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Quertus
2018-11-13, 09:47 PM
So, here's my train of thought:

One of my tables had several long-running parties. One if those was the one I refer to as the BDH party. They could take on nearly anything, and waded through their enemies like they were humans.

They had incredible alpha-strike potential, with high initiatives and high damage.

People have made numerous comments about this party that felt to me like there was something I just wasn't communicating successfully. Comments like, "it's fine for the the party to be powerful, but the GM has to scale the encounters in kind".

I know that this isn't true, because that party - among other things - ran through one or more published modules, and had a blast.

I've always tried to approach explaining this from the PoV of Player Agency - how it takes away from their decision to play powerful characters if the GM artificially scales the encounters to match. I've subtly or blatantly tried to liken it to Railroading, or the dreaded leveling treadmill. But I've always felt that, in addition to having questionable success at getting people to see how it could possibly work, that I have somehow failed to capture the essence of that party, of what made it work.

So, yes, very few monsters got to take a turn. Perhaps only one or two ever got two turns. If you got a 14 on initiative, you probably weren't going get a turn, because combat would probably be over.

But that was fine, because, even if you didn't get a turn this fight, it was only one of a dozen or a score encounters we'd blaze through in a night. We'd wade through most monsters like they were human.

Also, no single character was soloing these fights. Sure, maybe you wouldn't get to go this encounter, but it wasn't being solod by a single übercharger, or ending to a single SoD. So it wasn't ShadowRun level "and now it's Aquaman's turn to shine". No, everyone felt like they were shining all the time, even if they occasionally had to wait 10-15 minutes for the next encounter for their shine to be visible.

But, somehow - perhaps because of my poor explanations, perhaps because of the differences between a CaW vs CaS mindset, perhaps something else entirely - I felt like the message was never coming across. Worse, it felt like it was the wrong message - like, somehow, I should be looking at the issue differently to properly explain it.

And that's where this thread comes in. While keeping this on the back burner forever, something (and, sadly, I'm too senile to remember what right this second) made me look at this from another PoV.

See, in the BDH party, yes, most encounters were very easy. Most encounters, the party crushed their opposition, and moved on. But a few encounters, they didn't. A few encounters, the opponents were so powerful, or smart, or prepared, or lucky, or whatever, that they didn't just die to the BDHs. Those opponents, the party didn't just wade through them like they were humans. Those opponents were epic. We killed an ancient dragon while it was still gloating how inevitable our defeat was on initiative count 19, but you? You actually got a turn / you actually had an effective Contingency? You're awesome. The party being so powerful, and steamrolling so many foes, made those special opponents more memorable, more impressive by virtue of them comparing favorably to so many who had fallen before so easily to the party's might.

Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

When you make the party vulnerable to weaker threats, you weaken the bigger threats. Like the old saying, "when a cow's life is as valuable as a man's, a man's life is as valueless as a cow's". While I don't know about that, I do know that, when I don't fear a Dragon significantly more than I do a band of orcs, it lessens the might and mystique of the Dragon, at least in my book.

Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME.

At least, that's my thoughts on the matter.

What do you say, playground? Does this make any sense? If it does, does it match your experience?

Pelle
2018-11-14, 05:25 AM
Playing all powerful characters who are not facing any real challenges is fine if that's your thing. To me it's boring, because it turns the game into Magical Tea Party. I want to do that - sure, you do that. I want to do that - sure, you do that. If so, I don't see the point of using a system more complicated than free form.

Now, I don't really see what this has to do with bounded accuracy or not. You can play a party that face challenge or not in both 5e and 3.x if that's what you are comparing it to. And bounded accuracy doesn't really make a single orc more dangerous, but hordes of orcs will be. Whether that's good or bad is just a preference. I like that stopping a BBEG is about more than just rolling high in iniative, and don't see it as a problem that it is weak in combat as long as it has political power. My games are not about winning individual combats, they are about achieving goals, so bounded accuracy is not a particular issue in that respect. And the memorable opponents with contigencies you are talking about is more about winning the combat before it starts, which is the same situation with bounded accuracy. If the dragon is vulnerable in a straight fight, it shouldn't risk fighting and needs to be played smarter. That's why you fear it. Yes, in 5e parties can punch above their weight class when it comes to CR, possibly making enemies less special, but CR just measure straight combat potential, not BBEG potential. That you have to build up narratively.

Pleh
2018-11-14, 06:15 AM
Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

This is the part that stands out. I also feel that Bounded Accuracy is at best tangential to the rest of this train of thought. "Where did this come from?" I can see how it relates, but not how it's a next step in the process.

The quoted set makes me feel less like Bounded Accuracy is your problem as much as User Error.

Bounded Accuracy makes the act of engaging in any fight inherently dangerous, which is one of the things I like about it. And it's dangerous for everyone that participates in it.

But the thing that makes me think, "user error" is that you established that the losing devil was Mephistopheles. Then it seems out of character for him to lose. If he shouldn't have much chance of losing, you don't have to use combat rules or offer a fight. If you want tbe BDH to fight a devil, don't give him a name until he's become an infamous enemy.

And why aren't we just raising the infamy of the orc gang? Sure, you didn't say if the party barely won the fight or ran away, but there's no reason either way that the rest of theur gang couldn't still be out there, with increased prestige and infamy for putting the fear of orcs into a group of BDH.

It just feels like you need to do more prep work to account for all outcomes. How do I want this to go if X happens? What about Y?

You seem to like CaW and favor gameplay that rewards preparedness, which makes Bounded Accuracy feel cheap as it insists there always be an element of chance. But in reality, it just means you can never trivialize combat, so you have to always be prepared to deal with the fickleness of combat.

But this isn't just for PCs, but NPCs as well. Mephistopheles didn't rise through the pandemonic ranks by ignoring the bounded accuract of combat in his world. He got there by knowing how he could recover or profit even when a battle went south OR how to prevent combat from initiating to begin with.

Quertus
2018-11-14, 08:51 AM
Playing all powerful characters who are not facing any real challenges is fine if that's your thing. To me it's boring, because it turns the game into Magical Tea Party. I want to do that - sure, you do that. I want to do that - sure, you do that. If so, I don't see the point of using a system more complicated than free form.

Now, I don't really see what this has to do with bounded accuracy or not. You can play a party that face challenge or not in both 5e and 3.x if that's what you are comparing it to. And bounded accuracy doesn't really make a single orc more dangerous, but hordes of orcs will be. Whether that's good or bad is just a preference. I like that stopping a BBEG is about more than just rolling high in iniative, and don't see it as a problem that it is weak in combat as long as it has political power. My games are not about winning individual combats, they are about achieving goals, so bounded accuracy is not a particular issue in that respect. And the memorable opponents with contigencies you are talking about is more about winning the combat before it starts, which is the same situation with bounded accuracy. If the dragon is vulnerable in a straight fight, it shouldn't risk fighting and needs to be played smarter. That's why you fear it. Yes, in 5e parties can punch above their weight class when it comes to CR, possibly making enemies less special, but CR just measure straight combat potential, not BBEG potential. That you have to build up narratively.

OK, I clearly failed to communicate here. Let me try again.

In D&D, one fairly common way of viewing encounters is that most aren't "life and death" situations - or, at least, aren't intended to be - but, rather, are simply a drain on resources. Such minion fights are more interesting as logistical challenges of "what resources can we afford to throw at this" in preperation for the fight against the "boss monster" than (to a war gamer like myself) interesting tactical challenges in and of themselves.

If one adopts this PoV, the BDH party was not failing to face any real challenges, because there were not any real challenges to be faced, outside the "boss monsters".

Unlike normal D&D, where the minion battles slowly wear the party down, and the success or failure of the boss fight is largely due to how well the players planned (against, mind you, the black box of whatever the boss monster happens to be, with the potential that zero foreshadowing of their capabilities is possible). So, you can have a party that struggles with or even TPKs against a boss fight that they "should have won easily", except that they expended critical resources in as minion fight.

With the BDH party, the coolness of the "boss" fights was entirely on the strength of the encounter itself. Mephistopheles wasn't cool because minion #127 managed to make the party expend their Potion of Defeat the Boss, Mephistopheles was cool because Mephistopheles was cool.

Lastly - and this is really hard for me to explain - but talk of the BBEG's political power is strictly outside the scope of this discussion. The biggest reason for that? Because if you're playing multidimensional chess against a BBEG opponent, and then win by punching him in the face, it's either really cool, or anticlimactic, depending on the setup and expectations.

So replace "BBEG" with "boss fight" for your purposes in this discussion, to limit the discussion to how cool the combat potential of creatures is. My assertion is, characters who more readily roflstomp minion fights are more wowed by the "cool" combat encounters than the ones who get TPK'd by rats.


This is the part that stands out. I also feel that Bounded Accuracy is at best tangential to the rest of this train of thought. "Where did this come from?" I can see how it relates, but not how it's a next step in the process.

The quoted set makes me feel less like Bounded Accuracy is your problem as much as User Error.

Bounded Accuracy makes the act of engaging in any fight inherently dangerous, which is one of the things I like about it. And it's dangerous for everyone that participates in it.

But the thing that makes me think, "user error" is that you established that the losing devil was Mephistopheles. Then it seems out of character for him to lose. If he shouldn't have much chance of losing, you don't have to use combat rules or offer a fight. If you want tbe BDH to fight a devil, don't give him a name until he's become an infamous enemy.

And why aren't we just raising the infamy of the orc gang? Sure, you didn't say if the party barely won the fight or ran away, but there's no reason either way that the rest of theur gang couldn't still be out there, with increased prestige and infamy for putting the fear of orcs into a group of BDH.

It just feels like you need to do more prep work to account for all outcomes. How do I want this to go if X happens? What about Y?

You seem to like CaW and favor gameplay that rewards preparedness, which makes Bounded Accuracy feel cheap as it insists there always be an element of chance. But in reality, it just means you can never trivialize combat, so you have to always be prepared to deal with the fickleness of combat.

But this isn't just for PCs, but NPCs as well. Mephistopheles didn't rise through the pandemonic ranks by ignoring the bounded accuract of combat in his world. He got there by knowing how he could recover or profit even when a battle went south OR how to prevent combat from initiating to begin with.

I feel much of what I wrote above applies here, as well, so I'll not repeat myself unless necessary. (Also, I'm regretting relying on my phone, as you really deserve a more point-by-point reply. Hopefully, I'm not missing too many important bits this way.)

Despite the length of the post, it isn't the entirety of my thoughts the matter, so feeling like I skipped steps is entirely valid. And, yes, I favor CaW.

Feel free to replace the orc gang with a bunch of rats. In fact, my original experience with this issue was with a party that happily slew dragons - sometimes multiple at a time - but was TPK'd by rats. Because RNG hated them (or loved the rats, perhaps?).

The fact that Bounded Accuracy makes every fight dangerous... I suppose it's easiest to see how that causes problems from a Narrative perspective, where the party that defeated Mephistopheles loses members to a random orc or rat. There's numerous discussions on the Playground where people have advocated the idea of "you cannot die unless it is narratively appropriate". While I don't hold to that - at all - I do feel that it cheapens the cool monsters when they lose, yet the most feeble of monsters actually pose a credible threat of death to the party. Also, for sufficiently large parties - which is my preference - you can make statements like, "Mephistopheles lost to this band heroes, who had just suffered three casualties to rats the day before - how tough can he be?"

It is solely the perception of the power of the encounter that I am discussing. Mephistopheles really looks lame when looked at in that light, IMO. Now, sure, I've seen/run boss fights that "won by losing" - heck, I've even ran a PC who pulled that off - but that's an exception. Not every cool monster should need to be playing 5d chess to seem cool, IMO. Perhaps, however, that is "user error" on my part, and worlds with Bounded Accuracy inherently have 5d chess as a prerequisite for coolness.

"If he shouldn't have much chance of losing, you don't have to use combat rules or offer a fight" - here I fundamentally disagree. Some of my best stories are from when the party won (or lost) against all odds. Some of my worst stories are from when the GM cut to narrative. I cannot imagine a war game where this would be acceptable. IMO, one should only "skip the rules" with the mutual consent of all parties involved.

Cluedrew
2018-11-14, 08:52 AM
I've always tried to approach explaining this from the PoV of Player Agency - how it takes away from their decision to play powerful characters if the GM artificially scales the encounters to match.I mean I do appreciate the idea of cranking things up as far as it can go and tackling the challenge head on. But generally I don't care about the challenge part of the equation and play a power-level (and power type, but here I will just focus on combat) that I feel fits the character.

Of course what that actually means can very. The best combatant I ever played managed to go 4/5 rounds with a swarm of monsters and then escaped with the help of other PCs and 1HP. In D&D that would not be considered that great, but this is a system where the strongest class of monster (which I was not fighting) might not have health. We killed one (across all campaigns) by setting off a cluster of nukes in its stomach, and that was narrated as part of the epilogue and it is still one of the most significant monster kills I any of the campaigns I have played.

So if you want to address: "Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME." I'll take it further than that. If everyone was playing the combat build I was, and we all had better weapons (the only area the character was not maxed out, possibly), then we still wouldn't be able to kill that thing. No it took narrative level impacts for us to kill that monster, unbounded accuracy wouldn't of made a difference.

So basically... I'm not sure bounded accuracy helps, but if "making enemies feel significant" is the core problem I don't think it is the primary cause. A monster that survives 2 rounds sounds like it was just a longer grind. A monster that a PC sacrificed themselves to kill in a campaign ending fight (we lost most of the party) will stay with me for a long time.

This post is not the one I set out to write, but I think it works.

Quertus
2018-11-14, 09:15 AM
I mean I do appreciate the idea of cranking things up as far as it can go and tackling the challenge head on. But generally I don't care about the challenge part of the equation and play a power-level (and power type, but here I will just focus on combat) that I feel fits the character.

Of course what that actually means can very. The best combatant I ever played managed to go 4/5 rounds with a swarm of monsters and then escaped with the help of other PCs and 1HP. In D&D that would not be considered that great, but this is a system where the strongest class of monster (which I was not fighting) might not have health. We killed one (across all campaigns) by setting off a cluster of nukes in its stomach, and that was narrated as part of the epilogue and it is still one of the most significant monster kills I any of the campaigns I have played.

So if you want to address: "Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME." I'll take it further than that. If everyone was playing the combat build I was, and we all had better weapons (the only area the character was not maxed out, possibly), then we still wouldn't be able to kill that thing. No it took narrative level impacts for us to kill that monster, unbounded accuracy wouldn't of made a difference.

So basically... I'm not sure bounded accuracy helps, but if "making enemies feel significant" is the core problem I don't think it is the primary cause. A monster that survives 2 rounds sounds like it was just a longer grind. A monster that a PC sacrificed themselves to kill in a campaign ending fight (we lost most of the party) will stay with me for a long time.

This post is not the one I set out to write, but I think it works.

So, I'm not sure if I follow you - let me know if the story I tell below seems to have anything to do with what you're trying to get across.

So, one day, the BDH party encountered - as a random encounter - a Puzzle Monster. At full health and full resources, they engaged this single monster... and it survived their alpha strike. It made a not humiliating show of itself offensively... and proceeded to survive a second round of assault by the party. Historically, this should have been enough to kill three great wyrm dragons, so something was clearly up. The party was forced to think their way around this encounter - all completely RAW, no fudging or homebrew - and thus it made for one of the more memorable monsters.

Narratively, this monster was a random encounter - it wasn't meant to be significant. However, it demonstrated very clearly that there were things out there being the party's understanding or capabilities, and thus was quite significant to them, personally.

Because of the stark contrast between it and most encounters, it's significance really felt significant.

I'm not interested in / having trouble with making monsters be significant, I'm more concerned with significant monsters that don't feel significant - in this case, because rats can feel as significant (or, worse, already have felt more significant).

I feel that, when you've lost party members to rats, random orcs, and starving children with rusty knives, it lessens the coolness factor of other monsters.

Or, to more directly address you story, would your party's sacrifice have been as meaningful if, just yesterday, you'd sacrificed two party members to escape the rats that the danged lazy cat hadn't eaten?

JAL_1138
2018-11-14, 10:02 AM
Consider, though, the characters in fiction who’ve defeated dragons. The majority have been physically-ordinary mortals (or physically-equivalent immortals, in the case of elves). Bard the Bowman rolled a Nat 20 on Sneak Attack (hit to the one spot where a scale was missing) with a Masterwork Arrow to defeat Smaug. Túrin Turambar defeated Glaurung with an intelligent magic sword, also pretty much due to a crit on a Sneak Attack (stabbed in the underbelly from below). St. George killed the Dragon of Silene by stabbing it with a lance and then beheading it with a sword (using some form of Divine Smite, presumably), but he himself was executed/martyred by ordinary humans.

The typical dragon in fiction is killed by the sort of person who could get wrecked by a massive Orc army. Or at least someone who’d have to consider it rather dangerous to wade out onto the battlefield, instead of being secure in knowing that it wouldn’t be possible for a huge Orc army to really harm them appreciably.

And as for Mephistopheles, he doesn’t have stats, as far as I’m aware, so you’re free to have him be as unbeatable as you like. Most of the Archdevils that do have stats are failures who’ve lost their thrones (Geryon, who can’t even defeat an ice cube; or Moloch, who’s banished from the Hells outright), or upstarts (Zariel, a fallen angel turned general mostly powerful through command of hordes of lesser demons; or Titivilus, called out in MtoF as weaker than others and hiring outsiders to deal with other “problem” devils, mainly wielding the political power of an Evil Vizier to Dispater).

But even so, powerful evil beings being taken out by mere mortals isn’t without precedent. “Really, Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, chief lieutenant of Morgoth, you lost to Isildur? He got one-shotted by a nameless Orc archer later.”

