Making multiple sources of advantage and disadvantage count

[Chaosvii7]

I originally came in here with an idea for adding a greater mechanical benefit for stacking instances of advantage and disadvantage. Since this topic has started, different variants have appeared. Below is a list of all of the current systems for multiple instances of advantage and disadvantage stack.

The idea I came up with is simple; Every source of advantage beyond the first is a cumulative +1 penalty, and every source of disadvantage beyond the first is a -1 to the roll, to a minimum of +0 and a maximum of +20(heaven forbid someone or something actually be able to achieve this with 8-9 sources of advantage from various sources.)

In addition, while advantage and disadvantage at the same time negate each other out, subsequent advantages and disadvantages do not negate the modifiers. This means that somebody who gets their legs cut off casts invisibility and tries to make a ranged attack against a target, or whatever silly situation have you, they don't roll any bonus dice, but instead just take a bonus or penalty(in the case of our legless sniper, probably a -2 or -3.)


A new idea that pops into my head; Using the Proficiency dice variant that'll be out in the DMG, have multiple sources of advantage and disadvantage affect how many proficiency dice you roll and keep as well; I don't mind the mountain of dice but the d20 is the most sacred of them all and should only be called in once or twice as a definitive yes or no; Not just like a gaggle of headless chickens you're trying to gauge opinions from.

This consolidates the mountain of dice so it's not all focused upon the d20, which already has a great statistical impact upon all roll-based actions. Also supports letting people roll a smorgasbord of dice without it becoming either increasingly irrelevant or very swingy.

Move variants are incoming. If you have an idea you'd like represented among the list, please post it below.

[Angelalex242]

Nah. Do the logical thing.

For every source of advantage you have, you roll an extra d20. If you have advantage twice, you roll 3d20 and keep the best. If you have it 3 times, roll 4d20 and keep the best.

And so on.

Likewise, multiple source of disadvantage have you rolling more and more d20s and keeping the worst.

[Yakk]

A huge design point of advantage/disadvantage is that once you impose it, there isn't a reason to continue looking for more advantage/disadvantage. This speeds play.

The inability to stack is a feature, not a bug.

[Chaosvii7]

Nah. Do the logical thing.

For every source of advantage you have, you roll an extra d20. If you have advantage twice, you roll 3d20 and keep the best. If you have it 3 times, roll 4d20 and keep the best.

And so on.

Likewise, multiple source of disadvantage have you rolling more and more d20s and keeping the worst.

That seems...

...sorry, no.

That would mean something with advantage on all of their attacks rolls and multiple attacks in a round would roll a literal wave of d20s. I'm all for player empowerment, but that would just be ridiculous, tossing that many d20s out multiple times.

More power to you, but I don't think that suits my fancy as a houserule. I want the game to be relatively dice light as far as having to use the d20 to determine outcomes. If this were a 2d6 game, I'd be all for it. A d6 feels like it should always be rolled in bucketfuls.


The inability to stack is a feature, not a bug.

I get that, but the unintended side effect is that it creates scenarios in which one good strike could negate several bad strikes, and vice versa. I'm not looking for realism in a game where you can summon Pazuzu like Beetlejuice, but it should be at least a little more flexible towards making circumstances in which there's some pressure or tension feel stronger when you've got odds going for or against you in more ways than one.

[pwykersotz]

That seems...

...sorry, no.

That would mean something with advantage on all of their attacks rolls and multiple attacks in a round would roll a literal wave of d20s. I'm all for player empowerment, but that would just be ridiculous, tossing that many d20s out multiple times.

More power to you, but I don't think that suits my fancy as a houserule. I want the game to be relatively dice light as far as having to use the d20 to determine outcomes. If this were a 2d6 game, I'd be all for it. A d6 feels like it should always be rolled in bucketfuls.



I get that, but the unintended side effect is that it creates scenarios in which one good strike could negate several bad strikes, and vice versa. I'm not looking for realism in a game where you can summon Pazuzu like Beetlejuice, but it should be at least a little more flexible towards making circumstances in which there's some pressure or tension feel stronger when you've got odds going for or against you in more ways than one.

Perhaps the same effect with a different focus would smooth things. For every source of advantage beyond the first, the GM lowers the DC/AC/etc by 1. For disadvantage do the opposite. This keeps combat running smoothly and character calculations stay easy.

