Opinion: Will D&D ever acheive caster vs martial balance?

[Satinavian]

Neither of the things you mentioned (bounded accuracy and open-ended skills) stopped 5e from being the most successful D&D edition... well, ever. So declaring that those things "aren't D&D" doesn't really resonate.

Moreover, you can "evaluate a rogue's bonuses" just fine. You don't need uniformity across all tables to do that.
If we use the success of 5E as excuse to say "everything is fine", we could close this thread as obviously no kind of significant improvement is possible.

A couple of years ago 3.x was "the most successful D&D edition". I think even AD&D2 was "the most successful D&D edition" at its time. Was that alone a reason as well to not change anything ?



I admit to not liking D&D 5. And the rubbish skill system plays a huge part in this. I also don't play it, there are other systems for me out there. But maybe 6th Edition could be different ? So far nearly every edition has differed from before quite a lot (it gets a bit fuzzy with the first ones, but considering that the whole high level part of BECMI got axed, that still counts somewhat ). Maybe we finally get one that can do nonmagical noncombat stuff properly.

[Lord Raziere]

Well, I don't actually have to, because the success proves that the current approach is something a large number of tabletop gamers - perhaps even most of them - seem to want. Or at the very least, are willing to pay for. But to humor you:

I'd say D&D's identity is a game that has room for all three pillars, but is one where the combat pillar gets the most focus and thus the most detailed ruleset. While dungeons are certainly explorable, and dragons can be interacted with, the primary focus of both aspects of the game's title are to facilitate engaging combat.

The other two pillars are left vague/open enough that groups have the freedom to give them as much or as little focus as they want to, and not have to shoulder any expectations foisted onto them by the system itself. If you want to run a campaign centered around, say, painstaking wilderness survival. or labyrinthine political intrigue - well, my first recommendation would be to try a different system. But failing that, my second would be to either to look through third-party approaches, and the third would be to homebrew something of your own. And the best way to facilitate wildly differing approaches to these two pillars is to abstract them, and not mandate either specific DCs or specific results for the effects of the rolls therein.

There is no humoring here at all.

You want to claim success, you have to explain how its successful and why success is good. Success alone is not a virtue. It has to be for the right reasons, as proven by many other things people pay money for.

Furthermore to claim someone wants something just because they pay money for it is a quite an assumptive leap, especially when often people don't have any idea of what they're buying when it comes to this industry. A purchase is a gamble on whether the product is good or not and its not guaranteed it will always be good to everyone. To claim otherwise is to claim that people can somehow see the future and know if its good before they get it. And if your only criteria for success "willing to pay money for" and the only identity of DnD is that "its successful" then that means the real identity your defining Dnd by is actually "DnD is something people pay money for" and thus you'd like it because people pay money for it, which is frankly bizarre at best, and at worst saying you like it because a lot of people pay for it over paying for another thing. If DnD wasn't "successful" and Vampire the Masquerade was "successful" instead, would you still like it? or would you be claiming the same of Vampire just because you want to be apart of something "successful"?

furthermore you claim three pillars, but then you say two of them are "open"......so in short your admitting that they're not pillars at all. the only pillar is combat, if survival or intrigue were pillars they'd have actual support. anything the player has to bring to the table themselves isn't actually a pillar. a pillar is something solid, something that holds things up by definition. if it can be ignored or changed or not given any focus at all, its not a pillar.

meaning your saying that "DnD's identity is a game with combat that makes money". and thus makes money because of its combat as the only thing consistent about it, because that is what can't be changed. meaning your claiming people see the future to buy a game that only supports combat and thus want a game that only supports combat or at least pay for a game that only supports combat. while also saying that making money is somehow self-justifying- when such a mindset is nothing but thoughtless consumerism. People buy things for reasons, not because its successful, because that ignores all the people that didn't know whether it would be successful or not buying it to make it successful in the first place. Success is not a force that can defy causality and be the reason that people buy it before it exists, or before people know that its successful.

[Selion]

I think that D&D is so much filled with iconic spells, which i wouldn't remove for fluff reasons
, that a fine balance between those who swing sticks and those who create demiplanes during breakfast is not possibly achievable, at least at high levels.
5e made a turn in the right direction, limiting the layering of multiple spells with the concentration mechanic, shrinking spell slot pool, and giving to (some) martials the highest single target DPR in the game. General consensus is that it's not enough, i think there could be more leverage if they developed for real the gritty-realism optional rules (spreading the 1/day resources to 1/week, if you didn't know about it).
It's ok that a spellcaster could solve a difficult interaction with the use of invisibility, it's boring they could do it three times per day at low levels. If they had to preserve their resources in a week of travel/social interactions/combat (it must be said that in this option even encounters are spread in a wider time interval), their use could not only be more balanced in respect to classes which have at will features, but even a climatic event.

