D&D General What Is D&D Generally Bad At That You Wish It Was Better At?

[TiQuinn]

That's never been my problem with D&D mounted combat. The big problem is mount fragility at higher levels. Drop a fireball on a high-level mounted party and they just become a slightly singed high-level walking party. The lack of durability of mounts compared to PCs just makes mounted combat a bit of a novelty that doesn't last very long.

(My 12th level paladin recently had cause to ride his celestial mount into battle. 150hp astride 19hp. Sigh)

5e made a good decision in making riding something that PCs were all assumed to be able to do at a basic level of competence. So your party is not completely handicapped by having a PC who just didn't take the proficiency and couldn't ride. And a PC who WANTED to specialise in mounted combat - well, there's a feat for that, but ONLY one feat for that, so you can't overspecialise yourself into uselessness when you're not on your horse.

Hit point inflation kills mounted combat. If your mount keeps the same stat block as you advance, they can hardly take a single hit at high levels without dying. If they do, then suddenly your mount functional acts as an additional party member and is kicking beholders to death on its own. And what happens when you steal someone else's mount, does it suddenly level up to match your power level because you're the one riding it?

If I had my way, I'd start treating mounts as equipment in combat rather than separate creatures with their own stat blocks. A warhorse is a piece of equipment that increases your speed to 60ft, your side to large, gives you one extra 'kick' attack causing 2d6+3 bludgeoning, doubles your carrying capacity, and you gain the 'mounted' condition (check to not fall off under certain circumstances, disadvantage to climb checks, etc etc). Just treat rider and mount as a single creature until such time as they're not (maybe you fall off on a crit?)

Of course, even then it's the edge cases that get you. Spells cast specifically to affect the mount, what happens when you dismount and then remount in combat, etc etc.

It's a shame it's never worked, because the whole image of the charging mounted knight is so emblematic, and you can't really represent cultures like horse-archer nomads etc without mounted combat that works. But it's just so hard. And even if you do manage it somehow, mounted combat moves so fast that most battlemaps are too small to handle it anyway.

I had forgotten about how bad D&D is at mounted combat because no one has attempted to have a mount in a game I’ve been a part of since I was a kid, and even then we knew it sucked.

I like the idea of a mount as equipment though.

 

[GrimCo]

PF1 and Sacred huntsmaster with pet and teamwork feats would like to chat about mounted combat. He also brought his Mammoth rider friend with him.

In 10+ years of playing 5e, no one ever took mount or tried mounted combat. But in PF1, animal companion feature classes did use them as mounts. And mounts did become more powerfull, gained templates and increased in size with levels. Sure, they were like another party member which would start to slow down combats when half the party has one (other half usually has few undead, or they combine it and ride undead mounts ). In my PF1 group, in 7 years of playing, not one campaign was without at least one character who had companion/mount/undead mount.

 

[payn]

PF1 and Sacred huntsmaster with pet and teamwork feats would like to chat about mounted combat. He also brought his Mammoth rider friend with him.

In 10+ years of playing 5e, no one ever took mount or tried mounted combat. But in PF1, animal companion feature classes did use them as mounts. And mounts did become more powerfull, gained templates and increased in size with levels. Sure, they were like another party member which would start to slow down combats when half the party has one (other half usually has few undead, or they combine it and ride undead mounts ). In my PF1 group, in 7 years of playing, not one campaign was without at least one character who had companion/mount/undead mount.

Yeap, PF1 had lots of mount options! There still was the issue of many places a mount doesnt work, leaving the character ineffective, but there were many fun options for mounted PCs still.

 

[GrimCo]

Sure. If you go exploring tight corridors and such, mounts are not very useful. PF1 did differentiate between large tall and large long, so your large mount would in fact be same height as medium sized creature and could act on it's own. It helped that lance was x3 crit, double damage on mounted charge (triple with spirited charger) and one handed when mounted (dual wielding lances was thing). In 5e, it's meh and not worth the hassle.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Isn't Lizards of the Coast revisiting this system with the 5.5 update?

Dungeons & Dragons: XP Budget, Explained

Learn how the XP budget works in D&D!

www.thegamer.com

Unfortunately no, for three reasons.

1. The monster design for 5.5e is, to put it bluntly, sloppy (mostly because it was so in 5.0, to be clear). For example, we've gotten leaked info saying that spells, whether used by players or monsters, are "balanced" with some...not entirely wise or fitting ideas (like an AoE spell is assumed to only hit two targets...)
2. The lack of monster roles significantly hurts the utility of the XP budget process, because it is a lot harder to parse how different monsters' abilities, strengths, and weaknesses interact within their group. You need to know a lot more about each one in order to put together a team that is effective but not overwhelmingly powerful, especially because of the aforementioned spells (and some other abilities) being severely undervalued, or (less commonly) overvalued.
3. The system is still ultimately CR-based; its XP values are themselves based on the CR of the creature in question, so it's just the CR method with more steps. That linked page, for example, explicitly says not to use too many low-CR creatures, because such creatures don't give XP but still increase the difficulty of the encounter. To have an XP budget system where some monsters literally don't cost any XP is, I should think, a pretty obvious design hole.

