Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 4649291" data-attributes="member: 55271">That's statistically busted. A character with +19 (1d20 + 19) will get higher results on average than a character with a +20 (2d20 + 0).Average of 1d20 + 19 = 10.5 + 19 = 29.5Average of 2d20 + 0 = 10.5 + 10.5 = 21And the bell-curve on 2d20 will depress the high- and low-end results, as well.There are basically three problems with high-level play:(1) Complexity of prep due to the multitude of abilities. While some of these problems can probably be ameliorated in various ways, I don't think there's any clear-cut solution: Part of the appeal of playing at those high levels is to have that high power level.4th Edition works around this problem by simply narrowing the focus. You don't really get more powerful types of abilities -- you just get the same abilities with bigger bonuses. This solution can work in 3rd Edition, too, but in a very real and meaningful sense it's a cheat. You're not really offering high-level play, you're just offering bigger numbers.(2) <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/saveordie.html" target="_blank">Save-or-die effects</a>. The link also has the solution I play under. These are independent problem, but it's exacerbated by...(3) The limited range of the d20. If you allow a differentiation of ability, it doesn't matter what randomizer you use -- the differentiation of ability will eventually out-strip the range of the randomizer.I have yet to see any good solution for this. The ELH tries to simply flatten out everyone's progression (but does so in a way that causes all kinds of wacky problems). Another way might be to use a "mega-roll" system for characters with sufficiently high bonuses (where the type of die switches out), but this creates noticeable and meaningful points of discontinuity. I suppose you might be able to mute the discontinuities by instead switching to multiple dice. So when characters reach level 15 everyone starts rolling 2d20; and when characters reach level 30 everyone starts rolling 3d20. (Those numbers are pulled out of my ass.) The bell curve would mute the discontinuity, but you'd still be looking at some weird probability behavior.4th Edition obviously fixes this by simply preventing characters from being meaningfully differentiated from each other. Everyone is basically Doc Savage and advances in all areas of skill and ability in a largely lock-step fashion. (Although if you only did it on attack rolls and saving throws -- which are the only real problem areas anyway -- the probability oddities might not be that bad.)It should be noted that the extant epic-level rules of the ELH are broken in many other ways while doing little to actually fix these fundamental problems.</blockquote>

Verification