D&D 3E/3.5 Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E

[FormerlyHemlock]

He does, and that is what he does. But... that's his first order strategy (stand as far as possible away (in this case 5 ft) and shoot).

Generally the problem with switching to other weapons is that while he's got a rapier and, I think, Duelist fighting style, his golfbag weapons are not as good as his primary weapons so he needs to be eating a fairly huge disadvantage from something for 'and I shoot it with my crossbow' not to be the go to attack.

Let's say then, based on what you describe, that he's got four main attack modes:

(1) Shoot with crossbow for damage (with or without Sharpshooter sniping)
(2) Shoot with crossbow for disarm (using DMG Disarm option, opposed attack roll vs. enemy Athletics)
(3) Throw net to restrain
(4) Rapier and shield for damage

Granted that, given crossbow expert, #4 is probably not useful very often. But #1, #2, and #3 have very different utility profiles, e.g. #2 is more likely to be useful vs. Frost Giants than #1, and #3 is more useful in a large party. Sure, it's true that 5E is so easy by default that you can probably get by on just #1--but you don't have to play on default difficulty. I strongly recommend turning up difficulty to somewhere between Deadly and Quadruple-Deadly if you want to have interesting fights. Or in other words, see if you can get your DM to handwave fights under that threshold ("You kill the bugbears, losing 3d6 HP or one spell slot in the process." "[rolls] Okay, I lose 8 HP. What happens next? Can I tell if anyone heard the struggle?") and only break out the initiative/battlegrids/etc. for fights that you could actually lose. You ask the question, "Why would I choose to play a mostly-noncombat-oriented campaign in D&D?" and the answer is, "If you want the potential for violence to shape the campaign." If the Parshendi invasion could theoretically be resolved by fighting your way across the continent, infiltrating the court, and butchering the Parshendi Emperor, but you can't do that because you're not a demigod and you have to sneak around and do what you can while looking for opportunities to do more... then D&D might be a good ruleset to use for the campaign. If on the other hand the campaign is about legal maneuverings and love triangles and looming bankruptcies, maybe GURPS would be a better choice.

We've played together over a ton of different game systems. I think a huge part of it is 5E. Obviously everyone can disagree about what constitutes good encounter design for someone's home game, so let's bust out a published adventure - mines of Phandelver has good reviews, and thus should be providing interesting encounters. This group has played through. It was amazingly boring combat wise to play, because none of the combats required me as a druid to mix up my 'go to' combat script. We played pretty intelligently and dodged the two potential fights that could get ridiculous I suspect.

I'm not saying the combats weren't challenging btw. It was often close as to whether someone would die. It was just very straightforward to decide what to do.

Crank up the difficulty by a factor of four or so, to the point where somebody will die unless you change your doctrine and tactics. Enemy hobgoblins entrench every night behind field fortifications (3/4 cover or better), goblins own the night thanks to Nimble Escape and darkvision, drow have designated Faerie Fire spotters, kobolds throw nets and come in large numbers and when things go badly retreat over what turns out to be prepared pit traps, orcs abandon orcish culture as a loser's game and study elvish culture/magic (scro!) and ride horses for mobility and have lots of battlemages, banshees play hit-and-run using their incorporeality to avoid retaliation, dragons leverage their Stealth to get surprise on the party, goblins buy sleep poison from drow, illithids send Intellect Devourers to meet the PCs wearing the bodies of peasants and pilgrims and try to possess PCs when they are asleep, etc., etc. Try to crank up the difficulty in a way that leaves the possibility of counterplay on the part of the PCs, instead of silly fiat stuff like "this dragon has AC 29 and is immune to all magic and poisons."

5E is easy by default. Make it more interesting.

 

[ProgBard]

So in the home game I've been running for going on a year now, one of my players is a self-described powergamer. A few months ago he confessed, with tongue partially but not entirely in cheek, that in most games before this one he felt his biggest accomplishment would be if he could make the DM cry - i.e., come up with some loopholing combo of powers that could exploit RAW to effectively work as a cheat code and do an end-run around the carefully crafted obstacles of the scenario.