[Chaosvii7]

Perhaps the same effect with a different focus would smooth things. For every source of advantage beyond the first, the GM lowers the DC/AC/etc by 1. For disadvantage do the opposite. This keeps combat running smoothly and character calculations stay easy.

That sounds a lot more workable, thanks for the idea!

[Stubbazubba]

That sounds a lot more workable, thanks for the idea!

That is literally your exact proposal, just on the other side of the equal sign.

[Chaosvii7]

That is literally your exact proposal, just on the other side of the equal sign.

Exactly. Instead of multiple players having to keep on their toes for math, it's just on the DM, and target numbers are generally easier to increase than just modifiers that are aiming for those targets. This also means that you don't have to cap the modifiers to rolls.

[JRutterbush]

Adding tiny little bonuses or penalties completely defeats the entire purpose of advantage and disadvantage: removing all the tiny little bonuses and penalties that cropped up in earlier editions. If you're going to do that, it's a lot easier to just go back to the +2 and -2 circumstance modifiers. You're already removing the main benefit of using advantage and disadvantage, you might as well just go all the way with it.

[Chaosvii7]

Adding tiny little bonuses or penalties completely defeats the entire purpose of advantage and disadvantage: removing all the tiny little bonuses and penalties that cropped up in earlier editions. If you're going to do that, it's a lot easier to just go back to the +2 and -2 circumstance modifiers. You're already removing the main benefit of using advantage and disadvantage, you might as well just go all the way with it.

No, I love advantage and disadvantage, I just want to make the impact of getting multiple sources of it meaningful, short of having to stack dice on top of each other. Next best thing, in my opinion, is to use the modifiers.

While I'm pro-advantage, I really don't think saying no to modifiers is a good thing. It's not a crime to sometimes equate things to bonuses, especially when advantage is stronger as a narrative mechanic than it as just something that people can use abilities to tack onto their rolls. That's why I'm a lot less judicial with my advantage and just ask for some interesting descriptiveness or actions to achieve it so that it comes with the flourish it should have. I think a better design would include advantage and disadvantage, but make that the gateway to narrative description of characters' interactions with the world, enemies, and each other.

A new idea that pops into my head; Using the Proficiency dice variant that'll be out in the DMG, have multiple sources of advantage and disadvantage affect how many proficiency dice you roll and keep as well; I don't mind the mountain of dice but the d20 is the most sacred of them all and should only be called in once or twice as a definitive yes or no; Not just like a gaggle of headless chickens you're trying to gauge opinions from.

[Angelalex242]

Says you. I'll stick with my 'roll as many d20s as it takes for multiple adv or disad.'

[Chaosvii7]

Says you. I'll stick with my 'roll as many d20s as it takes for multiple adv or disad.'

Mind if I add yours to the post? Does the good of collecting a bunch of them so that people who stumble upon this topic later down the road get a smattering of different ideas.

This also applies to you, Pwykersotz. I'd love to make this a running tab of different variants of advantage stacking.

[Morty]

If you don't want players to roll three d20s and pick the best or worst outcome, a milder version of that would be to have multiple sources cancel each other on a one-for-one basis, even if you always only re-roll once. This way multiple sources would act as a safety measure of sorts - if you have to sources of advantage, it won't help you in optimal circumstances, but if something slaps you with a disadvantage, you still roll with an advantage.

[Kurald Galain]

Nah. Do the logical thing.

For every source of advantage you have, you roll an extra d20. If you have advantage twice, you roll 3d20 and keep the best. If you have it 3 times, roll 4d20 and keep the best.

And so on.

Likewise, multiple source of disadvantage have you rolling more and more d20s and keeping the worst.

Yes, I would do precisely that. First, rolling 3d20 is actually faster than rolling 2d20 and having to change the target. Second, the scenario where a player rolls four or five dice will be rare, but it will also be much more memorable.

Ad/disad not stacking is very much a bug, not a feature; it's unintuitive, makes numerous tactics irrelevant, and steers away from memorable moments as mentioned above. I would certainly expect the above rule to be in the DMG.

[SpacemanSpif]

Before you start to houserule in stacking advantage, it might be wise to take a look at how good stacked advantage is.

