D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Tony Vargas]

Why does the DM's imagination trump everyone else's? Aren't we all playing a game together?

There are games in which the players are co-equal and the DM is just another player. 5e is not one of them. 5e actively followed a design goal of DM Empowerment, and delivered on it. Thus, yes, the DM's imagination trumps that of each of his players individually, or all of them, collectively. D&D has mostly gone that way. In 3.5/Pathfinder, you might be able to assert yourself a great deal as a player, and 'rules lawyer' the DM into seeing things your way, thanks to the reverence fans of that ed/system have for 'the RAW,' but 3.5, itself, actually codifies the DM's prerogative as 'Rule 0' - the community just tends to ignore it.

What if I use a spell/ability creatively and it, by the rules, takes out the BBEG in one round, only for the DM to say, "That's anti-climatic, BBEG stays up." It's 'better' because he says so?

In that example, the DM undercuts himself by explaining his reasoning, but, in general, yes, that's the idea. The system failed (snapped under the strain of your system mastery), but the DM corrected that failure.

What if the DM isn't as imaginative as the rest of the players...his imagination still trumps everything else? Really??

Yes, really. In that case, of course, one of the more imaginative players might just offer to take over the DM role, himself.

I don't dispute that, I just note that just because a low-level party comes up against a high DC in 5e doesn't mean that something's broken, so thus having the assumption that the DC is not tailored to the party isn't inherently flawed (as AA was indicating).

The only thing that would be 'inherently flawed' would be if the DC somehow didn't work. If 'easy' DCs turned out to be impossible, and 'hard' ones turned out to be a cakewalk. Given something as simple as d20+mods vs a DC, I don't see how that could easily happen.

It's totally in-fantasy-genre to always succeed, but not it's not typically a very good gameplay element. Games are interactive, and part of that interactivity is shown by the ability to fail

Unfortunately, 'failure' in D&D combats is prettymuch the TPK. That's a pretty extreme failure, and it's not like there's a grand tradition of saving to disk in D&D, either.

Instead, the sense of jeopardy or challenge can be provided not by actual total failure once in a while, but in making a combat feel close or an enemy clearly threatening, much of the time. The typical dynamic in a fantasy confrontation, for instance, is for the villain/monster to come on strong, nearly mop the floor with the hero, then the hero comes back and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. It's dramatic even though you know the script. D&D uses the rather oddball D&D-originated trope of the Cleric (in-combat healer) to get there, but it does get there.

Early days of tabletop RPGs or modern days of videogame RPGs. I see it as really kind of a playstle thing.
The D&D I like to play is more Western in style than tightly controlled, but neither is better than the other, they just work different fun muscles

(the fun of expression and discovery vs. the fun of creation and presentation).

So I don't thikn 5e's CR guidelines are "less than dependable."

An encounter that fits 'easy' guidelines can be anything but, a 'deadly' encounter can be a rollover. They really haven't gotten the kinks ironed out yet. It's hard to say it's even as dependable a guide as CR was in 3e.

A hard DC is hard compared with all the challenges in D&D, not just at the level you encounter it.

That's in in-fiction concept of 'hard.' If it doesn't do a good job of predicting how it'll challenge your PCs, it's not very dependable for you, as a DM.

When that isn't on the table, dangling from a rope 500' above the ground is almost dull. Because, really, you're not going to let me splat. If I say "I let go," there's going to be some flying bird that swoops around at the last minute and breaks my fall. If I then stab that bird, well, I landed safely in the treetops, maybe took some damage. I've got no real agency, I'm just here to roll dice and advance the plot.

Yeah, I'm always sure to kill off the character of any player who starts bitching about that kind of thing.

Yeah, it does, by saying that the DC of the lock shouldn't necessarily depend on the level the party encounters it at.

Still nonsense. The DC of a lock that stands between the party and some objective of theirs is decided by the DM - not by the level of the party, not by some static chart of lock DCs somewhere. Neither a guideline that gives DCs that should challenge a party of a given level to a given degree, nor a guideline that lists DCs for different kinds of locks, keeps the DM from giving that lock whatever DC he wants: the former (if dependable) gives him an idea of how challenging a given DC will be, useful for a 'tailored' style game, the latter gives him a touchstone for in-world consistency, useful for a 'status quo' style. A particularly complete game will give you both.

