D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Hussar]

I'm sorry, but, I haven't been following this DC discussion very closely, but, do I have this right? People are seriously arguing that DC's are set by some sort of world building notion? That the objective DC's of, say, 3e D&D, were based off of what the world should be like? Are people seriously making that claim?

Good grief, has anyone ever READ a module? Look, it's all well and good to talk about how a mountain would be difficult for a peasant or easy for a PC, but, who cares? The DC of that mountain climb will be whatever is required by the adventure at the time, and it will be set based on the level of the PC's in that adventure. Same as locks, traps and various other DC's. You won't find DC 30+ locks in a 1st level adventure, nor will you find DC 15 locks in a 10th level adventure. What would be the point? The DC of a given lock will always be determined by the expected level of the PC's in that adventure.

Full stop.

You can talk all you want about how there's a dragon's lair over there and if the PC's go there before they're ready, they'll die. Fine and dandy. But, shock and surprise, when they eventually DO go over there, every lock, every trap and every NPC' interaction DC will be based on the expected level of a PC group who can successfully navigate that adventure. So, if the Dragon's Lair is a 15th level adventure, then every DC in that adventure will be based on a 15th level party. Some harder, some easier, but, all within that range.

It's been that way since time began as well. It doesn't matter what edition you want to look at. The adventures are tailored for a specific level range of PC's. You don't find Tomb of Horror style traps in a 1st-4th level adventure. You don't find 10 foot pit traps in a 9-12th level adventure either.

So people can blow all the smoke they iike about how DC's are set by the setting and it's all about building a believable world, but, when the rubber meets the road, it's all a load of baloney. DC's are set by the expected level of the adventure first, and foremost. Always have been and always will be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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".

Just to try to clarify this. I doubt that I would have so much detail described about an individual mountain (unless it has come up before, my game world has been in use since 1977, so there are a lot of established facts). It would be a mountain, and I would assume that less and more powerful blizzards might blow there from time-to-time. I'd thus decide that indeed this mountain is known for nasty weather, and its a big storm blowing in. Maybe the size of the storm isn't chance either. Maybe later it will come out that forces are working against the PCs. Lets say one of them asks about giants, because he's a dwarf and in 4e there's a backstory that giants and dwarfs are enemies. Indeed it turns out that the local Storm Giant is piling it on, but maybe there's a way to turn that to advantage, etc.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm sorry, but, I haven't been following this DC discussion very closely, but, do I have this right? People are seriously arguing that DC's are set by some sort of world building notion? That the objective DC's of, say, 3e D&D, were based off of what the world should be like? Are people seriously making that claim?

Good grief, has anyone ever READ a module? Look, it's all well and good to talk about how a mountain would be difficult for a peasant or easy for a PC, but, who cares? The DC of that mountain climb will be whatever is required by the adventure at the time, and it will be set based on the level of the PC's in that adventure. Same as locks, traps and various other DC's. You won't find DC 30+ locks in a 1st level adventure, nor will you find DC 15 locks in a 10th level adventure. What would be the point? The DC of a given lock will always be determined by the expected level of the PC's in that adventure.

Full stop.

You've got causality backward, neighbor. The expected level of PCs is based off the difficulty. You don't reduce the strength of traps in the Tomb of Horrors because first level PCs choose to go there; you just laugh maniacally and run the module as written. More power to them if they survive.

 

[bert1000]

I'm sorry, but, I haven't been following this DC discussion very closely, but, do I have this right? People are seriously arguing that DC's are set by some sort of world building notion? That the objective DC's of, say, 3e D&D, were based off of what the world should be like? Are people seriously making that claim?

Good grief, has anyone ever READ a module? Look, it's all well and good to talk about how a mountain would be difficult for a peasant or easy for a PC, but, who cares? The DC of that mountain climb will be whatever is required by the adventure at the time, and it will be set based on the level of the PC's in that adventure. Same as locks, traps and various other DC's. You won't find DC 30+ locks in a 1st level adventure, nor will you find DC 15 locks in a 10th level adventure. What would be the point? The DC of a given lock will always be determined by the expected level of the PC's in that adventure.

Full stop.

