D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Right. There's plenty you need to make a check to do, but also plenty that you don't. I think 5e's spell descriptions are undeniably tighter than 2e's, its much more clear what you can and can't do and when maybe there needs to be some checking of some sort. The real problem 2e had was just not having any system spelled out for the checks, unless they fell directly into a specific NWP, and then the problem was, NWP's were all 'trained only' and an open ended list, so it was unclear what you could attempt AT ALL without having a specific NWP. It was all very murky.

I think my original point still stands. There are LOTS of situations where the plot likely revolves around something the wizard can do with a spell. Other times its just popping out as the best problem solver. Of course people use skills all the time, but wizards (in particular, other casters too) just seem to have this 'edge' in terms of the most difficult situations.

While my 5e wizard often only contributes the same as the other characters, and they certainly do some things that are cool, the time we killed off the owl bears was because of spells. The time we killed the dragon, was a spell. When we defeated the bugbear king it was the wizard that killed him (in single combat no less). I don't think that can be chalked up to "your DM is a wimp". I mean I can summon her, [MENTION=2093]Gilladian[/MENTION]! and she can give you her impression.

The 5e wizard seems to be the most flexible of all D&D wizards on the whole. But there aren't really generally 'broken spells', or as many simple exploits as there were in AD&D. I think you can see it both ways, casters are very strong, they have a better ability to pop out the specific spell that's needed NOW, but the spell's effects are often not so overwhelming (IE you don't charm people into being almost completely dominated, but its easier to have charm person ready when you need it).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I think WotC's vision problems affected us all in the sense that there were poor adventures, there were less players or the players were sometimes rather unsure about the message, and certainly 3rd party material was all over the place. For me personally it wasn't too much of an issue, though if the game had been more on-message I'd have gotten going faster.

I guess you could ask in terms of WotC's aspirations how much of it was the game itself and how much was WotC's cloddishness or failures to execute the whole plan (and how realistic that plan was). We can surely say that 5e is retrenchment. I think this is a bad time to be retrenching though. WotC seems to have a sort of 'tempo problem' WRT the whole industry. 2008 wasn't a great time to release a radical new system. 2014 doesn't seem to me to be a great time to release a backwards-looking system. Especially if you have to live with it for the next 10 years, which they are likely to do.

 

[BryonD]

At this point, there is still no discussion of "shifting DCs for static challenges".

Untrue. He was specifically talking about needing to know that the PCs were Paragon and I was responding to that.
I'm willing to accept the current narrative in this thread (again, I'm glad to see the agreement), but I still maintain that knowing the level of the characters is completely unneeded. He was talking about a specific mountain, but he didn't know the DC until he knew the PCs were Paragon. If the PCs had been a different tier then THAT EXACT SAME MOUNTAIN would have been a different DC. Thus I saw him proclaiming the merits of "shifting DCs for static challenges".

Again, I'm good with accepting being corrected on this. But I still say that knowing the level or tier of the PCs should be irrelevant.

So I don't see any bait-and-switch. I see people talking about various sorts of approaches to setting DCs, and relating that to the fiction of the game.

The approach I said was being praised is being praised. My comment was not in regard to the frustration of setting DCs. It was in regard to the relevance of PC level on DCs.

This is all biographical information about you. But it doesn't give AbdulAlhazred, or me, any reason to stop wanting a DC-by-level chart.

I'm not saying it does. But I'm saying this is a significant difference and the way it has been describe in this very thread, reinforcing numerous prior conversations, creates the strong impression of "shifting DCs for static items".

I have stated many, many times now that I greatly respect that 4E nails a playstyle for a certain niche. And I'm still completely on that point. But the flip side of adding a whole mechanical rebuild to offer something a large community outside of that niche don't want or need is not good for forging a sustainable fanbase.

In post 1010 upthread, you express distaste for "the system dictating the world to me". But for the reasons I have been stating in the past few paragraphs, I do not share your distaste.

Yes, I understand and respect this.

But the tone of this conversation is swinging like a pendulum. People who didn't like 4E say that they like X about 5E and 4E fans start proclaiming that they were unfair to 4E because 4E did this just the same. Then the conversation moves to "but this is in 5E exactly the way I did it in 3E" and we hear that 4E is better. DCs in my 5E game function exactly like they do in my 3E/PF games. Yes, the range is tighter, but they still work the same and they still completely and fully ignore character level. Over three editions the approach has gone from A(static) to B(level based) to A(static). You can't reasonably say that B was a vast improvement over A when comparing 4E to 3E and then say that A and B are the same when comparing 5E to 4E.