4e's "DC is dynamic with your level" philosophy would mean that the party doesn't encounter locks that they don't have a fair chance to pick,

False. There was no such philosophy. There were just guidelines showing about what DCs would challenge a party of a given level. Locks didn't morph to become more difficult as higher-level characters approached them. The DM just had a tool for designing 'tailored' challenges. That still might mean that the party encountered a lock they couldn't pick, it just meant that the DM had a pretty good idea, when he set the DC, that such would be the case. You could also turn those guidelines around to design a status-quo scenario. For instance, you could decide that a rakshasa laired in a certain building, and, being a little paranoid and very wealthy, had locks, traps and other security that were up to it's standards (level). If the PC thief tried to crack that joint at level 6, he'd be hosed.

but 5e's "DC is static with regards to your level and varies with the world" philosophy means that the party will encounter locks that are easy, locks that are difficult, and a range in between, depending on what their goals are and how they approach the adventure.

False, there is no such philosophy. The party will encounter locks that they can open or not as the DM sees fit. If he's using a 'tailored' approach, they'll often require a roll, if 'status quo' they'll be opened without one when the PCs are slumming, impossible to open when they overreach, and allow a roll when they blunder into something closer to their paygrade.

In 5e, there is no such thing as a check out of your league. Just a check of varying difficulty for your league.

Not true. A nearly impossible DC 30 is entirely out of your league if the total bonus you can manage is less than +10, for instance, and not really solidly in your league until you have a pretty fair chance - which'd likely mean very high level with max stat & expertise.

 

[Erechel]

I don't fear any control. @Hemlock states the Czege principle upthread, and I generally subscribe to it. I want the GM to have control over the framing of scenes and presentation of challenges. I want the players to have control over deploying their resources to overcome (via their PCs) those challenges. The GM's role at this point should include adjudication, but I think there is a clear difference - even if sometimes it's degree rather than kind - between adjudicating the fiction and deciding whether or not an action declaration succeeds or fails.

Setting thresholds, for instance, is tantamount to deciding that a certain PC just can't succeed at a certain action declaration. That's something that I prefer to be approaches with caution and transparency. When done ad hoc in a bonus-based, target-number resolution system, I find it tends to lead to railroading.

This runs together GM control over framing and GM control over resolution. I want these kept separate.

(Also, in a skill challenge, the players decide what skills or abilities to use: PHB p 179; DMG pp 73, 75.)

Here it is your equivalent.

"In most cases, a trap's description is clear enough that you can adjudicate whether a character's actions locate or foil the trap. As with many situations, you shouldn't allow die rolling to override clever play and good planning. Use your common sense, drawing on the trap's description to determine what happens. No trap's design can anticipate every possible action that the characters might attempt.
You should allow a character to discover a trap without making an ability check if an action would clearly reveal the trap's presence. For example, if a character lifts a rug that conceals a pressure plate, the character has found the trigger and no check is required."

You see? It's easy to extrapolate the above to the whole game.

5e does not have comparable guidelines for level appropriate DCs. And 5e PCs are more asymmetric than 4e ones. So at one and the same time pressure on the GM to manage pacing in a way that will avoid intra-party imbalance is increased, while the system support for doing so is reduced.

Pemerton, you are a pretty reasonable guy. As I said earlier, there is a bunch of predefined guidelines, obstacles and such. They are not defined by level (with the possible exception of traps, which are classified by the deadliness and tier of play) but they have a predefined difficulty for you to take as an example (traps, dungeon and wilderness dangers). And again, if you don't want to place your own obstacles, you always can go through an official (or unofficial) module. As I said earlier, there are guidelines, not specific, hardcoded rules. And the GM agency -not fiat- is there to decide when and how. If the players (in the same way of the skill challenges can do) decide to creatively use another solution to the problem, I don't see any problem to do it. One character maybe wants to smash down the door on brute strenght, while other may want to open it with thieve's tools to be more stealthy. Maybe the same character, on different occasions.

I would say that the traps DCs are a useful guideline to setting DCs without taking out DM agency. A guideline, not a law in stone.

Whether or not 5e DCs are "fixed to the world" seems to be a matter of contention. @Imaro and @Celtavian don't agree, as best I can tell from their posts.

