM doesn't control the PC, nor the player decisions on what PCs to make and how to play them. If they die they die. But, DM doesn't get to control all aspects of the game - the PCs are the one aspect they're not in control of.

The player can control their PC within limits. You don't get to play a Jedi in D&D. You don't get to play a Ancient Red Dragon if the DM doesn't want that in his game. You can't play a Kender if they don't exist in this DMs world.

If the PCs are in the middle of a quest to throw the One Ring into Mordor, playing a blacksmith who refuses to leave home because he's happy there means you won't be involved in the game in any way. That character is simply not appropriate.

The DM sets the parameters for the game. Sometimes the game system itself sets a number of parameters as well.

I have no idea what's available in that game...let's stick to discussing D&D in this D&D topic?

My point is that each game has a tone it's built for. It sounds like you haven't played many of them so you may not know this. Call of Cthulhu is a horror game where you run away from enemies and solve problems using mostly non-combat methods because its system builds only characters who are bad at combat. Which is rather the opposite of D&D, which creates characters who are good at combat.

It's really not. It might be for you, but there are lots of people who NEVER go into dungeons in their games. I know people who have run a swashbuckling sea adventure game for years and years, and others who have been running political intrigue games for years. Dungeons are just one possible thing you can do with this game - not the only thing or even primary thing you can do. What did you think all those city supplements and wilderness supplements and ocean supplements and planes supplements were for?

That's why I said it was about all 3 of those things. Dungeons are a heavy theme. That's why it's in the name of the game. However, it's possible to use only the other two: Defeating monsters and solving problems that require larger than life abilities to solve and still have a D&D game.

I'm guessing that swashbuckling adventure involves being attacked by pirates, exploring strange islands(possibly filled with strange, dangerous creatures, and ancient temples with evil magic...also known as dungeons), and solving strange magical situations.

City adventures often have ambushes in back alleys, monsters in the sewers, plots to solve and eventually do battle with the perpetuaters, and battles with Wizards in their towers.

It's certainly possible to run political intrigue games. However, none of the rules really assist with this in any way. You don't need rules to talk. So, political intrigue games can literally be run in ANY system. In PHB only 1e D&D, doing so required almost literally throwing away your character sheet except for spells and thief skills since nothing else applied.

It should support it as one method of playing, for sure. But it should not force you to play that way. It should support people who don't play that way, as well.

Nothing can FORCE you to play any way. If you choose to be a 1e Fighter in a game with no fighting at all, your character sheet gives you no useful abilities at all. However, the class is designed to fight things. There is an entire Monster Manual where 90% of the information contained therein will be useless in your game.

The rules encourage you to run a game where you fight these monsters, that's the point of giving you combat abilities and having a list of monsters to fight.

I believe you can rest easy that D&D will not FORCE you to play that way any more than any other edition of D&D has.

On the other hand, I don't want the reverse to be true either. I don't want there to be NO monster manual simply because a couple of people say "We don't have battles in my D&D game and I don't want them to publish a book that encourages that."

I assure you, a caper adventure can absolutely be run with a diverse group of PCs of a variety of classes and abilities. It's a blast too. And D&D has supported this type of adventure from the very beginning, and in every edition of D&D, on some level.

I don't believe you. I've tried it. It ALWAYS ends up with at least one party member bored out of his mind and leaving the table to go play SNES because: "My character doesn't like to sneak around, so he'll wait at the inn while you guys do this."

That's a shame. There is a lot you can do in that sort of situation. But, if you didn't like it, that's cool. Just understand, many people do, so that sort of adventure should be supported by the rules.

What can I do in a political intrigue adventure with a charisma of 8, intelligence of 8, and a big sword and animal hides on me? Also, my character hates people, has lived in the woods all his life, and doesn't understand or care about culture or politics. Also, keep in mind that our DMs always enforce roleplaying your stats. Any good ideas I come up with are likely to be met with "Your character has an Int of 8, you are too stupid to come up with that."

Also, as I mention above, you don't need rules to support talking. You can talk without rules. Not sure what you want the rules to do to support this type of game....other than ruining my game by adding in options to play completely non-combat characters.

There is no part of the game that inherently excludes everyone else. A good DM can adapt to make sure everyone's enjoying things no matter what the party decides to do.

I don't think this is possible. Many players styles simply are not compatible with other player's styles: One character would like to go to the inn and see if there are any rumors of nearby dungeons to go into and find treasure in. The rest of the party is playing courtiers who are vying for power in the Royal Court and are very concerned about who will marry the princess and which play will be put on at the Festival next week.

The PCs in the court absolutely refuse to go into a dungeon, their characters wouldn't want to get their clothes dirty and it would be considered uncouth. The PC who wants to go into the dungeon hates pompous nobles and politics and refuses to set foot in the court for any reason.

How do you run this adventure without telling one of the players to roll up a new character and without concentrating on any one character for longer than 10 minutes at a time to avoid boring everyone else at the table?

I find it particularly interesting you keep mentioning puzzles. I like puzzles, but this is an aspect of the game that's both poorly supported by most rules, and also that a lot of players say is very boring to them. You will find 10 times the number of wilderness and city adventure support, than you will puzzle adventure support. So, it seems you get this idea that you can make something that is shrouded by the perception of being not for everyone, into something that everyone can appreciate. You seem to have done it with puzzles. So, can you understand those other types of adventures might be like that one?

Puzzles don't need rules. But they exist in many, many published D&D adventures. So, they are supported in terms of "The creators of D&D published ideas as to what the average thing that players would be doing in D&D and that involved puzzles" way.

Though, I don't mean puzzles to necessarily be the riddle kind. I mean "puzzles" in terms of "Everyone in this town is acting strangely, figure out why" or "There are strange people in black robes wandering around the forest, figure out who they are and what they want." Puzzles are often the primary motivators for adventures. Even wilderness and city adventures.

