D&D (2024) 2024 needs to end 2014's passive aggressive efforts to remove magic items & other elements from d&d

[tetrasodium]

Low-level monsters will always be meat for the thresher... Bounded Accuracy just says that if you put enough of those low-level monsters together, they can eventually as a group still be able to take down a higher-level foe. The numbers do not make that possibility impossible.

Granted, in actual game practice its a situation that will almost never come up... because any DM that wants a thousand Commoners to help defend their town by trying to take down a dragon will more often than not just turn that scene into a "narrative story action" rather than actually bother rolling that combat out (with Commoners needing Nat 20s to hit and then plink-plink their damage time and again)... but the DM could do it if they really wanted to.

Me personally? I think at the end of the day the concerns about BA are a whole lot of nothing because 99% of the time the DM is going to throw level appropriate enemies against the party anyway. So whether the PCs have attack bonuses of around +9 or all the way up to +35... their attack bonus is going to get perfectly acceptable for the enemies they will face. So at the end of the day what difference does it make where the numbers fall?

Bounded Accuracy cuts both ways, it's not just low CR trash being designed for a tedious swarm scenario nobody wants to sit through at the table. As PCs advance their GM will quickly discover that it does matter if players have PCs sporting that +9 because the "level appropriate" monsters crippled by Bounded Accuracy are failing to be appropriate thanks to being tuned so a lower level party can fight them. God forbid there be a lower CR monster built to be level appropriate to that lower level party so the higher CR monster can be level appropriate to that higher level party

 

[DEFCON 1]

Bounded Accuracy cuts both ways, it's not just low CR trash being designed for a tedious swarm scenario nobody wants to sit through at the table. As PCs advance their GM will quickly discover that it does matter if players have PCs sporting that +9 because the "level appropriate" monsters crippled by Bounded Accuracy are failing to be appropriate thanks to being tuned so a lower level party can fight them. God forbid there be a lower CR monster built to be level appropriate to that lower level party so the higher CR monster can be level appropriate to that higher level party

If I am inferring the correct thing from your statement... then I would agree with you to a certain extent. But the issue in my mind wouldn't be Bounded Accuracy as a concept, but rather WotC default assumption of expected player potential min-maxing and how their monster damage was undertuned.

What I mean by that is this: The way BA was originally meant to be designed... PCs and monsters were to have relatively low attack bonuses and ACs, so that low-level PCs/creatures could still hit higher-level creatures/PCs. But where the "level-appropriate" disparity would come in would be in the damage and hit points. Low-level creatures would have low damage and low HP so while they could all hit that high-level monster... their damage was so low that it would take hundreds of hits to finally down the creature's massive HP pool. Whereas a high-level creature would have such a high damage rating that a single attack on a low-level creature could essentially one-shot them and basically recreate the "minions" concept from 4E.

The problem that I think a lot of us have found with WotC's monster design paradigm though is that their beliefs of "level-appropriate" damage from monsters in the Monster Manual is too low to be a true threat against PC that have been built with a modicum of min-maxed intelligence. BA is designed for higher-level creatures to have higher damage... but WotC has undertuned that damage. Their numbers don't really work for a lot of tables. So while the concept of Bounded Accuracy is sound and should work... they just messed up one of the numbers in their design (in my opinion).

Personally, I have found that changing monster damage just by either doing max damage for monsters on their attacks, or by rolling double the damage dice listed for the monster (if I really want a randomized damage roll) it satisfies the BA standards the format is meant to have and it works fine. And quite frankly I still find it less ridiculous that what I have playing in my friend's Pathfinder campaign where my attack bonuses are +32 / +27 / +22 with all my iterative attacks. That's just numbers inflation for no real benefit in my mind.

 

[James Gasik]

Last session, we stumbled upon some cultists attempting to summon a powerful creature from the Far Realms via a ritual sacrifice. We were unable to prevent it, and found ourselves staring down a CR 19 Lovecraftian horror! It was more concerned with killing the cultists (at first), and we knew we were intended to run (we're level 8), but were hemmed in by cultist guards blocking our exit route.

The Cleric threw out Banishment and...turns out the monster has a terrible Charisma save. So now it was a battle to protect the Cleric for 10 rounds! Of course, the enemies did everything in their power to damage the Cleric, and they inevitably failed the Con save to keep concentration.

So now we were fighting a battle on two fronts. We looked at each other and decided to go out in a blaze of glory. We threw everything we had at it- the Cleric blocked it's path and took the Dodge action (though it's attack bonus was so high that only unlucky rolls kept him from being hurt, even with a 21 AC!). I threw a Blistering Radiance on top of it, our Ranger fired some poisoned arrows and it actually failed it's save, ending up with the Poisoned condition for a minute (we were surprised it wasn't immune, as most of our foes are), and the Bard kept spamming Dissonant Whispers until they ran out of spell slots.