By "fixed to the world" I'm meaning in the opposite direction of "fixed by levels", not in opposition of DM Agency. In the words of DMG:

IT'S YOUR WORLD
In creating your campaign world, it helps to start with the core assumptions and consider how your setting might change them. The subsequent sections of this chapter address each element and give details on how to flesh out your world with gods, factions, and so forth.
The assumptions sketched out above aren't carved in stone. They inspire exciting D&D worlds full of adventure, but they're not the only set of assumptions that can do so. You can build an interesting campaign concept by altering one or more of those core assumptions, just as well-established D&D worlds have done. Ask yourself, "What if the standard assumptions weren't true in my world?"

This is true about how to handle difficulties as well. They are assumptions about how people handles things. In my own homebrew world, there is no direct influence of "gods", although many people believe in them. But there are spirits everywhere (if you search among custom backgrounds, you will see the Animist Shaman that acknowledges this), both good and bad, and a succesfull DC 20 Religion check, after a long ritual, allows the players to "see" them. Also, you can exorcise a weak demon/spirit possession with a DC 25 Religion check. Strong demons are near impossible to exorcise (DC 30), and a Demon Lord is uncannily difficult to banish, but there is a chance (DC 35). But, if you make logical assumptions, careful thinking, and waste some resources (maybe some spells, maybe money, or magical items -very scarce and valuable in my world) you can decrease the difficulty of this. The monk and the paladin of the group have also a little decrease in the difficulty, due to their backgrounds and skill selection.

This information is shared among my players. They expect to do that, and they expect certain constants and improvise viable ways to decrease difficulty (in one session, they sang and danced Cuban Pete trying to keep a powerful demon at bay from posses a powerful warrior). I brought this here because I try to make a point: This difficulties are fixed to the world, but the world is in the table's hands.

 

[tyrlaan]

I think this is one of the philosophical differences. If a game wants you to succeed, it's not offering a very meaningful choice - either way, you're probably going to succeed. Either way, you win. Either way, the good guys emerge victorious. The fight vs. the bridge doesn't actually affect your chances of the mission succeeding or failing much.

5e throws back to pre-4e game-centered philosophy in that in general it is perfectly okay with you failing disastrously, if that's how it plays out. Now, when the fight is at 1st level against a young green dragon and the bridge is rickety but at least manageable, things like reconnaissance and scouting and in-character research and questions pay off: they let you know the situation before you blunder into it, because if you blunder into a bad situation, you will eat it, and there will be consequences. It's not just choosing the color of the explosions in your ending, it's choosing if you get the good ending, or the bad one.

Overcoming hard obstacles is part of the fun of play. Creating story out of dramatic decision points is part of the fun of play. There is a reason that "kill your darlings" is absolutely critical writing advice, and that stories where victory is assured are often dull. Games where you don't actually beat difficult challenges can also be underwhelming (imagine Super Meat Boy on "Easy mode.")

I don't think "wanting you to succeed" is quite the hyperbole you paint it to be, but more to the point - I've run encounters in 4e that were designed very much in the sense of it being "okay with you failing disastrously". I do not profess to be some 4e GM master. I do however ask how is this a feature of non-4e games, especially considering I've witnessed myself do this in 4e?

Overcoming obstacles and dramatic tension are presumably two of the keystones behind why many of us play RPGs, and I very much agree with what you say in the final paragraph of yours I quoted. I'm just not sold on how 5e somehow delivers this in a way that other editions haven't. To be frank, I think the art of delivering meaty obstacles and drama are completely tried to the ability of the GM and in no way tied to the ruleset (Hm, maybe that's not completely accurate - perhaps mechanics like the Doom Pool in MHRPG actually DO help deliver meaty obstacles and drama).

Anyway, if you GM 4e and slavishly abide by scaling DCs/numbers, yeah you risk coming up short in the drama and obstacles category. But if you GM 5e and your arbitrary number choices aren't right, you risk the same. So 4e needs a good GM to apply common sense for a greater story and so does 5e.

The system easily facilitates anything. It encourages you to hand-wave things that are unimportant. No more taking 20 or 10 or requiring any check. If the players have time and can get through the door, they do. If the players are under some kind of time constraint, the DM can fashion that dramatic tension in whatever fashion they deem interesting. Most DMs will fashion such tasks to make it fun for the player only throwing such obstacles at players prepared for such tasks or that might find them interesting. In 5E if the players come up with a good idea for breaching the door or whatever activity and he can find no reason not to allow it to work, the DM allows it to work. No time wasted rolling. No series of bad rolls requiring roll after roll after roll while the DM figures out while the players have failed as often as they have. It all focuses on the narrative purpose of the activity and the result of failure, which the DM should have determined before play for the key points when he will require skill rolls or non-combat rolls. He doesn't require rolls all the time any longer. Every door does not require a break DC. If the Big Bad Fighter or Barbarian is raging through a dungeon with doors he can break down, the 5E DM doesn't waste his time requiring rolls that might allow a wizard to break the door down with a lucky roll. The 5E DM uses his time to describe how the raging barbarian is bashing down doors like they are made of paper. If he does have a door in mind that only the big strong character can break down, he constructs the DC system to allow only this to occur with a high percentage rather than some lucky single roll like 3E did.

