D&D 5E "The problem with 5e" is the best feature - advantage

Isn't that what people wanted? For the DM to be empowered to run the game as they see fit? To make the game their own? To be free from burdensome rules that impose a playstyle on the DM? To be free from the "Tyranny of Fun" that plagued 4th Edition??
But the rules do impose a playstyle on the DM. The levelling rules, the combat and injury/recovery rules, and the magic rules all say a lot about the nature of the world, the setting, and the playstyle. You can't make complex (or even simple) rules without guiding towards some playstyles.

And with any question like this it's always what some people wanted - and almost always what others didn't. Communities are very rarely monolithic.
 

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loverdrive

Prophet of the profane (She/Her)
For the DM to be empowered to run the game as they see fit? To make the game their own?
Well, it's not like any edition of D&D since maybe AD&D 1E encourages to make the game your own. As opposed to, say, aforementioned Blades in the Dark or Dungeon World where turning the game from gritty meatgrinder to a PG-13 superhero game doesn't require to houserule anything at all.
 



I think you are failing to spot the obvious points that people were making in reply to you if you trace that back a couple points rather than taking thar some people out of context in isolation
I'm complaining about boarder trends on this board in general. I do admit I am getting lost...

When it comes to Advantage, I'm fine with it. It's a mechanic designed to be quick and easy to use. In order to be easy to use, some precision is sacrificed. If you want greater precision; that's fine; but it will involve more work.
 

Ancalagon

Dusty Dragon
I'm complaining about boarder trends on this board in general. I do admit I am getting lost...

When it comes to Advantage, I'm fine with it. It's a mechanic designed to be quick and easy to use. In order to be easy to use, some precision is sacrificed. If you want greater precision; that's fine; but it will involve more work.
It's not the precision I'm concerned about. It's lack of engagement with the world.
 

jers

Villager
I haven't seen this video, but I have heard the argument and there is a fair bit of truth to it.

The issue is that in 5e, virtually every ability is something you get from your class and level. You gain a level, you get new abilities on a nice little schedule. You take a feat, that's what the player wanted. You gain a level in a class, it's what the player wanted. If you're playing a Battlemaster Fighter who made it to level 15 in Dungeon of the Mad Mage and you compare them to a Battlemaster Fighter who made it to level 15 in Descent to Avernus, what exactly do they do differently? The answer: Basically nothing. You picked the ancestry, you picked the background, you picked the class, you picked the feats, you picked the attributes, etc.

Compare this to, say, 1e/2e AD&D. Sure, on it's face, what every character can do comes from the class and level. Indeed, at level 1 you certainly do have identical characters. However, it doesn't take very long before your character finds meaningful magic items. Not just basic items, but one PC will get a horn of blasting while another might get boots of speed and another might get a sword of sharpness. These items significantly alter the capabilities of each PC, not just because it's the only way you gain abilities, but because the items themselves are a lot more potent. In earlier editions, your character's abilities was determined not by what you could select at the beginning of the game, but by what your individual character actually accomplished. You have the ability to knock down doors easily because you found that. You have a story behind how your PC came into possession of these fantastic abilities.

As D&D has steadily removed the potency of magic items and steadily increased the potency of class abilities, it has left characters much more uniform than they used to be. This has been a problem since 3e and the emergence of "builds", but it was somewhat mitigated by the fact that prestige classes added so many options that it kind of concealed it. Still, the very idea that you could have a character "build" before you even begin playing the game and you would have a reasonable expectation of having those exact abilities when you reached high level and nothing else of consequence is almost anathema to 20th century D&D.

In other words, it's a way to backdoor complain that in-game rewards in 5e are godawful. That magic items have been so deprecated and depowered in the name of not giving out too much power that they can feel like they're barely worth carrying with you. Like finding that +0 longsword really does feel kind of like finding a silver dagger used to. The fact that everything actually interesting is attuned means that you just don't get that many valuable items and finding new items suffers from diminishing returns. Magic item abilities, by and large, feel like bad versions of class abilities when they really ought to feel like character-defining major rewards of gameplay.

Even worse, there's no clear purpose for all this gold you're finding. You might find 10,000 gp, but once you've got full plate armor what exactly is it good for? You're not bringing hirelings. You can't buy items. There's no benefit to hoarding gold. Most PCs should retire by level 5 or 6.

Treasure rewards have kind of become the absolute worst thing imaginable: boring at best and worthless at worst.



No, I don't think so.

I think the bonus-hunting minigame was not a useful way to spend time. I think getting rid of stacking circumstantial bonuses was 100% the best addition to D&D that 5e brought. I think it's fine if certain tables want to re-introduce stacking bonuses and penalties. If that's how they want to play that's fine. However, I'm not interested in doing that anymore. All it adds is accounting, and that's not really a fun way to spend time.

Advantage/disadvantage as written is the perfect example of a "good enough" rule. Because unless you're going to allow bonuses to stack so high that bounded accuracy breaks, that's exactly what it is: good enough. It does exactly what you need: it keeps die rolls having a meaningful chance for success and meaningful chance for failure. And like 85% of the time, it's exactly what you'd get if you still used fixed bonuses.