[warty goblin]

There is no humoring here at all.

You want to claim success, you have to explain how its successful and why success is good. Success alone is not a virtue. It has to be for the right reasons, as proven by many other things people pay money for.



It's successful in that fairly unprecedented numbers of people are playing and enjoying it. Sure some things thst suck sell big right away based on hype, these things do not generally get 10 years of active releases and growing popularity. That D&D 5th Ed. has this I think very strongly suggests that it is delivering an experience that people want.

This seems like a good thing to me because it means a lot of people are finding an enjoyable, imaginative and creative way to spend time with old friends and/or make new friends.

That this experience is based in a ruleset that doesn't live up to your (or anybody else's) standards of game purity is immaterial. We don't play at their tables, we don't really get to critique what or how they play. If they're having fun, they're doing it right, and the growth of 5th Ed. pretty strongly suggests they are having fun. Generally people don't spend lots of time and money on leisure activities they hate, or rope their friends into them.


Furthermore to claim someone wants something just because they pay money for it is a quite an assumptive leap, especially when often people don't have any idea of what they're buying when it comes to this industry. A purchase is a gamble on whether the product is good or not and its not guaranteed it will always be good to everyone. To claim otherwise is to claim that people can somehow see the future and know if its good before they get it. And if your only criteria for success "willing to pay money for" and the only identity of DnD is that "its successful" then that means the real identity your defining Dnd by is actually "DnD is something people pay money for" and thus you'd like it because people pay money for it, which is frankly bizarre at best, and at worst saying you like it because a lot of people pay for it over paying for another thing. If DnD wasn't "successful" and Vampire the Masquerade was "successful" instead, would you still like it? or would you be claiming the same of Vampire just because you want to be apart of something "successful"?

There are zillions of hours of footage of people playing D&D freely available. It's pretty trivial to figure out what D&D is, and make a very informed guess as to whether it is to a person's taste. Are some people going to buy a PHB, play once or twice, and drop out because it's not their thing? Sure. But clearly lots of people don't.

And I don't think anybody is trying to be part of something successful here. I at least was trying to point out that, again, lots of people are apparently really enjoying D&D. Any critique of D&D as a system had to account for the fact that what it's doing clearly works for a really large number of people. I'd in fact argue that you cannot meaningfully call a game bad when it succeeds in doing this. You don't have like it or play it, but the fun people have playing a system you don't like is as valid as the fun they have playing your favorite system.


furthermore you claim three pillars, but then you say two of them are "open"......so in short your admitting that they're not pillars at all. the only pillar is combat, if survival or intrigue were pillars they'd have actual support. anything the player has to bring to the table themselves isn't actually a pillar. a pillar is something solid, something that holds things up by definition. if it can be ignored or changed or not given any focus at all, its not a pillar.


The combat can be changed though. People play with house rules, or play minimal combat in the game.

D&D is, tautologically, the things sold as D&D. Those things usually have a lot of rules for combat, and rather less for social interaction or exploration. This is plausibly because, in my view, for a lot of people combat is one of the more fun parts of the game, and also the part that benefits the most for being codified by rules. I don't think this means that exploration and social interaction are irrelevant to the game as a whole (though they can certainly be irrelevant to any particular table), merely that by focusing fewer rules on them, the game gives tables a lot of leeway to figure out a form and level of focus that works for them.

[Psyren]

you have to explain how its successful and why success is good.

Success is good because D&D is a product being produced by a for-profit public company.


Furthermore to claim someone wants something just because they pay money for it is a quite an assumptive leap, especially when often people don't have any idea of what they're buying when it comes to this industry.

1) Payment for leisure or hobby activities is generally voluntary. D&D is not a tax, medical expense etc.
2) As warty goblin said, believing that a majority of people buy D&D without knowing what it is in 2022, or that a majority decide it's not for them and exit the hobby, is quite an assumptive leap.


furthermore you claim three pillars, but then you say two of them are "open"......so in short your admitting that they're not pillars at all.

You appear to be using a different definition of "pillar" than I and WotC are. Ours is found on PHB pg. 8.



meaning your saying that "DnD's identity is a game with combat that makes money". and thus makes money because of its combat as the only thing consistent about it, because that is what can't be changed.

You appear to be overvaluing consistency over flexibility.

[Brookshw]

Your argument though isn't that 5e is a good system, has a skill system that doesn't need fixing, or hasn't repeatedly failed DMs in my area from start to today. That its a system that exists in X state, has existed in X states before, and that many people have been able to successfully use those states, sure.


The rest of your argument is that we can play 'cops & robbers: D&D edition' without any rules or shelling out money for dead trees. No idea where you're coming form, no one said there were no rules, though I did comment that the DM has traditionally had massive authority to interpret/change those rules or create new ones.