And then there was that one time Cthulhu got somewhat inconvenienced by a boat and went back to sleep.

Pelle
2018-11-14, 10:05 AM
So replace "BBEG" with "boss fight" for your purposes in this discussion, to limit the discussion to how cool the combat potential of creatures is. My assertion is, characters who more readily roflstomp minion fights are more wowed by the "cool" combat encounters than the ones who get TPK'd by rats.


Sure, but I still don't see the relevancy, maybe I still don't understand your issue. Also with bounded accuracy you can have parties roflstomping minions, and then being wowed by cool boss fights. It's just a matter of how you use the CR scale. (Also without BA, you can have challenging minions and boring bosses)

Your issue seems to be that you want specific creatures to be roflstomped, and specific creatures to be special. Yes, it's inherent in bounded accuracy that the power level is tighter, it's not increasing exponentially. The intent is to have both orcs and dragons be potential opponents at a given level. But it's not necessarily difficult to get the same experience, you just need to shift your perception of which specific creatures are suitable as minions and which as bosses. In your example, use a better statblock for Mephistopheles if he is supposed to be that spectacular.

What bounded accuracy does is make quantity matter as much as quality. I don't think of Mephistopheles as pathetic for losing to orcs if it was a whole horde of them. A single one still has no chance. If your measure of boss coolness depends on how big armies they can take out singlehandedly, then BA will affect that.

Faily
2018-11-14, 10:37 AM
Well, I totally get what you're trying to say, and I agree.

It's one of the reasons I don't like Bounded Accuracy, and don't really want to play in games with them. I don't want a fight against commoners with pitchforks to be equally tense and difficult as fighting the great Dragon and his goons.

I've been in groups too who have gone through most fights without a sweat, and those "boss-fights" have had that big important finale-feel to them. People get to have that power-fantasy of being awesome, and it's fun.

Now I'm not saying I need this in every game I play, but in D&D I vastly prefer that over the Bounded Accuracy-mode where being wasted by a swarm of rats is as likely as becoming dragon-chow.

Anonymouswizard
2018-11-14, 11:48 AM
Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

Specific point, this is 5e Bounded Accuracy, not 4e Bounded Accuracy (where a 'level appropriate monster' would always be hit between an X and a Y, but everybody scaled with level). Now, we have to ask, how important is Bounded Accuracy.

Now what does BA do? At it's core it means that at the end of the day numbers and tactics can make up for pure power. This is actually the way many games work, in that getting swampped by 50 starter monsters has a very good chance of killing a four man high level party, so we know that it's something that gamers like enough to keep buying these games. The way it's done in 5e means that numbers mean more than they did in previous editions, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

The thing is, compared to 3.X or 4e, this leads to a different world. In 3.X Mephistopheles wouldn't lose to a bunch of people who nearly TPK'd to several squads of orcs. He wouldn't in 5e either, because Mephistopheles doesn't fight when he doesn't know he can win. He's not a fighter, he's a schemer. Ba'al might get into that fight, but he has three times the hit points and 50% magic resistance.

Now is a game where you can just curbstomp low level threats a bad one? No, and it's why I'm sad that 5e isn't that game, it's rare among my collection. But the idea of a game and more importantly a world where you don't need 3,872 orcs to threaten a level ten party isn't inherently a problem, just different to what you like.

If you want that style, just continue with 3.X. Nobody can force you to play a game you don't want to.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-14, 01:25 PM
All I'll say is that Bounded Accuracy is a bigger problem for this in theory than in practice. Because there are very very very very very few cases where an actual party will face a hugely overwhelming number of low-power creatures and actually fight. And it does have to be a hugely overwhelming number, at least if the high-level people have half a brain.

For me, knowing who wins by who wins initiative is fundamentally a denial of agency. Why even bother rolling the round if it's a foregone conclusion? Just roll initiative and tell it out narratively.

So in practice, you do get high level parties scything through large numbers of creatures before being seriously challenged by a big encounter (which may or may not be a single enemy--often BBEG + goons works better). It's just a few fewer than you'd have in 3e. I ran a 1-20 campaign like that where the last major piece (at level 18) was them slaughtering things that could only save on a 19 or 20, and sometimes not even then. In fact, the most challenging thing for them was deciding who of their party (including some long-term NPCs) would end up making a final, ultimate sacrifice to prevent the BNSEG (Not So Evil) from changing the world according to his vision (which the players didn't like). Took them several sessions of discussion and debate where the in-game clock didn't move at all.

In fact, the encounters they most enjoyed and that were most memorable were the ones where the monk stun-locked a beholder so it didn't get a single action (I rolled poorly) and where they threw a demon off a building and burned a rope ladder behind them to deny reinforcements. For them, a "tense" encounter is where one PC drops low on HP or gets knocked to 0.

And bounded accuracy does not mean that every fight is equally tense balanced. In fact, you can go an entire campaign using only Medium encounters. Medium (by the DMG definition) is not supposed to run any significant risk in isolation of killing a character. Yet you can have adventures that are tense, merely by making them choose between pressing on when short on resources or wait (and possibly lose their goal). Death is easy. Death is cheap. Death is boring. Real challenges are to things the players care about. And that can't be summed up by combat power, CR, or any such thing. That takes actual role-playing.

Bounded accuracy merely means that the system math does not assume that ATK bonuses and defenses increase strongly with level. That's it. It does not mean they can't, merely that the system works just fine if they don't.

Not only that, but unbounded systems are horrible for world-building. If the PCs aren't the first high-level creatures out there, then why are there still problems to be solved? A single quasi-immortal (epic level) character could have already solved all those problems before breakfast. It also means that every king, every guard, etc has to be high level or they'd evaporate under threat. And that's horribly jarring to me. I can have significant NPCs who have the power of a 2nd level character at best. I can have "high power" characters held in check by the masses. The actually available world-building solution space is tremendously higher because you don't have the distortion of level == power in an exponential, unsurmountable sense.

It also lets me use a much larger fraction of the MM, no matter what the party's level is at. I can throw "interesting" things at them without gating them behind "you have XYZ items/abilities to play or you're insta-dead or can't hit anything."

Quertus
2018-11-14, 02:24 PM
@JAL_1138

... ****. Afaict, you fully understand what I'm saying, and I can't disagree with any of your facts. The best I can do is spin your response as saying that yes, what I'm saying makes sense, and, yes, I am technically correct, but it's a style preference, which, sure, Bounded Accuracy may not support - but neither does the fiction.

I may, in a bit, come back to why that still leaves me grouchy / still leaves me with battles to fight (but in an almost "searching for my missing piece" way), but, for now, I'll at least savor my (potentially Pyrrhic) victory that, yes, people could use my original post to see from another angle how the BDH party was fine in the modules as written.


Sure, but I still don't see the relevancy, maybe I still don't understand your issue. Also with bounded accuracy you can have parties roflstomping minions, and then being wowed by cool boss fights. It's just a matter of how you use the CR scale. (Also without BA, you can have challenging minions and boring bosses)

Well, I suppose I'm not being entirely clear. I'm not talking about what a fight/encounter/element is supposed to be, but what it is.

The module writer planned the Puzzle Monster as a meaningless random encounter; it was actually eye-opening. The module writer planned something as a challenging boss fight, it was actually trivial. I planned someone as a BBEG, he actually became the party's patron. And I'm fine with that.

But it's like Captain Hobo. You can build a character who looks fine in a vacuum, but, next to him, your character suddenly looks terrible. Same thing with Bounded Accuracy - you can have an event that looks fine in a vacuum, but degrades when evaluated with respect to previous performance. Sure, you shot the Dragon through the heart via a chink in its otherwise impenetrable armor - but that was clearly just luck, given that you missed a stationary target repeatedly just yesterday. You're not really that skilled. Sure, Mephistopheles put up a good fight, but those rats yesterday killed three men, so the big M was kinda a letdown by comparison.

My point was that, with the BDH party, there was never any question of whether the encounters that were (not were intended to be, actually were) cool felt cool. There were no, "well, when you look at it that way..." moments.


Your issue seems to be that you want specific creatures to be roflstomped, and specific creatures to be special.

Not really.

I'm fine with the party curb stomping Mephistopheles, or getting a TPK vs rats.

What I'm not fine with is when, because the rats were fatal, they Captain Hobo the otherwise memorable Mephistopheles encounter.

But even that isn't actually the point of the thread, but an analogy to explain the point. The point I was actually trying to make was that powerful PCs roflstomping most encounters makes the encounters that give them trouble even more memorable, makes them feel even more special.


Yes, it's inherent in bounded accuracy that the power level is tighter, it's not increasing exponentially. The intent is to have both orcs and dragons be potential opponents at a given level. But it's not necessarily difficult to get the same experience, you just need to shift your perception of which specific creatures are suitable as minions and which as bosses. In your example, use a better statblock for Mephistopheles if he is supposed to be that spectacular.

Well, no, that's cheating.

If I'm playing MtG, a Scathe Zombie is B2 for a vanilla 2/2 Zombie, and that shouldn't change based on what table I'm at, or how well my Merfolk deck is faring against the zombies.

I'm pretty sure that particular table* would agree with me that restatting the big M is a no go. Everything should be exactly as tough as it is, not as tough as the GM intends it.

The issue is that, under Bounded Accuracy, the existing stat blocks Captain Hobo poor Mephistopheles (who is just a stand-in here for "powerful opponent", be it Dragons or demons or whatever). By making rats as scary as Mephistopheles, you make Mephistopheles as much a joke as rats.

Similarly, if the BDH party waded through everything like they were humans, then it would have made all the encounters bland and samey, and I'd agree that it was a bad thing.

But since that was not the case - since they still had trouble with a few rare encounters - that made those encounters even more memorable, even more special.

* That particular table made several parties, which ranged from BDH to struggling with minions. And that flavor difference, where the GM ran the world honest, and each party felt different, is, IMO, very important.


What bounded accuracy does is make quantity matter as much as quality. I don't think of Mephistopheles as pathetic for losing to orcs if it was a whole horde of them. A single one still has no chance. If your measure of boss coolness depends on how big armies they can take out singlehandedly, then BA will affect that.

Well, no, the question is, if the Supreme Ten is down to the Supreme Seven because they went down to their cellar and encountered the rats that their lazy cat wasn't hunting, can they possibly prevail in an epic battle against Mephistopheles without him looking like a joke in retrospect? Do the rats not Captain Hobo the big M?

Mordar
2018-11-14, 03:17 PM
Not really.

I'm fine with the party curb stomping Mephistopheles, or getting a TPK vs rats.

What I'm not fine with is when, because the rats were fatal, they Captain Hobo the otherwise memorable Mephistopheles encounter.

But even that isn't actually the point of the thread, but an analogy to explain the point. The point I was actually trying to make was that powerful PCs roflstomping most encounters makes the encounters that give them trouble even more memorable, makes them feel even more special.

[SNIP]

Well, no, the question is, if the Supreme Ten is down to the Supreme Seven because they went down to their cellar and encountered the rats that their lazy cat wasn't hunting, can they possibly prevail in an epic battle against Mephistopheles without him looking like a joke in retrospect? Do the rats not Captain Hobo the big M?

I think I see what, for me, the issue is with this discussion.

The encounters that "give them trouble" are the ones that are memorable or special. They cruise through virtually all of their encounters, even those featuring three elder great dragons of deathiness, to the point where if an enemy gets a turn is it exceptional. However, that exceptionalism is probably not actually the result of the opponent being especially tough or capable (based on your description), but more likely due to special planning by the GM or "good" luck (either RNG or just happening to have Puzzle Monster nature/defenses that countered the blitz of death).

Thus the Big M falling to the party after they became the Supreme Seven because of the Cellar Rats doesn't speak to Big M at all. It simply points out that the Cellar Rats just happened to be one of those exceptionally lucky encounters that went south on the Supreme Ten. No one in that environment would think "Wow, Cellar Rats are super tough while Big M, 3 EGD of Deathiness, entire continents of rampaging Storm Giants, Tarrasques and Beholders are all chumps, because the Supreme X stomped all of them but lost 30% of their members to those Cellar Rats." They would simply think "Wow, that batch of Cellar Rats must have won the galactic lottery that day."

Basically instead of a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters and a thousand years turning out the works of Old Bill, we've got a thousand farm boys with a thousand spears and a thousand attacks finally hitting Achilles in the heel.

- M

Edit to add: Bounded accuracy doesn't make the big monsters a joke. Those characters do. Bounded Accuracy just means that each monster gets a ticket in the $1.5B mega millions lottery...and one of those tickets might pay off.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-14, 03:25 PM
Quertus, you're assuming something that doesn't exist (at least in 5e). Just because there's bounded accuracy doesn't mean that villains lose to rats. Or even guards. Not unless they stand stupidly in the middle of hundreds of them in a white room under permissive circumstances. It means that mechanically, the range of (attack and defense) power does not automatically grow with level. That is, that just because you're level 1 does not mean you can't hit that level 20 or that the level 20 will automatically hit you. Thats...all.

For an adult dragon (for example) to lose to a bunch of guards, you have to assume he flies straight and level out of clear blue sky, with tons of warning and does nothing but fly in and sit-and-spam attacks. Any other strategy is going to be fatal to the vast majority of the guards unless there are literally thousands of them.

I'd say this enhances things. No longer can the BBEG simply no-sell you until you have the plot token of power (or are high enough level)--it actually has to act like a real character. And this is done without the fatal-to-world-building arms-race that happens without bounds on the power.

Arbane
2018-11-14, 04:23 PM
For an adult dragon (for example) to lose to a bunch of guards, you have to assume he flies straight and level out of clear blue sky, with tons of warning and does nothing but fly in and sit-and-spam attacks. Any other strategy is going to be fatal to the vast majority of the guards unless there are literally thousands of them.


I was briefly in a group playing "Horde of the Dragon Queen" (I think?) for 5th edition. The starter adventure for first-level characters has you shooting and throwing things at an adult blue dragon flying around overhead in hopes of getting it to leave.

....When our group's wizard got turned into a cloud of charged particles by one stray draconic lightning bolt, my rogue started looking for an escape route.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-14, 06:32 PM
I personally love bounded accuracy, because it makes the world feel more real to me. A dragon where armor and attack scales (heh) heavily the dragon just flies down and crisps an army. Which immediately makes the probability of there being enough people to make armies suspect. With bounded accuracy it burns some outposts and villages, then retreats when forces large enough to threaten it approach. The party can sneak up on it where an army can't, which is why they are heroes and not soldiers.

Mephistopheles is the same thing. If I got 1,000 archers and he stood in an open field they could probably kill him. If he wanted to kill 1,000 archers he would wait until most of them were asleep, set their camp on fire then rinse and repeat until the army was dead. In 3.5 that army would lose to a Vrock, much less a Duke of Hell.

Without bounded accuracy it makes it difficult for me to buy the survival of any populations of mortals, and makes all enemies equally above them. The threats really stop scaling after level 6 compared to the world and only scale to the party, as a commoner is just as incapable of dealing with a bulette as a great wyrm dragon.

Edit: And a party could easily kill an army even in a bounded accuracy system, they just couldn't walk up to one in a field and blow it up until everyone is dead. With exactly one exception (wheel of time) I don't know a book where the protag could kill an army like that. But casting Weather Control to flood them out, having the Rogue poison or destroy their supplies until they have to split up and then kill the groups one at a time? Totally doable.

Pauly
2018-11-14, 06:50 PM
This is a storytelling issue.
In a superman story any problem that can be solved by punching it in the face is instantly resolved that way. The storytelling is in finding problems that can’t be solved by punching it in the face, while keeping punching minor problems in the face within the story to keep up the “wow!” factor. (ie the PCs are paragonsj

In a batman story the problems he fights can punch back just as hard as he punches. This makes the fights more meaningful because each fight carries a risk that random thug pulks out a gun and gets a lucky shot in. The problem solving has a lot to do with how batman or the joker gets an advantage when it comes around to face punching time. (ie the PCs are everymen)

I prefer playing PCs who are below level 5 because I prefer to be John McCain over Dutch (from Predator), I prefer to be Odysseus than Achilles, Ripley is more interesting to me than Boba Fett. In your case the party is superman, so of course when batman elements turn up it feels out of place in that story.

Quertus
2018-11-14, 07:03 PM
Ok, I can't keep up with individual replies any more, but let me clarify a few things:

I have never talked about having a BBEG or whatever fight rats. Captain Hobo didn't have to fight your character to make your character seem worse just by his existence, nor does the BBEG need to be beaten up by rats for them to make his combat prowess appear anemic. They need merely both exist, and both threaten the party, for this to be true. Having the rats actually defeat the BBEG would just be pouring salt on the wound.

The encounters were created by the "content writer" - the one who wrote the module - who is not necessarily the same person as the "rules adjudicator" / the GM. And, for most of the time in question, they are explicitly not the same person.

The encounters that are special are the ones that are special - not the ones that the content writer intended to be special. Unlike many encounters with other parties at that table, there was never a "yeah, you seemed cool, but, really, a pack of rats was as effective" moment with the BDH party. That which was cool was unambiguously cool.

That party struggled with anything social that couldn't be solved with innuendo. "Well, you're quite skilled with your tongue, but I'll need to see how you handle your sword." "He's got a huge sword, but his stamina leaves something to be desired." I mean, their slogan was, "we waded through them like they were human". And possibly my favorite exchange involved them asking the local clergy "can you cast Heal?" to undo the effects the party had used to "subdue" someone they wanted to question. So, upon learning that the answer was "no", they slit the prisoner's throat, and asked, "how about Speak with Dead?". It was after this exchange that the party adopted a "no prisoners" policy, simply to keep the aghast clergy off their backs. I loved that this party made simple dealings with NPCs memorable (often leaving the NPCs asking themselves, "are you sure these are the heroes?").