I am perfectly okay with the idea that 5e does not especially support this style of play. It doesn't need to be a tent that friggin' big.

In our game, this guy is a delight to play with - he's proactive, he does things that forward the plot, he often makes choices that are interesting instead of "optimal." His style balances well with a group that has varying levels of time and experience in the hobby and want diverse things out of the game. I think I can take some credit for this, because I invest a lot of time and care in the game, I'm not an adversarial DM, and I want everyone to have the kind of fun they're looking for as best as I can provide it - he wants to kick a lot of ass, and I'm happy to give him lots of opportunities to use his powers to be awesome doing it. But the system helps, simply by not being fiddly in ways that make it easy or tempting to rules-lawyer. It's set up to be a conversation between the players and the DM, and that suits our collective style well, even though it means having to find the sweet spot among a number of different player goals.

(Which, by the by, is why, having seen this diversity in action, I cast a very serious side-eye on assertions that "everyone power-games" and "everyone optimizes." Yes, if you dim the lights and squint, you can sort of say that those words include most of the things players do, but whether it's intended to or not, saying these things feels like a gotcha-game rhetorical flourish, an attempt to say, "Actually, you agree with me, if you'd only admit it." Which is kinda not cool on its face, really, but also not helpful in that it doesn't actually illuminate the things that are being discussed - so you can dilute the meaning of optimize so that it covers the whole universe of player choices, but doing so sheds no light on what we actually point to when we talk about "optimization" or "power-gaming," which really truly are definitely not things everyone does. Anyway.)

So this probably isn't much consolation to folks for whom previous editions with more robust build choices hit their fun buttons more thoroughly than this one, even if your definition of "powergamer" isn't "rules-lawyer who enjoys playing trump cards at the DM." It's true! 5e probably doesn't support your playstyle as well as it does others. Sorry. So it goes.

The question, then - which the OP can feel is directed specifically at him if he likes, or not - is what does that mean for you? What do you want out of this thread? Is this a problem you want to find some solution for? If so, you're going to have to give in on one side or the other of this, I hate to say. Either accept that you are not the audience for this edition and don't play it, or find a way to have fun playing in a way that isn't your preferred style. Your tastes and druthers aren't going to change, probably - which is fine! Your playing style is a perfectly legit approach to this hobby! - but neither is 5e. Alternatively, do you just want a place to bitch about the disparity here? Also cool, bitch away. Only maybe be clear that what you want is a space to say, "Goldurnit, this sure dissatisfies me," so your fellow posters will quit trying to look at it as a problem to solve. Because, fifty pages into this discussion, there's been an awful lot of heat, but precious little light, and maybe it would help to define just what it is you're looking for here.

 

[pemerton]

That isn't true though, players/characters don't need to enter a dungeon more or less on a whim to THE game work. It might be required to make some games work, but not 99% of the ones I have been involved in (at least in the recent past). Characters can have a real hook ie; an item they want or need, someone they need to save, a problem that need solving, etc. Or the characters can simply have that type of personality, especially with the built in back-story and personality of 5e.

And when the person is rescued, or the item recovered, or whatever else, then - if the campaign is not to end - the player must author a new dramatic need for his/her PC.

In D&D, party play is also very important, so the players must also take steps to ensure that the dramatic needs of their various PCs are somehow interrelated or at least reconcilable. This is more metagaming.

Metagaming decisions tend to result in decisions that make less sense for the character

That's not generally my experience, but that's because I play with RPG systems where the mechanics and the fiction push in the same direction, rather than against one another.

To give an example from my 4e game: the invoker/wizard PC has tremendous knowledge of both the past and the future. This is because he is a deva with the memory of 1000 lifetimes; a divine philosopher (paragon path) and a sage of ages (epic destiny). He meets very little that he does not recognise, by reputation if not by prior experience; and little occurs that surprises him.

Mechanically, whenever the player is wondering something (about campaign backstory, or the nature of some NPC or other creature), a knowledge skill check can be framed and rolled and will almost always succeed (knowledge skills in the high +30s and low +40s, where at 30th level the highest default DC is 42). If a check fails the first time round he can use his Memories of 1000 lifetimes (a racial ability enhanced by a couple of feats) to give himself +1d8 on the check.