Again, just to be clear, over and over in this thread I took exception to the insistence that PC level play any role in the setting of DCs. I see that as directly connected to "shifting DCs for static items". I accept that I've been enlightened that this is not mandatory.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yeah, I guess I can imagine that scenario, though its not one that has actually ever occurred to me in the past. Well, once my sister made a 'test of heroes' scenario, which was in 3e, but in 4e you might do it with scaled level DCs, where the test wasn't "can you pass the challenge" but was more "will you make the heroic choices". Its a pretty niche application of the rules in any case.

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. @AbdulAlhazred 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.

When @AbdulAlhazred 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.)

Yeah, in truth there's some mixture of things going on. In terms of fiction there are a range of blizzards. In the real world you might have a blizzard in Vermont where a bunch of snow falls and if you're outside in it you should be equipped, but any hardy adventurer will just bed down. If they have to push on, maybe they might get lost, but even low level PCs could survive there, vs the blizzards that happen on top of Mt Everest that routinely kill off dozens of highly equipped and trained climbers and might well be a paragon challenge to survive, vs the side of Pemerton's Obelisk of Ice, which could kill an epic hero.

So, I could say "yeah, I have these mountains on the map, and its winter, and I gave the PCs a reason to go up there, lets hit them with a blizzard and lets make it the storm of the century, paragon DCs for paragon PCs. Its not that the world is built around the PCs, but we're telling the tales of heroes here, not of the guy that walked up the mountain on a sunny day and back. If the players want to forgo being heroes and just climb in the sun, well, why even play that with rules? Its fine to have things that are already scaled where say "the dragon is way to powerful for you to defeat" but see my comments below about that...

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 @bert1000'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.

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.

We all did this from day one, and this is one of the things that drives me nuts in these discussions is that there's a vocal element of DMs who INSIST that there's this 'unicorn' of "true sandbox play", which really just doesn't exist. You always arrange the world in some fashion that it can be presented to the players in a graded series of challenges. The first thing Dave Arneson did when he built the first dungeon was establish the convention that deeper levels equaled greater danger. Come to a stairs and you have to decide, do you go for the bigger treasures, or do you stick to the level you're on now and hope to get stronger first?

Of course there are games that are 'undirected play' where maybe the PCs are allowed to just wander into the dragon lair at level 1 and get eaten, but if they pay ANY attention they'll surely see clues, and the kobold warren is surely more accessible to them than the dragon lair. No DM wants to waste table time setting it up otherwise, unless he's just a sadist, and he won't have players for long!

So, I don't object to the sandbox terminology, but its clearly not what some people try to pretend it is. Nor IME do DMs really live by some sort of hard-core ethic where when the players got into deep water through no fault of their own that its just all tough luck. In some sense every DM except the sadist who wants the level 1 meat grinder, has somewhere in his agenda the story of mighty heroes who actually made it, and so every DM is in some sense an advocate for the PCs. DW just makes this utterly explicit, which is a great reason to play it.

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).

Exactly. Think about it this way, in 4e EVERY SINGLE GAME ELEMENT can be assigned unambiguously to a level and that assignment is pretty accurate. That was a really significant advance, and one big reason I personally am not fond of the idea of DMing 5e is I'm not giving that up.

 

[BryonD]

Wow. That's what you remember? Really? And you complain about me misinterpreting you. Lol. Are you still so annoyed about the spanking you received when you tried to recreate facts about medusa that you feel the need to revise history again?

Spanking?

If you say you never said that then fine. I take it back. But giving you full benefit of the doubt regarding my memory of years ago isn't exactly equitable with you repeatedly putting false words in my mouth in real time conversations.

As to Medusa, I'm still up for polling the public on how she affects people who look at her.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm thrilled that you have come around.
Again, back when 4E was in print you, and Hussar, and many other highly PRAISED this innovation of mathematically purity and were highly critical of me and others for promoting the approach you have described here.

You described in detail how it was the duty of the DM to always make sure that the SAME WALL was harder to climb if and when the party came back later, the lock would always be better, etc, etc. You made it clear that this applied to anything and everything.

You keep going back to "consistent nature" and using references as if this is a key point. That is exactly what I do. But I never need to know if a character is Level 1 or level 13 in order to reference fiction or nature or be consistent.

