D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Eric V]

Depends on how good everything else has been. You make it seem like this event would happen all the time. Why would any DM allow such an event to happen all the time? Give me a reason why this would continuously occur? Are you implying you would play with a DM so lacking in ability that he would decide matters in this fashion all the time? What is the point of your example?

It seems like you're using an extreme, unrealistic example to make some kind of point. What is that point?

You have it wrong. You ask "Give me a reason why this would continuously occur?" when the question I am asking is "Why should that occur even once?"

 

[SkidAce]

But that is a false assumption. Hard means "world" hard. Look at this way: power, training and expertise are the way to do hard things. But still, to the other characters (whom probably don't have Proficiency or Expertise) is still hard. The Expert guy at level 10 can accomplish more often very hard tasks, and can attempt with some success Nearly Impossible tasks, and at the end of his career, Hard tasks are a cake to the experienced rogue, and he is accustomed to the impossible enough to have a fair chance of succeed (+17, 13 or more to make Near Impossible things). But the magician still has to use the Knock spell to open the easiest locks (unless background, etc.).

Quoted for truth!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

As part of the gradual drift of elements of the D&D community away from classic exploration (especially dungeon exploration), I think divination has become less central to D&D play. If you want to run an exploration and planning-heavy game, divination is certainly an aspect of the magic system worth amping up. (Though the spell ranges in classic D&D make it not worthwhile for non-dungeon exploration; in a wilderness game you'd want to expand them a bit, although wilderness gaming poses other problems for adjudicating divination, like a lack of precise knowledge of the setting on the part of the GM.)

RE: "lack of precise knowledge on the part of the DM," this is what makes the Portent ability interesting to me. By dictating die rolls, 5E's Portent manages to give the feeling of knowing the future even without the DM actually knowing the future. "I knew all along he would fail that save if we could just wait for the right time."

There's no reason a DM couldn't create a similar mechanic for Augury in an unknown situation: "If I say 'Weal', you get an auto-Portent die for the next half hour. If I say 'Woe', I get one. Okay, ready to cast your spell?"

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If the GM doesn't succeed in making the fiction engaging in this way, I imagine the game might fall pretty flat. Whether "objective" DCs will cure that I suspect is also pretty GM-dependent, though. And player dependent, too: after all, there is a real difference between "I couldn't overcome that door before, because it was DC 25 and my bonus was +4, but now I can because my bonus has grown to +8!" and "I couldn't overcome that door before because a lowly street thief can't hope to infiltrate the Overtemple of Vecna, but now that I'm a Master Thief I have a chance!", but I think different sorts of explanation (mechanically grounded or fictionally grounded) speak to different players (or perhaps to the same player in different moods).

Wish I could give XP multiple times for this post. You, sir, have made sense of my limited 4E experience for me. I think it's still not to my taste, but if I'd gone in with expectations framed as you have done in your post I would have been a lot more relaxed about the things that I didn't enjoy.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

A DM's imagination trumps everyone else's because he's running the game and putting the most work in designing the adventure. If you want to play alone, you can. Roll the dice, tell yourself the story, have no DM, and you decide everything. I've seen a few players do this.

I do this occasionally, both as prep work for my player-run stuff (test fights with the test party, to measure difficulty and refine monster tactics) and for fun. In order to make it fun you need random tables to generate uncertainty: even if I know there's a 70% chance this coffin is empty and a 30% chance it will release a vampire, there's still some uncertainty about how much to pre-buff before opening the coffin, and also of course the role-playing uncertainty about whether or not Eladriel is going to think it's a good idea to open the coffin anyway. It is somewhat like storywriting and somewhat like playing D&D.

It's hard to do a long session like that but I can run several scenes at least.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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).

No, what is 'flawed' if you wish to use such language, is the PRESENTATION of the information. You present it as 'hard', but that's not really what it is, except in some context that never enters into the actual game.

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, to have the bad guy win, to decide to take those eagles to Mount Doom, etc. If there's no real failure state, there's no real game to play, it's just shared dynamic fiction (which can be fun in its own right!). No edition of D&D gets it that bad, but 4e at its most "fail forward-y" can produce that feeling of impotence in the face of success.