Despite the title, the point of this thread - for me - was to try to see if I could make another way to explain why it wasn't necessary to scale up published modules for the BDH party. Although the attempt may not have been 100% successful, I think it's shown promise. So I'll happily selfishly enjoy being the one to learn - in this case, about people's stances on the effects of Bounded Accuracy.

It's not a matter of pure rocket tag "wherever wins initiative, wins". No, it's a matter of a group of BDHs - who happen to be pushing towards the rocket tag border - playing in a "normal" module. If a PC won initiative (they usually did, having iirc +12-+18 initiative), they did not solo the fight. If an NPC got to go, let alone won initiative (which technically could happen, especially with surprise), then... they certainly never did just win the fight, and rarely seemed to threaten to do so singlehandedly.

Cluedrew
2018-11-14, 07:32 PM
So, I'm not sure if I follow you - let me know if the story I tell below seems to have anything to do with what you're trying to get across.Paragraphs 1-2 are about one topic (letting characters be powerful relative to the setting) and paragraphs 3-4 are about a different topic (the necessity of a range of power). Does that help? (I forgot section labels.) Your reply, and most of the rest of the thread, focused on the second part so I will focus on that. But before I do:

On Scaling to Characters: I am not a fan of it in general. I think it serves a role in some challenged based games but otherwise should be avoided.


Or, to more directly address you story, would your party's sacrifice have been as meaningful if, just yesterday, you'd sacrificed two party members to escape the rats that the danged lazy cat hadn't eaten?Is this a game of MouseGuard?. Otherwise no, of course not.

But more importantly I feel that if the only thing keeping a prepared half dragon* warrior of impossible strength and speed from the rats that the deranged lazy cat didn't eat (but could of) is the hit/miss ratio of their attempts to bit the warrior... there more fundamental issues about how you are representing the universe than the numbers being used to determine accuracy.

* Seemed like the most over the top PC race for the example.


This makes the fights more meaningful because each fight carries a risk that random thug pulks out a gun and gets a lucky shot in.... Do people actually wonder if Batman is going to make it through that fight with that random thug? Sometimes seeing how he makes it is interesting, but the fact that he will is never in doubt in my mind.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-14, 07:39 PM
Paragraphs 1-2 are about one topic (letting characters be powerful relative to the setting) and paragraphs 3-4 are about a different topic (the necessity of a range of power). Does that help? (I forgot section labels.) Your reply, and most of the rest of the thread, focused on the second part so I will focus on that. But before I do:

On Scaling to Characters: I am not a fan of it in general. I think it serves a role in some challenged based games but otherwise should be avoided.

Is this a game of MouseGuard?. Otherwise no, of course not.

But more importantly I feel that if the only thing keeping a prepared half dragon* warrior of impossible strength and speed from the rats that the deranged lazy cat didn't eat (but could of) is the hit/miss ratio of their attempts to bit the warrior... there more fundamental issues about how you are representing the universe than the numbers being used to determine accuracy.

* Seemed like the most over the top PC race for the example.

... Do people actually wonder if Batman is going to make it through that fight with that random thug? Sometimes seeing how he makes it is interesting, but the fact that he will is never in doubt in my mind.
He does actually get smacked by thugs from time to time. He has to be saved from thugs by Huntress in Hush, and she actually almost loses to them anyway.

And again, Batman uses his skills to divide and conquer. If Batman just attacked sixty thugs on foot you would expect him to get pretty roughed up, if not beaten. Scaling bonuses aren't needed for Batman.

Pauly
2018-11-14, 08:25 PM
... Do people actually wonder if Batman is going to make it through that fight with that random thug? Sometimes seeing how he makes it is interesting, but the fact that he will is never in doubt in my mind.

If it’s a boss fight no, but there have been plenty of times that batman gets KOed and left for dead or doesn’t foil the robbery or doesn’t know how to counter the boss villain’s new weapon yet. An encounter that would be 2 pages in a superman comic becomes a 5 issue storyline in batman.

JAL_1138
2018-11-15, 12:26 AM
You seem to be making two different arguments, one being there’s no need to scale encounters to the party, and one that BA results in Captain Hobo for the BBEG. These are not the same argument, and one doesn’t necessarily entail the other. You’re also overstating the effect Bounded Accuracy has in-game by comparing three rats to Mephistopheles (or a dragon, or whatever the BBEG happens to be).

To equal the XP budget for the absolute lowest-CR Archdevil, Titivilus, at CR 16, 15000 XP, you’d need 150 Giant Rats (CR 1/8, XP 25, x150, encounter adjustment x4 XP= 15000). Most dragons are higher CR than Titivilus, and more combat-focused to boot (most of what makes Titivilus dangerous is high-DC Charm effects—he can’t really take you in a fair fight, but once he starts talking...)

The typical fantasy hero, facing 150 Rodents of Unusual Size, has about three options: 1) use clever tactics/AoEs, 2) escape, or 3) die.

That doesn’t apply to every single fantasy hero or mythological figure by any stretch, particularly high-power superheroes or descendants of gods, but it applies to quite a lot of protagonists who defeat powerful foes.

It’s worth mentioning that even within bounded accuracy, certain monsters are completely immune to damage from nonmagical weapons, so the largest army in the world can’t do anything to them without casters or magic weapons, other than maybe try to abuse the grappling rules to hold them in place for a while. (Technically, that invulnerability is also available to PCs, technically, via lycanthropy, but that’s not really recommended and too specific to be a viable solution, if a solution is needed). And this can be the case without one threat Captain Hobo-ing the other, because they’re different kinds of threats. The PCs can take on the nigh-invulnerable BBEG because they have the particular set of skills and gear that can do the job when no one else can, but still be risking death if they go up against a company of soldiers from the army without that also thereby making the BBEG a chump.

Interesting you mention MtG, though, since fielding a boatload of small creatures is a valid strategy in MtG to defeat godlike wizards who can summon eldritch abominations, mighty planeswalkers, angels, demons, dragons, vampires, nature spirits, island-devouring leviathans, and suchlike to do their bidding, who can cast spells that crumble mountains to dust, burn forests to ash, scour plains into desert, sink islands beneath the waves, trigger volcanic eruptions, and so on...but can be defeated quite handily by a sufficient quantity of 1/1 tokens if you can get them online quickly enough and attack with all of them.

Captain Hobo—I had to look that term up, although I got the gist—is largely a matter of preference, what you personally find cool. There are times when it could be mechanically blatant and hard to argue against—like if a trench knife does more damage than a tank’s main gun, the game has problems—but oftentimes, it’s just a matter of what you favor. Perhaps you prefer Supers style games, where Superman can shrug off an infinite number of bullets so long as there’s no Kryptonite around, and can deal with threats no mere mortal possibly can (no, Batman doesn’t count as a mere mortal, because the writers are on his side). That’s fine, and there are games catering to that preference, especially where you do play godlike entities (e.g., Exalted, Scion, etc.). But a lot of fiction and a lot of gameplay revolves around protagonists who have to take attack by large numbers of mundane foes seriously, and could bite the dust if they drop their Artifact of Invisibility and a random enemy archer crits the bejeezus out of them.

And, too, there’s always the counter to the Captain Hobo argument: Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning.

Ignimortis
2018-11-15, 01:11 AM
And, too, there’s always the counter to the Captain Hobo argument: Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning.

Except in the context of this thread, it would be the GM going with the flow and just letting Hastur be killed by a ton of dynamite. I figure that an Elder God shouldn't even have HP, and a different GM might've said "Ok, you blew it all up, and yourself too. Hastur is unperturbed.". Sure, the first GM is more fun, but I don't think that was entirely RAW, which means that Rule of Cool was in place and it can mitigate many problems with both bounded and unbounded accuracy.

Kaptin Keen
2018-11-15, 02:20 AM
I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch. I consider the whole exercise somewhat uninteresting - although others clearly love it to bits, which is fine.

However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly, in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead.

And that's what seems to always be missing from these discussions: The simple fact that the rules apply to the game and all things in it - not just the players and their actions. If you can do a bajillion points of damage on round one, so could some NPC. And it just becomes a game of 'roll the highest initiative', which sounds slightly boring to me.

But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D

Pelle
2018-11-15, 03:28 AM
The point I was actually trying to make was that powerful PCs roflstomping most encounters makes the encounters that give them trouble even more memorable, makes them feel even more special.


Sounds plausible, fine. But that point doesn't have to do anything with bounded accuracy. What bounded accuracy does though, is stretch out the range of when that happens. With, it may be rats to this Mephistopheles I guess, and without it may be orcs to dragons. But so what?



Well, no, that's cheating.


Absolutely not. When a GM (or scenario designer) creates an npc, they have carte blanche to determine their stats. There are no rules to determine the stats of Bob the npc, and it's decidedly the responsibility of the GM to determine which to use. Now, if the stats have been established, you shouldn't change them during the game. If the intent here was that this Mephistopheles should be a spectacular combat opponent, your table just did a bad job when establishing his stats.



Well, no, the question is, if the Supreme Ten is down to the Supreme Seven because they went down to their cellar and encountered the rats that their lazy cat wasn't hunting, can they possibly prevail in an epic battle against Mephistopheles without him looking like a joke in retrospect?

Sure, maybe not. So what? Find a worthy opponent instead if that's what you are looking for.

Pleh
2018-11-15, 05:26 AM
Except in the context of this thread, it would be the GM going with the flow and just letting Hastur be killed by a ton of dynamite. I figure that an Elder God shouldn't even have HP, and a different GM might've said "Ok, you blew it all up, and yourself too. Hastur is unperturbed.". Sure, the first GM is more fun, but I don't think that was entirely RAW, which means that Rule of Cool was in place and it can mitigate many problems with both bounded and unbounded accuracy.

I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.

JAL_1138
2018-11-15, 06:26 AM
Except in the context of this thread, it would be the GM going with the flow and just letting Hastur be killed by a ton of dynamite. I figure that an Elder God shouldn't even have HP, and a different GM might've said "Ok, you blew it all up, and yourself too. Hastur is unperturbed.". Sure, the first GM is more fun, but I don't think that was entirely RAW, which means that Rule of Cool was in place and it can mitigate many problems with both bounded and unbounded accuracy.


I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.

Pleh beat me to the punch, but yeah. “Rule of Cool” is not in effect if the DM is angry enough about what the player just pulled off to flip the table and leave because he wouldn’t be able to say the strategy doesn’t work without contradicting something he previously established as fact.

Quertus
2018-11-15, 08:58 AM
So, it feels like the consensus is, no, most people haven't seen what I've seen. Well, kinda - many people are still commenting as though I'm saying something other than what I'm saying, so maybe I shouldn't measure general consensus yet.


I'd say this enhances things. No longer can the BBEG simply no-sell you until you have the plot token of power (or are high enough level)--it actually has to act like a real character. And this is done without the fatal-to-world-building arms-race that happens without bounds on the power.

Several people have said this, so, clearly, not having clear delineation of "this foe is beyond any of you" for Demons / Dragons / Superman / whatever is important to a not-niche style of play.

Which is fine, given that I'm only trying to show that, for one style of play (apparently, not this one), the monsters in the published modules do not need to be scaled to the BDH party for fun to be had without calling BadWrongFun.


You seem to be making two different arguments, one being there’s no need to scale encounters to the party, and one that BA results in Captain Hobo for the BBEG. These are not the same argument, and one doesn’t necessarily entail the other. You’re also overstating the effect Bounded Accuracy has in-game by comparing three rats to Mephistopheles (or a dragon, or whatever the BBEG happens to be).

Well, yes and no. I suppose what I'm really doing is trying to paint a picture of one of my preferred gaming styles. But because I'm playing 5d chess, painting the picture in multiple dimensions, and not explicitly explaining that that's what I'm doing (because I'm too Old Man Henderson to really realize that that's what I'm doing), it feels like I'm saying several different things.

So, in other words, when you're in this particular mindset, both of these facts will be true: a) you don't need to scale the monsters to the BDH party (and, in fact, doing so would be actively detrimental); b) otherwise cool encounters that you defeat seem lame when you realize that a pack of rats / orcs / fodder posed more threat. (EDIT: I suppose I should add "c) there exists the notion of 'this foe is beyond any of you'" - or is that covered implicitly by "b"?)


Interesting you mention MtG, though, since fielding a boatload of small creatures is a valid strategy in MtG to defeat godlike wizards

Sure can. But some kid's My First Tome Deck - let alone a several of them - isn't likely to seriously threaten the tournament champion, making your loss to him seem that much more pathetic by comparison.

I've seen good decks win matches my deck couldn't, but I doubt I've ever seen a random pile of cards thrown together for their pictures by someone who didn't know how to play accomplish spectacular feats, like TPKing the PCs (which is what "defeating the tournament champion" is really standing in for in this example).


Captain Hobo—I had to look that term up, although I got the gist—is largely a matter of preference, what you personally find cool.

I certainly never thought of it like that, but I suppose a case could be made...


And, too, there’s always the counter to the Captain Hobo argument: Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning.

The correct parallel would be if Old Man Henderson, instead of being such a BDH, had been hospitalized repeatedly in the campaign, by a bag lady, two pidgins, and a noisy cricket, then killed Hastur by punching him in the face, and walked away whistling.


I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch. I consider the whole exercise somewhat uninteresting - although others clearly love it to bits, which is fine.

However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly, in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead.

And that's what seems to always be missing from these discussions: The simple fact that the rules apply to the game and all things in it - not just the players and their actions. If you can do a bajillion points of damage on round one, so could some NPC. And it just becomes a game of 'roll the highest initiative', which sounds slightly boring to me.

But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D

So could some NPC have the party's level of alpha-strike tech? Sure. But that NPC was conspicuously absent from those published modules.

Also, the BDH party in question? There were no true übercharger builds - no-one was soloing an encounter*. The party just had higher alpha strike potential than Krusk / Devis / Jozan and company.

Part of the point is, because the module was run "as written", the party got to actually feel like BDHs.

Many times before when I've mentioned this party, the response had been like yours, that that's fine, so long as the GM scales encounters to match. My response is, no, it's fine, so long as the GM doesn't scale encounters to match.

Would a party of purely optimized übercharger builds have killed the fun? For my group, absolutely. As I've said (or, at least, hinted at) earlier in the thread, the party worked in no small part because no one was going around soloing encounters, because everyone got to shine all the time. The BDH party felt like BDHs because they were so much shinier than (most of) the world.

Why would you want to remove their shine?

* Outside the one time that a group of fodder ate a fireball.


Absolutely not. When a GM (or scenario designer) creates an npc, they have carte blanche to determine their stats. There are no rules to determine the stats of Bob the npc, and it's decidedly the responsibility of the GM to determine which to use. Now, if the stats have been established, you shouldn't change them during the game. If the intent here was that this Mephistopheles should be a spectacular combat opponent, your table just did a bad job when establishing his stats.

Two things. One, we were running through published modules - the stats were already established, and the table chose to play characters who were strong. Note that this table also, in separate parties, choose to play characters who were average, characters who were weak, and characters who were a mixed bag. Changing the published stats would be a denial of their agency to make that choice.

Two, I'm not a fan of "intent". Trying to preserve "intent" sounds like orc mischief railroading to me.

Heck, I wrote an NPC to serve as the campaign BBEG, and the party instead took him as their patron. I rolled with it, rather than trying to preserve his intended narrative purpose.


I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.

No, it's "X rounds until fully manifested and vulnerable to being killed" - singing the song was a very clear timer that that amount of time had passed, and the GM couldn't pull shenanigans saying that Hastur wasn't vulnerable yet.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-15, 09:57 AM
Quertus, steamrolling a module isn't being a BDH unless the DM is GG himself and the module is the original Tomb of Horrors and you're the first group doing it. It's taking candy from a baby. It's like coming to a "learn to play MtG" event as a tournament pro with a tournament deck. It's like playing Doom on the lowest setting with cheat codes on and crowing about not dying.

Modules are written to the lowest common denominator. They're not written with any kind of optimization in mind--they're written to be easily doable by a 4-man band of Blaster Mage, SnB fighter, standard rogue, and heal-bot cleric. A "standard optimization" party (as found on this board) will not be threatened by anything there unless they play like total idiots, even in 5e with bounded accuracy.

That's part of the discrepancy here--you seem to think that modules are benchmarks for the game. They're not. They're intentionally undertuned so you don't have to optimize. And for most modules, they don't assume access to the wide array of splats, especially those published afterward.

Pelle
2018-11-15, 09:59 AM
Two things. One, we were running through published modules - the stats were already established, and the table chose to play characters who were strong. Note that this table also, in separate parties, choose to play characters who were average, characters who were weak, and characters who were a mixed bag. Changing the published stats would be a denial of their agency to make that choice.


Sure agreed, if you want to play a published module straight, don't change the stats. I was talking about designing the stats/scenario, don't call that cheating. If you want a different experience than what the modules provide, you should consider redesigning the stats/scenario though.

This is just how the modules are designed, and it is not because of bounded accuracy itself. They are designed so that every creature should be relevant to the PCs (apparantly). And because that's the goal, bounded accuracy is suited for the job.

So your real problem seems to be that you want to play the published adventures which are not designed for what you want to experience. You could just as well design adventure modules where minions are roflstomped and bosses are challenging, even with bounded accuracy.



Two, I'm not a fan of "intent". Trying to preserve "intent" sounds like orc mischief railroading to me.

