D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Minigiant]

Wait.... is there another way to play?

Asking for a friend.

The 6 year olds can't drink silly.
But good DMs let them say a bad word just that one time when their dice are naughty and need timeout.

 

[cbwjm]

you know how there aren't any CON skills, what would people's thoughts be on the following four:

-Resistance - proficiency in CON saving throws, also grants half proficiency in untrained skills when resisting effects
-Vitality - prerequisite for adding your CON modifier to HP gain
-Concentration - for spell concentration or any other abilities that use it
-Death - for death saving throws

now, i realise none of these are 'active' abilities you can use but CON has always been a little bit weird like that, in 5e at any rate, add in a few extra skill proficiencies to classes especially martials so they can really benefit from their basically required CON investment, i realise with some of these some of the base math might have to be tweaked a little to account for modifiers on things that didn't have them before.

I actually quite like the idea of ditching saving throws and using skills as saving throws, sort of like how investigation is used to detect illusions. You could have acrobatics replace many of the dexterity saves, athletics might be for strength, insight might protect against charms, etc. Your resistance might work for constitution saves. It'd be a bit of work reorganising it, but I think it could work. You could even just make them ability checks and allow different skills apply as needed so an intelligence save might allow for investigation in one instance, arcana in another.

 

[cbwjm]

That reason is the online CharOp crowd comes to bonkers conclusions about what is “necessary”.

Behold the gospel of DnD wherein it states "You need a 16 in your main stat at level one or your character is trash!"

Behold the wisdom on how to play "you are required to have between 6-8 encounters between long rests, or else you're playing the game wrong!"

 

[tetrasodium]

And I think this is where we just diverge, and I think thats fine. I think the success rate on various things is already assumed to be too high, and that people should yes, have to optimize for it. If the assumptions are otherwise (Easy is a 5, etc) then it just trivializes the game for the optimizers, and thats even worse.

This so much on both elements of that. It's like wotc saw the problems created by removing take10/take20 & decided to just ensure the die roll pretty much never matters much to solve without simply restoring it. Doing that caused the problems you note with removing the plausible chances of failure -AND- it removed the possibility of interesting courses of action blossoming from the weight that needing to solve/avoid distractions/time pressure less severe than being on fire or something from. Now we have a practically certain check made even in the middle of combat with added distractions

 

[Vaalingrade]

Behold the gospel of DnD wherein it states "You need a 16 in your main stat at level one or your character is trash!"

Behold the wisdom on how to play "you are required to have between 6-8 encounters between long rests, or else you're playing the game wrong!"

One of these is other players telling you how to not make your play experience one full of constant failure because of how the game is designed to worship the d20 and allows nothing to overshadow it.

The other is the designers tell you how to make your game annoying and boring as a stopgap to deal with how they designed the game.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I actually quite like the idea of ditching saving throws and using skills as saving throws, sort of like how investigation is used to detect illusions. You could have acrobatics replace many of the dexterity saves, athletics might be for strength, insight might protect against charms, etc. Your resistance might work for constitution saves. It'd be a bit of work reorganising it, but I think it could work. You could even just make them ability checks and allow different skills apply as needed so an intelligence save might allow for investigation in one instance, arcana in another.

That's actually a really interesting and pleasantly elegant idea!

 

[Tony Vargas]

I actually quite like the idea of ditching saving throws and using skills as saving throws, sort of like how investigation is used to detect illusions. You could have acrobatics replace many of the dexterity saves, athletics might be for strength, insight might protect against charms, etc. Your resistance might work for constitution saves. It'd be a bit of work reorganising it, but I think it could work. You could even just make them ability checks and allow different skills apply as needed so an intelligence save might allow for investigation in one instance, arcana in another.

I guess 6 skills to cover all saves is not as rough as 4 feats...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Nah.

It was that you could use you 2nd or 3rd highest score, have proficiency, and roll a 10 and still fail at something your DM described as "Moderate".

That nudged the CharOp boards to make things necessary.

Bologna. CharOp was positing the necessity before the game was even published, and had the same mindset during 4e and 3.5.

So, we know that 14 (+2) Prof (+2) at level 1 - Moderate (DC 15) = 50% ya?

"Well thats too hard Scribe." OK, so you chop that down to the 'easy' DC of 10, and 'easy' becomes 5, which you...can now only fail on a natural 1 which seems...poor but whatever, thats how we are adjusting things.

So now Easy is so trivially done, why bother?

So that the Characters who have no stats or prof in a given task can do things easier? So we can give the Fighter a chance in Social?

Why?

I see a lot more 11, 12, and 13 DCs than 10 or 15, in the adventures.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Behold the gospel of DnD wherein it states "You need a 16 in your main stat at level one or your character is trash!"

Behold the wisdom on how to play "you are required to have between 6-8 encounters between long rests, or else you're playing the game wrong!"

yeah basically

Meanwhile I’m over here never starting with any stat higher than a 15 at level 1 and performing quite well, and running games where 4 encounters would be an especially big day, and the game runs quite well.

 

[Scribe]

That nudged the CharOp boards to make things necessary.

Nah, its still not necessary, its just gamers being gamers.