I don't think this is at all unique to 4e. In fact the 5e game I'm playing in right now is rife with this. IME it has nothing to do with 4e. There's not even the slightest barrier in place of a hard-edged 4e game where you can brutally slaughter characters for whatever reasons float your boat. The worst you can say is that ALL modern forms of D&D require significant work in chargen, which can deter this sort of thing. CB was actually a pretty good answer to that, I can make a 4e PC in under 2 minutes if I'm willing to take recommended feats and not angst too much over which power to select.

So I don't thikn 5e's CR guidelines are "less than dependable." They're perfectly dependable - "hard" and "very hard" and "easy" have meanings in the world, independent of PC level. A hard DC is hard compared with all the challenges in D&D, not just at the level you encounter it. If you beat it at a low level, you've exhibited skill and ability, like a low-level run.

And you can not do it that way, if you want.

I think when he was talking about CR he was talking about monster challenge rating, its not at all reliable. In fact 5e's CR system is a hot mess. Still, 4e aside, its no worse than every other D&D and so it certainly can be lived with, as all 5e's quirks can be.

And again, with the DCs it is presentation. We all know what you can do with them, but its a more obtuse system because the labels aren't meaningful relative to the only thing that matters in the game, the PCs. Nobody cares about 'compared with all the challenges in D&D'. That comparison is of no value to the DM at the table. IMHO the key, central, and most important thing that 4e ever did was to take a step back and re-examine the tenets and goals of the game, and then reshape the mechanics to serve those goals and tenets. The failure of 5e, such as it is, is in failing to do likewise. I could always trust the principles of the 4e designers when they created material. It would always be useful and usable because they would design it in light of actual game play. I don't know how to trust the 5e designers in the same way. Sometimes they do the most ridiculous things for reasons I can't even fathom.

Right - gameplay is the process for doing that. Specifically, in D&D, using resources and exploring the world and asking questions of the DM in a back-and-forth matter. It's hard to build a character to trump DC's in 5e (at least without being high level to begin with). Much better to ask the DM: "What's the lock made of? Is it acid-resistant?"

Its also hard to build a character to PASS DCs in 5e! So the problem is everyone has the same difficulty passing them. Sure, at very high levels the game just barely starts to really differentiate, but the fact that people constantly bring up level 20 Expertise characters and such is exactly a sign of the issue.

As for 'asking is it acid-resistant' how is 4e's system not amenable to that? In fact, again, you ignore the solution, running an SC, which is exactly focused on those sorts of questions. You use narrative to explore and approach the problem and some checks to introduce some variability into the process without making long-shot DCs the primary focus. Still, you can always set a huge DC for atmospheric or other reasons if you wish.

"Make this Athletics check to catch yourself" is a world apart from "Make this Strength save or fall," psychologically speaking. The former is empowering the character, showing how heroic and strong they are that they are able to actively turn a disaster into something not so bad. The latter empowers the effect, showing how dangerous and menacing the threat is, that it can force you to fall unless you do something to stop it.

No it isn't, they're utterly the same. The bad guy blasts you with a 'push' effect. In 4e you go over the edge, now you can make a check, can you grab the dangling rope? 5e, you go over the edge, well you have a save DC, presumably saving means SOMETHING fictional, does it not? Or are you maintaining that the difference is purely in the fiction? If so that's not psychological at its root, its mechanical. There's no difference here though, since each thing should be rooted in fiction the character 'heroically saves himself' or 'heroically resists' etc. In both cases its an active participation in the game.

Nah. Especially when you know that "oops splat you're a mark down below" isn't an option. 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.

This is silly. If you really want to play that way, yes of course you can. That's not what we're talking about here. Characters died quite frequently in my 4e campaigns for instance. They just died for REASONS, not usually "oops I missed a check." You're dangling from the rope, now, what can happen that is interesting. Oh, you can see the bad guy climbing up the back side of the platform to backstab the wizard who's performing the ritual, oh oh! You can swing down to a lower level or try to climb the rope and save the wizard, while some demonic rats are gnawing on it. Take the big risk, or survive until tomorrow to fight again? Going splat is what is boring. I mean maybe at some point going splat is fine, you gambled, you lost, you've played your last card, the character's number is finally up. Its all a matter of context. Dramatic play is not about endless last-second saves, that's a mere pastiche of the technique.

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

No, not true. You can still set DCs to any value, they just get adjusted by 1 point up or down per level of the PC. Again, this is not the way 4e envisages DC working, you simply asked the question "how would you emulate 5e's static DC system in 4e" and I answered, you'd null out the bonus progression by scaling. I have no idea why you would ever do this BTW, its not something I'm suggesting, but it does illustrate that 4e's DC system can flex quite a lot.

