D&D 5E Where does optimizing end and min-maxing begin? And is min-maxing a bad thing?

[Campbell]

I vastly prefer what I would call more organic spreads of ability modifiers where for the vast majority of values natural ability has less of an impact, there's a range of values where it has a minor impact, and a slightly better impact at extreme values. I find that fits my understanding of the way the world makes much better and has the side benefit of putting less pressure on rolling high ability scores, particularly if other factors like skill level, adjustments for fictional positioning, and equipment take more precedence. Obviously, the game needs to be designed with this in mind. There's also less pressure to roleplay slightly below average scores like 7-8 as representing massive disadvantages. I would hate to roll 3d6 in order in modern versions of D&D, but have no issues with it in Moldvay B/X and Stars Without Number.

Examples are included below.

Here's the Stars Without Number spread

• 18 +2
• 14-17 +1
• 8-13 No Impact
• 4-7 -1
• 3 -2

Here's the Godbound spread

• 18 +3
• 16-17 +2
• 13-15 +1
• 9-12 No Impact
• 6-8 -1
• 4-5 -2
• 3 -3

 

[doctorbadwolf]

As for "monster knowledge checks," I only call for an ability check when a player describes an action with an uncertain outcome that would call for an Intelligence check. And I don't have simple communication cost an action. In my view, that's a tax that discourages character interaction and I want more of that back and forth (within reason), not less.

I can't even imagine requiring an action to communicate simple information. That is...not great DMing, imo.
I think some folks just like the game to be arbitrarily "hard"* and "gotcha" trap filled for the players?

*not actually challenging, just full of "artificial difficulty".

 

[iserith]

I can't even imagine requiring an action to communicate simple information. That is...not great DMing, imo.
I think some folks just like the game to be arbitrarily "hard"* and "gotcha" trap filled for the players?

*not actually challenging, just full of "artificial difficulty".

If I squint really hard, I can kinda see it as, essentially, the cost of getting valuable information on a monster. Most fictional actions for which a "monster knowledge check" might apply have no action cost and there's no downside to failure in my experience. As a result, there's really no reason every single person in the party shouldn't be trying to recall lore on a monster to get a benefit. Giving it an action cost puts an end to that pretty quickly. Since a fictional action to basically remember something doesn't feel like it would take much time at all, you then say "Okay, well, the time spent on it is when you communicate to the rest of the party and that takes an action."

So I can see how someone might get there, but that's a very steep cost for a pretty shaky reason in my view. Making it a straight bonus action is probably a good enough deterrent to the skill check pig-pile. As is making sure there's no expectation on the part of the players that they get to make checks for things at will. If the character background doesn't suggest having specific knowledge of a monster, the DM is well within his or her rights to say "No roll, you just fail to recall anything."

 

[Arnwolf666]

Whenever you worry more about levelling and builds than the plot of the adventure and how the world works and when you don't know the names of NPC's, cities, factions, and motivations and/or only care on how it makes your character more powerful.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So I can see how someone might get there, but that's a very steep cost for a pretty shaky reason in my view. Making it a straight bonus action is probably a good enough deterrent to the skill check pig-pile. As is making sure there's no expectation on the part of the players that they get to make checks for things at will. If the character background doesn't suggest having specific knowledge of a monster, the DM is well within his or her rights to say "No roll, you just fail to recall anything."

I just have the whole party roll at once, at the start of combat, or I just use their initiative rolls. I use the 4e monster knowledge checks as a vague guideline for what skills tell me if they recall something about a type of monster, and I just have them keep their dice as they rolled them while I jot down init order.
Any init rolls that are high enough that I think there might be a chance of success, I ask what their skill bonus is for the relevant skill, and add that, and check it against the arbitrary DC in my head. It takes about a tenth as long to do as to describe.

I allow bonus action Investigate checks to examine an enemy to figure out it's weaknesses, especially if circumstance feels right for an observant person to see a clue and be able to deduct something useful.

As for the background part, I really dislike that. IMO, players should feel free to establish bits of background during play. I don't expect them to run through an exhaustive metagame excercise pre-game, where they try to think of everything in the game that their background could be relevant to, and make note of anything at all that fits, and then that is it. I imagine I'd have no players if I did that.

But, without that, such a system, if it can be called that, puts the player character's competence and history into the hands of the DM's "common sense", which means nothing more in reality than that individual's intuitive, subjective, sense of the world. I don't like the idea of a player character's knowledge of something being determined by the vague intuition of someone other than the player of that character.