Don't read too much negative into the word here. This was meant more as in matching the right stats to what it is supposed to represent in the fiction. For example, if this npc should be able to take on an army alone, the stats need to match that 1-to-1. If its size is supposed to be larger than a human, size Small is objectively wrong etc. If the designer want to include a powerful creature in the scenario for whatever reason, the intent was to have an actual powerful creature, not a weak one.

Pleh
2018-11-15, 10:20 AM
No, it's "X rounds until fully manifested and vulnerable to being killed" - singing the song was a very clear timer that that amount of time had passed, and the GM couldn't pull shenanigans saying that Hastur wasn't vulnerable yet.

I don't see how your version is substantially different than mine, which I guess means I probably just didn't relate it very well. It was early this morning.

Quertus
2018-11-15, 10:20 AM
Sure agreed, if you want to play a published module straight, don't change the stats. I was talking about designing the stats/scenario, don't call that cheating. If you want a different experience than what the modules provide, you should consider redesigning the stats/scenario though.

This is just how the modules are designed, and it is not because of bounded accuracy itself. They are designed so that every creature should be relevant to the PCs (apparantly). And because that's the goal, bounded accuracy is suited for the job.

So your real problem seems to be that you want to play the published adventures which are not designed for what you want to experience. You could just as well design adventure modules where minions are roflstomped and bosses are challenging, even with bounded accuracy.

Don't read too much negative into the word here. This was meant more as in matching the right stats to what it is supposed to represent in the fiction. For example, if this npc should be able to take on an army alone, the stats need to match that 1-to-1. If its size is supposed to be larger than a human, size Small is objectively wrong etc. If the designer want to include a powerful creature in the scenario for whatever reason, the intent was to have an actual powerful creature, not a weak one.

"Make the stats match the fiction"? Yeah, that's something I can get behind.

Don't tell me that the Scathe Zombie is the most sought-after creature in Dominia, that Wizards are betraying their countries or killing one another to get them, and then make them a substandard stat block. Sure.

That wasn't what I read the first time, as I was under the impression that Mephistopheles had published stats. So, best you could do in that scenario is to change the narrative, and have him in an appropriate role (ie, not have him foolishly engaging in these unwinnable fights).

That's the problem of me using the big M both literally and as a stand-in for "something powerful" - it makes it difficult, at times, to know which layer people are referencing.

Quertus
2018-11-15, 11:35 AM
I don't see how your version is substantially different than mine, which I guess means I probably just didn't relate it very well. It was early this morning.

...



I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.


No, it's "X rounds until fully manifested and vulnerable to being killed" - singing the song was a very clear timer that that amount of time had passed, and the GM couldn't pull shenanigans saying that Hastur wasn't vulnerable yet.

So, in both versions, he's not all there at first.

In your version, that means he's weaker at first, and Old Man Henderson should quickly alpha-strike him while he's suffering from summoning sickness and vulnerable.

In my version, Hastur starts out invulnerable (in a 2e outsider kind way), and Old Man Henderson needs to wait until he's fully there in order to deliver a killing blow.

In your version, the song was a distraction to confuse Hastur. In my version, the song was a timer, to verify beyond GM fiat that Hastur had been there long enough to kill him.

I'm really not seeing how those are similar, besides having a song, Hastur, and timing.

EDIT: just read the Old Man Henderson story, and noticed that it was different from the one that I read the first time (the version I just read was notably missing several scenes). The version I just read agrees with your interpretation of events. I'll have to see if I can find the version I originally read.

Henderson smiled, and called Hastur forward into the world, and set the timers.
As Hastur stepped forward, he got a rather... unusual greeting.
"O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free!~"
The King in Yellow pauses, while Mike apparently hits the limit of the internal clock he's been ticking off in his head.
"Alright, we win."
"What?"
"The charges go off. I set them for fifteen seconds. I needed to make sure he had enough time to arrive, but not enough time to actually ARRIVE."
"What."
He then broke it down and explained little pieces of information gleamed from investigative portions of the game. Meticulous notes from MONTHS prior. Together, they painted a very obscure bit of information regarding the nature of the gods in this setting.
"But that's... That's..... You BASTARD!" The Gm accused dramatically, standing up and pointing.
"You only just now noticed?" Mike returned, politely baffled.
The Gm then performed the first and ONLY table-flip I've ever seen in my years of gaming, before leaving in a huff.

So, I guess the timing was both? He needed to be there enough to kill, but not there enough to be at full power? But the song was definitely a timer, to make sure that the timing was correct.

Tanarii
2018-11-15, 12:14 PM
OP is either indicating a complete misunderstanding of what 5e Bounded Accuracy actually is, and how it works out in terms of encounter difficulty. Or exaggerating so hard that the argument is actually helping the opposite point of view due to extreme inaccuracy. :smallamused:

JAL_1138
2018-11-15, 12:30 PM
Neither version of Henderson vs Hastur is exactly correct. There was specifically a period of “summoning sickness” for Hastur. He had to wait until Hastur manifested, yes, but also set off the charges before Hastur was no longer weakened by manifesting. The charges were set to a fifteen second timer, not related to the song. The song was just because Henderson was crazy. Edit: It did seem to have a distracting effect, since Hastur paused briefly, but who knows if that was the actual plan for it, since that’s never stated in thread.

Anyway.

You keep changing the goalposts, dude. In your first post, you said 5e’s bounded accuracy is the new Captain Hobo because, quote, “When you make the party vulnerable to weaker threats, you weaken the bigger threats.”

And yet, when this is given a counterexample, you rephrase it and change the statement slightly. For MtG, it’s no longer “a multitude of small creatures can kill one of these wizards,” it’s “you get chumped by some kid’s first deck.” (And hey, even the tournament champion can get mana-screwed and get rolled over sometimes.) For Henderson, it’s no longer relevant that he would absolutely be vulnerable to getting shanked in a back alley because he’s literally just a crazy old stoner with a violent streak and not a superhuman, but still killed Hastur without that making Hastur seem like a chump villain (instead making Henderson legendary), ignore that, the scenario now has to be something else to make the assertion that “when the party is vulnerable to weaker threats you also weaken the bigger threat” hold true.


You’re also misrepresenting bounded accuracy, becase bounded accuracy does not by definition entail what you assert it does. It does not mean a party that gets wrecked by three rats can one-shot Mephistopheles. It means the to-hit numbers and DCs have a tighter scale such that it’s possible for a rat to scratch a high-level PC without needing to crit, sure, but it doesn’t mean a group of rats that would threaten a low-level party would still threaten a party of sufficiently high level to be taking on an adult dragon, or an archdevil. All bounded accuracy does is compress the range of to-hit numbers and limit the scaling of target numbers by level.

You can create foes (or find them in the MM) that still follow bounded accuracy, but which are completely, utterly unbeatable by a low-level party unless both sides have a string of dice rolls so utterly improbable it would likely never occur if you rolled from now until the sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the earth. You’d be able to get a hit in, because ACs don’t scale with level to compensate for a BAB that scales with level, but that hit wouldn’t accomplish much (if it accomplishes anything at all, as the monster might be immune to nonmagical damage. Bounded accuracy just means you can hit it, not that you can kill it, because bounded accuracy only relates to the range of target numbers). To go back to your version of the Henderson example, bounded accuracy does not mean Henderson would be able to kill Hastur with one punch, it means he might be able to land a punch. It might still take a hockey rink full of enough explosives to be measured in megatons to actually kill Hastur, even if you can hit him with your fist on a die roll that isn’t a crit.

Also. Module design =/= bounded accuracy. And to a large extent, monster design =/= bounded accuracy. There are a lot of poorly-designed monsters that are just big bags of HP with nothing much in the way of cool abilities, or that get shafted due to action economy. But that’s not really an issue with bounded accuracy—there’s nothing the matter with their AC being plausibly-hittable by a lower-level PC, or their save DCs being potentially passable by a lower-level PC. But said lower-level PC doesn’t really stand a snowball’s chance in the Elemental Plane of Fire of defeating even the “big bag of HP and physical attacks” monster, because they can’t crank out the DPR needed before the monster commences to hulk-smash them. Nor do groups of monsters—say, three Giant Rats—that would be a threat at lower levels stand the aforementioned snowball’s chance of being a threat to a high-level party. An army of a couple hundred Giant Rats could, because at a certain point enough hits will get through, and it’s a smaller number than in 3.5 because the rats don’t need to crit to hit, but the same group of three? Not a chance. Let’s assume a greatsword-using Fighter with no feats, the Defense fighting style, a +5 proficiency bonus and a 20 in their attack stat—say, level 14? The fighter can only miss the Giant Rat by rolling a nat 1, and has a minimum damage with a nonmagical greatsword of 7, which happens to be the average HP of a Giant Rat, so there’s only a 5% chance the Fighter doesn’t kill one rat per attack, and by then the Fighter has 3 attacks per round. Sure, the Fighter could possibly miss or lose initiative and take a few bites, but they’re in no way likely to lose or even get seriously inconvenienced. Which, really, isn’t that much different than 3e. The rat has to get luckier to get in a hit in 3e, but it’s not impossible. The rat still dies, and the Fighter still only misses it on a nat 1, and the Fighter is still largely just inconvenienced rather than seriously threatened. BA comes into play mostly through numbers—it takes a smaller horde of rats than it took in 3e—but it still takes a horde.

Bounded accuracy doesn’t do what you seem to think it does with the continual reference to the “three rats” wrecking a party that could take down Mephistopheles, which is frankly a strawman for how bounded accuracy actually works in game.

Even so, a mortal who could die to being shivved in the kidneys defeating a powerful being necessarily Captain Hobo the powerful being, given the actual examples of it being done in games and fiction. Isildur vs Sauron—Isildur gets one-shotted by a nameless Orc, but before that, managed to hack the ring off Sauron’s hand with a broken sword and thereby defeat the dark lord for millennia. Old Man Henderson vs Hastur—crazy old stoner kills an Outer God, although said crazy stoner, as a mortal human, would be vulnerable to a knife in the kidneys (judging by various comments in the posts, or the deaths of other party members Henderson either delibarately or inadvertently killed; we can’t go on Henderson’s actual stats since they’re unknown). (It doesn’t actually matter that Henderson never got knifed in the kidneys, as that’s an issue of adventure design, luck, and tactics; it could have happened within the rules). In neither case does the BBEG come off looking like a chump because of it, ergo it does not necessarily entail that a party vulnerable to weaker threats makes the BBEG seem weaker.

Pleh
2018-11-15, 01:49 PM
Ok. I guess all I meant was that our different versions don't change how they support the argument that OMH didn't win because the DM bent the rules in favor of the rule of cool. Regardless the exact details, it was a carefully calculated strategy that succeeded despite the DM, not because of Fiat. Exactly how it went down is less important to the point.

Point was that it made the DM literally flip the table and rage quit. It wasn't rule of cool.

Quertus
2018-11-15, 02:03 PM
OP is either indicating a complete misunderstanding of what 5e Bounded Accuracy actually is, and how it works out in terms of encounter difficulty. Or exaggerating so hard that the argument is actually helping the opposite point of view due to extreme inaccuracy. :smallamused:

I mean, how much can it be exaggeration if I'm relating game events? (Not all from the same group, and, yes, mixed in with both theoretically that are related to actual events, and ones that aren't).


Neither version of Henderson vs Hastur is exactly correct. There was specifically a period of “summoning sickness” for Hastur. He had to wait until Hastur manifested, yes, but also set off the charges before Hastur was no longer weakened by manifesting. The charges were set to a fifteen second timer, not related to the song. The song was just because Henderson was crazy. Edit: It did seem to have a distracting effect, since Hastur paused briefly, but who knows if that was the actual plan for it, since that’s never stated in thread.

Yeah, that's probably the right of it.


You keep changing the goalposts, dude. In your first post, you said 5e’s bounded accuracy is the new Captain Hobo because, quote, “When you make the party vulnerable to weaker threats, you weaken the bigger threats.”

And yet, when this is given a counterexample, you rephrase it and change the statement slightly. For MtG, it’s no longer “a multitude of small creatures can kill one of these wizards,” it’s “you get chumped by some kid’s first deck.” (And hey, even the tournament champion can get mana-screwed and get rolled over sometimes.) For Henderson, it’s no longer relevant that he would absolutely be vulnerable to getting shanked in a back alley because he’s literally just a crazy old stoner with a violent streak and not a superhuman, but still killed Hastur without that making Hastur seem like a chump villain (instead making Henderson legendary), ignore that, the scenario now has to be something else to make the assertion that “when the party is vulnerable to weaker threats you also weaken the bigger threat” hold true.

Am I moving goalposts? Let's look at this. I am trying to make arguments of the form

X being threatened/beaten by Y makes Z look lame for losing to X.

The PCs being threatened/beaten by rats makes Mephistopheles look lame for being beaten by the party.

The tournament champion losing to a group of random cards thrown together by someone who doesn't know the game makes the other people who have lost to him look lame.

Old Man Henderson being beaten up on the separate occasions, by a bag lady, two pidgins, and a noisy cricket, would make Hastur look lame for losing to Henderson punching him in the face.

No, those seem like they follow the same format. That doesn't feel like moving goalposts to me.

Let's look at what other people have said:

"Bard the Bowman rolled a Nat 20 on Sneak Attack (hit to the one spot where a scale was missing) with a Masterwork Arrow to defeat Smaug" - that makes Bard look lucky, not like a BDH. And I may come back to this later. Oh, and didn't follow the format (but might not have been trying to).

"I don't think of Mephistopheles as pathetic for losing to orcs if it was a whole horde of them." - no, that's Z looking lame for losing to Y, and doesn't reference an X at all.

"I don't want a fight against commoners with pitchforks to be equally tense and difficult as fighting the great Dragon and his goons. " - this follows the format, albeit as a vote for a style, rather than a statement of what causes lameness.

"In 3.X Mephistopheles wouldn't lose to a bunch of people who nearly TPK'd to several squads of orcs." - this follows the format, while denying the very possibility of its existence.

"Just because there's bounded accuracy doesn't mean that villains lose to rats. Or even guards." - this is Z losing to Y, with no reference to X

"For an adult dragon (for example) to lose to a bunch of guards" - still Z losing to Y

"fielding a boatload of small creatures is a valid strategy in MtG to defeat godlike wizards" - this is comparing valid strategies of equivalent beings, like one dragon using its breath weapon, while a second attacks in melee, a third casts spells, and a fourth pulls out a bow. It sounds like it follows the format, but, to do so, it would have to read (the way my response did, or) "Force of Nature feels lame for failing to get past a stupid Living Wall when lowly Scrib Sprites managed to deliver the killing blow". Only, you know, something like this, but for some set of creatures that wouldn't involve death to trample damage.

"Old Man Henderson, the crazy old stoner who killed Hastur and thereby went on to Internet glory. At pretty much any point Old Man Henderson could have been killed by cultists, explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs—he was just a crazy old lawn-gnome-obsessed stoner, with a violent streak a mile wide, who kept somehow getting lucky—and people don’t remember Hastur seeming weak because Old Man Henderson killed him, they remember Old Man Henderson being crazy-awesome for taking on an Outer God and winning." - OK, this one was closer than I have given it credit for, but things like "explosives, police, the military, vehicle crashes, eldritch monsters, or fellow PCs" don't exactly sound lame the same way "rats" and "orcs" and "fodder" do. Also, they never hospitalized or otherwise visibly threatened Henderson. Thus my changes.

And then there's other seemingly similar things people have said that, afaict, are people trying to sell me on the value of Bounded Accuracy. Which may be all well and good, it may have cool advantages in world-building and whatnot, but that doesn't mean it cannot simultaneously have the effects that I'm describing. So all such comments are irrelevant to the conversation at hand.

So, as far as I can tell, what I'm doing that you are describing as "moving goal posts" is, in fact, quite the opposite - I keep trying to cement the bloody goalposts in place. That place is, again,

X being threatened/beaten by Y makes Z look lame for losing to X.
(For values of Z supposedly much much greater than Y, and values of Y that just sound lame, like Z="Mephistopheles" and Y="rats")

Or, as I once had a character taunt a foe who had run me through, "dude, I've had piercings that hurt worse than this".

Or, as everyone knows, "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave... with a box of scraps!"


You’re also misrepresenting bounded accuracy, becase bounded accuracy does not by definition entail what you assert it does. It does not mean a party that gets wrecked by three rats can one-shot Mephistopheles. It means the to-hit numbers and DCs have a tighter scale such that it’s possible for a rat to scratch a high-level PC without needing to crit, sure, but it doesn’t mean a group of rats that would threaten a low-level party would still threaten a party of sufficiently high level to be taking on an adult dragon, or an archdevil. All bounded accuracy does is compress the range of to-hit numbers and limit the scaling of target numbers by level.

It's possible that I'm misrepresenting Bounded Accuracy. So, if the party fought 1,000 fights against orcs, rats, and other fodder - all on different days - is there not a reasonable chance of character death? Could the characters not, then, after defeating Mephistopheles, reasonably* comment that he had posed less threat than orcs?

(EDIT - and does not Bounded Accuracy contribute to those 1,000 encounters both feeling and being more dangerous than they would be without it?)

* While the results are clearly biased by "1" not being a statistically significant number of encounters.


To go back to your version of the Henderson example, bounded accuracy does not mean Henderson would be able to kill Hastur with one punch, it means he might be able to land a punch. It might still take a hockey rink full of enough explosives to be measured in megatons to actually kill Hastur, even if you can hit him with your fist on a die roll that isn’t a crit.

Sure, but what I was trying to point out is that Henderson is different in several details. Letting him "punch out Hastur" was one of the details that needed to be changed to make it match the format. (EDIT because what he actually did is more of what Cluedrew referred to earlier as a Narrative death, IMO - and for other reasons I'll not spoil for those who haven't read the story.)