Completely cannot understand what 5e does for me to allow this to happen in any way easier than it could in any other edition. I can hand wave and state "it works" in any game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Completely cannot understand what 5e does for me to allow this to happen in any way easier than it could in any other edition. I can hand wave and state "it works" in any game.

There's also the community to consider. In 3.x, for instance, as in any RPG, you, as GM, could change any rule you wanted, it even came right out and said so in 'Rule 0.' Yet, in spite of that, the community was very focused on RAW, and that carried through to the attitudes of many players. So you could hand-wave in 3.5, but some of your players might rebel if you did.

5e also admits that the DM can change things, but it doesn't just do it once and forget about it, the concept is part of the core resolution mechanics, and the player is constantly directed to 'ask the DM.' It creates an expectation that the DM will decide how stuff happens. So the DM hand-waving the rules to decide how stuff happens isn't a stretch.

 

[pemerton]

I think your characterization of 5e's DC's is off. If a low level PC encounters a significantly high DC, there are a few things to note:

• There's still a chance, thanks to Bounded Accuracy and mechanics like advantage. There are vanishingly few DC's that are actually impossible. That's heroic and legendary - that's Bilbo Baggins sneaking into a dragon's lair.
• The sense of accomplishment in overcoming the challenge is huge because the challenge doesn't calibrate itself to your capability. The lock doesn't care if you're a level 1 rogue or a level 20 rogue, so if you're a level 1 rogue and it's a very hard DC and you get it anyway - that's a huge win, a reward for clever play, and a lucky roll.
• A "managable" DC in that same situation would be a speedbump - roll until someone gets lucky enough to beat it.

• There are a few assumptions built into this.
  
  One is that retries are permitted. 4e is a bit ambiguous on this, but there was a Save My Game column some years ago now advocating "Let it Ride" for 4e, and that is pretty clearly how a skill challenge works, because every retry costs you a failure, and three failures bring the challenge to an end.
  
  Another is that the player is somehow unaware that the ingame situation is a fiction constructed by a referee. Because if the player is aware of that, the player is equally aware that whether or not there are sufficient mechanical and/or in-fiction resources available to overcome the DC is something that has also been determined by the referee - especially if [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s philosophy of super-strong GM force is being applied.
  
  Another is that the choice to tackle a challenge, even one which the PC can overcome without needing a lucky roll, carries no interest or cost in itself. That is often true in traditional dungeon-crawling play, but often isn't true in the sort of high adventure, high bathos drama towards which many games are oriented (and which 4e tends to support fairly well).
  
  For instance, if opening the lock is easy, but opening the lock will free your father's killer, then the agony of choice isn't in trying to roll a 20 on the die; it's in deciding whether or not to open the lock at all.
  
  

  5e throws back to pre-4e game-centered philosophy in that in general it is perfectly okay with you failing disastrously, if that's how it plays out.

  The flipside to this, presumably, is that 5e throws back to the pre-4e game-centred philosophy of disposable characters?
  
  Or perhaps there is a more neutral way of describing the difference in approach between the two games?
  
  

  Getting the die to a higher number with limited resources - that is challenge. Bring me your blesses, your ability score bumps, your Help actions yearning to breathe free. That's the challenge.
  
  But of course, it's an opt in challenge - you could just not bypass the lock. That's fine, too.

  Why not just let them figure out if they can bypass it? Maybe rather than pick the lock, someone brought a vial of acid, or the fighter has a crowbar and doesn't know the meaning of the word "closed door." Or there's a back entrance that they just haven't found yet. Or whatever.

  This fails to describe any difference between 4e and 5e, given that in 4e, just as much as 5e, marshalling resources to boost success chance - both in PC build and in action resolution - is a pretty important part of the minutiae of play.
  