Ask: if the 5e combat system works fine for pretty much everyone right out of the box, yet you're still trying to argue the skill/ability check system works only if people read and understand and use it in the exact same way you do while others are saying they still see people struggling with it, why is the combat system with its set DCs & all its tables & that everyone gets working decently well pretty much right away the system that never sees this level of discussion discord and repeated failure with? If I had made that argument I'd ask that question. I didn't, some people like the current system, others don't, that's just a matter of opinion which I'm not the judge of. As much as it may annoy Psyren, I prefer (with mixed success) to limit my comments to objective standards about what the game is/was rather than express value statements about its systems or what D&D should do next. Except when people start talking about some absurd requirements for someone to be able to DM and other gatekeeping.

[Telok]

No idea where you're coming form, no one said there were no rules, though I did comment that the DM has traditionally had massive authority to interpret/change those rules or create new ones.

That was from your statement:
"Considering D&D's a game, that's pretty much all you need, and it turns out kids know how to have fun even without knowing a bunch of math."
Mostly I'm pushing back on the statement that all DMs should be game designers. That's not what the DMs want, they don't buy the DMG to learn how to write game rules. They want instructions on what to do to make the game work.

If you take the whole "as simple as possible" & "5e skill rules are liberating & good for the game" to the logical conclusion you end up with something that looks like a fantasy hack of Lasers & Feelings. L&F has an elegant and streamlined skill system with as much mechanical rigor as 5e's easy-medium-hard table.



If I had made that argument I'd ask that question. I didn't, some people like the current system, others don't, that's just a matter of opinion which I'm not the judge of..... Except when people start talking about some absurd requirements for someone to be able to DM and other gatekeeping.

Sorry. I don't like the excessive multiquote slice & dice of a lot of the posts here because I have a hard time parsing it and most of the time it seems used to attack specific word structures rather than address the point of a post. My previous post took something like an hour and a half to text in due to family interruptions and I may have confused you with someone else.

I agree about the gatekeeping. My experience has been that 5e's complexity for the sake of complexity combat works for novice and average DMs because it has tables of DCs, modifiers, and clear rules & procedures to follow. That diesn't seen to keep anyone out. Its rather the undefined nature of the rest of it that seems to stop them having fun. You could whack 4/5th of the 5e combat & spells and still have a perfectly working game, it would just look more like the skills/stat roll section andneed the same level of expertise to use decently.

[InvisibleBison]

That this experience is based in a ruleset that doesn't live up to your (or anybody else's) standards of game purity is immaterial. We don't play at their tables, we don't really get to critique what or how they play. If they're having fun, they're doing it right, and the growth of 5th Ed. pretty strongly suggests they are having fun. Generally people don't spend lots of time and money on leisure activities they hate, or rope their friends into them.

The fact that people are having fun with the game doesn't mean they couldn't be having more fun, or having fun more easily, if the game was different.



Success is good because D&D is a product being produced by a for-profit public company.

That explains why the people selling D&D think the game being successful is good. It does nothing to explain why success would be good for the people buying the game, much less those playing the game without buying it.

[Dr.Samurai]

The fact that people are having fun with the game doesn't mean they couldn't be having more fun, or having fun more easily, if the game was different.

.........

That explains why the people selling D&D think the game being successful is good. It does nothing to explain why success would be good for the people buying the game, much less those playing the game without buying it.
Excellent post. It's important to remember that "selling lots of books" doesn't mean the game is doing all things right or that deviations from the current design paradigm can't work or shouldn't be implemented.

Designing a game so that three year olds can play with little difficulty is all well and good for "accessibility", but leaves a lot to be desired for people that can handle and engage with a more robust ruleset.

[KorvinStarmast]

You keep telling yourself that, and the game will remain accessible to anyone who wants to DM without a math degree regardless. +1

Two DMs being allowed to differ on what their tables can do with a check is a feature of the system, not a bug. Correct. For those that like their games hard coded, the CRPGs are over there ====> as are many board games. :smallcool:

And quite bluntly, you're vastly overstating the degree to which most DMs would differ on most checks. This is done every time this chew toy gets tossed into the posting stream. :smalltongue:

Neither of the things you mentioned (bounded accuracy and open-ended skills) stopped 5e from being the most successful D&D edition... well, ever. So declaring that those things "aren't D&D" doesn't really resonate. D&D was made to be wide open. It's better when it is.
And the best way to facilitate wildly differing approaches to these two pillars is to abstract them, and not mandate either specific DCs or specific results for the effects of the rolls therein. It works in play.

I admit to not liking D&D 5. And the rubbish skill system plays a huge part in this. I also don't play it Which makes your decision to involve yourself in this conversation an odd one - one that resemble a case of seagull posting. But to be fair, this thread reached a point of diminishing returns some pages back.

[Lord Raziere]

Success is good because D&D is a product being produced by a for-profit public company.