It's sort of a "too little, too late" kind of thing. It would be like adding subclasses to every class in the game specifically designed to have the general notion of 4e roles. Maybe, if such a thing had been done back in D&D Next such that it could actually interact with the system as a whole and establish useful patterns and structures, but tacking it on now, over a decade on, with the entire rest of the system still working the old way and this method just being a different coat of paint on that old way, it's just not going to work like 4e did.

If I may give a different example: Imagine if they added a new way to look at subclasses, which allowed players to pick one subclass features option from a list of (say) 3-5 at each point where their class gets subclass benefits, and they called this option "Kits". Would that be a true translation of the way 2e kits worked? Or would it just be a very, very slightly tweaked version of just getting a typical 5e subclass, just using the name "Kits" without really expressing the spirit of that mechanic?

My position is that that would be a hollow, kind of fake implementation of "Kits" in the 2e sense, which were much wilder and woolier and could heavily remake a class, something subclasses do not do and which it doesn't look like they'll ever do. (WotC has had many opportunities to make subclasses that remove or entirely replace existing class features, and has never actually done it.) It would be wearing the name of "Kits", but it wouldn't be Kits, not even as a translation.

As an aside, note my use of the word "translation" here. I fully understand that just ripping a mechanic out of one game and shoving it into another is often unwise and counterproductive, just like trying to rip a phrase out of one language and sticking it into another. Hence I speak of "translating" a mechanic from one edition to another; it needs to account for the different structures of the new system. But just as you can have a deeply flawed and inaccurate "translation" from one language to another, you can have such a thing from one game system to another, where the spirit of the mechanic is abandoned while preserving a superficial shell of similarity. Or, to use the famous (but probably inaccurate/false) example, Bibles poorly translated into Russian that transform "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (=people want to do good, but human failings inhibit them) into the utterly hilarious and completely off-target "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

IMO, the 5.5e XP Budget is a "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten" bad translation of a 4e mechanic. I'll leave the topic there, because I'd rather not be responsible for making this "about" 4e. Just note that this is far from the only place that 4e mechanics were handled so.

 

[Celebrim]

With social encounters, basically, if a situation is pure roleplay, your stats don't matter, and if your stats do matter, a Bard or Rogue with Expertise in a few social skills does all the heavy lifting, while the best thing the other PC's can do is keep their mouth shut.

This is not a problem with D&D specifically. This is a problem with skill challenges generally. If for example you present a hard stealth challenge, then it's almost certainly better to send in a single stealth specialist than it is to try to have the entire group pass the challenge given that some members will be inept at stealth. If you have a hard social challenge, it's almost certain the case that only the socials specialists are necessary and able to pass the challenge and they'll do better working alone than with characters that treated CHR as a dump stat and are officious in all social situations. This is a design challenge that is pretty much independent of game system provided that character concepts like "bad in social situations" exist. Dealing with it is hard because the real solution is split the party along the lines of tasks that they are each good at, but not only is designing that hard it requires some imagination on the part of players to utilize each characters strength. Not only do you have to design the puzzle, but they have to for example realize that Count Sedrick loves nothing more than betting on gladiatorial combat and that presenting the uncultured barbarian as a potential prize fighter would attract his interest more readily than elegant talk at parties. Or at least be open to that as some previously unstated aspect of the Count's character.

And chase scenes, well, some classes do have abilities that trivialize them. Barbarians, Monks, and even Rogues (thanks to double Dash) are especially fleet of foot, and there are many spells that can close the gap with ease (hey I'll make a wall in front of the person we're chasing!). The classic chase scene doesn't really work unless the person being chased only has a slight advantage over you that can be overcome.

Chase scene design is also complicated, but this protest sounds something like complaining that combat is pointless because a class might have an ability that trivializes it, like for example a character might can both fly and have strong ranged attacks making Tyrannosaurus Rex pointless as an encounter. That's an encounter design issue, and not a problem with combat.

 

[Celebrim]

Not simulation. Simultaniety. As in, things happening at the same time. Particularly in combat.

In the TSR editions it was at least possible to have multiple things happen at once, though still not often and-or believably. In the WotC editions it has become impossible by RAW.

