D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Scribe]

The core issue is that it is too difficult to have a good score in an ability that is not central to your class. Fix that, it fixes most of these issues. Then there also is no need of awkward patches like letting barbarians to use strength for everything or having fighters to boost any skill with the second wind.

Its not difficult, for a given definition of 'good'.

Its really really not difficult at all.

The only problem here, is that of players thinking if they dont race to 20 in their primary that they will lack 'consistency' in their attacks.

It is quite literally, the min/max problem that has reared its ugly head over any number of actually wildly different topics.

Player expectation and minmax. 5e is not nearly punishing enough to need to do so.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yup, and that can be a problem, in itself.

Too many skills can also be a problem. Perception and Investigation (3e Search) for instance - you don't need both, all having both does is make a high PER character occassionally bad at finding things.

Are you thinking to equalize stat usefulness or something? How would more physical skills not just make it harder to be generally competent at physical stuff?

A big part of that one & done problem is that the skills themselves are to overly condensed, there's no room for the GM to use player strengths weaknesses & overlaps in a way that weaves them together into a tapestry that took multiple checks. Following that perception/investigate thread with 5e skills & going back into 3.5 you had

• Search
• Spot
• Listen
• Maybe even appraise & any of several knowledge:x skills

All of those (and maybe more in specific cases) Were different for meaningfyl reasons that carried their own themes flavor & applicability to the kinds of things someone could find with the skill & with taking 10/taking20 their users could guarantee they were good at the check for a skill they had been invested in rather than totally random. You could hypothetically have a situation where... Alice hears some rustling noises in the corner with listen.
Bob could search for the false wall in the corner.
Cindy could spot the strange runes & glyphs worked into the stone behind the moss covering it
Dave could appraise the valuable metal in those glyphs & get an age on how far back it was put in place based on the workmanship
Eddy could use any number of relevant knowledge skills to glean a bit of info about the cult & what they worship.
The group could take all of that & assemble it bit by bit digging for one more step hoping it might be useful later.

Now the GM needs to stretch for more than a single check & PCs don't have enough granularity in skills to dig for more without the GM just info dumping with directed skill checks.... even if that is done now we have a DC ladder that's so short & stunted that it hardly matters if the knowledge could be useful later when that usefulness will simply be made a pointless waste if someone says "oh! I cast guidance" or "and I want to help them cause I'm proficient too" when the time comes later on.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What's your solution?

I don't have good way to achieve the effect I want, but I also am not paid to design games. But what I did was to do away with ascending costs for abilities (you gonna max your main stat anyway, and then the ascending cost just makes getting second good stat very difficult,) I made the point buy a bit more generous (obviously taking account the effect of removing ascending costs) and having everyone start buying from 14, 12, 12, 12, 10, 8 array. There were no starting ASIs. Then I made it so that when you get a levelling ASI, you also get a feat, however, the ASI is always two +1s, and you can't put a possible third one to from a feat to the same with one of those either. So this makes getting a second high score easier, and forces you to spread your levelling ASIs around, nor do ASIs anymore compete with feats. But of course most important thing I did was to just tell the players to get "a hobby ability score" so they did. I'm sure minmaxer would just use my system to max their main stat and con.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Because in many cases, only one person rolls some checks.

If that is a common occurrence, the DM needs to read the DMG and think through scenarios more in the context of having multiple simultaneous moving parts to a challenge. (As usual, this is a DM guidance issue, not a RAW issue)

There are some checks multiple people get to roll. Or group check where everyone rolls.

But some of the checks there are only one roll: To inflict penalty, loss, or bars upon failure.

Right. Sometimes a situation calls for a single roll, sometimes it calls for a whole scene. Which makes the fighter subclasses giving extra skills not an OOC feature…how?

One person gets to navigate.
One person gets to pickpocket the guard.
One person gets to convince the official.

Others can help. But working together does not use proficiency unless it requires it which pretty much is only for picking locks and disabling traps in core.

That’s the only explicit example. The language does not imply that other checks don’t fit the bill.

Beyond that, so what? If the rogue is already navigating, they aren’t pickpocketing the guard. If the Bard is seducing I mean convincing the official, they aren’t examining the portal runes.
Multiple things to deal with, one scene.
In addition, multiple persuasive characters can be doing different things in a conversation, or an insightful character can be reading someone while the persuasive PC chats them up, etc.

So only one person between the Fighter Rogue Wizard and Cleric gets to track. On failure you lose the tracks. So the fighter and cleric both having Survival is redundant. Because you only need one person with Survival.

False. The above is only true if the game isn’t giving the characters several thingns that need to get done in the same span of time, and the players are always hard-optimizing every aspect of the game.

 

[Minigiant]

Its not difficult, for a given definition of 'good'.

Its really really not difficult at all.

The only problem here, is that of players thinking if they dont race to 20 in their primary that they will lack 'consistency' in their attacks.

It is quite literally, the min/max problem that has reared its ugly head over any number of actually wildly different topics.

Player expectation and minmax. 5e is not nearly punishing enough to need to do so.

I blame moderate DCs being 15 and medium AC being 15.
That and HP bloat.
And poor DM guidance.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I blame moderate DCs being 15 and medium AC being 15.

So you need a +4 bonus to reach that half the time? So ability modifier of +2 and proficiency.

I don't think this proves what you think it is proving...

 

[Scribe]

So you need a +4 bonus to reach that half the time? So ability modifier of +2 and proficiency.

I don't think this proves what you think it is proving...

And that +2 issssssss

14.

 

[Minigiant]

So you need a +4 bonus to reach that half the time? So ability modifier of +2 and proficiency.

I don't think this proves what you think it is proving...

Like @Scribe stated it's about numbers.

50% odd is okay for attacks when you get 2 of them a turn and are drilling down an HP bar.

But when you are rolling Out of Combat with a Poorly written DMG with few examples in the most successful RPGs every with a community of New DMs who lack experience and Old DMs with harsh failure expectations of older editions...

50% odds is not so great.

My rogue is floating in the Plane of Blood due to a failed Cha check then failed Cha save. Drowning in blood.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Wheras I figure its better to address something systematically out the gate than have to patch it after the fact.

5e's already not where I want it to be out of the gate, necessitating I fix what I want to fix. I see no value in fixing something that's not a problem for me until it is.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No it isn't. That is a terrible kludge that creates ugly duplicate skills. Super inelegant design.

The core issue is that it is too difficult to have a good score in an ability that is not central to your class. Fix that, it fixes most of these issues. Then there also is no need of awkward patches like letting barbarians to use strength for everything or having fighters to boost any skill with the second wind.

I would say the core issue is having stat bonuses simply be too important to the game. Make a flatter curve like in the TSR days, combine skills and feats into a list of abilities a PC could choose from (perhaps divided into general stuff and by class) and make sure those are where bonuses to particular skill-type actions primarily come from.