D&D 5E Starter Set Character Sheet Revealed!

[The Hitcher]

There's no way I can possibly suspend disbelief that far.

Wow, I'm sorry. Have you seen anyone about that?

 

[pemerton]

So what happens when an ogre falls from a cliff? How injured does it get? How many hit points does it lose? Or in an avalanche?

What's the chance that it will be able to break down a iron-banded wooden door (DC 25), when nobody is watching?

If an ogre falls from a cliff while in a combat with the PCs, it takes 1d10 hp damage per 10' fallen, and lands prone. Because in such circumstances its fall is a consequence of an action declaration by a player, and the resolution of that action declaration, and the action resolution mechanics apply.

If an ogre falls from a cliff "off screen", it takes the injuries I think are worth describing. If I am presenting a clue for the players - "Your PCs, as they walk along the mountain path, notice the body of an ogre lying at the base of a cliff" - it is probably going to be dead, unless I have good ideas for an ogre's mysterious last words!

If I am framing a challenge for the players - "As you are walking along the mountain path, you see an ogre fall from the cliff ahead of you! It lands prone, but gets to its feet and brushes of the dust. It seems bruised, but not fatally hurt. And it looks angry and ready to smash anyone who gets in it its way!" - then the fallen ogre has the stats appropriate for it to play the role in the situation I want it to play (in this context, of providing a decent challenge for an entire party, perhaps a 5th level solo) - ie its injuries, which reduce its toughness, are built into its mechanical presentation.

If the same ogre interacts with both level 3 characters (and it has stats for a level 2 elite at this point), and then interacts with level 9 characters (as a level 8 standard monster), then how does the damage done in the first encounter translate to damage done in the second encounter? What if it encounters both at the same time?

It is not going to encounter both at the same time. The levelling rate in my 4e game is about 4 to 5 levels a year, so the encounters you describe are more than a year apart in the real world, and (even at the fairly rapid ingame levelling rate in my game) weeks apart. Lingering wounds (eg the PCs severed a leg last time, and now it wears a peg-leg) can be built into its stats easily enough (eg reduce its MV rate from 8 to 6).

If you are planning to resolve back-on-back but non-fatal encounters between a given ogre and two parties of significantly different levels, 4e won't support you very well. But to the best of my knowledge few D&D campaigns have raised that sort of situation in the past 30 years of the game's history. (The overwhelming number of campaigns, as far as I can tell, have only one active group of PCs at a time, and those PCs are mostly of similar level.)

If a creature only has stats in relation to the heroes, then that system is absolutely worthless for resolving anything about that creature other than its interaction with those heroes. I need more than that. I need to know how it interacts with everything in the world.

I am not disputing your desires for your system. (Though frankly I think D&D is an odd system to choose for your purposes. Runequest and Rolemaster are two systems that are both quite a bit better for it.)

I am disputing your claim that no other system can deliver a consistent gameworld.

 

[pemerton]

And what's the in-game justification for why an NPC wizard has re-charge spells and a ton of hit points, where a PC wizard has AEDU spells and healing surges? Why does a PC fighter need a +X magic weapon in order to strike with the same accuracy as an NPC fighter?

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The justification is that PCs are the heroes of the narrative, and that each has an individual human to manage a whole lot of bits and pieces. Those pieces need to be enjoyable for them to manage.

That justification, while valid on a gamist level, does not represent anything within the game world. Where anything within the game world reflects something that exists only in the real world, it violates causality.

It seems to me that [MENTION=63747]The Hitcher[/MENTION] didn't assert that his/her proferred justification represents anything in the gameworld. I could be wrong, but I suspect that The Hitcher doesn't believe that every difference in the game mechanics must, of necessity, correlate to some meaningful difference of causal process in the gameworld.

The NPC wizard's 6 hit points per level (for being artillery) represents the same in-game state of affairs as is represented by the PC wizards 4 hp per level (for being a wizard) + healing surges + accompanying friends who have the ability to unlock those surges for the wizard. In the case of the PC, for the reasons that The Hitcher gave, we break the resolution of the character's combat resilience down into these component parts because it's fun and interesting. In the case of the NPC we glom it all together into a simple 6 hp per level because we don't care about the same degree of detail. No one cares about whether the NPC wizard is on his/her last legs and then surges back, or goes down in a steady decline. Whereas for PCs this sort of stuff is what generates emotional responses from the game participants during the course of play.

Similarly, a PC has magical weapons because we think it's fun to play characters who carry mighty artefacts (like Excalibur or Mjolnir or Captain America's shield or whatever). For the average NPC no one cares! But it certainly doesn't cause any inconsistency that, disarmed of his/her magical sword, PC A is not as powerful in combat as NPC B. This is equally true in any version of D&D, that there are some NPCs who will be more puissant in combat than the PCs unless the PCs are loaded out with magical gear. (There are also more interesting ways to look at it, too. The PCs loss of his/her treasured weapon might be a blow to morale, which explains the significant drop in performance. NPCs typically aren't as moved by passion as the PCs - passion is the special, thought not exclusive, province of protagonists.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I am disputing your claim that no other system can deliver a consistent gameworld.

I'm not disputing that any other system can do this. I'm disputing the claim that D&D cannot do this, or should not do this, when it has managed to do so in every other edition.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not disputing that any other system can do this. I'm disputing the claim that D&D cannot do this, or should not do this, when it has managed to do so in every other edition.

Let me try again.

4e does not satisfy your system preferences. (Nor, as far as I can tell, do B/X D&D or AD&D, but that's a different matter.)

