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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 6649215" data-attributes="member: 6777737">This is a bit late to the party -- my time for forums is somewhat limited these days -- but I guess I'm confused by all this 4e p42 hype.First of all, 5e has rules for this kind of thing:It's just that 5e's "rules for things the rules don't cover" is just "the rules."  The ability check rules already cover everything.  There's only one set of DCs because DCs don't scale with level outside of 4e.  There's no damage listed because 5e doesn't strictly limit or scale damage the same way 4e needed to.  And these rules are robust enough to tell you how to resolve anything in the game for skills or ability checks or saves.  If you take the same table and change "DC" to "AC", you can see how attacks work, too.  Instead of taking up a whole page, it takes up half a column.  Yes, there are some things not in it, but basically everything is there.3e had a problem with bonuses going off the end of the d20.  You'd have a target DC of 25 as "hard" and a bonus of +30 by level 10.4e solved it by trying to force everybody to always use the middle of the die.  The major problems with this are a) since the game was built with min/maxing in mind, if you invested everything you could and took all the "feat tax" feats, your bonuses still fall behind the target DCs by ~1 per tier of play, and b) it quickly left secondary stats in the dust as there weren't enough bonuses or resources to keep up everything, so if you wanted to do something that wasn't your schtick, you were not going to succeed (possibly falling off the other end of the die, depending on when you were playing).  NPC DC and bonuses scale at +1 per level.  PCs were supposed to get 50% of their potential bonus from level, 25% of their potential bonus from ability score, and 25% of their potential bonus from magic, but in practice they got 45% from level, 20% from ability, 20% from magic, and 15% from feats.  And that still only got you 9/10ths of the way towards breaking even.The thing I dislike about DMG p42 is that it's wrong.  They errata'd the table.  Twice.  Once in the DMG errata (and in the table they published in DMG2), and again when they published the Rules Compendium, which gave yet another set of DCs to use for skill checks because the "add 5" rule for skills didn't work.  So now there's three versions of the rule in three different books and none of them are complete or right.  So, yes, DMG p42 technically aggregates the whole game onto a single, simple, extremely elegant page.  Except the math is wrong.  And DMG p42 has to exist because the math is so complicated that you have to show it to the DM in order for him to do see what the system is even doing wel enough to improvise anything with any sort of accuracy.  You roll so many dice to resolve everything (due to number of hp of enemies, skill challenges, the save system, etc.) that the dice stop being a varying factor.  Call it the law of large numbers, call it central limit theory, call it regression towards the mean; I don't know what it's actually called.  Fair dice being fair, the more dice you roll the more your results look like the probability distribution.  In that kind of a game you end up having to be extremely careful about even a +1 or -1 modifier because it has a real, tangible effect to give a +1 or a -1 to a die you roll 50 times.  So you essentially can't rely on the DM to be capable of ad hoc rulings because the system has too many moving pieces to allow for it.I'm not saying that 5e solves all these problems.  It doesn't.  I'm just saying 4e's DMG p42 isn't something that was abandoned, nor is it something which worked particularly seamlessly.</blockquote>

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