1) Payment for leisure or hobby activities is generally voluntary. D&D is not a tax, medical expense etc.
2) As warty goblin said, believing that a majority of people buy D&D without knowing what it is in 2022, or that a majority decide it's not for them and exit the hobby, is quite an assumptive leap.



You appear to be using a different definition of "pillar" than I and WotC are. Ours is found on PHB pg. 8.



You appear to be overvaluing consistency over flexibility.

1. Which is not relevant to the consumer except when the consumer is being convinced they're apart of some "corporate family" where somehow they think by buying into corporate dogma they benefit from the company benefiting when they get no money out of it of the company's profit. You only get a product that works just as well the previous product, regardless of popularity, not an improved product. your subjective liking of the product has nothing to do with the company's bottom line- if you disliked it, they still make money, while if you like it your incentivized to deny the money made from other people not liking it as something bad thus denying that DnD is not pure good thing. thus you downplay. just like your doing now. because for some reason you need a company's bottom line that you don't work for to be good for you to like DnD, which is absurd. you don't need that.

2. Irrelevant.

3. I'd hope so, since I'm questioning the definition your using since it does not seem to be a good one

4. "combat" is not flexibility and a lack of support is not flexibility. its a lack of support. a blank page is "flexible" only if you consider staring it blankly wondering what your possibly going to put on it for a while as flexible, rather than having options that detail what you can actually do in various shades that you can actually choose from. options that you have to put in yourself can't be attributed to the system. a void is not a strength, or freeform would be the strongest system in roleplaying.

[Psyren]

The fact that people are having fun with the game doesn't mean they couldn't be having more fun, or having fun more easily, if the game was different.

It doesn't mean they could either. Every change has pros and cons, and some have more of the latter than the former.



That explains why the people selling D&D think the game being successful is good. It does nothing to explain why success would be good for the people buying the game, much less those playing the game without buying it.

Editions that don't sell tend to get discontinued, which means no new content or support. This is particularly true for D&D, which is currently a more closed ecosystem (the 5e OGL is missing quite a lot of mechanics and a great deal of setting information for example.) It also makes finding games and introducing new players harder since all the marketing budget is going to the shiny new thing.


1. Which is not relevant to the consumer except when the consumer is being convinced they're apart of some "corporate family" where somehow they think by buying into corporate dogma they benefit from the company benefiting when they get no money out of it of the company's profit. You only get a product that works just as well the previous product, regardless of popularity, not an improved product. your subjective liking of the product has nothing to do with the company's bottom line- if you disliked it, they still make money, while if you like it your incentivized to deny the money made from other people not liking it as something bad thus denying that DnD is not pure good thing. thus you downplay. just like your doing now. because for some reason you need a company's bottom line that you don't work for to be good for you to like DnD, which is absurd. you don't need that.

There are in fact many things I don't like about 5e and many ways I think it can be improved. Ditching open skill resolution and bounded accuracy are not on that list.


2. Irrelevant.

3. I'd hope so, since I'm questioning the definition your using since it does not seem to be a good one

You declaring these two things to be so does not make them so. Consider making an argument.


4. "combat" is not flexibility and a lack of support is not flexibility. its a lack of support. a blank page is "flexible" only if you consider staring it blankly wondering what your possibly going to put on it for a while as flexible, rather than having options that detail what you can actually do in various shades that you can actually choose from. options that you have to put in yourself can't be attributed to the system. a void is not a strength, or freeform would be the strongest system in roleplaying.

The skill system is not by any stretch "a blank sheet of paper," a "void," or "freeform." It's more open-ended that prior editions, sure, but that allows it to encompass a much wider possibility space than those prior editions ever could.

[NichG]

That was from your statement:
"Considering D&D's a game, that's pretty much all you need, and it turns out kids know how to have fun even without knowing a bunch of math."
Mostly I'm pushing back on the statement that all DMs should be game designers. That's not what the DMs want, they don't buy the DMG to learn how to write game rules. They want instructions on what to do to make the game work.

If you take the whole "as simple as possible" & "5e skill rules are liberating & good for the game" to the logical conclusion you end up with something that looks like a fantasy hack of Lasers & Feelings. L&F has an elegant and streamlined skill system with as much mechanical rigor as 5e's easy-medium-hard table.


It's not that 'all DMs should be game designers' in the sense that only game designers should DM, its that 'any time a DM makes a choice, they are making design decisions about the game'. You're absolutely free to DM while ignoring that, but doing so means that you're likely to encounter situations where your decisions make the game worse for the table, or fail to resolve a situation that you actually did have the capability of resolving. Or just that the game doesn't live up to what you had in mind. I don't think its unreasonable to want a system to support you in making it easier to make those design decisions, but if you're DM-ing and choosing categorically not to care about the consequences of your choices to 'how the game plays' for the other people at the table, no system alone is going to salvage that and also remain flexible enough to handle all that players might choose to try to do.