You can talk all you want about how there's a dragon's lair over there and if the PC's go there before they're ready, they'll die. Fine and dandy. But, shock and surprise, when they eventually DO go over there, every lock, every trap and every NPC' interaction DC will be based on the expected level of a PC group who can successfully navigate that adventure. So, if the Dragon's Lair is a 15th level adventure, then every DC in that adventure will be based on a 15th level party. Some harder, some easier, but, all within that range.

It's been that way since time began as well. It doesn't matter what edition you want to look at. The adventures are tailored for a specific level range of PC's. You don't find Tomb of Horror style traps in a 1st-4th level adventure. You don't find 10 foot pit traps in a 9-12th level adventure either.

So people can blow all the smoke they iike about how DC's are set by the setting and it's all about building a believable world, but, when the rubber meets the road, it's all a load of baloney. DC's are set by the expected level of the adventure first, and foremost. Always have been and always will be.

Oh boy. This is not really what the conversation was about.

I hope we're not going to have 20 pages of debate on whether sandbox/exploration style play has ever existed.

I don't even like sandbox/exploration style play anymore but I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist. Like someone up thread said, I also don't agree with some of the extreme "purity" stances from some sandbox players but it's not hard to imagine someone drawing a map, seeding it with challenges of different levels, giving warnings/rumors as to the relative level of challenge, and NOT changing the challenge regardless of when the PCs decide to tackle it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The second part of this quote suggests that the first part is really saying that D&D can give a fair play experience regardless of how it is approached. I know from my own experience that this isn't true, unless we take a very liberal notion of fair.

Yes, I have a fairly liberal notion of 'fair' (adequate, OK, not too bad, reasonable...) in that context. No, I did not mean to imply that any specific version of D&D had ever met (or not met) the basic standards I was talking about, just that it's not unreasonable to expect any given game to do so.

I don't think that will upset the balance. (Unless you have a party containing Essentials martial PCs, who may be a bit overshadowed with no dailies to call on.) My concern is that it might tend to make the game a bit boring.

Of course, fun vs boring gets subjective. I find playing basic strikers like a Champion, Slayer, Leap Attacker or double-specialized-dual-wielding Cuisinart of Doom (to cover ~30 years of D&D history), pretty darn boring. Other folks find doing so endlessly amusing. By the same token, the kind of full-on Alpha-Strike-vs-Uber-Monster dynamic you get in the 15MWD seems exciting, or at least logical and fulfilling, to some.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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).

Well, I will say this: I haven't spent the considerable time that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and I imagine [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] have in doing analysis of Forge discussion and reading up on theory in indy game design. I've read a lot of discussion about techniques and application, but I leave the heavy theoretical lifting to others.

So, during at least the earlier part of my 4e experience, I probably did frame the debate about 3e vs 4e DCs more in terms of making a DC system that gave some chance for most anyone to potentially pass a lot of DCs. I'd also note that the DMG1's released DC numbers support that, as the range of DCs is somewhat compressed vs later revisions. PHB1 also necessarily contained far fewer ways to amp up specific DCs and create a wider disparity than training + stat bonus, which by themselves only amount to a +10, not enough to push people off the d20 (and I'd note that even adding in Skill Focus and +3 for an item, and a racial bonus, etc doesn't push people astronomically far out in most cases). So at least in the beginning that seemed to be a design goal of 4e, and at the time I hadn't evolved so far in terms of story-driven technique.

TODAY I would say that I don't think I consider 'keeping everyone on the d20' to be critical. 5e obviously does, and if the game had been released in 2008, or maybe 2000, I'd have probably thought that was a great and worthy design goal. Now I think its fine if one guy has a much higher DC, the other guy just better bring some element into the conflict that lets him do something effective! And I'm not likely to ask for more than one check using a given skill before the fiction moves on, so at worst you get stuck trying to fumble through something, and hopefully you invent a reason why the endurance check is really arcana, or etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You've got causality backward, neighbor. The expected level of PCs is based off the difficulty. You don't reduce the strength of traps in the Tomb of Horrors because first level PCs choose to go there; you just laugh maniacally and run the module as written. More power to them if they survive.

But he's right, nobody sat down and said, "I'm going to write up the Tomb of Horror, a Lich Tomb" and THEN decided it was a level 15 adventure. Instead they decided to make the nastiest adventure possible and set it at level 15 as being a level where the PCs are super powerful, so they could get their comeuppance. Based on the determination of appropriate level the difficulty of traps, monsters, etc was determined, and the fiction was developed alongside those mechanics to support the idea of it being super lethal to even powerful heroes.