Either way, even if we are talking about typical riddle adventures...they can involve anyone. Solving riddles might not be for everyone, that's true. Which is why when I introduce them I make sure they can be solved in less than 10 minutes and we can move on to something else. Everyone has things they don't like. Which is why any adventure that concentrates on one thing for too long ends up alienating certain types of players. I might do part of one session as a political intrigue...but I'd move on quickly to avoid boring those people who don't like political intrigue. I'll run part of a session as "exploring the wilderness" but I'll have the PCs find something they can fight or talk to on a regular basis because "You head north for a day and then set up camp" gets boring after a while.

The goal is to have enough of everything to satisfy every type of player while not concentrating on anything long enough to make any of the other players bored. Unfortunately, that's not entirely possible. Inevitably, the game still needs a core experience that all players need to be involved in. In D&D, that's fighting. There's too much time in a session and battles take too long for it to be possible to accommodate players who absolutely hate combat without alienating those who like it.

As a side note, to me Wilderness and City adventures are simply dungeons with different dressing. My point isn't that D&D should be all about dungeons. It's that the core of the D&D experience is: Find out about a problem, investigate that problem, fight the people responsible for it, take their stuff. Whether that problem is in a city, forest, or dungeon is rather inconsequential.

 

[Dausuul]

I wouldn't put it quite the same way Majoru does, but I agree on the general thrust: One of the core premises of D&D is that PCs are capable adventurers, with "capable" meaning "can pull their own weight in a dungeon full of traps and nasty monsters." You can, of course, run a D&D game that changes that core premise. Sometimes that leads to really awesome games. But for better or for worse, D&D has never been designed as a general-purpose RPG, and I think it would be ill-served to try to be one. It's a swords-and-sorcery game and the rules are focused on supporting that genre (with a smattering of epic fantasy at high levels).

Now, I rather like playing characters who aren't straight-up hackmasters. When I play a wizard, for example, I tend to be heavy on illusions and control, light on blasting. I had great fun playing a lazy warlord in 4E. Similarly, a rogue need not be a damage machine. I'd love to see a "trickster" rogue that replaced sneak attack with a bunch of maneuvers to put opponents at a disadvantage or lure them to their doom.

But all these characters still contribute plenty in battle--they just do it in less-direct ways. I think it's a bad idea to design a class variant that is actually useless in a fight. When an option is provided in the rulebook, one should be able to assume the system supports that option out of the box. I do not expect that D&D will ever, out of the box, support noncombatant PCs; far too much of the system is devoted to combat to make that workable. If a player wants a noncombatant character and the DM is willing to work with him/her on that, more power to them, but they should understand and accept that they're going outside the design parameters of the game.

 

[pemerton]

I rather like playing characters who aren't straight-up hackmasters. When I play a wizard, for example, I tend to be heavy on illusions and control, light on blasting. I had great fun playing a lazy warlord in 4E. Similarly, a rogue need not be a damage machine. I'd love to see a "trickster" rogue that replaced sneak attack with a bunch of maneuvers to put opponents at a disadvantage or lure them to their doom.

<snip>

I do not expect that D&D will ever, out of the box, support noncombatant PCs; far too much of the system is devoted to combat to make that workable. If a player wants a noncombatant character and the DM is willing to work with him/her on that, more power to them, but they should understand and accept that they're going outside the design parameters of the game.

The thing about an illusion or charm wizard is they have abilities that can be used not just in combat, but to do other stuff. Even if, in the actual play of the game, they are primarily combatants (because that's where most of the action is), in the fiction they are primarily non-combatants, and both the story and their out-of-combat expertise reflect that. For instance, a classic AD&D illusionist is great for infiltration missions, whereas an artillery mage brings a very different skill set.

My worry about the idea of replacing sneak attack with other combat manoeuvres is that those other manoeuvres still paint the rogue into the combat corner. I would much rather have broader abilities that have a wide range of applicability (like an illusionist or enchanter's spells) and then adequate resolution rules for the player of the rogue to be able to bring those abilities to bear both in combat and out of it.

 

[Dausuul]

My worry about the idea of replacing sneak attack with other combat manoeuvres is that those other manoeuvres still paint the rogue into the combat corner. I would much rather have broader abilities that have a wide range of applicability (like an illusionist or enchanter's spells) and then adequate resolution rules for the player of the rogue to be able to bring those abilities to bear both in combat and out of it.

I completely agree with this. (Although I wouldn't say the rogue as currently written is painted into the combat corner--far from it.)

 

[sheadunne]

My worry about the idea of replacing sneak attack with other combat manoeuvres is that those other manoeuvres still paint the rogue into the combat corner. I would much rather have broader abilities that have a wide range of applicability (like an illusionist or enchanter's spells) and then adequate resolution rules for the player of the rogue to be able to bring those abilities to bear both in combat and out of it.

This should be the case with all abilities and in reverse. Sneak Attack isn't necessarily the problem, the problem is that it's not usable outside of combat. What is the skill set that the rogue has to be able to perform a sneak attack and how can that skill set be used out of combat to do other things. I'd like to see it expanded to all classes, abilities, feats, skills, and spells. What are the non-combat utilities of Fire Ball? Perhaps as a way to provide heat to a tent/room/area or to light all the candles in a room simultaneously, perhaps to slowly increase the temperature in a room which has implications on social encounters. Perhaps abilities/feats/etc can be combined with skills to make other uses possible. If you have Diplomacy (5 ranks) and Sneak Attack, you can make jabbing/witty remarks to throw your opponent off balance and win the debate. If you have Survival (5 ranks) and Fire Ball spell you can increase the temperature in an area by 5 or 10 degrees for 8 hours making for a good nights sleep in your tent.