But 4e can, 100%, deliver a consistent gameworld. I know this because I play 4e, and my gameworld is consistent.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

4e does not satisfy your system preferences. (Nor, as far as I can tell, do B/X D&D or AD&D, but that's a different matter.)

But 4e can, 100%, deliver a consistent gameworld. I know this because I play 4e, and my gameworld is consistent.

Fair enough. I agree that 4E does not satisfy my system preferences, where AD&D and 3.X do.

I hope that 5E continues to support my preferences by giving each creature only a single set of stats, and not treating the player characters any differently based on their meta-game status.

 

[Hussar]

You can work with probabilities, though. You should be able to quickly determine whether one side will win with little damage taken, or whether it will be an extremely close fight. You can, occasionally, have things turn out unexpectedly. After all, the one benefit of not watching the fight is that you don't get a close look at all of the details, so there's only a finite amount of accuracy needed in your prediction. It's not quite as random as what you'd get from rolling it out, but it should be close enough to the expected outcome if you had rolled it out as to not seem out of place. It's impossible for any DM to actually be unbiased (due to human failings), but the DM should strive to be as unbiased as possible while arbitrating this outcome.

It's like, a goblin might beat an ogre in a fight, but will probably die quickly. If the fight happens off-screen, and the goblin wins, then that's fine very occasionally. If that sort of thing happens routinely, then it strains suspension of disbelief.

But, funnily enough, every time orcs attack a caravan they succeed and the locals call on the pcs to help.

The power of Narrativium.

 

[The Hitcher]

It seems to me that @The Hitcher didn't assert that his/her proferred justification represents anything in the gameworld. I could be wrong, but I suspect that The Hitcher doesn't believe that every difference in the game mechanics must, of necessity, correlate to some meaningful difference of causal process in the gameworld.

Oh yeah, this. For the record I don't actually like 4E, and I do believe that some of its systems are alienating in terms of breaking suspension of disbelief. But consistency between monster types is not one of the things that bothers me. Fun and storytelling are far more important than systemic consistency.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

And what's the in-game justification for why an NPC wizard has re-charge spells and a ton of hit points, where a PC wizard has AEDU spells and healing surges? Why does a PC fighter need a +X magic weapon in order to strike with the same accuracy as an NPC fighter?

Because no one in game knows any of those things. No one in the game world is sitting around saying "I can only cast this spell once before taking a short rest. How come he just cast it twice?!?!"

Instead both of them are saying "I'm a wizard. I cast spells. This round, I believe I will cast this spell." Wizards might be capable of casting the same encounter spell twice in an encounter but the rules say they will choose not to(I like to call this the "Removing monotony rule". In books, spellcasters can often cast spells at will with no recharge time at all. However, these same wizards will constantly switch up what spells they are casting. Why? No idea. If they have a "best" spell, they should cast it over and over again. Instead, they vary them. Because the book would be monotonous if the reader had to read "He cast another fireball" 100 times in the same book. This rule says "Please don't cast the same thing every round, it's boring. You are technically allowed to, but we won't let you). Either that or the time it takes to recharge spells is variable, Wizards never quite know how quickly they will recover and PC Wizards often take around 5 minutes, but some NPC Wizards have trained in techniques that let them recharge faster or they are lucky and this time their recharge takes less time.

No one in game knows their own accuracy either. No one is sitting around saying "I only had a 30% chance of hitting that guy in full plate, but he had a 40% chance? Why the heck is that?" They are instead thinking "I missed, but he got lucky and hit me. That's not good."

It's the same reason why a 1st level Fighter who gets stabbed with a sword and a 20th level Fighter who gets stabbed with a sword don't have the same thing happen to them. One dies, the other one barely notices someone attacked him. Even though in the game world they both should be thinking "OW, I just got a sword in the chest! Now I'm bleeding to death, it hit my heart!" The rules of hitpoints say "Different in game effects happen for you because you have more hitpoints. But your character has no idea what a hitpoint is or that you lost 6 of them. The game rules are different than what happens in game."

 

[Uller]

If the PCs fight the guard, and it turns out he has 100hp and +27 to hit for ~35 damage, but the guard is later defeated by some goblins, then we don't expect those goblins to have 10hp and +2 to hit for ~4 damage. We expect that the outcome of the fight should be very close to what it would have been, had we actually played it out. You can't change the outcome of that sort of situation merely by watching it.

Except the players (or the PCs) dont know that sort of information. In a recent game my players had a town militia member guiding them. She was really a powerful monster in disguise. They encountered a hydra and she rushed in to help. The hydra scored two hits on her, one critical. Any town guard should have been killed out right. So I descrbed it as one hydra head driving her under the water and a second going under after her and viciously shaking. The players assumed she was dead. Next round she popped up just fine. That left them wondering a bit. In your example if my players tangle with a npc and discover he is very tough then later learn he was killed by goblins then they would take that as a clue there is something special with the goblins. But I'm not going to force the npc and the goblins to follow any rules off screen. I'll just decide what happens and be sure it is reasonable. Maybe the goblins got some poison or some magic or the npc was drunk and they killed him in his sleep or whatever. And yes...an npc can get a broken leg...so can a pc if I decide that is interesting. For instance: maybe a character fell of a cliff while exploring and was reduced to 0 hp. He's out of HD. The party is out of healing... I may be inclined to describe him as having a broken leg rather than dying. It's not in the rules but it's more interesting. So what? You seem to be saying thatjust because there are no rules for specific injuries or other details of the world then they don't happen in the game world. I see no reason why that should be the case. One of the things that makes TRPGs fun is they are not computer simulations rigidly constrained by rules but adjudicated by thinking human beings who can think outside the rules.