But maybe I'm using incorrect assumptions about what you meant? Idk, I'm just a guy. lol

Either way, I see what you're saying. If a player thinks their character should know about Lich phylacteries, in a campaign world where Liches are a new or long forgotten thing, and only the equivalent of old candlekeep scholars would even know the basics of what the hell a lich even is, that player needs to explain why their character would know that, and if there is no explanation, it isn't a check. At most, they could Investigate the problem, if something in the world indicated that there is something to investigate.

Which segues into a thing Ive been thinking about a lot lately.,

That is, "metagaming" as a way to make up the difference between character competence and player knowledge/intellect. But that is fodder for another thread, I imagine.

edit: forum bugginess on my browser lead to cross tab multi-quoting, and then cross thread multi-quoting. fixing it now.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It is objective. The warlord objectively cannot mechanically model the concept most of the time in play, while the ninja can.
[...]
If the Fighter was a bare chassis, with most of it's features being in the subclasses, the Battlemaster might actually cover a warlord. But a class concept isn't covered if you can't spend most of your time doing it's "things", so no, the warlord isn't covered in 5e.

It is entirely subjective, because it depends entirely on what a given player thinks a warlord is all about. The way I see it, a warlord is primarily someone who hits an enemy with a sword, because that's what it's powers do. Some of their powers also give bonuses to other characters, or give them actions or whatever, but I never saw that as being their main thing. YMMV, obviously.

While we're at it, a wizard (in 2E or 3E) was still a wizard, even if when it could only cast one spell per day. The fact that it spent most of its time as a lousy fighter did not mean that the class concept wasn't covered; it just meant that a class concept doesn't require doing unique things most of the time.

And yeah, I stand by my anti-fighter statements. It's been a terrible class in nearly every edition of dnd, and the game would be better off without it.

I'm not going to disagree with that. At the very least, the level of broadness in the Fighter class is inconsistent with the level of specificity in the Barbarian and Ranger classes. Either the latter two should be subclasses of the former, or each subclass of the former should be expanded out into a full class.

 

[iserith]

I just have the whole party roll at once, at the start of combat, or I just use their initiative rolls. I use the 4e monster knowledge checks as a vague guideline for what skills tell me if they recall something about a type of monster, and I just have them keep their dice as they rolled them while I jot down init order.
Any init rolls that are high enough that I think there might be a chance of success, I ask what their skill bonus is for the relevant skill, and add that, and check it against the arbitrary DC in my head. It takes about a tenth as long to do as to describe.

I allow bonus action Investigate checks to examine an enemy to figure out it's weaknesses, especially if circumstance feels right for an observant person to see a clue and be able to deduct something useful.

In my games, it's very rare for someone to try to recall lore on a monster. I can't say why exactly. I do make an effort to telegraph certain aspects of the monsters when describing them, not just initially when things kick off, but on each player's turn as things play out. So it could be there's enough information there for them to make deductions on their own. It could also be that many of my players are veterans and they know a lot of the monsters' capabilities. But even among the newer players they don't tend to make an action declaration along the lines of trying to recall lore. This is why I've never implemented an action cost, but I can see an action cost being a good thing in some cases, just to create that trade-off.

As for the background part, I really dislike that. IMO, players should feel free to establish bits of background during play. I don't expect them to run through an exhaustive metagame excercise pre-game, where they try to think of everything in the game that their background could be relevant to, and make note of anything at all that fits, and then that is it. I imagine I'd have no players if I did that.

But, without that, such a system, if it can be called that, puts the player character's competence and history into the hands of the DM's "common sense", which means nothing more in reality than that individual's intuitive, subjective, sense of the world. I don't like the idea of a player character's knowledge of something being determined by the vague intuition of someone other than the player of that character.

But maybe I'm using incorrect assumptions about what you meant? Idk, I'm just a guy. lol

Either way, I see what you're saying. If a player thinks their character should know about Lich phylacteries, in a campaign world where Liches are a new or long forgotten thing, and only the equivalent of old candlekeep scholars would even know the basics of what the hell a lich even is, that player needs to explain why their character would know that, and if there is no explanation, it isn't a check. At most, they could Investigate the problem, if something in the world indicated that there is something to investigate.

Which segues into a thing Ive been thinking about a lot lately.,

That is, "metagaming" as a way to make up the difference between character competence and player knowledge/intellect. But that is fodder for another thread, I imagine.

edit: forum bugginess on my browser lead to cross tab multi-quoting, and then cross thread multi-quoting. fixing it now.