Part of the issue is that, outside of combat, if you're getting double or triple or higher advantage your DM should stop asking you to roll. You roll dice when the outcome of an event cannot be determined otherwise. If you've got that much advantage, it's not really hard to determine anymore. Adding more die rolls to the game doesn't make it more fair. It just makes it more random, and stories aren't random. Don't ask dice to perfectly model reality because they cannot and will not. You're not only playing D&D when you're rolling dice. Put the dice down and just move on.

I'm perfectly okay with the mechanics not being perfect. I want the game to be fast to play and simple to resolve. I love that once I find one source of advantage I can stop hunting through the rules looking for more. I love that once I find one source of disadvantage I can stop hunting through the rules looking for more. That's perfect. No more, "Oh, wait, I forgot prayer. Oh, wait, I forgot I'm a dwarf. Oh wait, I forgot...." You can take that away when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
This is painfully stupid. Not only are you saying that in 1e/2e your character was unique because of their material possessions (which they weren't), but you're saying that because a character can be customized through skill point distribution, optional class features, and chooseable feats, that makes them LESS unique? It's utterly ridiculous to say that since not only can you still roleplay however you like and you still gain a plethora of different magical items, having character builds was a part of 2nd Edition.

And your quote about you wanting the game to be simple and fast to resolve, well alright, that was already solved decades ago. It's called D&D Basic, and there's a reason they separated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which turned into the mainline D&D series) from D&D Basic, it's because for an "Advanced" game they wanted more complexity and "Advanced" rules. If you want a simplified, watered down experience you should go play D&D basic or, get this, find another game to play. Nobody put a gun to your head and said you have to play D&D, and quite frankly I'd prefer if you didn't, since this game doesn't need more childish players that get upset about being able to pick and choose options to optimize your rolls and abilities better, you know, things that function as the "game" part of the "roleplaying game".

The Advantage/Disadvantage system is an abortion of game design antithetical to the core framework of the game since it strips play options down by removing the need for buffing, removing the need for using tactics, and generally stripping players from actually thinking about the engagements they are in. Jump up on a table to get the highground "I have the advantage!", kick sand in the enemies eyes, "I have the advantage!", there's so many easy shortcuts a player can take to simply gain the advantage that cancels out gear, spells, and tactics that they can all just be thrown out and the DM can say to the player "Yea, do whatever you want, you'll have the advantage either way." Bonuses weighed the choices the player made, whether you like it or not, and were a hell of a lot more necessary to the outcome than saying "I have the advantage" after doing some trivial stunt that cancels out a magical item that's worth thousands of gold pieces and took 10 levels to get. What a joke.
 
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Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
This is painfully stupid. Not only are you saying that in 1e/2e your character was unique because of their material possessions (which they weren't), but you're saying that because a character can be customized through skill point distribution, optional class features, and chooseable feats, that makes them LESS unique? It's utterly ridiculous to say that since not only can you still roleplay however you like and you still gain a plethora of different magical items, having character builds was a part of 2nd Edition.

And your quote about you wanting the game to be simple and fast to resolve, well alright, that was already solved decades ago. It's called D&D Basic, and there's a reason they separated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which turned into the mainline D&D series) from D&D Basic, it's because for an "Advanced" game they wanted more complexity and "Advanced" rules. If you want a simplified, watered down experience you should go play D&D basic or, get this, find another game to play. Nobody put a gun to your head and said you have to play D&D, and quite frankly I'd prefer if you didn't, since this game doesn't need more childish players that get upset about being able to pick and choose options to optimize your rolls and abilities better, you know, things that function as the "game" part of the "roleplaying game".

The Advantage/Disadvantage system is an abortion of game design antithetical to the core framework of the game since it strips play options down by removing the need for buffing, removing the need for using tactics, and generally stripping players from actually thinking about the engagements they are in. Jump up on a table to get the highground "I have the advantage!", kick sand in the enemies eyes, "I have the advantage!", there's so many easy shortcuts a player can take to simply gain the advantage that cancels out gear, spells, and tactics that they can all just be thrown out and the DM can say to the player "Yea, do whatever you want, you'll have the advantage either way." Bonuses weighed the choices the player made, whether you like it or not, and were a hell of a lot more necessary to the outcome than saying "I have the advantage" after doing some trivial stunt that cancels out a magical item that's worth thousands of gold pieces and took 10 levels to get. What a joke.
You registered an account just to call somebody names and insult them? I mean, you must have read the rules just minutes ago and agreed to them. Bye!
 

Fanaelialae

Legend
I'd say the best option would stack advantages, but no more than 3.
If you're going to allow advantage to stack, I see no reason to cap it at 3.

The benefit from having 4+ stacks of advantage is minimal, and I think it's quite unlikely to come up in actual play (I can't recall a time at my table that anyone had more than 2 stacks of advantage). If someone can actually figure out a way to acquire 4+ stacks of advantage, I say let them have the glee of rolling all those dice, rather than arbitrarily denying it by imposing a cap.

If you allow advantage to stack, you've already removed most of the RAW simplicity, so you might as well own that and let the players enjoy it for all it's worth, IMO.
 

Plaguescarred

D&D Playtester for WoTC since 2012
Advantage was specifically not made a bonus to be more Bounded Accuracy friendly. The downside is that once you have it, additional advantage don't give you more edge unless you also had disadvantage somehow.

It's a bit like cover, having multiple instance of cover doesn't give you more bonus to AC than +2.
 

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