That's not to say 'you shouldn't DM' or 'you can't DM' or something, just that things will from time to time break down, become awkward, get imbalanced, get frustrating, produce hurt feelings, marginalize some players, etc. It might still happen even if you take a game designer mindset, but doing so gives you far better tools to reduce that sort of issue and make the game work for everyone at the table. Not even because of homebrew or house rules or anything, just being able to get out of the stuck mindset of 'supposed to' that tends to run things straight onto the rocks when things start to get out of kilter.

[Pex]

+1
Correct. For those that like their games hard coded, the CRPGs are over there ====> as are many board games. :smallcool:

Yet you don't seem to mind that every class ability that has a saving throw is calculated the same way for all games everywhere. Ditto the damages of weapons, the AC of armors, the effects of most spells (insert debate about who chooses creatures summoned etc.)

No, wanting a defined number of how difficult it is to balance on a narrow ledge would somehow ruin the game of its creativity. I don't accept that.


This is done every time this chew toy gets tossed into the posting stream. :smalltongue:

Because it's the truth of reality. I've experienced it as I've written many times of having a warlock climbing walls and a monk who can't climb trees.


D&D was made to be wide open. It's better when it is. It works in play.
Which makes your decision to involve yourself in this conversation an odd one - one that resemble a case of seagull posting. But to be fair, this thread reached a point of diminishing returns some pages back.

D&D is wide open to adventure. Everyone playing by the same rules does not change that. Players choose to interact with a Thing. The rules determine how that interaction works. The DM chooses why the Thing is there and determines the results of the player's interaction. The player's choices and DM's whys are what drive the multitude of possibilities of play.

[Lord Raziere]

You declaring these two things to be so does not make them so. Consider making an argument.

The skill system is not by any stretch "a blank sheet of paper," a "void," or "freeform." It's more open-ended that prior editions, sure, but that allows it to encompass a much wider possibility space than those prior editions ever could.

1. You first. all I'm hearing is how much you love a company getting profit because of a product you like and thus trying to justify that product being good because of profit, and certainly no arguments. I am under no obligation to make you feel good about your consumer choices, agree with your consumer choices being good, or your criteria for your consumer choices being sound. I am not required to somehow agree that "Dndpopularitygood because Dnd corporate overlord bank accounts smile" because you insist on it. I am not obligated to agree with you in an never-ending logic loop of "DnD is popular and good because DnD is popular and good".

And neither is anyone else.

2. Neither is it a pillar by any stretch.

[Dr.Samurai]

The skill system is not by any stretch "a blank sheet of paper," a "void," or "freeform." It's more open-ended that prior editions, sure, but that allows it to encompass a much wider possibility space than those prior editions ever could.
Unless there is language that sets the DCs as suggestions/tools for DMs that would like to use a table. You can have both worlds, open-ended, and suggestions for DMs that want to use those DCs.

The problem is that people are in a position where they don't trust players to read the rules and understand them, so the rules have to be... well, what we have now, which is "ask your DM what they think about it lol".

And apparently these players will never be able to understand rules with any more complexity, because any notion of adding to the rules is met with this resistance. So D&D will be the TTRPG with training wheels for everyone, always because... we can't trust people to learn to ride a bike anymore.

[Brookshw]

That was from your statement:
"Considering D&D's a game, that's pretty much all you need, and it turns out kids know how to have fun even without knowing a bunch of math."
Mostly I'm pushing back on the statement that all DMs should be game designers. That's not what the DMs want, they don't buy the DMG to learn how to write game rules. They want instructions on what to do to make the game work.

If you take the whole "as simple as possible" & "5e skill rules are liberating & good for the game" to the logical conclusion you end up with something that looks like a fantasy hack of Lasers & Feelings. L&F has an elegant and streamlined skill system with as much mechanical rigor as 5e's easy-medium-hard table. Ah. The kids having fun comment was in regards to the gatekeeping, apologies if that wasn't clear. As to the rest, /shrug, some people will like the simple rules approach, some wont, though as long as we have some level of rules, even if its that there's a designated person making the rules, I don't know that we're in Calvinball territory.

Incidentally, you just entered the vortex zone and now have to spin around and throw the ball at Korvin to get out. :smalltongue:




Sorry. I don't like the excessive multiquote slice & dice of a lot of the posts here because I have a hard time parsing it and most of the time it seems used to attack specific word structures rather than address the point of a post. My previous post took something like an hour and a half to text in due to family interruptions and I may have confused you with someone else.