Bounded accuracy doesn’t do what you seem to think it does with the continual reference to the “three rats” wrecking a party that could take down Mephistopheles, which is frankly a strawman for how bounded accuracy actually works in game.

Dang it, I've reread (OK, skimmed) the thread twice already from your post, I don't want to have to do it a third time. Do I keep saying "three rats"? I'ma blame autocorrect for that mangling "the rats".

Maybe summer day I'll go back, and strike through the errors, and correct the text (thanks for using that style, btw).


In neither case does the BBEG come off looking like a chump because of it, ergo it does not necessarily entail that a party vulnerable to weaker threats makes the BBEG seem weaker.

"Does not necessarily" - sure, I'll buy that.

Which, really, brings us full circle to my original question - had anyone else seen that happen?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-15, 02:44 PM
It's possible that I'm misrepresenting Bounded Accuracy. So, if the party fought 1,000 fights against orcs, rats, and other fodder - all on different days - is there not a reasonable chance of character death? Could the characters not, then, after defeating Mephistopheles, reasonably* comment that he had posed less threat than orcs?

(EDIT - and does not Bounded Accuracy contribute to those 1,000 encounters both feeling and being more dangerous than they would be without it?)


Assuming those were fights of Medium difficulty (or even Hard), no. That's the definition of a Medium encounter--it should drain some resources but pose no significant threat of characters even dropping to 0 HP, much less death. A Hard encounter should pose some risk, if not played right, of dropping one character to 0 HP (which is not death).

Let's consider a prototype party to face a CR 20+ Demon Lord (which are the ones with stat blocks currently).
Let's say Baphomet, CR 23. For this to be a threshold Deadly encounter (which, by the way, a party should be able to do 2 or 3 of in a day), the party (5 people) should be level 18+.

A 5-person level 18 party can face 26 orcs in a single encounter before it's even classified as an Easy encounter (shouldn't drain anything more than a single low-level spell slot or a couple HP). Medium encounters start at 53 orcs. Hard encounters at 79. Still with no significant threat (barring real bad tactics and horrible dice luck) of character loss. Deadly at 118 orcs. They should be able to do 2-3 fights of 118 orcs in a single day before being drained of resources.

And a common complaint about 5e is that the default CR calculations err on the side of being too easy. They're built for a party with no magic items at all and with a standard, no-optimization design. For a party with a reasonable number of items and decent optimization, they might be able to handle double those numbers.

Edit: and orcs are particularly deadly for their CR, with both ranged and melee attacks and decent tactics. Replacing those with giant rats approximately quadruples the numbers involved in theory, and more like octuples them (or even more) in practice. It's more likely that you'd just get very very bored of killing rats with cantrips and regular attacks than actually have any threat from them.

Mordar
2018-11-15, 03:29 PM
Am I moving goalposts? Let's look at this. I am trying to make arguments of the form

X being threatened/beaten by Y makes Z look lame for losing to X.

The PCs being threatened/beaten by rats makes Mephistopheles look lame for being beaten by the party.

The tournament champion losing to a group of random cards thrown together by someone who doesn't know the game makes the other people who have lost to him look lame.

Old Man Henderson being beaten up on the separate occasions, by a bag lady, two pidgins, and a noisy cricket, would make Hastur look lame for losing to Henderson punching him in the face.

No, those seem like they follow the same format. That doesn't feel like moving goalposts to me.

My response remains that your conclusion is incorrect even though your observables are true.

Given:

X is truly BDH and have repeatedly been shown to be such by slaughtering hordes of other accepted-as-potent enemies
Y is truly an inferior for and has been repeatedly shown to be such (by cats, farm boys or 0-level commoner exterminators)
Z is perceived to be more capable than Y (at any magnitude above say, "twice as strong")


The fact that Y threatened X does not impact the perception of Z. It will be ignored as statistical aberration. Lots of people have survived Cellar Rats. Someone, this group got lucky. Match them up against X a thousand times and they likely don't replicate the result.

Modern version: Last year the Golden State Warriors (Z) were the NBA champions. They were beaten in a game by the Memphis Grizzlies (X). Memphis lost 60 games last year. to an astonishing array of teams (each of which can be Y). By your model, each Y must now look superior to Z because they beat X...even if they didn't beat Z themselves.

No one familiar with the NBA believes for a heartbeat that Memphis was (or is) a better team than Golden State. And they certainly don't believe, as a byproduct of that single result, that teams that beat Memphis would thus be able to regularly defeat Golden State.

Had this been at the beginning of Golden State's ascent, people might have legitimately questioned the capability of Golden State (or ranking those that beat Memphis as better than Golden State). But Golden State has been killing dragons and laughing at giants and so forth dominating the NBA for a few years now, so the result on that Saturday in October is understood to be an aberration.

Returning to our BDH...even they were regularly defeated by the Cellar Rats (while still maintaining dominance over nearly all the rest of the denizens of the multiverse) then they *might* be viewed as superior...but not just to Z but to all of the non-Y creatures that can be encountered.


It's possible that I'm misrepresenting Bounded Accuracy. So, if the party fought 1,000 fights against orcs, rats, and other fodder - all on different days - is there not a reasonable chance of character death? Could the characters not, then, after defeating Mephistopheles, reasonably* comment that he had posed less threat than orcs?

(EDIT - and does not Bounded Accuracy contribute to those 1,000 encounters both feeling and being more dangerous than they would be without it?)

* While the results are clearly biased by "1" not being a statistically significant number of encounters.

The characters could reasonably comment that fighting Z once posed less threat than fighting Y 1,000 times...and, as has been mentioned, likely doing so without exerting any effort to offset the advantage of their numbers with terrain, tactics or common sense. As you clearly see, that one instance does not undo the litany of other successes, particularly in the shadow of the 1 Y having been beaten by characters less powerful/experienced/prepared than X.


Which, really, brings us full circle to my original question - had anyone else seen that happen?

I have absolutely seen instances in which a big boss was steamrolled by a party that struggled against a lesser adversary, and I have seen it enough to think it wasn't just luck. However, it nearly always involved either a lesser adversary accompanied by an array of other critters or of a very different "style" than the boss. I have assumed it was generally the result of having to deal with multiple targets instead of the single primary threat or lack of intelligence (the "knowing stuff about the enemy before fighting the enemy, and thus preparing for that enemy" kind of intelligence) rather than the lesser adversary actually being individually more potent than the big boss.

- M

JAL_1138
2018-11-15, 06:11 PM
Could be that I misread or misremembered, in which case I apologize. Working on a cell phone. I could’ve sworn I read “three rats” at some point, but maybe not. If that’s the case, my bad. Might have gotten it crossed up with “killed three men” or something? Anyhow, sorry.

I still say yes, the goalposts are moving. Because the MtG example concerned the wizard, not the player. Wizard summons island-eating leviathan, casts spells that level mountains, gets flattened by a horde of 1/1s; doesn’t strictly make the wizard seem like a chump villain.

I don’t see how the MtG example needs to be changed to “fit the format.” Because again, it’s looking at a bunch of 1/1 creatures killing a god-wizard who can make mountains explode, even though the 1/1s can individually get killed by any other creature with a nonzero Power. A rat, singular, isn’t going to stand a chance of killing a PC who could fairly fight a dragon. Just like a single 1/1 isn’t going to get past a Force of Nature, or one-shot the Player even if they hit. A rather large group of rats could potentially defeat a party that could take a dragon in a fair fight, due to bounded accuracy, yes. So if we’re talking about what bounded accuracy does for low-level creatures, we’ve got to look at groups of small creatures getting an advantage through numbers and action economy.

Changing the Henderson example to “fit the format” isn’t responding to what actually happened in the tale of Old Man Henderson, and what actually happened was the point of the example. The format to address whether the hero being vulnerable to weaker threats defeating a villain makes the villain look lame would be “X could be defeated by Y, therefore X defeating Z makes Z look lame.” Henderson could have been killed by a shotgun blast to the face, but Henderson defeating Hastur did not make Hastur look lame, instead it made Henderson legendary. Thus it’s a counterexample that does already fit the format. (That Henderson, who would be vulnerable to a shotgun to the face, actually survived all the ridiculous crap he did up until the ice rink explosion, despite being vulnerable to it in theory, just adds to his legend). Changing what it required for Hastur to be defeated changes the example to a strawman version. To reiterate, bounded accuracy wouldn’t necessitate Hastur getting one-shotted by a punch to the face. It still took an ice rink full of explosives to kill Hastur, and under bounded accuracy it still could take that much damage to do the job even though it would also be possible to land a punch on Hastur because his AC wasn’t beyond the bounds of plausibility to hit on anything but a nat-20.

Bard the Bowman looking lucky (as opposed to a really good shot, although I grant I phrased it in terms of luck) doesn’t make Smaug look more lame—whether Bard himself looks like a BDH is irrelevant to that point. Bard himself could have been defeated by any of the myriad things that can kill an ordinary, mortal human in Middle-Earth, such as Orcish archers. He wasn’t, but he could have been. Most dragons in fiction and legend tend to get killed by mere mortals who’d be vulnerable to the sorts of things that can kill mere mortals, like getting stabbed or shot; this doesn’t make dragons seem like chump villains.

Isildur defeating Sauron didn’t make Sauron look lame. Isildur It still took the Last Alliance of Elves and Men to defeat Sauron’s orc hordes so Isildur (and Elendil and Gil-Galad, who were killed in the fight against Sauron and his forces) to actually get to where he could cut the ring from Sauron’s hand with a broken sword. Put in “format,” Isildur was defeated by an Orc archer, but Sauron didn’t seem lame for losing to Isildur.

St. George was killed by a bunch of ordinary soldiers; does the Dragon of Silene look lame for getting defeated by St. George?

I forget whose example it was, but “I wouldn’t think Mephistopheles was lame for losing to a horde of orcs” kind of applies from a different direction; if Mephistopheles isn’t lame for losing to a horde of Orcs, Mephistopheles wouldn’t be lame for losing to a party who’d also lose to a horde Orcs, would he?

If a party that could reasonably defeat Mephistopheles—let’s drop Mephistopheles, since he doesn’t have stats, and use a high-CR statted monster like a CR 24 Ancient Red Dragon instead—fought 1,000 encounters, on different days, against Orcs, rats, and other cannon fodder in 5e, the threat the party faced would depend on the size and circumstances of the encounters. Is it a fight against 100 Orcs, 400 Giant Rats, 400 kobolds at once on each day? Then yes, it could well be more dangerous than taking on an Ancient Red Dragon four-or-five against one. There’s a ludicrous number of them and they can focus fire. Is it four or five CR 1/2 Orcs, four or five CR 1/8 Giant Rats, four or five CR 1/8 kobolds? Then no, there’s not a reasonable chance of party death, even over 1000 encounters, if the party’s not already beat to heck before the orcs/rats/kobolds/whatever get to them. The Orcs (or rats, or whatever) would be incapable of dealing enough damage to a single party member to KO them in one round, and next round or two they’ll all die.

If it’s something like 20 Orcs at a time, day after day for a thousand days, they might very well eventually get lucky, win initiative, focus fire to bring down the AoE caster(s) first, roll really well, and eventually win.

That particular group of 20 Orcs was not necessarily “more of a threat” than the Ancient Red Dragon—but that 20,000 Orc army that could keep sending goons twenty at a time every day for nearly three years until one squad got lucky was more of a threat, sure. 20,000 Orcs who want you dead and will keep coming until either you die or they all do being a larger threat to a four-or-five person group than one big dragon, that doesn’t sound so farfetched.

But say it happens on the first day to the first squad of Orcs. That squad of orcs got pretty lucky and will go down in Orc legend as the company called The Dragonslayer’s Bane, but the Ancient Red Dragon could still be seen as a “bigger threat,” because it was much more likely to kill you than the 20 Orcs were. The Orcs got lucky, but the dragon was still more dangerous. Just not as successful.

Anyway. The points I was making were: 1) that bounded accuracy does not inherently result in Captain Hobo scenarios because all it means is that the to-hit numbers have a smaller range (it actually doesn’t mean anything for the ability to actually defeat a thing, in and of itself; a monster within bounded accuracy might have an AC of 12, but have thousands of HP, immunity to nonmagical damage, immunity to magic below a certain level, and a ridiculous rate of regeneration per round); and 2) that a hero vulnerable to weaker threats taking down a powerful being does not necessarily result in the powerful being looking lame for losing to that hero; the existence of that vulnerability and that weaker threat do not inherently weaken the powerful being.

You’ve encountered module design you don’t like, monster design you don’t like, unoptimized parties, bad luck, etc. But none of that means that bounded accuracy in and of itself inherently results in Captain Hobo, or that a hero being vulnerable to weaker threats inherently does either.

Edit: Partly ninja’d by PhoenixPyre and Mordar.

Kaptin Keen
2018-11-15, 11:56 PM
So could some NPC have the party's level of alpha-strike tech? Sure. But that NPC was conspicuously absent from those published modules.

Also, the BDH party in question? There were no true übercharger builds - no-one was soloing an encounter*. The party just had higher alpha strike potential than Krusk / Devis / Jozan and company.

Part of the point is, because the module was run "as written", the party got to actually feel like BDHs.

Many times before when I've mentioned this party, the response had been like yours, that that's fine, so long as the GM scales encounters to match. My response is, no, it's fine, so long as the GM doesn't scale encounters to match.

Would a party of purely optimized übercharger builds have killed the fun? For my group, absolutely. As I've said (or, at least, hinted at) earlier in the thread, the party worked in no small part because no one was going around soloing encounters, because everyone got to shine all the time. The BDH party felt like BDHs because they were so much shinier than (most of) the world.

Why would you want to remove their shine?

* Outside the one time that a group of fodder ate a fireball.

Published modules confuse me. I never play them myself.

Be that as it may, you're answering a lot of things I didn't say - and, far as I can tell, nothing I did.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-16, 12:33 AM
So, it feels like the consensus is, no, most people haven't seen what I've seen. Well, kinda - many people are still commenting as though I'm saying something other than what I'm saying, so maybe I shouldn't measure general consensus yet.



Several people have said this, so, clearly, not having clear delineation of "this foe is beyond any of you" for Demons / Dragons / Superman / whatever is important to a not-niche style of play.

Which is fine, given that I'm only trying to show that, for one style of play (apparently, not this one), the monsters in the published modules do not need to be scaled to the BDH party for fun to be had without calling BadWrongFun.



Well, yes and no. I suppose what I'm really doing is trying to paint a picture of one of my preferred gaming styles. But because I'm playing 5d chess, painting the picture in multiple dimensions, and not explicitly explaining that that's what I'm doing (because I'm too Old Man Henderson to really realize that that's what I'm doing), it feels like I'm saying several different things.

So, in other words, when you're in this particular mindset, both of these facts will be true: a) you don't need to scale the monsters to the BDH party (and, in fact, doing so would be actively detrimental); b) otherwise cool encounters that you defeat seem lame when you realize that a pack of rats / orcs / fodder posed more threat. (EDIT: I suppose I should add "c) there exists the notion of 'this foe is beyond any of you'" - or is that covered implicitly by "b"?)



Sure can. But some kid's My First Tome Deck - let alone a several of them - isn't likely to seriously threaten the tournament champion, making your loss to him seem that much more pathetic by comparison.

I've seen good decks win matches my deck couldn't, but I doubt I've ever seen a random pile of cards thrown together for their pictures by someone who didn't know how to play accomplish spectacular feats, like TPKing the PCs (which is what "defeating the tournament champion" is really standing in for in this example).



I certainly never thought of it like that, but I suppose a case could be made...



The correct parallel would be if Old Man Henderson, instead of being such a BDH, had been hospitalized repeatedly in the campaign, by a bag lady, two pidgins, and a noisy cricket, then killed Hastur by punching him in the face, and walked away whistling.



So could some NPC have the party's level of alpha-strike tech? Sure. But that NPC was conspicuously absent from those published modules.

Also, the BDH party in question? There were no true übercharger builds - no-one was soloing an encounter*. The party just had higher alpha strike potential than Krusk / Devis / Jozan and company.

Part of the point is, because the module was run "as written", the party got to actually feel like BDHs.

Many times before when I've mentioned this party, the response had been like yours, that that's fine, so long as the GM scales encounters to match. My response is, no, it's fine, so long as the GM doesn't scale encounters to match.

Would a party of purely optimized übercharger builds have killed the fun? For my group, absolutely. As I've said (or, at least, hinted at) earlier in the thread, the party worked in no small part because no one was going around soloing encounters, because everyone got to shine all the time. The BDH party felt like BDHs because they were so much shinier than (most of) the world.

Why would you want to remove their shine?

* Outside the one time that a group of fodder ate a fireball.



Two things. One, we were running through published modules - the stats were already established, and the table chose to play characters who were strong. Note that this table also, in separate parties, choose to play characters who were average, characters who were weak, and characters who were a mixed bag. Changing the published stats would be a denial of their agency to make that choice.

Two, I'm not a fan of "intent". Trying to preserve "intent" sounds like orc mischief railroading to me.

It is fine to like being much stronger than your opponents. I'm not sure why you are making so many unrelated arguments here, the core of what you are saying is "I like being stronger than my enemies. My party had fun that way."

That is great, glad you enjoyed it. Say exactly that next time this comes up.

Quertus
2018-11-16, 12:35 AM
@JAL_1138 - I've got a rambling and unfinished reply (which I spoiled for length). I think that the important part of it is this: I am asserting that A can cause B, not that it will cause B, and asking if others have observed this behavior. Anything that isn't A is irrelevant to this conversation. Any specific instance of A not causing B is irrelevant. Any assertion that A cannot cause B is quite relevant, but probably false, at least in the general sense, as I've now cited three instances of observing the phenomenon in different media (D&D, MtG, and movies), and all three would need to be refuted as "me not seeing what I think I saw" for the phenomenon to not exist.