Think about it: in 3e-4e-5e it's impossible by RAW for two foes to kill each other at the same time because the strict turn-based setup dictates that one of them has to strike first and thus the other won't get to strike as it'll be dead.

It's easy to fix - use a smaller die for initiative, re-roll it each round, and allow ties - but for some reason they don't give us this even as an optional rule. EDIT to add: another easy fix is to have it that everyone still gets their attack in a round even if they die or are otherwise incapacitated during that round.

I can't speak for anything post 3.0e and my rules are slightly tweaked so I don't even remember but RAW is but it is at least theoretically possible for toe foes to kill each other in my 3e game.

1) If both fighters have the same initiative count and the same DEX bonus, they go simultaneously. In the course of seven years that happened at least a half-dozen times, though non-resulted in PC death because PC deaths are relatively rare. However, multiple times both sides landed blows simultaneously.
2) If both fighters can function at below zero hit points, then both can kill each other. This is somewhat rare in 3e RAW (though far from impossible) but it's actually really common with my slight tweak to the rules that gives dying characters a chance to remain conscious. There are also a lot of other potential circumstances though, such a raging character only being alive because they are in a rage and they'll die instantly if they come out of the rage (because their temporary CON bonus will go away).

Thus, there are circumstances where both sides could die, and AFAIK while both cases are rare both cases above can occur in RAW without going into cases that are highly specific to my house rules.

But that's not really IMO the problem. The real problem is a character being allowed to fully finish his move and/or fully finish his iterative attack before the opponent gets a turn. The game has no provision for partial rounds, and never really had firm rules for handling partial rounds ("segments") which is why they tended to be ignored even back when the game had them.

 

[Celebrim]

This is a great and interesting belief if you're good at social gameplay but a terrible thing if you're bad at it

No system can actually deal with that. It's a special case of a general problem that no system can take the player entirely out of the character. Players have to make choices, and if they are terrible at making choices no system can protect them from that. You can have the most system capable fighter possible, but if you are bad at skirmish tactics or ignore basic tactical ideas like don't get separated or don't let yourself get surrounded your fighter will underperform in numerous combat situations.

 

[Celebrim]

D&D is pretty bad at intrigue because you need more than a minimalist ruleset for it.

It doesn't need social combat rules, but it needs some kind of system that lets you concretely influence organisations without being in direct contact them. Blades in the Dark can do this, as can Wicked Ones and Lancer. You want clocks and ideally "downtime actions".

If there are no rules there is nothing concrete to interact with. D&D is imo a worse system for intrigue than something designed for that purpose.

I disagree, but my disagreement requires you understanding what a transcript of play is and why it matters and the difference between an outcome and an experience. A transcript is the recording of the actual events that occurred in character in the story - what the characters actually said or did. The nature of the transcript is different between the proclamation, "My character tells a joke." and "I say to the elf, "So, an elf and a dwarf enter a bar..." You'll notice that I have to ellipse that second example because I don't actually know a joke about an elf and a dwarf in the bar, so I can't record it in the transcript. If I could though, that would be very different than, "My character is being funny." The fact that I could roll to find out if my character was funny and prove that was the outcome couldn't create the missing transcript of the joke, so a later reader of the transcript wouldn't have the experience of a funny joke the way they would if there was an actual funny joke. The experience of the funny joke could not be shared or transmitted to anyone else, just the unfunny statement that the characters inside the story found it funny without explanation why they found it funny that a later reader could understand.

See the difference?

Blades is really good at tracking and rewarding outcome, but it's no better at generating transcripts or experience of courtly intrigue than D&D. The fact that you think "downtime actions" is an essential part of role-playing courtly intrigue makes me want to pull my hair out.

The fact that you think you need explicit clocks and reputation score is only slightly less frustrating, because I like clocks and used them as early as the early 1990s and having them codified is a good tool to give to DMs to help their decision making. But they aren't needed to run NPCs. A DM can run an NPC based on description of character and some common sense without a universal mechanic, and the notion of escalation while is useful to codify isn't something you have to codify. So yes, my homebrew WEG Star Wars D6 adventure about the Hunters infiltrating a war zone to recover a stranded rebel intelligence officer had codified escalation in it regarding what steps the Empire would take if they began to suspect the PC's existence, and in the same campaign in a different adventure I had codified escalation from a slaver/crime boss if the PC's became a thorn in his operation, but none of that is essential to creating the transcript or experience of courtly intrigue. The essential elements of transcript and experience of a story of courtly intrigue (and I'm going to emphasize this) do not exist in the metagame.

 

[overgeeked]

Not simulation. Simultaniety.

Too right. My bad. Posted while incredibly tired. Clearly had a reading fail.