  As is "bypassing" the lock, whether by using acid (a move in the fiction that opens up Dungeoneering rather than Thievery check in the challenge) or a crowbar (a move in the fiction that opens up a a STR or Athletics check rather than Thievery), or taking the back door.
  
  

  If a game wants you to succeed, it's not offering a very meaningful choice - either way, you're probably going to succeed. Either way, you win.

  Here we again see that assumption about stakes and costs.
  
  If the thrill of the game is whether you cross the bridge or die trying, that suggests one approach DCs. If the thrill of the game is located elsewhere - for instance, in story development or story consequences - then traditional low-level dungeon crawling DCs, with a high chance of TPK in every encounter, aren't very advisable.
  
  

  Also, philosophically, "tossing the players a bone" is tantamount to "removing consequences," and thus sets up the failure as potentially unsatisfying gameplay (as I experienced just the other week with a newbie DM in 5e!).
  
  <snip>
  
  It is fine if the mission fails. But it is almost always bad adventure design to let one roll come between success and failure, regardless of the odds on that roll. A lock with an outrageously high DC is not something that is gating off necessary content for your play experience.

  There seems to me to be a degree of tension between these two passages. If you're not "gating off" content, how are you nevertheless not "removing consequences"? What form does "consequences" take, if not the generation of fictional content that (ipso facto) precludes conflicting content?
  
  

  4e PC's have unique combat powers to deal with fights and don't have a lot of unique exploration powers to deal with rickety bridges.

  Speak for yourself, and your PCs!
  
  The PCs in my game have had a pretty broad range of powers for dealing with rickety bridges for pretty much the whole game, and especially from upper heroic!
  
  

  there is a HUGE psychological difference between a DC and a saving throw.

  Like [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], I don't see this at all. Traps that in 3E would be Reflex saves against a DC are, in HARP, Acrobatics checks against a DC. In 5e, some spells requires saves and others (Illusions and Web, from memory) require ability checks. These are differences that carry mechanical baggage with them, but not in my view any sort of dramatic baggage.
  
  

  I am saying that the presumption that a DC should be within a narrow 40-60% or so band of success is a presumption that can lead to bland, predictable gameplay. A presumption that a DC is high if it makes sense to be high regardless of the PC's level is a presumption that can lead to some interesting problem-solving moments.

  This looks like either projection (of your own unsatisfactory RPG experiences onto others) or theorycrafting. Look at the actual skill challenge posts that abound on these boards and you'll see that many of use are not experience "bland, predictable gameplay"!
  
  Here are a few favourites from my own game.

 

[Manbearcat]

Be fair. The Fighter should have to roll unusually high to do those things. Not that there's any skill involved in casting spells, but the poor casters will no doubt feel very hard done by if their strengths can be easily duplicated by someone who doesn't even have to roll a high score.

I was thinking 17 Arcana checks in rapid succession, any of which land on an even number and a Wild Surge happens; roll 1d6 to find out what irrevocable, terrible thing happens that you would never, ever, ever (did I mention ever?) risk happening to you so why did we even make up this table that will never get used in the first place?

AFAIK, fighters in 5E can only do the items in bold. They can't do Wall of Stone, Teleportation (except Arcane Charge), or Gate things in.

1 - I was thinking of the pure martial archetypes Champion and Battlemaster.

2 - If we do include Ritual Caster investment and/or EK magic, I'm still not seeing these capabilities on either the Ritual list or the EK spell list. Help me out?

You can run a game of D&D where rule resolution and content creation are separate responsibilities. The DM will always and must always be responsible for content creation, because as the Czege Principle states, "when one person is the author of both the character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun."[1]

Tiny little tangential aside. While I do subscribe to Czege's Principle across the majority breadth of an RPGing experience, I don't agree with it as a logically unassailable, ever-present axiom. I'm a big believer (especially as prologue) of he player authored kicker in Sorcerer and Dogs. Laws' DMG 2 in 4e brought this indie technique into the fold for that edition's Story Now (!) generating noncombat conflict resolution portfolio. I find it works extremely well when skillfully applied, situationally, and with limited use.

The trick is the resolution mechanics need to be robust enough such that if we're looking to find out if you break that bad habit (and I'm playing that bad habit at your behest), you can play you and I can play your bad habit and we can push hard against each other and find out what happens by way of the resolution mechanics mediating our dispute.

Done well that is a hell of a lot of fun and legitimately creates emergent content/establishes backstory regardless of who authored/introduced the adversity.