I agree about the gatekeeping. My experience has been that 5e's complexity for the sake of complexity combat works for novice and average DMs because it has tables of DCs, modifiers, and clear rules & procedures to follow. That diesn't seen to keep anyone out. Its rather the undefined nature of the rest of it that seems to stop them having fun. You could whack 4/5th of the 5e combat & spells and still have a perfectly working game, it would just look more like the skills/stat roll section andneed the same level of expertise to use decently.

No worries, 99% of my post are from the phone while wrangling kids, totally get it. As to people who don't have fun with the discretionary parts of the game, /shrug. Not to be dismissive of them, but it happens, sometimes we don't like things, I can name a lot of games that are popular but have various aspects I highly dislike to the point I won't bother playing them. If someone wants recommendations for more complex systems I'm happy to name a few.

[Psyren]

1. You first. all I'm hearing is how much you love a company getting profit because of a product you like and thus trying to justify that product being good because of profit, and certainly no arguments. I am under no obligation to make you feel good about your consumer choices, agree with your consumer choices being good, or your criteria for your consumer choices being sound. I am not required to somehow agree that "Dndpopularitygood because Dnd corporate overlord bank accounts smile" because you insist on it. I am not obligated to agree with you in an never-ending logic loop of "DnD is popular and good because DnD is popular and good".

And neither is anyone else.

I'm not asserting "D&D is popular and good because D&D is popular and good." I'm asserting that the designers have no reason to implement these proposed changes because D&D is popular and good.


2. Neither is it a pillar by any stretch.

I never said it was. The pillars of D&D 5e are Exploration, Interaction, and Combat, as stated on the page reference I provided earlier. While all three can involve skill checks to varying degrees, the skill checks themselves are not pillars - they are game mechanics. Pillars by contrast are dynamics, i.e. various mechanics operating in concert to ultimately deliver on the D&D game's core aesthetics - the reason we play, aka "the fun."

Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics (https://gamedevelopertips.com/mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics-game-design-theory-behind-games/) are a foundational framework for game design.


Unless there is language that sets the DCs as suggestions/tools for DMs that would like to use a table. You can have both worlds, open-ended, and suggestions for DMs that want to use those DCs.

No amount of labelling them as "suggestions" or painstakingly defining the circumstances pertaining to that specific difficulty selection would stop them from being weaponized by players. Worse still, doing so would not encourage DMs to first think about whether a check is needed at all or how their own circumstances might be different before applying that DC. And the more of those they try to make, the more DMs feel they have to memorize or at least check when designing challenges.


The problem is that people are in a position where they don't trust players to read the rules and understand them, so the rules have to be... well, what we have now, which is "ask your DM what they think about it lol".

Yeah, it's not like we had at least one whole edition justifying this skepticism or anything. One where they had to invent things like new feats, new skill uses and "skill tricks," all of which made the three big problems even worse.

[warty goblin]

The fact that people are having fun with the game doesn't mean they couldn't be having more fun, or having fun more easily, if the game was different.

This is of course possible. It also isn't really an argument for or against anything. Like, different how? The very fact that there's disagreement on this thread means there's no consensus even in this tiny and deeply non-representative sub-population on what should be changed.


That explains why the people selling D&D think the game being successful is good. It does nothing to explain why success would be good for the people buying the game, much less those playing the game without buying it.

If the game wasn't doing things for the people buying and playing it for years, they probably would stop buying and playing it. D&D doing well is good news for people who like D&D, it means there's more D&D created for them to enjoy, and more people to enjoy it with. Since D&D is a social game, having a large player base is transparently a good thing for players.

opportunities to enjoy that thing.

[Dr.Samurai]

No amount of labelling them as "suggestions" or painstakingly defining the circumstances pertaining to that specific difficulty selection would stop them from being weaponized by players. Worse still, doing so would not encourage DMs to first think about whether a check is needed at all or how their own circumstances might be different before applying that DC. And the more of those they try to make, the more DMs feel they have to memorize or at least check when designing challenges.
None of these are guaranteed. This is all dependent on the people at the table.

I am currently playing 5E: Super Streamlined D&D w/ Training Wheels and I still have to wait around for my turn while my fellow players and DM figure things out on their turns. No amount of "rules-lite" is going to "solve" for the human condition.

Also, there is no D&D Heaven as a reward to DMs that "first think about whether a check is needed at all" or "how... circumstances might be different before applying that DC". Like... that's in the book, that's great. And DMs should run with that. But the book also mentions that some DMs like to call for rolls for everything, and it's listed as a way to play the game. So this "accessibility" really only fits for tables with skilled DMs and unruly/inattentive players that, frankly, you wouldn't want at your table in the first place.

[Psyren]

None of these are guaranteed. This is all dependent on the people at the table.

I am currently playing 5E: Super Streamlined D&D w/ Training Wheels and I still have to wait around for my turn while my fellow players and DM figure things out on their turns. No amount of "rules-lite" is going to "solve" for the human condition.