But, to state my assertion less formally (and more generally), my goalposts remain that having something lame accomplish something that something otherwise cool failed to accomplish can make the otherwise cool thing look lame. Like when the head engineer of Stark Industries could not accomplish with full corporate funding & staffing what was done by one man in a cave with a box of scraps, it made him look lame in context. I'll temporarily dub it the "Transitive Property of Lameness" (which doubtless makes mathematically inclined academics cringe - hopefully they'll rename it for me).

Now, there is some question as to how much, if any, role Bounded Accuracy actually plays in exacerbating the phenomenon. I'll admit I'm on somewhat shaky ground there, in that I'm relying on intuition rather than fact. We'll see how that part of the discussion plays out.


Could be that I misread or misremembered, in which case I apologize. Working on a cell phone. I could’ve sworn I read “three rats” at some point, but maybe not. If that’s the case, my bad. Might have gotten it crossed up with “killed three men” or something? Anyhow, sorry.

I still say yes, the goalposts are moving. Because the MtG example concerned the wizard, not the player. Wizard summons island-eating leviathan, casts spells that level mountains, gets flattened by a horde of 1/1s; doesn’t strictly make the wizard seem like a chump villain.

I don’t see how the MtG example needs to be changed to “fit the format.” Because again, it’s looking at a bunch of 1/1 creatures killing a god-wizard who can make mountains explode, even though the 1/1s can individually get killed by any other creature with a nonzero Power. A rat, singular, isn’t going to stand a chance of killing a PC who could fairly fight a dragon. Just like a single 1/1 isn’t going to get past a Force of Nature, or one-shot the Player even if they hit. A rather large group of rats could potentially defeat a party that could take a dragon in a fair fight, due to bounded accuracy, yes. So if we’re talking about what bounded accuracy does for low-level creatures, we’ve got to look at groups of small creatures getting an advantage through numbers and action economy.

Changing the Henderson example to “fit the format” isn’t responding to what actually happened in the tale of Old Man Henderson, and what actually happened was the point of the example. The format to address whether the hero being vulnerable to weaker threats defeating a villain makes the villain look lame would be “X could be defeated by Y, therefore X defeating Z makes Z look lame.” Henderson could have been killed by a shotgun blast to the face, but Henderson defeating Hastur did not make Hastur look lame, instead it made Henderson legendary. Thus it’s a counterexample that does already fit the format. (That Henderson, who would be vulnerable to a shotgun to the face, actually survived all the ridiculous crap he did up until the ice rink explosion, despite being vulnerable to it in theory, just adds to his legend). Changing what it required for Hastur to be defeated changes the example to a strawman version. To reiterate, bounded accuracy wouldn’t necessitate Hastur getting one-shotted by a punch to the face. It still took an ice rink full of explosives to kill Hastur, and under bounded accuracy it still could take that much damage to do the job even though it would also be possible to land a punch on Hastur because his AC wasn’t beyond the bounds of plausibility to hit on anything but a nat-20.

Bard the Bowman looking lucky (as opposed to a really good shot, although I grant I phrased it in terms of luck) doesn’t make Smaug look more lame—whether Bard himself looks like a BDH is irrelevant to that point. Bard himself could have been defeated by any of the myriad things that can kill an ordinary, mortal human in Middle-Earth, such as Orcish archers. He wasn’t, but he could have been. Most dragons in fiction and legend tend to get killed by mere mortals who’d be vulnerable to the sorts of things that can kill mere mortals, like getting stabbed or shot; this doesn’t make dragons seem like chump villains.

Isildur defeating Sauron didn’t make Sauron look lame. Isildur It still took the Last Alliance of Elves and Men to defeat Sauron’s orc hordes so Isildur (and Elendil and Gil-Galad, who were killed in the fight against Sauron and his forces) to actually get to where he could cut the ring from Sauron’s hand with a broken sword. Put in “format,” Isildur was defeated by an Orc archer, but Sauron didn’t seem lame for losing to Isildur.

St. George was killed by a bunch of ordinary soldiers; does the Dragon of Silene look lame for getting defeated by St. George?

I forget whose example it was, but “I wouldn’t think Mephistopheles was lame for losing to a horde of orcs” kind of applies from a different direction; if Mephistopheles isn’t lame for losing to a horde of Orcs, Mephistopheles wouldn’t be lame for losing to a party who’d also lose to a horde Orcs, would he?

If a party that could reasonably defeat Mephistopheles—let’s drop Mephistopheles, since he doesn’t have stats, and use a high-CR statted monster like a CR 24 Ancient Red Dragon instead—fought 1,000 encounters, on different days, against Orcs, rats, and other cannon fodder in 5e, the threat the party faced would depend on the size and circumstances of the encounters. Is it a fight against 100 Orcs, 400 Giant Rats, 400 kobolds at once on each day? Then yes, it could well be more dangerous than taking on an Ancient Red Dragon four-or-five against one. There’s a ludicrous number of them and they can focus fire. Is it four or five CR 1/2 Orcs, four or five CR 1/8 Giant Rats, four or five CR 1/8 kobolds? Then no, there’s not a reasonable chance of party death, even over 1000 encounters, if the party’s not already beat to heck before the orcs/rats/kobolds/whatever get to them. The Orcs (or rats, or whatever) would be incapable of dealing enough damage to a single party member to KO them in one round, and next round or two they’ll all die.

If it’s something like 20 Orcs at a time, day after day for a thousand days, they might very well eventually get lucky, win initiative, focus fire to bring down the AoE caster(s) first, roll really well, and eventually win.

That particular group of 20 Orcs was not necessarily “more of a threat” than the Ancient Red Dragon—but that 20,000 Orc army that could keep sending goons twenty at a time every day for nearly three years until one squad got lucky was more of a threat, sure. 20,000 Orcs who want you dead and will keep coming until either you die or they all do being a larger threat to a four-or-five person group than one big dragon, that doesn’t sound so farfetched.

But say it happens on the first day to the first squad of Orcs. That squad of orcs got pretty lucky and will go down in Orc legend as the company called The Dragonslayer’s Bane, but the Ancient Red Dragon could still be seen as a “bigger threat,” because it was much more likely to kill you than the 20 Orcs were. The Orcs got lucky, but the dragon was still more dangerous. Just not as successful.

Anyway. The points I was making were: 1) that bounded accuracy does not inherently result in Captain Hobo scenarios because all it means is that the to-hit numbers have a smaller range (it actually doesn’t mean anything for the ability to actually defeat a thing, in and of itself; a monster within bounded accuracy might have an AC of 12, but have thousands of HP, immunity to nonmagical damage, immunity to magic below a certain level, and a ridiculous rate of regeneration per round); and 2) that a hero vulnerable to weaker threats taking down a powerful being does not necessarily result in the powerful being looking lame for losing to that hero; the existence of that vulnerability and that weaker threat do not inherently weaken the powerful being.

You’ve encountered module design you don’t like, monster design you don’t like, unoptimized parties, bad luck, etc. But none of that means that bounded accuracy in and of itself inherently results in Captain Hobo, or that a hero being vulnerable to weaker threats inherently does either.

Edit: Partly ninja’d by PhoenixPyre and Mordar.

Dude, from what my senile Henderson mind remembers of your post history, the day you need to apologize for anything you'd say to me to me is probably the day I get banned. But, yeah, I'll buy it was reading "three party members died to rats" as "three rats", just as easily as I'll buy that "the rats" was changed by autocorrect to "three rats". Shrug. Misunderstandings happen. Still, thanks for being polite, even to a **** like me.

I'm not completely sure about some of your examples, but your most recent MtG wording is definitely of the form "Y beats Z", and so has nothing to do with the phenomenon I'm asking about.

So, let's look at my original examples:

"Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday?"

"when I don't fear a Dragon significantly more than I do a band of orcs, it lessens the might and mystique of the Dragon, at least in my book."

OK, they're not that great. But I think that Henderson was never "nearly TPK'd", even by Eldrich Horrors, key alone by things that the setting world consider fodder, like a random bag lady. And Henderson certainly, uh, demonstrated that Hastur was not as casual an encounter as his previous victories. So - as awesome a story as it is - Old Man Henderson does not match the format of "things that would make Hastur look bad", even by my original attempt to state my goalposts by example.

As to previous MtG examples...

If your opponent in MtG is down to one - for whatever reason - and your mighty champion (as played my example by a Force of Nature) is unable to finish him off because of a stupid wall, but a lowly Scrib Sprite can, I have seen that make the mighty champion seem weak. Similarly, I've seen an air force of tiny creatures slowly beat an opponent down when huge ground forces failed. The worst of all is my Ennui tournament style, where I might eventually get around to beating my opponent down with a lone Brass Man - (who was one of the biggest jokes in oldschool MtG). So, sure, technically, a single Scrib Sprite could defeat an opponent. But that's entirely not the point.

I have seen a couple of cheap MtG fodder hold off much stronger, much more expensive units. And I have seen that make those units look bad. "Why did I pay $40 / 6 mana for you?", even when the unit could have performed just fine against most decks. So I've remembered having witnessed the phenomenon I'm discussing in D&D, MtG, and movies so far. So I'm quite certain that it's a real human psychological thing. But I'm rambling, as that's still not what you're talking about.

What you're describing in MtG is - and correct me if I'm wrong - a valid weenie / token deck being effective. A MtG weenie deck doesn't really have the same flavor of "something bad" that orcs and rats do in Fantasy. Well, unless you're Timmy. But I remember when my resident Spike (I'm more of a Johnny) won a tournament with a weenie deck, and when several of group explored the power of tokens to great effect, so I can't really cast either of those deck archetypes as a proper "Y".

But, sure. An individual 1/1 token is weak. Yet, having lots of them will let you overcome an opponent with a Circle of Protection that could have prevented the damage from even the greatest Angel / Dragon / Demon / whatever. That seems to match my format. Has anyone seen that make those big cards seem weak? ... Hmmm, well, not to the extent that I'm describing, no, but I have seen similar things result in "power" cards being devalued at least slightly when shown up by such "cheap" tactics - sometimes rationally, sometimes irrationally.

Despite my poor wording, I'm not trying to claim that this phenomenon is a scientific Law, that it always occurs. In fact, I even closed my original post asking if others had ever seen this occur. What I am saying is that I've seen it. I suspect that, in D&D, it's more likely in parties / at tables that like to taunt/bully their foes, but that's just a guess. Also, obviously, it's going to happen more at tables that care about "feel", not just "fact".

Quertus
2018-11-16, 02:17 AM
It is fine to like being much stronger than your opponents. I'm not sure why you are making so many unrelated arguments here, the core of what you are saying is "I like being stronger than my enemies. My party had fun that way."

That is great, glad you enjoyed it. Say exactly that next time this comes up.

Well, that's not entirely unlike what I said the first half-dozen or so times. More like "playing at a balance point above the enemies is perfectly valid and fun". And I constantly (but not exclusively) got responses like, "if the party all have high initiatives, you have to have opponents that have high initiatives, too", or otherwise suggesting that the opponents must scale with the party, and remove the players' agency to choose play fast characters, or strong characters, or anything other than perfectly balanced playing pieces that play exactly one and only one way, or else you're having BadWrongFun. That may be an exaggeration, but that's how my Henderson mind remembers it, at any rate.

So I've been thinking about another way to explain the advantages of that play style. That's when I noticed another advantage of that party - that it negated the conditions for Transitive Lameness.

Thus this thread.


Published modules confuse me. I never play them myself.

Be that as it may, you're answering a lot of things I didn't say - and, far as I can tell, nothing I did.

Really? Hmmm...


I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch. I consider the whole exercise somewhat uninteresting - although others clearly love it to bits, which is fine.

However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly, in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead.

And that's what seems to always be missing from these discussions: The simple fact that the rules apply to the game and all things in it - not just the players and their actions. If you can do a bajillion points of damage on round one, so could some NPC. And it just becomes a game of 'roll the highest initiative', which sounds slightly boring to me.

But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D


So could some NPC have the party's level of alpha-strike tech? Sure. But that NPC was conspicuously absent from those published modules.

Also, the BDH party in question? There were no true übercharger builds - no-one was soloing an encounter*. The party just had higher alpha strike potential than Krusk / Devis / Jozan and company.

Part of the point is, because the module was run "as written", the party got to actually feel like BDHs.

Many times before when I've mentioned this party, the response had been like yours, that that's fine, so long as the GM scales encounters to match. My response is, no, it's fine, so long as the GM doesn't scale encounters to match.

Would a party of purely optimized übercharger builds have killed the fun? For my group, absolutely. As I've said (or, at least, hinted at) earlier in the thread, the party worked in no small part because no one was going around soloing encounters, because everyone got to shine all the time. The BDH party felt like BDHs because they were so much shinier than (most of) the world.

Why would you want to remove their shine?

* Outside the one time that a group of fodder ate a fireball.


"I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch" - OK, so optimization and published modules are tangentially related to this thread. But, since the phenomenon exists in multiple media, I don't think that they are required, or that understanding them are required. In fact, I think that the phenomenon in question will be more prevalent at a lower optimization level - that's kinda the point of the thread, in fact. So you're a perfect candidate to have observed what I'm describing, whereas a dedicated optimizer is not.

"However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly," - Again, sure. But they weren't (afaict) many/any in the published modules, which was a good thing - it made the party have a feel to them that would have been lost if every enemy were the same as the party. Some of the custom content we created (yes, that party did not exclusively go through published modules) did exist at the same level of optimization (or, arguably, even higher optimization), but, key point, it was optimized differently, not for alpha strike potential. Thus the party retained its feel.

"in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead. " - well, no. At the party's level of optimization, nobody was one-shoting anybody. So, even if the opposition were clones of the party, and thus optimized not just to the same level, but also in the same way, it wouldn't have been pure rocket tag - even before the variety of tactics the two parties could have employed against one another. It would have been... Turbo 2D chess, maybe?

"But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D" - I'm a war gamer at heart. RPG combat bores me to tears, because it's easy mode in comparison to a truly sporting "50% chance of TPK" fair war game. So, personally, I'm into RPGs, not for the combat* (because it is, honestly, sub par compared to war game combat), but for the role-playing. And "optimization" is a means to an end - making the mechanics match the narrative, and making the character match the balance range of the group. And, despite the fact that I personally am only really caring about the details of one of those two for its own sake, I'm pretty sure there's a name for the fallacy that assumes that role-playing and optimization are mutually exclusive.

Do you feel that this post responds more directly to what you were saying?

* I should amend that to "not for the combat portion of combat, but for the role-playing, including the role-playing portion of combat."

Pelle
2018-11-16, 05:14 AM
X being threatened/beaten by Y makes Z look lame for losing to X.


Sure, let's say this is plausible. So what? Again, it has nothing to do with bounded accuracy, that's the situation without it as well.

Hypothetical example, in 5e, a party that might defeat a dragon may lose to a group of orcs. In 3.5, a party that might defeat a dragon may lose to a group of ogres. The fact that the party lose to a group of ogres make the dragon look lame for losing to the party, same thing. You only notice it with bounded accuracy because you insist on playing modules with specifically orcs and dragons, not ogres and dragons.

Kaptin Keen
2018-11-16, 06:08 AM
"I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch" - OK, so optimization and published modules are tangentially related to this thread. But, since the phenomenon exists in multiple media, I don't think that they are required, or that understanding them are required. In fact, I think that the phenomenon in question will be more prevalent at a lower optimization level - that's kinda the point of the thread, in fact. So you're a perfect candidate to have observed what I'm describing, whereas a dedicated optimizer is not.

"However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly," - Again, sure. But they weren't (afaict) many/any in the published modules, which was a good thing - it made the party have a feel to them that would have been lost if every enemy were the same as the party. Some of the custom content we created (yes, that party did not exclusively go through published modules) did exist at the same level of optimization (or, arguably, even higher optimization), but, key point, it was optimized differently, not for alpha strike potential. Thus the party retained its feel.

"in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead. " - well, no. At the party's level of optimization, nobody was one-shoting anybody. So, even if the opposition were clones of the party, and thus optimized not just to the same level, but also in the same way, it wouldn't have been pure rocket tag - even before the variety of tactics the two parties could have employed against one another. It would have been... Turbo 2D chess, maybe?

"But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D" - I'm a war gamer at heart. RPG combat bores me to tears, because it's easy mode in comparison to a truly sporting "50% chance of TPK" fair war game. So, personally, I'm into RPGs, not for the combat* (because it is, honestly, sub par compared to war game combat), but for the role-playing. And "optimization" is a means to an end - making the mechanics match the narrative, and making the character match the balance range of the group. And, despite the fact that I personally am only really caring about the details of one of those two for its own sake, I'm pretty sure that's a name for the fallacy that assumes that role-playing and optimization are mutually exclusive.

Do you feel that this post responds more directly to what you were saying?

* I should amend that to "not for the combat portion of combat, but for the role-playing, including the role-playing portion of combat."

Well - you yourself mentioned combat ending on round one, and quite possibly some characters wouldn't get to act. So ... that doesn't automatically translate into ubercharger, but it must mean doing a lot of damage quickly. That's why I mentioned rocket tag. Not because I think it's a party of uberchargers, but because you say combat often ends very quickly, sometimes before everyone has had a chance to act.

And all I'm saying is, to retain a credible feeling of risk, the opposition needs (IMO) to be able to counter. Not all the time, perhaps, but for combat to be combat and not slaughter, the opposition needs to threaten. Not that there's anything wrong with slaughter, but I doubt it can carry a game on it's own.

