D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[The Crimson Binome]

If you've got no issues ramping up that power, no harm!

If you're stealing the thunder from other players, time to start thinking about if police officers and security guards let their friends into sensitive areas unsupervised just because they're buddies.

Some magic does let you bypass a skill check entirely, but it tends to be edge cases that aren't crowding anyone else's territory. Invisibility, for example, will absolutely 100% allow you to bypass visual inspection... but that's only ever a minority of cases where Stealth would be important, and it doesn't let you bypass anything within range of anyone who might possibly hear you.

Likewise, I'm saying that the Charm spell will let you automatically get someone to provide minor aid that comes with no personal risk or cost to the target. This guard thinks that you're his or her friendly acquaintance, and so might be willing to give you directions out of the castle if you say that you're lost (where a hostile guard might immediately attack, or have you apprehended). Getting into the treasure vault is still going to take a check, if it's possible at all, but the DM is more than justified in saying that no check is allowed because the guard just wouldn't let you do that.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Some magic does let you bypass a skill check entirely, but it tends to be edge cases that aren't crowding anyone else's territory. Invisibility, for example, will absolutely 100% allow you to bypass visual inspection... but that's only ever a minority of cases where Stealth would be important, and it doesn't let you bypass anything within range of anyone who might possibly hear you.

Likewise, I'm saying that the Charm spell will let you automatically get someone to provide minor aid that comes with no personal risk or cost to the target. This guard thinks that you're his or her friendly acquaintance, and so might be willing to give you directions out of the castle if you say that you're lost (where a hostile guard might immediately attack, or have you apprehended). Getting into the treasure vault is still going to take a check, if it's possible at all, but the DM is more than justified in saying that no check is allowed because the guard just wouldn't let you do that.

Yeah, this is where some DM variance will undoubtedly come in - some DMs might let their buddies get away with more or more generously interpret "can't be seen." Some DMs will let their buddies get away with less or more strictly interpret "can't be seen."

And if your problem is that spellcasters are dominating noncombat spheres, it probably calls first for a stricter interpretation.

 

[Jessica]

If you're stealing the thunder from other players, time to start thinking about if police officers and security guards let their friends into sensitive areas unsupervised just because they're buddies.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/video/video-steven-seagal-arrives-police-bust-tank-230283

 

[BryonD]

Agreed: 3.x (and, I think, 4e) described it as 'status quo' vs 'tailored' challenges. The correspondence is obvious. ( but, I suppose you actually /could/ run a 'tailored' stand-box or 'status-quo' scene-framing. The former is a little less weird than the latter. You run your sandbox, but if the PCs decide to explore the lair of the Ancient Red Dragon at 1st level, they fight his little Kobold minions without arousing Big Red One's (pi) notice. If they go there at 15th, the Kobolds scatter and they fight the Dragon. Less intuitively, you could intentionally frame scenes in which the party is wildly over matched or faces no meaningful challenge from a 'foe.')

None of these options describe "The world is what it is. The characters make choices and the chips fall where they may."

But, whatever, I'm glad we all seem to agree that 4E was exactly like 3E......

 

[tyrlaan]

None of these options describe "The world is what it is. The characters make choices and the chips fall where they may."

But, whatever, I'm glad we all seem to agree that 4E was exactly like 3E......

Yup, COMPLETELY the same

I've had 3E campaigns in which the players knew on Day 1, "if you go over there you will almost certainly die" and then more than a year later in real time the party was adventuring there. The DCs don't care what level the party is. I get the point that you can do this is 4E. But I dislike the idea that the world would EVER care what level the PCs are, so this whole conversation is about a wart 4E inserted into the mechanics.

I really feel it's just a matter of presentation and approach to establishing the DC in 4e that fosters this contention. In fairness, maybe I just look at 4e differently than others.

To me, I only care about DCs once a PC is interacting with the thing. When that happens, I know if the DC of the thing is supposed to be level appropriate, dirt simple, or insanely difficult. From there I can establish my DC (or just completely skip it if it's dirt simple).

Therefore all 4e does differently for me is provide it's guidance on establishing DCs differently than other editions. That's the start and the end of it.

So to me, the world NEVER cares what level the PCs are. However, I do when specifically building something level appropriate for them.

 

[pemerton]

Its not at all that 4e failed as a game, particularly.

<snip>

Of course none of that really impacts the game, as a game. In some sense it may be for the best. I don't get the impression that for all the money thrown at 4e there was a very clear vision in the team as to what exactly they were creating.

As a game, from the perspective of a player, I think 4e was not a failure at all. There is heaps of material and the system is highly playable. There was a lack of clear vision from the designers, but that doesn't really affect me as a player. I can just impose my own vision. (For me there is a contrast here with 3E, which precludes me imposing my own vision because of the oil-and-water issue I mentioned upthread.)