As far as the character's prescience is concerned, he has a class feature (from Sage of Ages) that lets the player roll a d20 at the start of each round and use that in lieu of rolling; and the character has various abilities that allow him to move, or to attack, or perform other sorts of actions, outside the normal action economy.

In virtue of these mechanical features, the player is able to confidently declare his knowledge of things; very often know in advance whether or not a plan will come off (because he can look at the pre-rolled d20 sitting in front of him and work out whether or not it is enough to succeed at some check); react with confidence to the actions of his enemies (in virtue of his various interrupt and similar abilities); etc.

This player doesn't have to ignore the mechanics of the game in order to play his character. Playing the mechanics leads to the playing of the character.

Here's another example from my 4e game, but involves an effect that two PCs suffered, rather than features of character building:

The 4e Chained Cambion (in MM3) is described in the flavour text as having a "tortured psyche", as "hat[ing] its life, its captors, and its enemies who roam free", and as "screaming its despair within the minds of nearby foes." And it has a mind shackles ability which causes two enemies to take ongoing damage unless they are adjacent to one another, with each victim having to make a separate saving throw. When I used this in game, I shackled the melee fighter to the archer ranger. As the two players had to coordinate their actions or else take damage, they started bickering and complaining. Once one had saved but the other hadn't, the bickering got worse, because the one who had saved nevertheless had to stay shackled because the other player couldn't roll a d20 high enough.

In other words, I didn't have to tell the players to pretend to be filled with despair and hate towards one another; the mechanic ensured that this actually happened.

As a GM - which is the role I most often occupy - I am not going to decide via random die roll whether or not, inside the dank dungeon, the paladin of the Raven Queen encounters minions of Orcus. Of course I'm going to put those minions there, because that's what drives the game forward!

Anything the PCs do drives the game forward, while it might not drive the central "story" or "plot" forward, it those exist in said game. Rolling for monsters and putting things into a world that might be beyond the party in terms of "straight up" combat are entirely different things.

I don't understand how the last sentence has any connection to anything I said. I didn't mention combat ("straight up" or otherwise). I said that, as a GM, I don't author backstory (including the inhabitants of dank dungeons) randomly, but rather by reference to the dramatic needs of the PCs (which I take to signal the play interests of the players - more metagaming!). So if one of the players is playing a paladin of the Raven Queen, then absolutely that character is going to encounter minions of Orcus (or, at a suitable level, an Aspect of Orcus or Orcus himself).

As for the notion that "anything the PCs do drives the game forward", I don't agree with that. I know there are playstyles for which that is true - in my own experience I associate them mostly with a certain sort of 2nd ed AD&D playstyle in which the players "immerse" in character and spend a lot of time talking to NPCs although there is no conflict and hence nothing dramatic at stake. But that is not my own playstyle.

As per my post upthread about the relationship between 4e and DungeonWorld, I am more from the Vincent Baker/Luke Crane school of "say yes or roll the dice", and of pushing play towards conflict. That means authoring and manipulating backstory so that, as much as possible at every point, the players (as their PCs) are forced to make choices that matter, relative to each PC's dramatic need.

To give another example: in the actual play report linked above in this post, it is not a coincidence that Oublivae, the Demon Queen of The Barrens, offers to tell the PCs the location of the Raven Queen's mausoleum. Given that three of five PCs are Raven Queen devotees, but the other two are not and at least one is concerned that she is becoming overly dominant in cosmological terms, this forces a choice (or, as it turns out, a series of choices) that are not easy for the players (or their PCs), and that continue to push the game towards some sort of climactic resolution. (Another non-coincidence there: that Jenna Osteneth, the wizardly apprentice the PCs rescued when they travelled back in time at late heroic tier, turns out, in the present, to be an archlich servant of Vecna, another divine being to whom the various PCs have a complicated relationship.)

This is all metagaming on the GM side of the game. It is absolutely crucial to running what I regard as a good game. (You can easily follow the actual play report links to get more of a sense of what that game actually looks like.)