I like to feel the Cleave and Great Cleave feats exist for the purposes of occasional wholesale destruction, for instance. I just feel the game needs ... more.

Cluedrew
2018-11-16, 08:44 AM
Which, really, brings us full circle to my original question - had anyone else seen that happen?No. People cutting across power-levels is a staple of fantasy, perhaps more so than any other gene. ([ex] Hobbits vs. Fallen Angel) It happening when the protagonists aren't around is uncommon but not unreasonable. But your transitivity chain definitely gets softened when one of the links in it are PCs.

Additionally I see at least two (maybe three points) points in here. The first is about a need to balance against a powerful party. I agree that it is unnecessary, depending on the type of game. The second is the "transitivity of lameness" which can be further divided into A) is it a thing and B) does bounded accuracy cause it. I spoke to the first already and the second... well as the answer to A is no so B is kind of irrelevant. I don't think it would but then again I've never played 5e at a level where it came into play.

So agree, disagree and abstain. I think pulling the points out is actually the important bit.

Silly Name
2018-11-16, 09:33 AM
I don't necessarily disagree that, if the party that curbstomped and Ancient Red Dragon loses to a random band of orcs the next day, then the players will probably remember the orcs as a bigger threat than the Red Dragon, but I think one must analyse the situation a bit more deeply.

For one, narrative tone is important: the dragon might not have succeeded in defeating the party, but if the narrative is delivered properly, what the players will remember is playing well, making and executing good tactics, with perhaps a little dash of luck, which allowed them to overcome the tremendous threat posed by the dragon. If they lose to the orcs because they all rolled 1's on their initiative and the orcs all rolled 20, which meant they got to focus fire and disrupt the party's strategy, what the players are more likely to remember is "that time the dice shafted us".
And if they won against the dragon by winning initiative and dealing enough damage on the first round to kill the dragon twice then, yeah, the dragon will probably seem weak to the players, but they are also likely to think "Man, we're so cool and powerful that we can bring down dragons without breaking a sweat!"

If the orcs, however, win the fight by using strategy and guile rather than zerg-rushing, then they will be remembered as a threat rather than the simple application of enough firepower to bring down even the guys who can rofltstomp a dragon.

The fact is, bounded accuracy has no real effect on whether zerg-rushing is a legitimate way to defeat someone. Zerg-rushing was a perfectly viable monster tactic even in past editions, and lore-wise is the reason why certain fodder monsters are seen as dangerous. A lone goblin isn't going to raid a town on his own, but a tribe of goblins breeding fast poses an actual threat. Still, the lone goblin is lame, because he is meant to be lame. In the same way, a single dragon is cool and powerful on her own, but she can still be defeated if you can throw nearly endless waves of enemies at her.

The only thing which bounded accuracy changes about zerg-rushing is that, within a bounded accuracy based fighting system, the numbers necessary to execute the maneuver successfuly are a little bit smaller. That's all it does, but, statistically speaking, a party that is capable of easily defeating an Ancient Red Dragon shouldn't be brought down by a band of five orcs or a single rat swarm. Bounded accuracy doesn't change the fact that the Ancient Red Dragon-killing party has enough HP, items, DpR and AoEs to absolutely obliterate the pack of rats without incurring any loss of a party member. Bounded accuracy makes the rats hit a little bit more often, but they shouldn't be able, on average, to do anything more than simply scratch the party.

Tanarii
2018-11-16, 02:20 PM
My favorite part about 5e bounded accuracy and 5e power scaling in general is it lets level 5 characters adventure with level 10 characters in mixed groups, and still contribute about 40% of the effectiveness of the level 10. Since I run mixed groups within T2 constantly, it's awesome that they can not feel useless for being significantly lower level.

Keeping a fairly wide range of PC levels effectively able to contribute to the game isn't a design flaw. It opens up possible space for types of game tables.

Yeah, the math will break down if you try and put level 5s with level 20s. But that's to be expected. In any edition.

------------

My second favorite part is I can still run a group of, for example, 11 CR 1/2 Hobgoblins against a party of 4 level 7s (on average) and have it be an effective Medium encounter. Of which they should be able to handle up to 6-2/3 a day. I can even throw a group of 17 at them three times and expect it to be interesting Deadly challenge.

Keeping low level creatures available as somewhat effective enemies, in large mobs, up to a reasonable level of play, isn't a design flaw. It gives DMs more options.

Yeah, the system math will probably break down direction or another when you start trying to throw 100+ Mooks at a level 18 character. But that's to be expected. In any edition.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-16, 04:04 PM
Well, that's not entirely unlike what I said the first half-dozen or so times. More like "playing at a balance point above the enemies is perfectly valid and fun". And I constantly (but not exclusively) got responses like, "if the party all have high initiatives, you have to have opponents that have high initiatives, too", or otherwise suggesting that the opponents must scale with the party, and remove the players' agency to choose play fast characters, or strong characters, or anything other than perfectly balanced playing pieces that play exactly one and only one way, or else you're having BadWrongFun. That may be an exaggeration, but that's how my Henderson mind remembers it, at any rate.

So I've been thinking about another way to explain the advantages of that play style. That's when I noticed another advantage of that party - that it negated the conditions for Transitive Lameness.

Thus this thread.



Really? Hmmm...





"I'm not an optimizer. Not by any stretch" - OK, so optimization and published modules are tangentially related to this thread. But, since the phenomenon exists in multiple media, I don't think that they are required, or that understanding them are required. In fact, I think that the phenomenon in question will be more prevalent at a lower optimization level - that's kinda the point of the thread, in fact. So you're a perfect candidate to have observed what I'm describing, whereas a dedicated optimizer is not.

"However, it feels to me that if you build a character with (for instance) high alpha strike ability - you need to accept that any enemy can be built similarly," - Again, sure. But they weren't (afaict) many/any in the published modules, which was a good thing - it made the party have a feel to them that would have been lost if every enemy were the same as the party. Some of the custom content we created (yes, that party did not exclusively go through published modules) did exist at the same level of optimization (or, arguably, even higher optimization), but, key point, it was optimized differently, not for alpha strike potential. Thus the party retained its feel.

"in which case the game becomes a rocket tag, and if you roll low initiative, you're likely dead. " - well, no. At the party's level of optimization, nobody was one-shoting anybody. So, even if the opposition were clones of the party, and thus optimized not just to the same level, but also in the same way, it wouldn't have been pure rocket tag - even before the variety of tactics the two parties could have employed against one another. It would have been... Turbo 2D chess, maybe?

"But then, I'm all about story and fluff and so on, things that would likely bore a dedicated optimizer to tears =D" - I'm a war gamer at heart. RPG combat bores me to tears, because it's easy mode in comparison to a truly sporting "50% chance of TPK" fair war game. So, personally, I'm into RPGs, not for the combat* (because it is, honestly, sub par compared to war game combat), but for the role-playing. And "optimization" is a means to an end - making the mechanics match the narrative, and making the character match the balance range of the group. And, despite the fact that I personally am only really caring about the details of one of those two for its own sake, I'm pretty sure there's a name for the fallacy that assumes that role-playing and optimization are mutually exclusive.

Do you feel that this post responds more directly to what you were saying?

* I should amend that to "not for the combat portion of combat, but for the role-playing, including the role-playing portion of combat."

See the problem here is you are taking a personal preference and trying to turn it into something objective. Changing module stats is neither cheating nor railroading (it literally doesn't match the definitions of those words) and table top rpgs are not usually competitive. The DM isn't out to get you, and cannot "cheat" unless there is a toxic DM vs. Party relationship in which case don't play with that DM. The point of having a DM/GM is to adjust rules and gameplay so they and the party are having fun.

The reason to adjust numbers is many players prefer a challenge to slaughtering their enemies, and enjoy optimization as an expression of rules mastery. I personally find fights I auto-win to be boring, i would rather only have a fight every session or two and have it be lethal then walk over a bunch of enemies.

But if you feel the opposite that is great! It is totally legitimate to prefer having fights you win outright except bosses, or to feel less powerful due to bounded accuracy. Lots of members here hated BA when it came out, it is part of why 3.P remains popular.

Quertus
2018-11-17, 01:03 AM
I think pulling the points out is actually the important bit.

So, I wanted to call this out as rather wise.

So, yeah, there's several components to the conversation. Let's focus on one at a time... In another post.


Sure, let's say this is plausible. So what? Again, it has nothing to do with bounded accuracy, that's the situation without it as well.

Hypothetical example, in 5e, a party that might defeat a dragon may lose to a group of orcs. In 3.5, a party that might defeat a dragon may lose to a group of ogres. The fact that the party lose to a group of ogres make the dragon look lame for losing to the party, same thing. You only notice it with bounded accuracy because you insist on playing modules with specifically orcs and dragons, not ogres and dragons.

Isn't part of the stated purpose of Bounded Accuracy to make sure that fodder remains a serious threat? If so, then I'll continue to contend that it can contribute to increased Transitive Lameness (until proven otherwise).


Well - you yourself mentioned combat ending on round one, and quite possibly some characters wouldn't get to act. So ... that doesn't automatically translate into ubercharger, but it must mean doing a lot of damage quickly. That's why I mentioned rocket tag. Not because I think it's a party of uberchargers, but because you say combat often ends very quickly, sometimes before everyone has had a chance to act.

And all I'm saying is, to retain a credible feeling of risk, the opposition needs (IMO) to be able to counter. Not all the time, perhaps, but for combat to be combat and not slaughter, the opposition needs to threaten. Not that there's anything wrong with slaughter, but I doubt it can carry a game on it's own.

I like to feel the Cleave and Great Cleave feats exist for the purposes of occasional wholesale destruction, for instance. I just feel the game needs ... more.

Sure the game needs more than just slaughter after slaughter. But, when lame monsters are a slaughter, they don't Captain Hobo the cool encounters. Whereas when lame monsters are a challenge, they Captain Hobo the challenge of cool monsters - or, at least, they can.

And some encounters did counter - not by being identical to the party, nor by being unrealistically custom-tailored to the party, but by realistically* having a plan / capabilities / luck that let them challenge the party. Maybe they were invisible. Maybe they hid behind SoS traps. Maybe they had insane damage reduction. Whatever the reason, they made for cool, memorable encounters.

And, because this party had never struggled with fodder, they lacked the ammunition to perform their usual MST2000 impersonation of heckling their poor foes. Without successful lame encounters, there was no opportunity for Transitive Lameness.

* Created by the module writer, before the party even existed.


I don't necessarily disagree that, if the party that curbstomped and Ancient Red Dragon loses to a random band of orcs the next day, then the players will probably remember the orcs as a bigger threat than the Red Dragon, but I think one must analyse the situation a bit more deeply.

For one, narrative tone is important: the dragon might not have succeeded in defeating the party, but if the narrative is delivered properly, what the players will remember is playing well, making and executing good tactics, with perhaps a little dash of luck, which allowed them to overcome the tremendous threat posed by the dragon. If they lose to the orcs because they all rolled 1's on their initiative and the orcs all rolled 20, which meant they got to focus fire and disrupt the party's strategy, what the players are more likely to remember is "that time the dice shafted us".
And if they won against the dragon by winning initiative and dealing enough damage on the first round to kill the dragon twice then, yeah, the dragon will probably seem weak to the players, but they are also likely to think "Man, we're so cool and powerful that we can bring down dragons without breaking a sweat!"

If the orcs, however, win the fight by using strategy and guile rather than zerg-rushing, then they will be remembered as a threat rather than the simple application of enough firepower to bring down even the guys who can rofltstomp a dragon.

The fact is, bounded accuracy has no real effect on whether zerg-rushing is a legitimate way to defeat someone. Zerg-rushing was a perfectly viable monster tactic even in past editions, and lore-wise is the reason why certain fodder monsters are seen as dangerous. A lone goblin isn't going to raid a town on his own, but a tribe of goblins breeding fast poses an actual threat. Still, the lone goblin is lame, because he is meant to be lame. In the same way, a single dragon is cool and powerful on her own, but she can still be defeated if you can throw nearly endless waves of enemies at her.

The only thing which bounded accuracy changes about zerg-rushing is that, within a bounded accuracy based fighting system, the numbers necessary to execute the maneuver successfuly are a little bit smaller. That's all it does, but, statistically speaking, a party that is capable of easily defeating an Ancient Red Dragon shouldn't be brought down by a band of five orcs or a single rat swarm. Bounded accuracy doesn't change the fact that the Ancient Red Dragon-killing party has enough HP, items, DpR and AoEs to absolutely obliterate the pack of rats without incurring any loss of a party member. Bounded accuracy makes the rats hit a little bit more often, but they shouldn't be able, on average, to do anything more than simply scratch the party.

Well, it sounds like you get what I'm saying. Just... imagine a group of players who don't analyze more deeply, who just go off the surface feel. The one time they encountered this Dragon (before they killed it), it posed less challenge than some orcs. The one time we encounter this corporate head engineer, he's outdone by someone working with scraps. It doesn't matter what they could have done, it doesn't matter what they did off camera, to the audience, they're lame.

And, as above, isn't the point of Bounded Accuracy to let lame monsters remain a threat longer?

Pleh
2018-11-17, 05:38 AM
Trying to follow all this discussion, I think the titular Captain Hobo terminology is not helpful. I end up reading through it and all I hear is, "but BA is lame sometimes."

Ok? So what? D&D is lame sometimes, but there are workarounds when that happens. Seems more a question of how the group interprets events in the game than an inherent flaw in the mechanics.

But then again, the definitive example keeps being this Captain Hobo thing, which tells me that Captain Hobo is the only way you know how to rationalize when a threat not intended to be difficult overshadows one that was. "Rats nearly wiped out the heroes who bested Mephistopheles with ease."

I don't see Captain Hobo in the Rats. I see gritty survival themes. Mephistopheles is only lame if there really weren't any scenarios where he likewise threatens to wipe out the heroes, because fights against creatures who pose zero threat are rather lame.

But in survival games, a key element of gameplay is that every little threat can be directly or indirectly lethal. The key to winning survival games is preparation, which is a mainstay of your hero troupe. They get prepared, then crush the otherwise serious threat before it has a chance to fight back.

The Rats aren't Captain Hobo to me at all. They just represent a scenario where the heros' plan fell apart.

It was the insufficiency of their preparedness, not the mightiness of the rats, that nearly killed them. It was the insufficiency of Meph's preparedness that got him ganked like a punk. That's what makes him look lame: his own blunders and not the rats.

So I take issue with the use of Captain Hobo to frame the entire question. I think you're projecting bias without justification.

Kaptin Keen
2018-11-17, 01:21 PM
Sure the game needs more than just slaughter after slaughter. But, when lame monsters are a slaughter, they don't Captain Hobo the cool encounters. Whereas when lame monsters are a challenge, they Captain Hobo the challenge of cool monsters - or, at least, they can.

And some encounters did counter - not by being identical to the party, nor by being unrealistically custom-tailored to the party, but by realistically* having a plan / capabilities / luck that let them challenge the party. Maybe they were invisible. Maybe they hid behind SoS traps. Maybe they had insane damage reduction. Whatever the reason, they made for cool, memorable encounters.

And, because this party had never struggled with fodder, they lacked the ammunition to perform their usual MST2000 impersonation of heckling their poor foes. Without successful lame encounters, there was no opportunity for Transitive Lameness.

* Created by the module writer, before the party even existed.

Hm - but do the lame monsters need to be there at all?

Anyways I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason an army of orcs cannot be a 'boss monster'. Except that beyond a certain point, hordes of enemies becomes a pointless slog - 'yes, we've determined 100 orcs cannot threaten the PC's ... let's please not go for 200!'

By the way it occurs to me that maybe the deadliest trap of all is a dispel magic trap? Anyways ..

I'm by no means promoting tailoring encounters to specifically make characters and/or builds useless - even if, get famous enough, and someone is bound to start thinking. There's sure to be more than one super-charger out there, and also, trip+reach is enough to stop that joke. Or higher initiative, and charging first.

But that's not my argument. This is: Realistically, everything that works will eventually get countered. Sure, heavy horse ruled the battlefield for a couple hundred years, but then someone came up with sufficiently powerful missile weapons. And occasionally I feel every DM owes it to his players to hand them ... a bit of a wake-up call: You can't just rely on this thing to work forever.

JAL_1138
2018-11-17, 06:58 PM
The way BA keeps “lame” threats—are they lame? that seems like a charged term to use—relevant longer is lowering the size of hordes because the monsters don’t need a nat-20 to hit a high-level PC. But you still need to scale the size of the group considerably to keep those monsters challenging.

The same-sized encounter that was a threat at level 1, or level 5, is no longer a threat at level 20, just a speedbump. It might (might) whittle down some HP or a spell slot or two, but that’s it. A group of five Orcs could be a brutal fight at low levels (nearly certain to kill at least 1 PC at level 1), but it’s virtually impossible for that same group of five Orcs to do more than mildly inconvenience a single level 20 character, much less a level 20 party.

This allows you to make, for example, a levels 3-15 campaign out of, say, an Orcish warlord’s army invading the country more easily. You don’t reach a point where you need to fundamentally change the nature of the opponents as individual statblocks just to be able to challenge the PCs in the slightest, or come up with new statblocks just so the Orcs can hit the PCs. The Orcs don’t need +X swords and several character levels each to get their to-hit numbers up to the point they can hit a PC on something besides a 20. You can just throw more of them into a given encounter without reaching numbers where it’s no longer feasible to have that many minis on the table and it’d be better to crack open the mass-combat rules instead of using normal combat. Granted, it’ll still get boring if you never add new monsters with new abilities like spellcasting, but you no longer need to change the basic Orc statblock to make large but manageable-to-DM groups of them relevant.