If the resolution mechanics are not robust or they're subordinated by force, then what is the point? But that stands regardless of whether I, as GM, introduced the adversity or the player did.

 

[TheSwartz]

Trolls. I hate the trolls...

 

[Manbearcat]

Just wanted to quote both of these right quick as I'm trying to get up to speed on responses. Both of these address issues that I wanted to address. These are responses to thread participants as a whole, not to pemerton.

This runs together GM control over framing and GM control over resolution. I want these kept separate.

(Also, in a skill challenge, the players decide what skills or abilities to use: PHB p 179; DMG pp 73, 75.)

GM Force is different than GM fiat is different than GM scene framing authority.

Force is a very specific phenomenon. It is the phenomenon that I invoked quite a bit in the "Best of 4e" thread as 5e being very vulnerable to the phenomenon due to its construct and its ethos. It is the phenomenon that you're seeing [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] not just saying 5e is vulnerable to, but advocating the technique as the best/required way to run 5e.

Force is a technique that subordinates player agency or player authorship rights over their thematic, strategic, or tactical decision-making and/or the authentic/legitimate output of the resolution mechanics when they are consulted "to find out what happens." Suspension, abridgment or fudging of the action resolution mechanics or their results is the classic example of Force. Done by the GM it is GM Force. Done covertly (without knowledge or consent by the players) it is called Illusionism. Done prolifically and outside of the established social contract, it is called Railroading. Players consenting to such a scenario is called Participationism.

It is the reason that you're seeing [MENTION=6779717]Eric V[/MENTION] protesting and crying foul.

There are a few assumptions built into this.

One is that retries are permitted. 4e is a bit ambiguous on this, but there was a Save My Game column some years ago now advocating "Let it Ride" for 4e, and that is pretty clearly how a skill challenge works, because every retry costs you a failure, and three failures bring the challenge to an end.

Also true and addressing one of the aspects of KM's posts that I have a problem with. The only thing I'll add here is that I don't think 4e is ambiguous on it at all.

1) Mutliple of those Save My Game articles and Skill Challenge articles advocated for:

a) Let It Ride with the situation dynamically changing after each resolution
b) Success with Complications
c) Failing Forward

2) The advice in the DMGs, especially DMG 2, were stoutly in the corner of the situation changing dynamically post-resolution. People brought (utterly incoherent) process-sim carry-over for Extended Contests from 3.x and kludged it into 4e Skill Challenges. Hence why you have seen me routinely cite the "I DIPLOMANCE THE KING HARDER/MOAR" phenomenon when GMs respond to a failed parley (diplomacy check) with the king and his court with "...the king isn't convinced..." You can't have dynamic, closed-scene conflict resolution if the play procedures mandate that each micro-outcome and the authorship of each instance (or lackthereof) of subsequent content generation must be constrained by process simulating, causal logic and binary success/failure of the immediately preceding resolution.

If failed Diplomacy can only and ever mean "your target is unmoved/unconvinced/unfriendly", then expect social conflict to be boring/stagnant and expect the next action declaration to reflect that (eg MOAR/HARDER). 4e's Skill Challenge mechanics, and no good social conflict resolution, advocates for an unchanging situation post-resolution. This goes just the same for climbing mountains, crossing rope bridges, riding horseback, sign cutting and tracking, sneaking through barracks, and pulling out your roguish "Tricks of the Trade."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You were the one who claimed all you had to do was remove a range of numbers... go back and re-read the post I replied too.

So you'd (still) scale them by level...how... and how is that the same as 5e? No I said if one wanted to simplify it the book suggests using easy/moderate/hard and he game shouldn't break from doing so... what I didn't claim was that it was the same. I'm sure there are differences in play with different ranges being used.

What do you mean 'how'? You just use the current PC level DCs. RC even suggests this for a few specific types of skill checks, probably on the assumption that it mirrors roughly the sorts of situations you'll be in, but it WILL work fine. So a barred door is a DC 26 IIRC, but for a level 10 PC it will be a level 36 DC, etc. A simple lock might be an easy level 1 DC8, for the level 10 guy its 18, still very easy. I mean clearly this isn't as straightforward, but you're bending the system to operate in a way it isn't meant to.

Why would the system not work 'as intended' with only certain DCs? You can't even tell me how it was intended to work, its up to each DM!

No I haven't I said there were loose guidelines... I know what hard is for any relative or concrete definition of hard in my 5e game it is a DC of 20-25. What is hard in your 4e game played the same way?

