D&D 5E What Single Thing Would You Eliminate

[AbdulAlhazred]

A Monk surviving a 10d6 fall makes in-game sense as if it's a Monk of any worth it'll probably have means of mitigating that fall and thus the damage. Any other class, without magical help? Not so much...

A better comparison would be a Fighter surviving both.

Which, since I have been immersed a lot in various Chinese fantasy shows, seems perfectly in keeping for protagonists.

As for the rest, other than an extremely rare property of some magic armours I don't use DR. Armor Check Penalty must be from an ediition or splatbook I'm not familiar with. Three arrows in six seconds? Not gonna happen unless you're somehow trying to fire them all at once. No gunpowder in my games thus a smoothbore matchlock musket ain't gonna be much use other than as a rather second-rate clubbing weapon; though even if I had pre-19th-century muskets I'd still have the longbow be the better and more reliable option.

There's a video of a guy firing arrows, with effect, at close range at multiple targets at very high rates of fire. It is not as unrealistic as you think. This is one of the dangers of this whole "what is realistic to me" concepts of play. Not only does everyone have a different concept, most of them are more-or-less inaccurate.

Thing is, grounded realism extends way beyond this into much more basic things that we most of the time just take for granted. We generally assume gravity and magnetism work the way we're used to; ditto the relationship between elements and materials (e.g. water puts fires out while oil makes 'em burn hotter) and that the same materials are generally used for the same things they are in the real world (houses are built of stone or wood, clay can be made into ceramics for pots and urns, weapon blades are metal, etc.).

Most of us also assume - until and unless specifically told otherwise - some real-world basis for how things like geology, tides, weather etc. work, and how they shape the physical world the characters inhabit.

These are the basic sort of things that make a game world consistent and - for us limited-to-the-real-world players - relatable.

Nobody is suggesting that gravity shouldn't work, as a baseline assumption. Instead OVERCOMING gravity should show how awesome you are, so gravity isn't some sort of realism tyrant, it is a challenge to be overcome, or sometimes a tool to be used. There's a huge difference between what is baseline assumption for the world, and what should be the abilities and SOP for powerful PCs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sometimes I really want to let loose against the PCs but it can be disruptive to an ongoing campaign. I am toying with having the PCs discover and investigate the site of a battle between the BBEG and some group of powerful good guys, and actually have the players play out that battle as sort of a flashback. This way I can give them information about the BBEG's capabilities while also scaring them with just how ruthless and powerful the BBEG is.

Frankly, I just unload on the PCs. If I created a combat scenario, its there to challenge them with its elements. The monsters will try to win, or otherwise fulfill their objectives. Of course I very rarely run a "steel cage death match" style combat encounter.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

See, and this is why magic doesn't work in D&D, why all of the magical elements and the "heroic" elements don't hang together-- because D&D worlds are not magical worlds, they are mundane worlds with a thin layer of magic spread on top. People then expect that magic to conform to the same physical laws that, by definition, it is breaking and are stymied when it doesn't and can't.

I'm not advocating for some kind of Eberronian magitech or some Final Fantasy business... but, fundamentally, magic cannot be consistent and make logical sense in a reality that stipulates the existence of nonmagical processes. An actual magical setting isn't nearly as unrelatable as you're suggesting, because most of the sciencelords demanding that magical law at least imitate physical law aren't really that good at science in the first place-- just ask them about their dice.

This is exactly how I have explained things in my D&D campaign world. EVERYTHING is a magical process, there is nothing BUT magic. Things like 'poison' and 'disease' are therefor just a flavor of curse. Even the most ordinary processes are magical, and in fact this is somewhat of the nature of divinity that it is a process of organizing and systematizing magical processes to produce 'the world' we understand. This is pretty much in keeping with pre-modern thought as well, AFAICT.

 

[Lanefan]

I still think there's so potential in the idea that the XP reward is assessed AFTER the fight based on how hard it was -- damage suffered, spells cast, and so on.

Problem with that is it directly dis-incentivizes the players/PCs to do anything strategic or tactical to make the fight easier for themselves. Is that really what you want?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Probably a 1st or 2nd level, IF THAT. More likely a commoner specialist who can't even hunt his own food because his draw strength for his bow is less than a childs and thus his arrows couldn't kill squat (except maybe a hummingbird...try eating that for a meal...you'll be hungrier than a starving elephant on a diet!).

Anyone can shoot "fast" if they have no power in their bow, even a kid. It takes a little more talent to hit things and targets, but that guy's bow doesn't have the strength to kill a squirrel. In D&D terms, he has a weapon which may surprise you, but it's damage is 0-0, or if he is VERY lucky...maybe a 0-1 damage.

He did put 3 shots through a riveted chain hauberk. So, I'm a bit skeptical.