As a commercial venture I don't think 4e was a failure, in the sense that it seems to have clearly made more than it cost to produce, and it helped keep the D&D department of WotC afloat for several years (including through the 5e design period).

From the point of view of WotC's aspirations for D&D, it clearly fell short. It seems likely that some of the features of 4e that are, for me as a player, strengths, were not strengths relative to WotC's aspirations.

 

[pemerton]

We just didn't get around to having any big, spread-out combats during that period. (There were a few times when the healer had to move to get in range for Healing Word, and in those cases it did feel a little bit more like actually doing something, but still not quite like maneuvering around opportunity attacks to get within touch range.)

Maybe we just never got that far into it, but we were never really in danger of running out of Surges.

It seems to me like you may have been playing in a way that failed to bring out the strengths of the system.

My experience is that about one extended rest per level, maybe two, is the right degree of pressure to make the system work. If you let the players take an extended rest whenever they want, or on a clock that they control (eg end of session) then you will get a very different experience. (Given that level gain is around 1 per three to four sessions.) Likewise if you don't explore the geographic dimensions of the system (movement, etc) which requires space.

 

[pemerton]

Most of this DC discussion has been about playstyle. I think arguing over 'subjective' and 'objective' is just clouding the real discussion point
One side seems to be arguing for exploration, sandbox type play while the other is arguing for scene framing play. Those are two different ways to play but in both you set a DC to a fiction and after that it doesn't change. In both, the DC is also relative to other DCs you have already assigned.

I'll have to think about the fate element part. I agree that that there is this more looseness that COULD be applied, but not sure if this is just similar to the Slime discussion or not. You could just say 'fate' but is this a valuable tool or just an easy out?

Sandboxing vs scene-framing is clearly an aspect of it. But I don't think it's all of it. I run 4e scene-framing. I run BW scene-framing. But the fact that one uses "subjective" DCs and the other uses "objective" DCs matters.

To give another example that doesn't appeal to the "fate" idea, but does rely upon 4e's "looseness of fit": in 4e, when setting a DC for some situation, I look up the DCs-by-level chart, set a DC, and run with it. I will describe the situation in terms that help convey why it's as hard as it is (eg "You're flying your Thundercloud Tower down the Obelisk of Ice into the Elemental Chaos: make an Arcana check to maintain conrol!"). But I won't decompose the situation, either on the fiction side or the mechanical side, into its constituent elements of difficulty. (How much is the wind, how much the cold, how much the ambient waves of elemental chaos - whatever exactly that means - etc.)

In BW, on the other hand, DCs are built up out of those constituent elements: the DC for such-and-such a task is set out in the skill description, and then there are rules for giving players advantage dice if appropriate, and rules for adding additional obstacle penalties (eg faffing around in the dark), etc. There is very little looseness of fit, less GM handwaving in respect of elements of the fiction, and a feel that is more gritty and less gonzo. The objective DCs do push the focus away from "How hard is this for the protagonists?" and onto "What are the gameworld elements that are at work here?"

A passage from Maelstrom Storytelling nicely states the contrast, from the subjective DC side (p 116 of the rulebook):

A good way to run [the game] is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. . . . A ten foot fence might seem really tall to one person, and a little tall to another. But if the fence is described as really tall instead of 10 feet, everyone gets the idea. In other words, focus on the intent behind the elements in the scene, and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or the emotional reaction to the scene, and in doing so it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It then is no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. In this way, the presentation of each element of the scene focuses on the difficulty of the obstacle, not on laws of physics. . . . [A] wide range of arguments can arise from saying that the chasm is 15 feet across. . . . If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game.

The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities. . . . Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.​

Conversely, "objective" DCs do tend to emphasise literalisms and "laws of physics", and encourage debates about whether or not a normal person can easily clear a 15' chasm. (Again, BW has mechanical devices outside of its DC-setting rules to help counteract this particular tendency. On the other hand Rolemaster, which unlike both 4e and BW it doesn't use fortune-in-the-middle for action resolution, and which lacks the other devices that BW includes, is especially prone to coffee-table-jumping moments.)

Again, taking away the notion that you assign level DCs to fiction regardless of fiction which is both subjective and nonsensical

That notion seems to be alive and well in this very thread!

 

[BryonD]

I really feel it's just a matter of presentation and approach to establishing the DC in 4e that fosters this contention. In fairness, maybe I just look at 4e differently than others.

To me, I only care about DCs once a PC is interacting with the thing. When that happens, I know if the DC of the thing is supposed to be level appropriate, dirt simple, or insanely difficult. From there I can establish my DC (or just completely skip it if it's dirt simple).

