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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9510924" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I've always felt that kludge has a more narrow (albeit not necessarily more specific) meaning.It's a shoehorned solution. Something that clumsily, and generally forcefully, pushes play in a specific direction when the rules would naturally push in the opposite direction.To give a pair of concrete examples from D&D 5e (which I think has a lot of kludgy/inelegant design), two things that both relate to the saving throw rules: Legendary Resistance and PCs getting proficiency in resistances. The first is more useful as an example case of a place where a kludge is knowingly and intentionally applied because an actual solution would require reworking a massive and poorly-structured subsystem (the spells), while the latter is more useful to show how a kludge can be the result of needing a "patch" for a problem discovered late in development.In the former case, something the designers were aware of from a very early point in the "D&D Next" playtest was that big stonking boss monsters were incredibly weak in specific ways. In particular, even the much better-balanced 4e had shown that "solo" monsters were extremely sensitive to crowd control effects. Locking down an enemy early on could mean parties could have a reliable way to turn intended steep challenges into cakewalks. Knowing they had to do something, they went with Legendary Resistance: so many times, "boss" type monsters like beholders and dragons and such can just...decide they don't feel like failing a saving throw, so they succeed instead. It's a small set of "get out of jail free" cards for crowd control or ongoing damage effects. These accomplish their goal most effectively (given I just fought a 5.0 Beholder in my Monday game, I can assure you they do their job), but....well it feels pretty bad. Very bad, actually. It just feels like your smart plays are getting totally no-saled for no reason, so you know you should just not bother. That's not very fun. Instead of removing the no-fun aspect by doing something fun instead, we just swap one kind of no-fun (challenging bosses get flattened by saving throws too often) for another kind (don't bother even thinking about saving throws unless you can overwhelm Legendary Resistances.) This is an excellent example of a kludgy solution in action. It does what it was designed to do! But it does so in a clumsy, weak, un-fun way.Kludge arising from needing to "patch" existing rules inefficiently can be seen in how 5e characters got their two and only two saving throw proficiencies. Originally, nobody was proficient in any saving throws. Instead, it was meant that your individual ability scores would do all the heavy lifting, thus being a reward for choosing to be more diverse rather than hyper focused on the "important" stats. The problem is...that just absolutely did not work with the monster abilities as designed. In a very real sense it was the mirror image of the problem above. Some folks had made minor mention of this midway through the playtest, but WotC either ignored them or didn't think it was an issue until an event I (and seemingly only I) called the "ghoul surprise."The "ghoul surprise" occurred during an official, recorded test game meant to show off the system to fans, put it through its paces, get players excited for its potential. As part of that run, the party of four or five PCs (I don't recall the exact number) had to deal with some ghouls. The party had a small numbers advantage, and per the CR and encounter building rules, this should have been a perfectly reasonable encounter, not even Deadly. Instead, it was a TPK on camera, one that shocked the developers and kinda ruined their attempted "look how awesome this is" moment because it went so catastrophically wrong when it wasn't intended to. (I know some folks find this exciting, but their intended audience definitely did not.)The real problem was that PCs failed saves too often, and the ghouls got multiple attempts to paralyze their targets every round (once per attack), meaning the PCs were essentially guaranteed to get stunlocked and thus die, without any ability to prevent it or fight back. This is, as I think most folks would agree, kind of a problem (even those who like the "stuff can go badly wrong" generally would prefer that a prepared party could do something, but that wasn't the case here.) Now, the designers nerfed the ghoul hard to address that end of things (it now only gets one claw attack per round and the paralysis DC is only 10), but the "ghoul surprise" proved that they needed to make PC saving throws better in order to mitigate this problem more generally. So...they gave PCs saving throw proficiencies.Except this....didn't really fix the problem, because of the "all six stats are saving throws" design. Yes, it patched up the immediate problem, but it leaves most PCs abysmal at most saves. As in, even a typical PC is only going to succeed on that DC 10 Con save from the ghoul about 60% of the time. Compare this to something like feeblemind, which is an incredibly nasty effect, targets a save few characters will be good at (Int), and has a DC of 17, meaning most characters will have at best a 25% chance at success!This is a crude patch over the problem, done crudely not because the designers specifically decided that that was the only option, but because there was very little development time left and they couldn't afford to re-tool saving throws again so late in the process. Had they done more and better testing, they almost certainly would have seen this coming and been able to get a more holistic or at least more robust change to the mechanics so a kludge wouldn't be necessary.</blockquote>

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