No, it isn't. DC 20 is hard for level 1 PCs (19 is 4e's level 1 hard DC). For level 10 PCs 20 isn't so hard. They have almost surely about a +4 to their checks in 5e vs level 1. So probably on the order of +8 or +9, and for a character with Expertise or somesuch it would be higher. Heck, our thief had +14 to Acrobatics at level 1! OTOH in 4e Hard is always Hard. I can say "well, its a hard check from way back at level 1" but at level 10 that's a Moderate DC, reflecting that getting a 20 isn't so tough anymore.

It is just a more descriptive system FOR THE TABLE. Its purpose is to be fast and easy to use in play on the fly. The DM only needs to keep in mind three numbers. They're a different three numbers at each level, but he can keep DMing with the same mental toolset at all levels.

 

[Erechel]

I don't think "wanting you to succeed" is quite the hyperbole you paint it to be, but more to the point - I've run encounters in 4e that were designed very much in the sense of it being "okay with you failing disastrously". I do not profess to be some 4e GM master. I do however ask how is this a feature of non-4e games, especially considering I've witnessed myself do this in 4e?

Overcoming obstacles and dramatic tension are presumably two of the keystones behind why many of us play RPGs, and I very much agree with what you say in the final paragraph of yours I quoted. I'm just not sold on how 5e somehow delivers this in a way that other editions haven't. To be frank, I think the art of delivering meaty obstacles and drama are completely tried to the ability of the GM and in no way tied to the ruleset (Hm, maybe that's not completely accurate - perhaps mechanics like the Doom Pool in MHRPG actually DO help deliver meaty obstacles and drama).

Anyway, if you GM 4e and slavishly abide by scaling DCs/numbers, yeah you risk coming up short in the drama and obstacles category. But if you GM 5e and your arbitrary number choices aren't right, you risk the same. So 4e needs a good GM to apply common sense for a greater story and so does 5e.

This is a response on @AbdulAlhazred post about how the DCs "should" guarantee success at about a 60% of the time. In fact, it's a description about 4ed made by a 4ed fan, against 5ed, which is supposedly a deadlier game (or at least a frustrating one). Many people (myself being one, but specially @Celtavian) insisted in your point exactly: there are many of the same assumptions. 5ed isn't worst because somehow delivers dangers in a way that no other game has. The examples given were Skill/Ability Checks against Skill Challenges, with somehow people whom presumably don't understand Skill Checks believe that they are less roleplaying (!) than Skill Challenges, when clearly there is no such difference except on the "in-world" difficulty against "by-level" difficulty. I've always handled Skill Checks in a very similar way to Skill Challenges: there are problems to solve, and there are several possible ways to overcome them, with or without synergy among different skills, abilities and roleplaying, depending on the players' choices. And there are more ways to reward careful play, like Advantage and Inspiration (which, awarded by the DM, is left to the players to decide when and where to use it, and so breaking the "DM tyranny").

The point being made is: many of the "5 Edition SUCKS because can't do X" are utterly false. I particularly like 5th edition because of Bounded Accuracy, which keep skill and stat choices meaningful; because how handles the interaction between Backgrounds, Classes and Races; because the empowerment of the Fighter without needing a weird system of vancian martiality (which is also there in a subclass); because keeps threats relevant en-masse at upper levels and don't scalate things in a Final Fantasy way where a high level character enters an area and suddenly all enemies are unable to even hurt them; because handles Multiclassing in a non-cheesy way; because I like subsystems to make the differences between the classes mechanically, but without the broken, messed out way of 3rd/ 2nd editions, and because the overall game is easy, simple enough encouraging careful roleplaying over dice-rolling without taking away rulesets.

Several critics made are, for me, gross simplifications (like the godlike, unfettered DM power) or blatantly false assumptions (as the luck overdependancy). I see several positions (not all of them) as heavily biased and unable to reason, no matter how many arguments are displayed. I can understand many reasons behind the bias (EG, the anger of leaving behind your entire edition due market reasons; the hatedom of your edition and the sense that this lead to an opposite direction of the new edition; and also emotional attachment), and I can understand a couple of reasonable "It's not my cup of tea" -as the linear and not exponential power growth of Bounded Accuracy-, but please try to read each other possitions in a meaningful way, open minded. Or at least, recognize some bias, and a certain amount of what has been always critiziced as bad for the same people who is doing it now: flame. This post is flame.