I wrote a quick matlab script to generate a histogram with labeled percentages. results = zeros (10000, 1); % Vector to store results of die rolls
dice = 3; % Sets number of dice rolled each time
rolls = zeros (dice);
for loop = 1:10000; % Loop to roll the dice 1000 times

rolls = randi(20,1,dice); % Rolls each die once4
results(loop) = max(rolls); % Saves the highest roll
end
bincounts = hist(results, 20);
bincounts = bincounts/100


[counts, bins] = hist(results, 20);
figure, bar(bins, counts),



for i = 1:numel(bins)
text(bins(i) - 0.3, counts(i), [num2str(bincounts(i))], 'color', 'r', 'VerticalAlignment', 'top', 'Fontsize', 16)
end

With three dice, the percentages look like this: http://imgur.com/lfmO3GW

So you have like an 88% chance of getting an 11 or better (about equivalent to a +7), a 65% chance of getting a 15 or better (about equivalent to a +8).

With 4 dice, it's like this: http://imgur.com/HxQT7Ay

Giving you something like a 6.5% chance to roll 10 or less (+9?), and maybe a 20% chance for 15 or less (+11).

[Angelalex242]

And that's fine! If you've got SUCH an advantage that you can roll 4d20 for that one action, you deserve to succeed nearly all the time. How often does double or triple advantage come up, anyway, without the PCs working very hard for it?

[Stubbazubba]

Ideally, not very often, but I suspect they'll be passing out advantage like candy through circumstance, feats, item properties, etc., because otherwise there aren't supposed to be modifiers. Since advantage doesn't stack, they don't have to worry about the math of it.

The simplest tweak that would address multiple ad/dis would be the suggestion to cancel out sources one by one, and whichever has net advantage or disadvantage gets that, just not stacking. That or reduced stacking (you need 3 net advantage to get 3d20, 5 to get 4d20, etc.) would probably work best without having it get out of control quickly and often.

[hawklost]

Ya know, I gotta love the way we try to completely ignore the reason ad/da was supposedly designed in the first place. It was supposed to help speed up the combat by keeping players from having to worry about getting every single little bonus they could. Instead of a person looking for ad here and there and there and there and trying to figure out the best exact position with the best move beforehand they could just say "Hey, I have advantage, I guess the rest is just fluff" and do whatever. Or "Well crap, he cancelled my advantage, guess its normal" instead of needing to find another source of advantage at the last moment.

[Kurald Galain]

Ideally, not very often, but I suspect they'll be passing out advantage like candy through circumstance, feats, item properties, etc.

Handing out ad/disad like candy is a problem under the current system as well. That means that you shouldn't hand it out like candy, not that stacking ad/disad isn't an improvement.

[pwykersotz]

Mind if I add yours to the post? Does the good of collecting a bunch of them so that people who stumble upon this topic later down the road get a smattering of different ideas.

This also applies to you, Pwykersotz. I'd love to make this a running tab of different variants of advantage stacking.

Feel free. :smallsmile:

[Knaight]

Ideally, not very often, but I suspect they'll be passing out advantage like candy through circumstance, feats, item properties, etc., because otherwise there aren't supposed to be modifiers. Since advantage doesn't stack, they don't have to worry about the math of it.

The simplest tweak that would address multiple ad/dis would be the suggestion to cancel out sources one by one, and whichever has net advantage or disadvantage gets that, just not stacking. That or reduced stacking (you need 3 net advantage to get 3d20, 5 to get 4d20, etc.) would probably work best without having it get out of control quickly and often.

Another, slightly more complicated way would be to have advantage not scale linearly. You get one source of advantage, you get one die. To get the second, you need another two sources. To get the third, you need another three sources. Sure, having 4 dice is pretty substantial, but if you have 6 sources of advantage doing pretty well pretty easily is fine by me.

I don't think this would be necessary, but if the game ends up handing out advantage too easily it will work as a bottleneck. Getting to 5 dice takes 10 sources of advantage, and that's likely to be a soft limit even in the best of times. It also prevents the issue of people trying to eke out every source - once you have 2, you're going to need another 3, so whether you have another 1 or not is irrelevant.

[Tehnar]

Why? You are already getting diminishing returns on your success chance anyway as you stack advantage. If its a +5 equivalent at 2d20 then its a +7.5 equivalent at 3d20 and so forth..

[Knaight]

Why? You are already getting diminishing returns on your success chance anyway as you stack advantage. If its a +5 equivalent at 2d20 then its a +7.5 equivalent at 3d20 and so forth..

The main reasons are to accelerate the rate of diminishing (for people who feel that the probabilities of failing get too low too quickly, particularly on rolls which don't need to be all that high in the first place), and to prevent the scrounging of every last die. I don't think it would be necessary, but I'm also fine with advantage providing reasonably high bonuses once aggregated.