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

And that's an issue! 4e allows the possibility of DCs that you simply cannot pass, yet at least. Now, to some extent so does 5e, but its not the same clear-cut thing.

It - correctly - disputes that what you say is reality. For a lot of tables, it really isn't. For a lot of tables, what the DC is will be a property of that thing (that lock, that chasm, that challenge), and it is up to the party to figure out how to beat that DC or go around it, not up to the DM to only give them challenges they can beat within expected margins.

Every GM largely tailors their adventures such that the challenges are beatable in some way. Lets not even kid ourselves about that. Every published module features a byline "adventure for characters of level X to Y". To pretend otherwise is to again go into this unfathomable mumbo jumbo land where you pretend that you're playing some other game than you're really playing. Again, I most admire 4e for in general stabbing that monstrosity in the heart. When it produces a mechanic it is producing it such that it fits the game at the table.

Obviously some subset of people will just play in a way that is so idiosyncratic that a given set of rules won't match up with their needs, but 4e was the practical edition. It always took the road that the game was first and foremost a game played at the table by people. Sometimes it might not actually achieve some of what it attempted, but it was all engineered in the service of good play, not some theoretical aesthetic judgement of how D&D should be that has to be worked around in practice. 5e very definitely backed off from that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Every GM largely tailors their adventures such that the challenges are beatable in some way. Lets not even kid ourselves about that.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Your generalization about all GMs does not hold except for extreme values of "in some way" which include totally unconscious effects. Some people instead choose to telegraph challenges and let the players face whatever difficulty they may. I deliberately don't even know the exact level and stats of my players' PCs at any given time. There are challenges in my game world which I would fully expect to eat them alive (if they go after Falgoth the ancient wyrm for example--right now they're scared stiff of his grandson the adult red). I'm pleased that my players have gotten good at knowing when to run away, even though I was kind of hoping to kill the barbarian last week when he went up against a Rakshasa solo. Through sheer luck he made his saving throw against Domination just before the Rakshasa would have made him crit himself to death. (I rolled both attacks at the same time so I know what the second roll was about to be.)

The challenges aren't designed to be "beatable" or "unbeatable." They're just there, and it's up to the players to beat them or avoid them until later.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I don't think it matters much here what you're playing, but I look at it in terms of 'process' when talking about game systems. I probably won't have established all the details of demons and demonology beforehand. It will come up at some point in the game in relation to a specific instance of demon possession or whatnot. That element will obviously be introduced to the game WRT characters and situations present at that time in play. So the DC will naturally need to reflect whatever role that element plays in the story. Hence what I will be thinking, in any system, is "I need a DC of X, this is supposed to be hard, so I want it to be high enough to explain why the PCs were called in, but low enough that when they take the proper steps they'll banish the demon." Now, if that's a pretty low DC, then maybe in the fiction I make this a 'low level' demon. That is I leave it fictionally that there could potentially be demons of much greater power which these relatively weak PCs couldn't handle. That question probably won't even come up, but its simply implicit in the way 4e handles it.

Now, maybe I've roughly outlined demonology already, or maybe I do so afterwards just for my own edification or to provide the PCs with some sort of clue or background knowledge. At that point I may well have done as you suggest, and established some DCs for different things, but again if those DCs can be attached to levels, then I am able to gauge that a DC 26 possession is one that 12th level PCs will handle with some difficulty, but that level 30 PCs will find trivially easy.

In other words you can run that system backwards and forwards as required. You can also use it to set an XP reward.

I don't think any of us realistically thinks DMs can't look at numbers and gauge these things in 5e, but it requires a bit of additional thinking, toting up what a PC's likely bonuses are NOW to see what is relatively easy or hard. 4e just did that step for you. The reasoning is a lot of DCs come up on-the-fly in play and the system acts as a good rule-of-thumb way to get generally useful DCs that can help make play interesting.

 

[Imaro]

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.

I am getting more confused isn't this... scaling by level? You're picking the DC's based on level. I asked how you would do this without scaling DC's by level...

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!

I was speaking to 4e... it is designed to scale by level. There are no objective DC's, DC's that scale with the species or abilities of creatures, or any other method that could be used. Are you claiming that there would be no effect in just ripping out a wide swath of ranges in 4e?