At some point, the thing retreated to the back of the room due to Dissonant Whispers, and we closed the door and I Arcane Locked it.

Thanks to disadvantage and the boosted DC, it failed break through the door, and started attacking it. We mopped up the other cultists and suddenly...silence.

We healed up a little, then I said the password and we opened the door.

The creature apparently was also not immune to exhaustion, and it had died. Everyone was overjoyed, but I got to thinking on the ride home. We were not supposed to fight this thing. That was obvious.

But we did, and we beat it. Were we lucky to do so? I won't deny it, but it still feels like level 8's taking on a CR 19 should be nigh impossible, but no one even died! So yeah, bounded accuracy does work both ways, and while it worked in our favor, I'm not really sure that it should have.

 

[Willie the Duck]

<whole story>

This one, at least, has a number of other confounding effects (amongst 5e's issues) to it, alongside bounded accuracy.

• Banishment being a de facto win-switch against extraplanar high-value single targets being a big one (with associated BA discussion about save scores, epic resistances, etc.)
• Exhaustion being a secondary hp track no one/nothing has more than 6 levels of being another.
• The (reasonable) urge to strip blanket immunities from high level monsters

 

[DEFCON 1]

But we did, and we beat it. Were we lucky to do so? I won't deny it, but it still feels like level 8's taking on a CR 19 should be nigh impossible, but no one even died! So yeah, bounded accuracy does work both ways, and while it worked in our favor, I'm not really sure that it should have.

This is where the 'set of 1' can't really be used as any sort of point. You all succeeded, through an entire series of actions and events that were the scenario played out 20 times, would never be duplicated. So your particular results can't really be used as proof of anything concrete. In that scenario you described I'm sure there would be any number of times where that TPK did occur-- either because of how the dice landed, or even based upon how the DM chose to run their table. Heck, a particular DM might have even let your party actually escape the area when you first wanted to retreat and not had the cultists stop you... thus rendering the whole battle null and void for your group altogether. That's just one of innumerable ways the scene could have gone.

It is a lesson I learned early on when I DM'd the same exact module at GenCon the entire convention weekend back in 2014. I ran the adventure probably 8 times(?) and saw how 8 different groups ran through it-- all the differing choices, party builds, creative ideas, actions, reactions, etc. etc. etc. Some groups it was a complete cakewalk, for others it was virtual TPKs, and then all kinds of groups in between. And for a 4-hour adventure for seven 1st level characters to have that wide of potential results... just showed me that the game cannot handle a very specific mathematical methodology that will produce a standardized result for every single DM and table. It is impossible. And I don't think any DM should even think it is. It's a mindset we'd all be better off just throwing away and instead become comfortable with just "winging it" all the time.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Low-level monsters will always be meat for the thresher... Bounded Accuracy just says that if you put enough of those low-level monsters together, they can eventually as a group still be able to take down a higher-level foe. The numbers do not make that possibility impossible.

Have you ever seen a thresher / combine harvester get destroyed by too many stalks of wheat?

When it happens, it's an anomaly telling you something was wrong with the thresher.

That's my problem. The wheat shouldn't be an actual threat to the harvester. I don't want the potential to get got by some loser monsters.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Have you ever seen a thresher / combine harvester get destroyed by too many stalks of wheat?

When it happens, it's an anomaly telling you something was wrong with the thresher.

That's my problem. The wheat shouldn't be an actual threat to the harvester. I don't want the potential to get got by some loser monsters.

If the odds are so long that the wheat could harm the thresher... at that point does it really matter whether it's 'impossible' versus 'exceedingly unlikely'? The results are virtually the same, so why sweat it if there's technically a 1-in-1 million chance rather than zero chance? But the BA is there for other tables for whom they might switch odds around so that there still could be these sorts of chances.

 

[Vaalingrade]

But the BA is there for other tables for whom they might switch odds around so that there still could be these sorts of chances.

And it robs that option for those who don't.

For for those who want to feel they're advancing in power.

Or want to see good tactics rewarded mechanically.

And honestly, the 'badass fantasy heroes murdered by normal animals' thing is just a side effect of the intent to obfuscate the math D&D has required and actually still requires.

 

[DEFCON 1]

And it robs that option for those who don't.

For for those who want to feel they're advancing in power.

Or want to see good tactics rewarded mechanically.

And honestly, the 'badass fantasy heroes murdered by normal animals' thing is just a side effect of the intent to obfuscate the math D&D has required and actually still requires.

Yep. But not much we can do about that now. The game's the game and we either play it or we don't.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Yep. But not much we can do about that now. The game's the game and we either play it or we don't.

I get the horse is... well still in the barn and will never leave it and was never going to leave, but... why do people keep saying this in the forum for discussing how the next iteration of the game should be?

It's like deciding a house's foundation just has to be made of packing peanuts because those were drawn on the blueprint.