I don't think solving the human condition is possible either, nor is that a reasonable goal for any game made by humans :smalltongue:
But reverting to "rules-heavy" would make the issues you claim to be experiencing even worse, on top of just making the game less accessible in general.


Also, there is no D&D Heaven as a reward to DMs that "first think about whether a check is needed at all" or "how... circumstances might be different before applying that DC". Like... that's in the book, that's great. And DMs should run with that. But the book also mentions that some DMs like to call for rolls for everything, and it's listed as a way to play the game. So this "accessibility" really only fits for tables with skilled DMs and unruly/inattentive players that, frankly, you wouldn't want at your table in the first place.

You're right that they list all the ways to handle dice on DMG 236 - but they go on to state the default for D&D on the subsequent page, 237: "Only call for a roll if there is a meaningful consequence for failure" and "If the answer to both questions is no, some kind of roll is appropriate." They further go on to describe what you should be considering when calling for a retry as well as the "Take 10" rule. None of these are stated to be variants; even if they were, you only have yourself to blame if the problems you experience stem from deciding against using the tools they've provided in the system you're trying to implement.

[Dr.Samurai]

I don't think solving the human condition is possible either, nor is that a reasonable goal for any game made by humans :smalltongue:
Right, but the protest from you and others is "players will weaponize", which strikes me as something the game can't control and, as you say, shouldn't try to control. That sounds like something that needs to be addressed OOC.

Place the DCs in the DMG. Write "These are just examples, and do not represent a definitive blah blah blah..." You can't do much more than that. But you have the open ended system that you and others find works best for your table, and you also have the option to use a DC table for those that think that will be helpful to their table.

But saying "no, because some people are jerks" seems unreasonable.


But reverting to "rules-heavy" would make the issues you claim to be experiencing even worse, on top of just making the game less accessible in general.
"Less accessible" according to you. I haven't met the people that wouldn't be able to make use of a more robust combat system. I'd really love to see the brain scans that show how exactly a player's brain and a DM's brain can handle the magic system, but can't handle a combat system or skill system. I'm eager for a neurologist to come in here and validate these claims of inaccessibility.

"Yes, as you can see here, this is the Vancian Lobe, this is the part of the brain that interprets spellcasting systems. As you can see, it is quite robust and takes up a disproportional share of the neo-cortex. Over here, if we zoom in quite a bit, we can see this dark shadowy region. The region is dark because it shows the absence of something. That's the "Fun Lobe", also sometimes known as the "Cool Lobe". That part of what we call the "Lizard Brain" shriveled up eons ago due to evolution. As such, players can no longer have a cool and fun combat/skill system in their D&D games."

The rhetorical position is as ridiculous as that.

You're right that they list all the ways to handle dice on DMG 236 - but they go on to state the default for D&D on the subsequent page, 237: "Only call for a roll if there is a meaningful consequence for failure" and "If the answer to both questions is no, some kind of roll is appropriate." They further go on to describe what you should be considering when calling for a retry as well as the "Take 10" rule. None of these are stated to be variants; even if they were, you only have yourself to blame if the problems you experience stem from deciding against using the tools they've provided in the system you're trying to implement.
Having a DC table does not contradict whether or not to call for a roll.

[Telok]

It's not that 'all DMs should be game designers' in the sense that only game designers should DM, its that 'any time a DM makes a choice, they are making design decisions about the game'.

Ok, then you're just using the word "design" rather differently than I do there. For me "any time the DM makes a choice" includes things like which spell a monster casts or which direction an intimidated NPC runs off in. Where as "design" implies things about intent and methodology that aren't usually present in those on-the-spot decisions.

What you might be more talking about is setting precedents through rulings on areas of ambiguity. In that case being able to understand & predict downstream results & interactions would be good and I can see the concept of "designing" the game during play used in there. But for those sirts of things you'll need discussion of stuff like "the whole party rolls perception/stealth and..." where you either assume people understand iterative probability or walk them through it. Major issue of course being there's a decent segment that's going to tune out when you hit that math because "teach me to design my own game rules with statistics" discussions aren't why they bought the DMG.

All the DMs I know don't want to design even part of a game. They want to buy a profesionally designed game and use its rules & guidelines to play without having to think about if you should roll dice because it might screw things up. That's not saying they want a boardgame, they want a RPG, they just want one where the don't have to continually fudge stuff to make sure the "expert warrior" or "super intelligent wizard" get punked by dirt farming commoners 10% of the time or something.

[NichG]

Ok, then you're just using the word "design" rather differently than I do there. For me "any time the DM makes a choice" includes things like which spell a monster casts or which direction an intimidated NPC runs off in. Where as "design" implies things about intent and methodology that aren't usually present in those on-the-spot decisions.