Again, I'm thrilled to know that doing things the 3E way is considered correct

Yeah, I'm calling you on that one. Lets see the posts because I never read such a post, and if I had I'd have called it out as highly dubious.

 

[BryonD]

Exactly. Think about it this way, in 4e EVERY SINGLE GAME ELEMENT can be assigned unambiguously to a level and that assignment is pretty accurate. That was a really significant advance, and one big reason I personally am not fond of the idea of DMing 5e is I'm not giving that up.

And that's cool. But just keep in mind it is completely fair for people to be not fond of 4E over the exact same issue.

 

[BryonD]

Yeah, I'm calling you on that one. Lets see the posts because I never read such a post, and if I had I'd have called it out as highly dubious.

And I'm willing to concede.
The claims within this very thread about presumed more slippery slime and or the need to know PC levels for DCs still create the same fundamental issue as far as I'm concerned. I accept that there is clearly a distinction between that and actually changing the DC of a fixed item.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One key difference here may be that a 12th level 4E wizard gains at least "+6" (whatever than means in model terms) to everything, including climbing mountains in blizzards. In 3E and in 5E, a 12th level wizard can be no better at climbing mountains in blizzards than a peasant. A "typical" L12 Ranger would be "good" at it and an optimized mountain climbing ranger may be "outstanding" at it. There is an implicit lack of "reliable", though I find it quite robust and dependable.

Again, to me this is a very good thing.

Edit to clarify: It isn't reliable because you don't know what the capabilities of the PCs will be, but it is robust in being self consistent.

I think the INTENT (you will have to judge the success of it mechanically) was to allow all PCs to be 'paragon tough' at level 12, so they'd have a chance of surviving the mountain blizzard. The Ranger will probably be better than that, and the specialist character really good. If there are hard DCs of level 12 that means the wizard MIGHT pass them, but only 25% of the time or maybe even only 10%. The regular ranger will pass them say 25-50% of the time, and the specialist ranger will pass them over 60% of the time, maybe up to 90% depending on exactly how min/maxed he is.

In 3e the wizard has no chance, he just dies, he's never going to pass a level 12 check in some skill he doesn't have that is based off a stat he probably doesn't care about. In 5e it SHOULD be roughly like 4e, except level is much less of a consideration. The level 1 and level 20 wizards both can maybe eek out survival with a lot of luck, etc. The level 20 specialist mountain ranger will of course just laugh at the challenge, but most everyone else will find it fairly difficult, again without much reference to level.

Each system is different, but in each its darn good to have that mountain ranger.

 

[BryonD]

I think the INTENT (you will have to judge the success of it mechanically) was to allow all PCs to be 'paragon tough' at level 12, so they'd have a chance of surviving the mountain blizzard. The Ranger will probably be better than that, and the specialist character really good. If there are hard DCs of level 12 that means the wizard MIGHT pass them, but only 25% of the time or maybe even only 10%. The regular ranger will pass them say 25-50% of the time, and the specialist ranger will pass them over 60% of the time, maybe up to 90% depending on exactly how min/maxed he is.

Agreed.

I recall conversations ( ) about how great it was that the "weak" characters always had a small chance to be successful at things a "strong" character was expected to do (but would still have a small chance of failure).

In 3e the wizard has no chance, he just dies, he's never going to pass a level 12 check in some skill he doesn't have that is based off a stat he probably doesn't care about.

Or he uses magic to solve the problem. But if he is stripped of the ability to use magic then a 3E wizard is pretty much a peasant. I like that.
Of course, you can also make 3E wizards that are anything but peasants if you want to. But the vanilla wizard, yep.

In 5e it SHOULD be roughly like 4e, except level is much less of a consideration. The level 1 and level 20 wizards both can maybe eek out survival with a lot of luck, etc. The level 20 specialist mountain ranger will of course just laugh at the challenge, but most everyone else will find it fairly difficult, again without much reference to level.

Bounded accuracy certainly plays a role. I've praised the fact that kobolds are not negligible to characters in their teens. The same applies here except the L1 wizard is the kobold and the dangerous mountain in the "character in his teens". The wizard is still in way over his head and pretty likely gonna die. But it is toned down from 3E. But the L1 and L20 wizard (sans all magic) are pretty much the same. The L20n has a better chance to hit the remorhaz with a stick, but that is about it.

Each system is different, but in each its darn good to have that mountain ranger.

Of course