The reverse, that someone sat down and started writing a module and it just sort of came out that all the elements were appropriate for level 1 PCs just doesn't hold water. Nobody does that. Not only do module designers start with a level in mind, home brew adventure designers do as well. Never in 40 years of DMing, regardless of theory employed, did an adventure "just happen to be right for level X PCs" it was ALWAYS conceived that way from the start.

If this weren't so then you'd expect there to be adventures with a large mix of different areas and elements juxtaposed with widely varying difficulty, yet you virtually never see that. As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] said, you never get a 10' vanilla covered pit in a level 12 adventure, certainly not presented as an actual trap.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So, during at least the earlier part of my 4e experience, I probably did frame the debate about 3e vs 4e DCs more in terms of making a DC system that gave some chance for most anyone to potentially pass a lot of DCs
....
TODAY I would say that I don't think I consider 'keeping everyone on the d20' to be critical. 5e obviously does, and if the game had been released in 2008, or maybe 2000, I'd have probably thought that was a great and worthy design goal.

There's some range of what could be meant by 'keeping them on the d20.' You can have widely ranging bonuses among characters of different classes at the same level, or even characters of the same class at the same level, or you could try to keep most characters of the same level 'on the d20,' or most characters of all levels. At one extreme, you have very high character definition - two rogues of the same level with the same DEX might have different specialties, one can auto-open a lock the other can't even take 20 on, the other can passive-perception spot a trap the other can't find on a natural 20 - but at the price of limiting participation to such specialists. At the other extreme - a 1st level character and a 20th level one, both have a shot at opening that lock or finding that trap - everyone participates all the time but the specialists don't feel quite so special.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There's some range of what could be meant by 'keeping them on the d20.' You can have widely ranging bonuses among characters of different classes at the same level, or even characters of the same class at the same level, or you could try to keep most characters of the same level 'on the d20,' or most characters of all levels. At one extreme, you have very high character definition - two rogues of the same level with the same DEX might have different specialties, one can auto-open a lock the other can't even take 20 on, the other can passive-perception spot a trap the other can't find on a natural 20 - but at the price of limiting participation to such specialists. At the other extreme - a 1st level character and a 20th level one, both have a shot at opening that lock or finding that trap - everyone participates all the time but the specialists don't feel quite so special.

Right. Personally I don't see a ton of reasons to keep all the PCs of all levels on the same d20 together. Unless you plan to have some seriously mixed-level parties this doesn't seem to gain you a lot. Keeping all PCs in a given party on the same d20 for each skill has some possible application. I've just concluded that there's no reason to insure that everyone has a shot at everything. Just let the players engage in the conflict that they want to engage in, and advance the story in the direction suggested by what they do. If nobody can pick the lock then surely someone can teleport through the door, or disintegrate a hole in the wall, bash the door in, etc.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Right. Personally I don't see a ton of reasons to keep all the PCs of all levels on the same d20 together. Unless you plan to have some seriously mixed-level parties this doesn't seem to gain you a lot.

There's some real potential to a mixed-level party, actually. For instance, you can more closely model the hero-and-sidekicks, or young-noble-and-protectors, or Fellowship o/t Ring types of party structures you see in genre. You can run a "death is real" campaign in which replacement characters start at 1st level. You can mix NPC henchmen of lower level into a party. You can have the over-done trope of the heroes training the townspeople to fight back actually help a little.

Keeping all PCs in a given party on the same d20 for each skill has some possible application. I've just concluded that there's no reason to insure that everyone has a shot at everything. Just let the players engage in the conflict that they want to engage in, and advance the story in the direction suggested by what they do. If nobody can pick the lock then surely someone can teleport through the door, or disintegrate a hole in the wall, bash the door in, etc.

Nod. My takeaway was to just avoid single points of failure and single-roll resolutions. They're just boring. Either hand-wave, or group check, or go into detail and play through it with RP, decision-making, and enough different checks that everyone's drawn into it, and it doesn't all derail on one bad (or good) roll. I suppose most characters of comparable level being "on the d20" helps with that, though, I agree, it needn't be every character in every skill.

But, yes, the extreme examples are just that: extremes.