 

[House_Of_Dexter]

Problem with that is it directly dis-incentivizes the players/PCs to do anything strategic or tactical to make the fight easier for themselves. Is that really what you want?

I would make it Pre-Battle...and probably only have 2 modifiers...the number of battles before you took a short rest and the number of battles before you took a long rest...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

5e doesn't do that either & it's a nontrivial change to make retroactive as wotc themselves show in the dmg. Linking the attrition to healing surges instead of hitpoints just shifts the focus of where the attrition is. 5e by comparison has a variant rule for healing urges that only works as anything but a huge power bump if applied to "parties that have no or few characters with healing magic", No mention on how to finish the variant rule so it works with parties with bard druid cleric some sorlocks etc because it's an extremely nontrivial thing to retroactively bolt onto 5e
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HS was just basically the 4e version of what 5e calls "hit dice". There was an action 'Second Wind' which a PC could use in combat, taking a standard action, and giving them healing worth one HS. This was not really a good move, you are better off attacking in 99.9% of all cases. Dwarves get it as a minor action, which is AWESOME for them, as they don't give up their attacks. This works fine though.

The whole model is quite elegant. You have HS which are your daily healing resource, and they are depleted by ALL healing, including healing word, second wind, healing potions, etc. CLW actually doesn't require an HS, and as a standard action power is not really a great option, though it is rather more useful if you have a healing focused cleric build. Short rests are 5 minutes and allow you to expend as many HS as you want, each heals 1/4 of your total hit points. So, GENERALLY you go into each fight with full hit points, or close to it. Leaders normally have 2 minor action heals (healing word for the cleric, etc.). Most parties have one leader, maybe certain other PCs may be present who have some healing, paladins for example. The point is, you are NOT guaranteed by any means to get 'popped back up', though probably that will happen the first time someone goes down. Also simply soaking up lots of damage is not a strategy, because you will run out of HS! While long rests recover all HS, there are obvious plot implications to an 8 hour pause. GMs also often rule that harsh environments inhibit recovery, partially or fully (I think this is also called out in various products, like DS).

The point is, while PCs ARE very resilient, they are far from unkillable, and while some PCs are likely to 'pop back up' at times, this is also less likely to be feasible in big fights (which tend to happen later in the day) and there is certainly a hard limit to this before you start giving up action economy to cast standard action healing. There are definitely tactics which can help with this, but frankly most good 4e players will tell you that a good offense is the best defense and wasting a lot of resources on masses of bulk healing and such are sub-optimal. A paragon Dark Pact Warlock is going to be a lot more help to a party than a paragon Pacifist Cleric, who has basically no damage output and simply stretches out each combat longer without having any good way to end them decisively.

The resulting system has lots of drama and tension around overall survival and success, and the GM can make things brutally tough (or not) as she sees fit.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Just a thread for "how would you change 5E" -- expect the explicit rule is that you only get to alter it by elimination, and you can only eliminate one element (although that may be broadly defined, as you will see in my example ).

For my part, I think I would get rid of non-human PC races. All of them. Maybe it is my players but no one I know actually plays a non human in a decidedly alien way. It's all rubber foreheads and free minor crunch enhancements. I think he world I would build in D&D would be much better with only human PCs, AND the image in my head of the PCs would likely be closer to what they are supposed to be from the players' perspectives.

What ONE THING would you remove from 5E?

Lol. For me it's the opposite. I'd eliminate humans. I see humans all the time, all over the place. I even work with some and live with some others! Boring.

But seriously, if there was one thing I'd get rid of it's probably the choice between Feat and ASI. I think it would be cool to give players more feats.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Why would you yell at a mechanic because your car doesn’t run out of gas every 10 minutes?

For the sake of analogy. Verisimilitude arguments IME have always been geared toward nerfing, removing or generally making things less awesome.

Because real life, a place where there is a shrimp that effectively wields a sonic cannon, a tree that burns its rivals to the ground, and a poison duck beaver is utterly mundane and doesn't have crazy crap in it.

 

[TheSword]

For the sake of analogy. Verisimilitude arguments IME have always been geared toward nerfing, removing or generally making things less awesome.

Because real life, a place where there is a shrimp that effectively wields a sonic cannon, a tree that burns its rivals to the ground, and a poison duck beaver is utterly mundane and doesn't have crazy crap in it.

Yeah, I don’t subscribe to the Dragonball Z school of awesome.

When the game world includes ‘power level 1.4 billion’ and the power to destroy planets, I just lose interest. it has no relevance to me.

I’m more of a ‘whoever saves one life, saves the world entire’ kind of guy. I don’t need immense scale to create pathos.

It’s the same reason I found the newer Star Wars films and the Infinity War films yawn.