Ignimortis
2018-11-18, 03:33 AM
I reread that story recently. Half the point of the strategy was that they had established the rule (whether houserule or RAW) earlier in the game that when an Elder Evil is summoned, there's a short couple of rounds that they are weak due to something like a summoning sickness.

During this time they are vulnerable. OMH, after summoning Hastur and triggering the detonator, started singing the canadian national anthem so Hastur would be confused rather than defensive, right until the moment the explosives went off, which were timed to detonate before he regained his strength.

I'm not familiar with the ruleset they were using, but the fact that OMH used the DM's clues against him to win legitimately was really the entire point.


Pleh beat me to the punch, but yeah. “Rule of Cool” is not in effect if the DM is angry enough about what the player just pulled off to flip the table and leave because he wouldn’t be able to say the strategy doesn’t work without contradicting something he previously established as fact.

Been a while since I've read that story, so yeah, erred there. Then it's the other case - we never actually see the BBEG at his full strength. It's like that one Elder Evil in 3.5 (Pandora-something? AFB at the moment), where the purpose is to defeat those seeking its' release and a small shard of its' essence rather than the being itself.

So in the end we applaud Henderson's player more than Henderson himself, because he outwitted his somewhat unpleasant GM while working without precise constraints set by the GM. I don't think that still applies to the fact that BBEGs are kinda too vulnerable under Bounded Accuracy.

Knaight
2018-11-18, 06:29 AM
X being threatened/beaten by Y makes Z look lame for losing to X.

Rock being beaten by paper makes scissors look lame for losing to rock.

Things have specific vulnerabilities and circumstances are a factor, is my point, and it's not unreasonable for numbers to be among them. Looking just at the fiction, take a dragon, a hero, and a band of soldiers. The dragon loses to the hero, because the hero is sneaky enough to corner them in their lair, quick enough to dodge their fire breath, and skilled enough to evade their close attacks and cut off their head. The hero loses to the band of soldiers because even if you're really skilled a dozen spears in your face is a problem to you. The band of soldiers loses to the dragon because none of them are individually that sneaky, that skilled, or that quick and they give their location away only to be blown apart in a blast of fire out of nowhere on a moonless night.

Beyond that there's also the matter of how flimsy something has to be to look "lame". Only being able to fight two dozen soldiers in a straight fight while also outmaneuvering them? That doesn't seem particularly lame.


Now, compare that to 5e bounded accuracy. Really, Mephistopheles? You lost to these guys? You realize that they nearly TPK'd to a band of orcs yesterday? ... How do you think that makes Mephistopheles feel?

When you make the party vulnerable to weaker threats, you weaken the bigger threats. Like the old saying, "when a cow's life is as valuable as a man's, a man's life is as valueless as a cow's". While I don't know about that, I do know that, when I don't fear a Dragon significantly more than I do a band of orcs, it lessens the might and mystique of the Dragon, at least in my book.

Bounded Accuracy is the new Captain Hobo, whereas characters and parties who live the high end of their table's power curve have more appreciation for truly special foes, IME.
This whole section basically boils down to more powerful being assumed to be more interesting. I can't speak for your interests, but personally that entire framework is ludicrous. How powerful and how interesting an entity is have nothing to do with each other, and while a scatter diagram of these is going to look something like a messy star field I'm pretty sure the line of best fit corresponds to a negative correlation, at least within the power at normal human civilian and upward region.

Godlike entities threatening whole planets that can only be fought by other godlike entities can be fun, don't get me wrong. They can also be really dull though, and certainly don't make a setting generally more interesting. Meanwhile small local threats can be very memorable. To use media examples, Dragonball Z is full of profoundly boring characters, who can blow up galaxies or whatever. Meanwhile the one occupation captain in Pan's Labyrinth is both interesting and a more palpable threat than anything in Dragonball, despite their power just being having a handful of troops under their command. They were consistently menacing, they were smart, and what safety one had from them was a matter mostly of social restraints that they were constantly wearing at.

Moving back to the warband, the hero, and the dragon there's also the matter of how the scale of the threat is different than the nature of the threat. The warband is pretty conventional. The dragon may not fight any better than them in a fair fight, but it can attack from out of nowhere, escape most fights, carry out incredibly fast hit and runs, and move quietly across huge portions of terrain leaving very little trace, and recover from most injuries. All of that is notable, and all of that remains notable whether the comparable warband is twelve large or twelve thousand large.

Heck, as long as we're talking long, rambling gaming stories - I've run games across a wide range of power levels, and fully intend to so so. Games across very different power levels have seen both individually forgettable opposition and the special enemies players remember for years, and the special enemies haven't been restricted to higher power games at all. For instance, there was Jenoak, in my demons-and-humans looking for El Dorado game. He was a demon military commander, dangerous with a sword with some personal tricks (short range teleportation used in conjunction with the sword. This game being this game though, that's not that impressive; it was set a bit in the future and some random soldier with a machine gun could easily pose a harder fight. They're not the ones concealing eye rules in natural bark patterns to run espionage ops though, or running misinformation campaigns to set up traps, or otherwise being dangerous. Even better examples are the two lieutenants Jenoak went through. The first was a big brute of a demon, fire breath, claws, regeneration, that sort of thing. It had a few good moments (e.g. melting all the moving parts of one of the many jeeps the PCs went through together, which I got to describe as "your jeep is in one piece"), but my not having a name here is telling. Then there was Aukchitzi, a small flying imp with some invisibility powers, and mad taunting skills. Aukchitzi ended up being the most memorable villain in that whole campaign, because of a series of clever invisibility tricks combined with petty dickishness, culminating in baiting the players to firing off plasma guns inside a flammable aerosol cloud to try and kill him because they hated him that much, only to have that fail because of a trick with a smoky glass pane blending in. That was the villain the players loved to hate. The big brute of a demon? Wings torn off, thrown down a mile deep pit to hell, and a bottle of bleach emptied in its face when it caught the edge of the pit to better kick it the rest of the way down - summarily dealt with, in other words.

This pattern has persisted across other games. My Mod-Bots campaign (players well all early AI robots who didn't want to be military machines and went rogue) saw all sorts of heavy opposition. Vastly bigger war machines, superweapons, etc. The opponent who stood out was comparable to the PCs, by which I mean a robot of the same model using comparable tools. They were one of a dozen in a fight the PCs won, who escaped to come back with better tactics, winning fights in fair ways with cleverness (e.g. bringing magnet grips to an open side aircraft then getting the whole aircraft to rotate and dump the PCs, who had comparable but less suited hardware), and eventually going out in a final fight that involved the PCs having to outsmart a good trap, where they got around Epsilon managing to fake invisibility with a thermally regulated cloud of fog and debris by deliberately dumping so much heat into the atmosphere to force it on thermal. A fantasy campaign where the PCs were seriously threatened by random street toughs had as it's most notable opponent a ruthless enforcer of a politician, skilled but mostly just determined and vicious. She could have been killed by any squad of soldiers, normal people with normal weapons. Another game had a villain notable because they had a particularly ridiculous doomsday plot (harness the power of a volcano for a super weapon that creates an artificial aurora borealis to hypnotize the world) along with a mean streak (a death trap that involved capturing the PCs then siccing their own hypnotized allies on them). They went down to one bullet eventually, because in an actual fight they were basically a civilian.

That the PCs that eventually handled all of these were all highly skilled and had all been in fights that went poorly against less than impressive opposition diminished none of them. Meanwhile I don't even remember the powerful villain that came up in a fairly recent game where the PCs were vastly more powerful. I remember the game, and I remember the player characters being army killers (their first fight involved the four of them basically cutting their way through the entire elite wyvern core of an army that was an existential threat to a kingdom they were saving) and that the villain was able to fight all of them, but despite this villain being the sort that would meet your big mystical threat they just left little impression. Meanwhile, you know who did make an impression as antagonists in that game? Entirely mundane antagonists who were incredibly everyday. The structure lent itself well to that (magical girl game, where there was a double life of ordinary college students on one side and army killing magic knights on the other, where the ordinary college students were generally up against social challenges), but still, one character's astoundingly terrible boyfriend and another characters cold and distant parents managed to be the memorable antagonists. Why? Because they were the impetus for some really good roleplaying, most notably a tragic scene where two characters in very different situations thought they were in parallel places, commiserate, and gave each other some astoundingly garbage advice that exacerbated both of their problems but would have been really useful if they'd just implemented it themselves. It was dramatic, it was memorable, it was possibly the best example of dramatic irony I've ever seen at a gaming table.

Mechalich
2018-11-18, 06:32 AM
Power scaling for combat in games is a mathematical problem. Bounded accuracy is a solution implemented within a specific game context - dungeon crawling - for specific purposes. Not playing 5e, I don't know how the math works out, but ultimately this happens in every game and just happens to be particularly obvious in level based games. Every game utilizes a formula for contested effects - and how the numbers are arranged with produce outcomes that limit the ability of entities carrying lower numbers to impact higher numbers depending on how that formula is construed.

Take the Attack roll in d20 as an example, since it's very simple. You roll a d20, generating a random flat scale result 1-20 and then add a static value to that, with the intent of equaling or exceeding another static value in order to hit. So if Person A has +2 to hit, the maximum armor class they can ever hit is 22, meaning they can never damage a person with an armor class above that.

Now, the d20 system introduces an additional rule such that a person will always hit on a roll of 20 on the die, which means that it's impossible for the to-hit chance to go to zero, there's always a 5% possibility. This means that, if you have ten-thousand blind ninety year old men in wheelchairs and give them all crossbows you can point them at the most powerful thing in the book and you'll register ~500 hits per volley (they may not do any damage, but that's because that means bringing in a different formula). This is obviously an absurd case, 10,000 blind ninety year olds who can't walk doesn't happen, but the case of 100 archers shooting at a single target - for instance from atop a castle wall at a giant - absolutely does, and when you put together the formula you need to consider that model.

Now, in 3.5 D&D by raw, if I put, say 100 elf warriors (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/elf.htm) on a castle wall and have them all shoot an encroaching Stone Giant (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/giant.htm#stoneGiant), I'll get 5 hits per round, because the elves have a +3 to hit and the giant has an AC of 25. This is actually still going to be a win for the elves since the giant only has 120 hp and will go down in about 5 rounds having killed less only a handful of them most likely, but it starts becoming less and less likely as the number of elves drops. At only 20 elves, they only do 4.5 damage per round, dropping rapidly, and the giant kills them all.

Overall, 3.X D&D tends to through out numbers where the difference between static values easily exceeds the range. A Stone Giant is a mere CR 8 monster with any special immunities, yet ordinary soldiers can harm one only a on a critical hit. There are numerous high level monsters that cannot be hit, outside of criticals, with anything less than a +10 or more to attack. This means that something like a gelugon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/giant.htm#stoneGiant) can wade through entire armies and never take damage outside of critical hits. So long as the devil manages its incoming attacks carefully (a simple protection from arrows would probably cover most of it), it could easily kill thousands of people one spear-thrust at a time.

The designers of 5e thought this was a bad state of affairs and developed bounded accuracy to correct this. It is a matter of opinion whether this was wise, and it is unclear how well the ultimate system works, but it is simply a design choice. It is certainly possible to go the other way and make it so that numbers are the only thing that matters in a combat scenario. The nWoD has this problem, where a dozen or so children with sharp sticks can annihilate pretty much any single opponent. Ultimately it comes back to math and the general difficult of making a system that reliably handles small tactical combats intended to have around a dozen maximum participants total, and mass combats with hundreds of people on each side, the various formulas simply don't scale very well. I don't play 5e, but I'm sure bounded accuracy, like any system that crosses the line between tactical combat and mass combat, has its own specific failure modes - there are probably certain attack modes that are unreasonably deadly when given a numbers boost and certain ones that fail miserably in isolation. There always are. Which ones you prefer are a matter of taste and depend on what kind of game you're trying to run.

Quertus
2018-11-19, 05:33 PM
So, there's a lot of disconnect between what I'm trying to say and the replies I'm getting. Apparently, I was either too ambitious or too Gygaxian in my pros.

So let me start smaller: Captain Hobo Captain Hobos the other superheroes. That, by making a hobo with a broken bottle powerful as Superman, you make Superman as weak / lame as a hobo with a broken bottle.

Does everyone follow me so far?

Has anyone seen this happen (presumedly in a game, but other media is acceptable, too)?

Does anyone want to contend that this phenomenon never occurs?

If we're can get through this discussion successfully, I'll think about where to go on the actual topic.

Knaight
2018-11-19, 06:15 PM
So, there's a lot of disconnect between what I'm trying to say and the replies I'm getting. Apparently, I was either too ambitious or too Gygaxian in my pros.

So let me start smaller: Captain Hobo Captain Hobos the other superheroes. That, by making a hobo with a broken bottle powerful as Superman, you make Superman as weak / lame as a hobo with a broken bottle.

Bolding mine. Those aren't the same thing, and that's a pretty critical point here.

Arbane
2018-11-19, 06:19 PM
And since I don't think 'Captain Hobo' was every actually explained:



A theoretical character in a system which generically surcharges game effects based on their utility and directs the player to fluff their effects post-hoc. He's used as a shorthand for the dangers of assigning weak fluff without regards to its relative in-game effect; Captain Hobo's super-speed is described as being the side-effect of 'too much energy drinks and vodka', his 12d6 attack (the max he's allowed to buy out of chargen) is a broken chair leg, his toughness is described as 'layered clothes from Goodwill with cardboard and tape', etc.

The problem with Captain Hobo is that merely by existing he makes everyone else's character less cool. Your badass magical martial artist with mastery over the four elements is only as effective at superheroics as a drunken smelly guy. A less extreme but no less illuminating example would be someone playing a James Bond clone whose PP7 could do more damage than the mortar shots of Artillery Man or someone playing a Conan clone who could outwrestle someone's Superman expy.


Or in this case, taking down an archdevil or similar with a sufficiently large mob of peasants.

Mordar
2018-11-19, 06:46 PM
So, there's a lot of disconnect between what I'm trying to say and the replies I'm getting. Apparently, I was either too ambitious or too Gygaxian in my pros.

So let me start smaller: Captain Hobo Captain Hobos the other superheroes. That, by making a hobo with a broken bottle powerful as Superman, you make Superman as weak / lame as a hobo with a broken bottle.

Does everyone follow me so far?

Has anyone seen this happen (presumedly in a game, but other media is acceptable, too)?

Does anyone want to contend that this phenomenon never occurs?

If we're can get through this discussion successfully, I'll think about where to go on the actual topic.

I think it happens, but primarily in media...Star Trek and superhero shows spring immediately to mind.

The Flash TV series does this, I think, in a couple ways. In order to continue raising the stakes each consecutive season needs a more impressive/dangerous/powerful adversary...but they used Flash's best two (three?) adversaries early, so we end up with lesser villains "Captain Hoboing" Reverse Flash and Zoom (and Grodd?) by being *at least* as hard for Flash to defeat as those iconic adversaries...despite Barry Allen having expanded his powers and his skill.

We also see a slightly different version of the same thing but with the lesser heroes Hoboing Flash with the henchman-level villains being the transitive agent. In order to have Elongated Man (or Vibe/Killer Frost to a lesser extent) seem valuable and capable they have to incapacitate or idiot-ball Flash. We saw it with several of the bus-accident metas last season, and we even see it with standard mooks from time to time. This also holds very true with the Worf effect, which I think is a corollary of your Captain Hobo transitive property of lameness.

I still hold that the rats don't Captain Hobo Big M in your primary example though.

- M

Mechalich
2018-11-19, 07:53 PM
Or in this case, taking down an archdevil or similar with a sufficiently large mob of peasants.

The thing is, overwhelming numbers is not, inherently, weak fluff. 'There's too many of them!' or 'They're everywhere!' are pretty famous last words for a reason, and burying the powerful or the elite under the endless weight of the swarm is a perfectly acceptable thing to happen in narrative fiction. In fact, it's something you want to be able to happen in speculative fiction - because there are severe distortions to world-building in a situation where overwhelming numbers become meaningless.

3rd and 4th edition D&D veered too far in the direction of overwhelming numbers being meaningless. Even shockingly low-level enemies could slaughter whole towns (the classic example being the Allip, a supposedly CR 3 monster capable of killing an infinite number of people if they don't have magical weapons). Bounded accuracy was devised for 5e as method to, among other things, prevent this from happening, and restore the idea of 'armies' being a thing that might actually matter in D&D fantasy worlds. Whether or not it works for this purpose is open to debate, as is whether or not it overcorrects too far and allows number imbalances that a reasonable observer would not consider overwhelming to be decisive. I don't play 5e and haven't followed debate on that system so I couldn't personally say.

This is a problem of design and math, with considerations both of world-building and actual adventuring sometimes at odds, and it depends on the kind of game you're producing. For example, you don't want a mid-level party to be able to solve all their problems simply by hiring a platoon of level 1 archers to follow them around everywhere in D&D, but you do want a single vampire to be able to solve most of her combat problems by deploying her bribed SWAT team in WoD.

Cluedrew
2018-11-22, 08:43 AM
See my thing with the Captain Hobos example is that it is not about making people look weak or anything. There is just a mechanics and story mismatch. And there are two solutions to that:

Story is correct, fix mechanics: An untrained combatant with a broken bottle is going to have +0 to hit and be doing 2 damage. Not [Superman level abilities], please rebalance the character appropriately.

Mechanics are correct, fix story: But after obtaining the link with the meta-mind and gaining the reality warping powers that go with it, Captain Hobarius was slowly driven mad by the visions and turned to alcohol and drugs to silence them.

In other words: your premise is false so the conclusion doesn't matter. Superman is not as weak as Captain Hobos because Captain Hobos cannot exist as stated.