 

[Jester David]

In our game, this guy is a delight to play with - he's proactive, he does things that forward the plot, he often makes choices that are interesting instead of "optimal." His style balances well with a group that has varying levels of time and experience in the hobby and want diverse things out of the game. I think I can take some credit for this, because I invest a lot of time and care in the game, I'm not an adversarial DM, and I want everyone to have the kind of fun they're looking for as best as I can provide it - he wants to kick a lot of ass, and I'm happy to give him lots of opportunities to use his powers to be awesome doing it. But the system helps, simply by not being fiddly in ways that make it easy or tempting to rules-lawyer. It's set up to be a conversation between the players and the DM, and that suits our collective style well, even though it means having to find the sweet spot among a number of different player goals.

+1
That's the thing, power games often want to kick ass, so the problem is alleviated if you provide them with spacious, kickable buttocks on a semi-regular basis.

5e characters as a baseline are slightly less heroic. The game is swingier, PCs squishier, and generally less super heroic. It lends itself less to regular ass kicking. But that's a problem with the base rules of the game. It'd be easy to house rule some options or variants into the game to allow but buttkicking potential for more heroic campaigns. Some accommodation from the DM just helps.

 

[Quickleaf]

1. My main dislike of the game comes from that I find it by far the most random of any edition of D&D, and being that random I never feel in control of my own destiny. It feels like the dice matter more than my decisions in play, or my decisions in character building. In 3E or 4E, good play could be and was often more important the dice. 1E/2E could be randomly dangerous, but that element of danger is mostly missing from 5E. 1E/2E was random but lethal, and there was a level of calculated risk involved in everything you did and your decisions thus mattered. 5E is random, but things don't seem to matter much. If you fail you fall on your face, not lose/die. This wasn't at all how I played in any previous edition.

Your main criticism here really comes down to how the DM runs the game, knowing that bounded accuracy is part of it. There are 3 points I've noticed DMs migrating from other editions often overlooking about 5e:

• Not everything is worth a roll. This is repeated in different sections of the DMG and PHB, but a 5e DM really should apply it with prejudice. All those "do I notice something?" / "do I know something?" checks from previous editions (esp. 3e/4e) don't really fit 5e's paradigm. Ability checks are reserved for when something that matters is in doubt. Otherwise, just narrate it.
• Know what failure MEANS and narrate more. It's true you can't get a 125% chance to hit a monster in 5e (AFAIK) like you could in other editions, but what this means for the DM is that failure is going to happen a bit more. I've observed 5e hit rates falling around 65-85% chance of success after observing groups playing from 1st-9th level. That seems about right, even if it is lower than a power-gamer wants. The DM, however, should make failure meaningful and interesting. "You miss" is not a good approach in general, but especially in 5e with bounded accuracy because it's going to happen more frequently. This is mitigated by most fights being shorter...which further factors into 5e being about the adventure holistically and not just who pwns the boss betters.
• Lethality involves multiple factors. If you're critical of 5e for lacking in the lethality department compared to 1e/2e, I'd argue that criticism is no more valid than saying 3e or 4e is less lethal than AD&D because AD&D was more lethal all around! There are lots of moving parts that I see 5e DMs miss when running games that could make them more lethal however: (1) Massive damage rules. They're in the game. Use them. (2) Monsters hitting players when they're down. Some monsters should do this when in character. (3) Challenge the party. The DMG's guidelines are a starting point for this, but as folks have widely observed online, the DMG encounter guidelines aren't made for highly optimized parties. I've seen folks go as far as tripling or quintupling those guidelines for power-gamers. This is really the same as in any other edition, to be honest. How the DM designs encounters & adventures is a huge factor in lethality.

 

[pemerton]

As far as TotM vs grid: An important difference in 5e is the absence of flanking. In 5e if your friend is there besides you he or she can help by well, helping (ie giving advantage), hitting your foe so it dies quicker, or (if you are a rogue), allow you to start making sneak attacks.

In 3e you needed to flank, not just "be there" for a lot of this to happen (+2 to hit, sneak attack). And because that is a much more precise position, the grid sorts of become needed.