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.

Wrong... this reflects that hard things become easier the more proficient and practiced one becomes... A hard DC is still hard, you're just better at doing it... Otherwise what's the point of increasing the numbers?

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.

Yes but with 5e you only need to remember the same 3 numbers throughout the game... I've asked you to explain to me why it is easier to narrow the range of numbers in 4e but I don't think you've really answered the question yet. I'm not seeing you show me how it's easier to create a narrower range of numbers in 4e.

 

[tyrlaan]

A DM's imagination trumps everyone else's because he's running the game and putting the most work in designing the adventure. If you want to play alone, you can. Roll the dice, tell yourself the story, have no DM, and you decide everything. I've seen a few players do this. If you want someone else to do the work to run your character, then his imagination decides the game. It's the courtesy you give the DM because of the work the DM is putting in to the game, which usually exceeds everyone else's investment at the table.

I kind of feel like a good counterpoint to this is that if the DM wants his/her imagination to trump everyone else's, that person may be better served writing a book. I'll come back to this.

So many players don't seem to get how thankless a job DMing is. How the sole pleasure of doing it is the creative process of building a story or encounters. Players want the DM to allow them to live this vicarious fantasy of being a successful adventuring hero. A DM will put hours into this activity spending money on modules, game books, and his time to create this fantasy. That's why he gets final say in a lot of matters.

I'll agree that GMing can be thankless at times (and probably varies from group to group). But this doesn't lead to the logical conclusion of "GM gets the final say". GM gets the final say because the GM is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter/referee unless your group works out something different. The GM doesn't get the final say just because he/she is the one that brought the volleyball to the game.

I'd go so far as to say that if someone GMs and feels he/she has the final say because he/she put in "all this work" (which yeah, can be a hell of a lot of work), then that person is probably not in the right frame of mind to be running a game. GMing is a labor of love, and if you build up expectations that you are "owed" something from your players ("final say" or whatever), you probably will not succeed as a GM.

What motivation is there for a person to commit to running the game if not the creativity of it? People that like to DM a lot enjoy the creative part of DMing. I don't mean just the story fluff, though that is a major part for many. But the encounter creation and the entire process that goes into building an adventure to challenge the PCs. It's a lot of work to DM. That work should be respected. It should be acknowledged as far more difficult than playing a character.

That being said, good DMs reward imaginative play. Part of my fun as a DM is thinking up interesting challenges and scenarios for players and seeing what they come up with to win or solve them. If they come up with something outside the box, I reward that play. I like players that use imaginative strategies outside the scope of standard rules to set achieve victory. That's when the game gets really fun and reaches beyond what any video game could possibly accomplish. It is the imagination of the DM and players that makes a TTRPG different from a video game experience.

Your second paragraph partially answers your first here. There's also the joy of seeing what the PCs will think of next and working with it, hearing them try to work out a mystery and realizing they come up with something better than you so you adjust things behind the scenes to adopt their wild conspiracy, listening for opportunities to pull in character specific/backstory bits and give the characters equal chance to be center stage in the story of the game for a while, adapting to the horrible moment when they one-shot your BBEG, and so on.

See, to me there are two fundamental rewards to GMing. One is unleashing your creations upon your players and watching with joy as the world you have built comes to life. The other is seeing what players do with it, making it even more alive.

I said earlier that if you want your imagination to trump all, write a book. I say that because players will destroy your plans. It's in their DNA. If you can't handle plans being destroyed, GMing is going to be very frustrating for you, or depending on how you handle it, your players. Because, when that happens, you have two choices as a GM.

Option one is to play your trump card and somehow twist things so your plans are not destroyed. Maybe that preserves the fun for the GM, but it's terrible for players. KM talks about feeling "impotent" in 4e because of the scaling DCs/fail forward philosophy/whatever, but that's nothing compared to a GM showing the players that their actions don't matter. So I'd say Option one is a quick way to for a GM to feel good at the expense of deteriorating his/her game.

Option two is to roll with the punch. Maybe someone saw the events and becomes the next BBEG, vowing revenge. Maybe words gets around of the PCs insane success and soon they are approached with a quest vastly over their head and unsure what to do. Maybe because they took a left instead of a right, a small village was destroyed that connects back to the story in some crazy way later. And so on. The GM is still exercising his/her imagination muscles, but doing it in a way that allows the choices made by the PCs to matter.