Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rhenny" data-source="post: 6857964" data-attributes="member: 18333">As for the randomness, sure, the game can feel random at times, but there are also many mechanics built right into the game to help give players more control over randomness.  Advantage/Disadvantage is the one big one, and inspiration is another.  There are also racial traits (like lucky) and feats (like lucky) and a ton of class abilities that work to grant advantage or allow for dice replacement, etc (like the Diviner dice tricks).   Spell use also can influence the randomness.  The barbarian, the bard...and now that I look at it, almost every class has something he/she can do to warp the odds in his or her favor even at low levels.  By in large, there are many more ways for players to deal with randomness in 5e than in 1e, 2e.  Also, in 1e and 2e, playing a wizard with 1d4 hp per level really amplified the feeling that life/death was random for those characters.  One good hit at low level...bam, and at 7th or 8th level with 25-32 hp, the randomness did not go away.I think the feeling of randomness in 5e is mostly due to the way the game is run, and the choices that players make when they build their PCs.  If a DM does not award inspiration (or allow players to call for inspiration or grant others inspiration like some groups have done) and advantage/disadvantage is not applied as liberally, the game is not taking advantage of those tools.  If the players are not playing the class/race/feat choices that minimize randomness the same holds true.I also think that 5e was designed to minimize the impact of powergaming so it is perfectly legitimate that a powergamer may not like it as much.  The key idea of Bounded Accuracy does keep boundaries on how much better any one PC can be than another even at different levels (also how they perform relative to the monsters they face).  Many find this a benefit, not a drawback, but again, it is perfectly understandable that a powergamer may not like it.From a purely gaming approach, it probably is best to deal more damage rather than defend in most situations, but in some situations it is better to avoid combat altogether to save resources or circumvent the risk that a lucky attack or two (including the critical hit) could do some serious damage to one or more PC.  There are also situations where one PC deciding to go into a defensive stance, could mean the difference between success and failure.   Choices are there.  DM and players need to take advantage of them if they want to tip the odds.</blockquote>

Verification