I still find weird stuff in 5e, though. Monks push for 15'; Thunderwave pushes 10'. Presumably that difference is meant to matter (otherwise why bother) but it doesn't strike me as very TotM-friendly.

 

[pemerton]

I think combat needs to be exciting and engaging, and for me that comes from:

A) Interesting tactical challenges
B) Clever monster design
C) Interesting decisions to make to respond to A or B
D) Meaningful stakes
E) Vivid descriptions

I think this is a non controversial list. D & E are very campaign/GM dependent so I'm not going to discuss them.

D&D is fundamentally about going into dungeons and killing dragons (It's in the title!). The game spends a ton of ink on rules for combat.

I think the combat rules are a bigger part of the game in more modern editions than in older editions. Gygax's DMG has a long chapter on combat, it's true, but it's probably longer than it needs to be (due to poor writing and editing). And when you compile all the rules on doors and traps they're actually nearly as long! And the rules for reactions, loyalty, recruiting henchmen and followers (a bit like the exploration rules, unhelpfully scattered across different parts of the book) are also quite lengthy and have many tables to look up.

Speaking from my own experience, what I see is that (for many D&D players), there has been a reduction in interest in exploration as the focus of play (doors, mapping, scouting out and planning expeditions and then coming back to take out a single monster in a single room - all the stuff that Gygax talks about at the end of his PHB), and a corresponding increase in dramatic conflict as the focus of play (princesses who need rescuing, world-ending crises that need averting, etc). But D&D's conflict resolution mechanics still focus mainly around combat.

I think 4e tried to make a virtue of this by linking D in your list above (and character-centred drama more generally) to A through C. 5e, on the other hand, seems to have somewhat decoupled these.

I think it's hard to deny, even from us who really enjoy 5e, that "tactical variety" isn't anywhere near as rich as it was in 4e, or in man other games. And that's a bummer for people who really like playing the tactical game.

But is it possible to have a game be tactically rich *and* have combat be resolved as quickly as it is in 5e? Because I don't want to spend my whole gaming sessions resolving combats. I don't play D&D to scratch a tactical miniatures itch, I play it to to scratch a storytelling itch, and too much time spent on combat gets in the way of that.

One design solution is to have "zoomed out" mechanics for some fights (those with lower dramatic stakes) and "zoomed in" mechanics for other fights (the ones with higher dramatic stakes). Burning Wheel and HeroWars/Quest both do this.

Some 4e tables do this too, by using skill checks/challenges to handle the lower stakes fights, or by using all-minion set ups for lower stakes fights. (I'm not a big fan of the second approach because I think it can be a bit boring even if quick.)

The higher stakes fights will take longer to resolve, but then these are exactly the ones where there is no tension between resolving the combat and engaging with story.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Let's say then, based on what you describe, that he's got four main attack modes:

(1) Shoot with crossbow for damage (with or without Sharpshooter sniping)
(2) Shoot with crossbow for disarm (using DMG Disarm option, opposed attack roll vs. enemy Athletics)
(3) Throw net to restrain
(4) Rapier and shield for damage

There are only two real options here because 2 requires DM fiat and 4 is as you point out generally a not good idea. The net is a good strategy if the party outnumbers the monsters and they are eligible to be netted. But... that's the thing. It doesn't change the flow chart significantly. 'Can target be netted, and does the party outnumber the target such that it's action economy advantageous to repeatedly net the target. If yes, net target. Otherwise, fire hand crossbow'

Note that from a player perspective at high levels netting sucks. The big drawcard of the fighter is that you get multiple attacks, but if you are throwing nets you can only attack once!

Very unfortunate. Probably more of a cleric activity, less to lose.

I strongly recommend turning up difficulty to somewhere between Deadly and Quadruple-Deadly if you want to have interesting fights. Or in other words, see if you can get your DM to handwave fights under that threshold ("You kill the bugbears, losing 3d6 HP or one spell slot in the process." "[rolls] Okay, I lose 8 HP. What happens next? Can I tell if anyone heard the struggle?") and only break out the initiative/battlegrids/etc. for fights that you could actually lose.