Therefore all 4e does differently for me is provide it's guidance on establishing DCs differently than other editions. That's the start and the end of it.

So to me, the world NEVER cares what level the PCs are. However, I do when specifically building something level appropriate for them.

I'm not disputing the preference of anyone else.
But obviously my preference is different here.

I just can't help but be entertained how the spin changes when the shoe is on the other foot.
I've been told on these boards (sometimes by the very same people) as well as in meatspace that the sliding DCs tied to PC level (and the entirety of "the math works") was a revolutionary breakthrough that made 3E a backwards, obsolete system.
But, abracadabra, now its just a matter of perspective.

I'm glad to hear from 4E fans that reverting to 3E style turns out to not be going backwards.

 

[pemerton]

I'm boggled that you can't wrap your brain around the difference between a hard mountain is hard for everyone and the DC shifts to match that and the exact same hard mountain is deadly to peasants and easy to super heroes.

I can easily imagine a mountain that would be deadly to peasant and easy for superheroes. And in my post above this one, I talked about a mountain that would be deadly to peasants but merely challenging to superheroes: the Obelisk of Ice. The epic-tier PCs in my game had to fly their Thundercloud Tower down the side of that mountain, from the Feywild to the Elemental Chaos, and it posed a degree of challenge but was certainly never going to be deadly. 4e is full of such mountains, and of comparable challenges. (Many of them are located on planes other than the prime material.)

That is not the same mountain that is hard for everyone. A mountain that is hard for everyone might be something like the "living island" in Giant Size X-Men number 1 - and when peasants try and climb it it only fights them with a little bit of effort, whereas when superheroes try to climb it it fights them tooth-and-nail. Hence it is hard for whomever climbs it.

I don't think there are any such mountains in default 4e. You are the first person to talk about such a mountain, in this post. [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] didn't talk about such a mountain - he talked about imagining a blizzard in the gameworld, deciding that he wants it to be a challenge for paragon tier PCs, and therefore setting the blizzard DC appropriately. Such a blizzard would obviously be impassable to peasants, and would blow them off the side of the mountain, given that peasants are self-evidently far less capable than paragon tier heroes.

I've had 3E campaigns in which the players knew on Day 1, "if you go over there you will almost certainly die" and then more than a year later in real time the party was adventuring there.

I assume, then, that either they were misinformed on Day 1, or else that the knowledge of certain death was capability-relative, and their capabilities had improved.

In my 4e campaign, the heroic tier PCs knew that the Elemental Chaos and the Abyss would not be safe places for them. At epic tier, though, they've been hanging out there a lot. That's because they became more capable.

The DCs don't care what level the party is.

That seems to be a consequence of the fact that the DCs, being inanimate non-thinking things, don't care about anything!

Do you mean that you never design gameworld elements having regard to the likely capabilities of the PCs your players will be bringing to the table? If so, that speaks to [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION]'s suggestion that part of this DC discussion is about scene-framing vs sandboxing. Though in D&D (as opposed to, say, Runequest or Rolemaster) discussion of sandboxing is complicated by the fact that there is a well-established convention of dungeon levels with graduated difficulties of monster, which mean that some of the elements of scene-framing play can be achieved within a more sand-boxy architecture.

But I dislike the idea that the world would EVER care what level the PCs are, so this whole conversation is about a wart 4E inserted into the mechanics.

I don't really follow this. The idea that a GM might build encounters, or indeed a gameworld, in order to provide a fun play experience for particular PCs brought to the table by particular players, is not new to 4e. I started doing this as an AD&D GM in the mid-80s.

The main thing that 4e does is make this easier, by setting out DCs in a handy series of level-appropriate lists (eg DC-by-level, Monster Manuals with monsters listed by level, DMGs with traps and hazards listed by level, etc).

Maybe you are assuming that the fiction in 4e is understood to be independent of DCs - so that rusty locks are DC 8 for 1st leve PCs and DC 18 for epic PCs. This is the thing that [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION] described not far upthread as "nonsensical": assigning level-appropriate DCs to the fiction regardless of the fiction. The only 4e player in this thread who suggested that s/he plays the game in that way is [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION], in the context of explaining something that he didn't like about 4e. The response from the other 4e players in the thread was a high degree of incredulity.

When [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] talks about setting the DC of a blizzard to something appropriate for paragon tier adventurers, he is not supposing that the blizzard has no consistent nature in the fiction. Rather, he's talking about introducing a new element into the fiction - a blizzard - and deciding, as GM, that he wants it to be a challenge for the PCs in his game, who are paragon tier, and then looking at his handy DC-by-level chart to see what a good DC would be to set for that blizzard. He then narrates it appropriately. (For me, the storm on Caradhras is my reference point when I want to narrate a fierce mountain blizzard to my players.)