When I say "background," I quite literally mean the Background that is provided by the game, not to be confused with "backstory" that the player may have written. (Though I require backstories to be no longer than a tweet in my game.) So a player might say, "Drawing upon my time as a Sailor, I try to recall what weaknesses this kraken might have..." or "As a Sage who studied at some of the greatest libraries of the world, I must have read something about flumphs and I try to remember what their goals are." This is part of describing a goal and an approach which are required in my view for the DM to adjudicate properly. Based on what they say, they may automatically succeed, automatically fail, or we'll go to the dice. "I try to recall lore on X..." is insufficient. I need to know what experiences you're drawing upon and what you hope to recall before I can decide how to narrate the result.

Of course, none of this matters to me if a player acts on knowledge he or she already has. I can only narrate the result of the adventurer's actions, sometimes calling for a check when the result is uncertain. If a player knows about kraken weaknesses, they're free to exploit them with no concern that I'll say anything about it. (They just better hope that I didn't change those weaknesses!)

To bring this somewhat back around to the topic... actually, I can't think of a good way back. So I'll leave it there!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Not just swingy ... but unbelievable. As in ... literally unbelievable.

But to recap one of my favorite 1e rules!

1. Under a 3d6 system, you had a .5% (actually, .46%) chance of rolling an 18. So, um, one out of every 200 characters that you rolled strength for would get an 18.

2. Based on that, the odds of getting the mystical 18/00 were one out of every 20,000 characters. ZOUNDS! (Note- odds are different with different dice gen methods, of course).

3. ...but, Gygax was human-centric. And had that M/F dichotomy. And the non-fighter issue. So most demi-humans (female or male halfling) tapped out between 14-17. Only fighters (incl. rangers and paladins) got to roll percentiles. And only male humans could get to 18/00.

So this wasn't just an example of swingy abilities (although it was), it was also an example of a fighter-specific ability.

Bonus fun fact!

Half-Orcs are the only race to get a bonus to strength in 1e, yet they have a LOWER maximum strength than humans, and they can only advance to fighter level 10. BECAUSE REASONS!

The number of PCs who had 18/00 STR in our old games clearly proves this math wrong!!

They were all legit! Legit, I tell you!!!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

In my games, it's very rare for someone to try to recall lore on a monster. I can't say why exactly. I do make an effort to telegraph certain aspects of the monsters when describing them, not just initially when things kick off, but on each player's turn as things play out. So it could be there's enough information there for them to make deductions on their own. It could also be that many of my players are veterans and they know a lot of the monsters' capabilities. But even among the newer players they don't tend to make an action declaration along the lines of trying to recall lore. This is why I've never implemented an action cost, but I can see an action cost being a good thing in some cases, just to create that trade-off.



When I say "background," I quite literally mean the Background that is provided by the game, not to be confused with "backstory" that the player may have written. (Though I require backstories to be no longer than a tweet in my game.) So a player might say, "Drawing upon my time as a Sailor, I try to recall what weaknesses this kraken might have..." or "As a Sage who studied at some of the greatest libraries of the world, I must have read something about flumphs and I try to remember what their goals are." This is part of describing a goal and an approach which are required in my view for the DM to adjudicate properly. Based on what they say, they may automatically succeed, automatically fail, or we'll go to the dice. "I try to recall lore on X..." is insufficient. I need to know what experiences you're drawing upon and what you hope to recall before I can decide how to narrate the result.

Of course, none of this matters to me if a player acts on knowledge he or she already has. I can only narrate the result of the adventurer's actions, sometimes calling for a check when the result is uncertain. If a player knows about kraken weaknesses, they're free to exploit them with no concern that I'll say anything about it. (They just better hope that I didn't change those weaknesses!)

To bring this somewhat back around to the topic... actually, I can't think of a good way back. So I'll leave it there!

Oh no! That is even worse! It has to relate to their specific Background? Like, as if the Sailor guy has no backstory with any relevance other than being a sailor?



Lol but seriously I assume that if a player has established that they grew up in an island chain in a family of fishermen, but has the criminal background, you wouldn't bar them from having knowledge of sahaugin just because their Background has nothing to do with the sea?

 

[iserith]

Lol but seriously I assume that if a player has established that they grew up in an island chain in a family of fishermen, but has the criminal background, you wouldn't bar them from having knowledge of sahaugin just because their Background has nothing to do with the sea?

I don't bar anyone from having knowledge. I can only describe the environment and narrate the results of adventurers' actions as DM. They're taking the fictional action to recall lore and in the doing they declare a goal (what they want to recall) and approach (what they draw upon to recall it). Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, sometimes they roll. The context will tell.