We mostly play hard encounters, but this just causes another problem that I've complained about in another thread - the classes are balanced for the assumption of 6-8 encounters a day in a meat grinder. If you don't do that, suddenly short rest classes look amazingly bad. As a result, this isn't a great solution IMHO. I really don't like it with your later suggest cranking up the difficulty of fights because this REALLY punishes short rest classes because more long rests are forced to get HP back. In our game fights already are 'difficult' in that players might die - some of the encounters in the Mines of Phandelver are pretty tough.

My beef just that you often don't have a derth of options once the fight has started. For example, when I'm playing my druid and I'm locked in combat with 4-5 bad guys that I'm holding down with sentinel I don't actually have to think. I cannot move, because otherwise I will get pounded into the ground by AoOs. I cannot cast any spells, because wild shape. So what I'm going to do is use multi attack and maybe heal myself. This is not a hugely complex decision tree.

I think the combat rules are a bigger part of the game in more modern editions than in older editions. Gygax's DMG has a long chapter on combat, it's true, but it's probably longer than it needs to be (due to poor writing and editing). And when you compile all the rules on doors and traps they're actually nearly as long! And the rules for reactions, loyalty, recruiting henchmen and followers (a bit like the exploration rules, unhelpfully scattered across different parts of the book) are also quite lengthy and have many tables to look up.

Yeah, there is a huge shift - you can see it in how long it takes to generate a character. 1E is fast (the basic box is insanely fast), 2E is slowing down, 3.5 and 4E take FOREVER to make characters and 5E is a lot faster but still much slower than the basic box esq ones (not sure if more or less than AD&D, it's been too long). The game completely changed focus at some point, possibly 2 or 3 times (because grouping 3.5 and 4 together is skating over tons of issues).

I've actually long thought that WoTC should do something like:

D&D Classic: Repacked basic box, gygaxian cruft stripped out, very simple, focus on exploration and supporting the character meatgrinder form of play. Of, you know, get Crawford to do Spears of Dawn D&D version.
D&D Tactics: Repacked 4E, strong focus on tactical combat
D&D 'Dragonfinder': Repacked 3.5E/PF picking up the best lessons of 5E.

I understand why they don't do this though. 5E is a bit awkward at times because it's stuck with a bunch of the complex trappings of 3.5E (but not all of it) while sort of reaching for the elegant simplicity of the basic box and not getting there because it's got a pile of cruft stapled on for unclear reasons. Sometimes I feel like it doesn't really know what to be.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

There are only two real options here because 2 requires DM fiat and 4 is as you point out generally a not good idea. The net is a good strategy if the party outnumbers the monsters and they are eligible to be netted. But... that's the thing. It doesn't change the flow chart significantly. 'Can target be netted, and does the party outnumber the target such that it's action economy advantageous to repeatedly net the target. If yes, net target. Otherwise, fire hand crossbow'

#2 requires DM cooperation, yes, like any optional rule. But "fiat" implies an arbitrary ad hoc ruling; using a DMG option is not an exercise in DM fiat any more than feats or multiclassing constitute DM "fiat".

It's not really my job to persuade you to play my way, but when you complain about the shallowness of a decision tree for nets/archers/Sentinel Druids/etc. it weirds me out a little that you're leaving so many options on the table. E.g. you're not even evaluating the utility of Dodging as a druid? Sentinel + Dodge go really well together. You're not even considering what might happen if you retreat a few steps (eating the opportunity attacks if necessary because wildshape HP), drop out of wildshape if necessary (if the attacks didn't break wildshape already), and casting Spike Growth or Conjure Animals around those same 4-5 enemies? Instead you're just going to jump right to "of course I multiattack and maybe heal myself"? That's often not the best option.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Ptobably play style differences. I find you need to ration your daily spell slots across what you project the day to look like - and as a result I think you're generally better off blowing off your spells before you engage in close combat or when you are knocked out of wild shape. Unless ambushed I find I can generally sequence spellcasting around wild shape activations and out of combat use.

Yeah dodge for disadvantage isn't terrible but the problem is most druid wild shape forms have terrible AC so you're typically ot reducing inbound DPR very much and dead is the best lockdown you can apply