I mean, those are also decisions with design considerations attached to them. Is the game better off with playing kobolds dumb, or doing a Tucker's Kobolds? What is to be achieved with that choice? Do you go ahead and have this NPC use heavy chain summon type abilities, or is the tradeoff of how slow/tedious that would be bad with respect to how important this particular encounter is? Should enemies do things like throw their gear over into the nearby chasm when they're on the verge of death to prevent the PCs from becoming more powerful (from an in-character 'if I'm going to die I will at least spite you' perspective), or is it worth the ding to realism to preserve the aesthetic of being able to loot the bodies or the wealth curve of the game? For that matter, what balance of non-human to human antagonists should you use with consideration of the tendency of the loot from human antagonists to fall along certain lines? If you make antagonists who can be negotiated with, how does that interact with the interests of the people at the table - are you denying them the ability to play the parts of the game they're most interested in, making things uncomfortably complicated, or playing into what your players are actually interested in?


What you might be more talking about is setting precedents through rulings on areas of ambiguity. In that case being able to understand & predict downstream results & interactions would be good and I can see the concept of "designing" the game during play used in there. But for those sirts of things you'll need discussion of stuff like "the whole party rolls perception/stealth and..." where you either assume people understand iterative probability or walk them through it. Major issue of course being there's a decent segment that's going to tune out when you hit that math because "teach me to design my own game rules with statistics" discussions aren't why they bought the DMG.


Again though, rather than 'you will need', its more that 'a DM who doesn't understand iterative probability is highly likely to call for things in ways that systematically penalize some PCs over others'. That's just a fact, regardless of system, so you have to deal with that reality. It might be that including text about iterative probability can lessen that problem, or as you say maybe people will just skip over it. You could pivot the entire system design to not have the success/failure asymmetry that currently exists, so that the most likely errors people make out of ignorance or lack of understanding are less likely to cause that particular issue. But I do think its important to recognize 'DMs not understanding iterative probability can lead to certain kinds of systematic problems' first, rather than e.g. jumping straight to 'DMs shouldn't have to!'. Because even if you pivot the system around, the consequence of that can creep in even in conceptual ways - even if you have the system forbid multiple rolls of the same skill, or even just make 'take 10' always available, the DM for example might decide to design some things in a way that requires multiple skills worth of investment in sequence and on the same character, while other things might require that across multiple characters, only require one skill, or even require none.

A DM who is able to understand those things is better equipped than one who isn't, which is not to say the other person shouldn't be allowed to DM. But we can recognize that DM-ing is an activity that does involve skill, actively encourage people to develop those skills, and yes have a preference for playing with people who are interested in putting in the effort to do things well over people who don't want to bother.



All the DMs I know don't want to design even part of a game. They want to buy a profesionally designed game and use its rules & guidelines to play without having to think about if you should roll dice because it might screw things up. That's not saying they want a boardgame, they want a RPG, they just want one where the don't have to continually fudge stuff to make sure the "expert warrior" or "super intelligent wizard" get punked by dirt farming commoners 10% of the time or something.

Clearly given this thread, not all the DMs you know...

[P. G. Macer]

On the topic of accessibility and success metrics, I feel it is important to distinguish what is good for D&D the brand vs. D&D the community vs. the D&D the game qua the game. The needs of these three D&Ds sometimes are perfectly aligned, sometimes diametrically opposed, and most often somewhere in between those extremes.

I am of the opinion that more complexity in martial classes and definition in skill DCs would likely be good for the game itself, but the former would be bad for the brand (as WotC is likely anxious in not wanting to kill the goose laying the golden eggs of TTRPGs) and the latter would likely be considered bad by the community, here referring to not us forumites but rather the causal player who likely doesn’t even realize that a melee weapon attack roll and an attack roll with a melee weapon are two different things in 5e. The current D&D zeitgeist seems to be towards freeform-ness and the improv aspects of the game, rather than mechanics. Of course, many 5e players play 5e as their first and only TTRPG, and thus are often unaware to varying degrees of the world of possibilities of RPG mechanics that are out there, which reinforces the tension between what the community wants and what would be good for the game itself.

Accessibility is generally good for the brand, but only in certain contexts (In my humble opinion) is it good for the community or the game itself. Tic-Tac-Toe is one of the most accessible games out there due to its simplicity (and not being owned by anyone). However, there is no depth whatsoever to the game; two mentally competent adults not trying to throw the game will always play to a draw. This leaves tic-tac-toe the province of very young children. There is no TTT community either.

Now, admittedly, that is a very extreme example, as among other things Tic-Tac-Toe is a(n ostensibly) competitive game and not an RPG, but the principle holds. At a certain point, when taken too far, accessibility (in the non-disability sense of the word) becomes dumbing-down. I do not think D&D has reached that point quite yet, but the danger is there, especially as WotC’s “I 'unno, you figure it out” policy places an ever-greater burden on the DM, which could lead to some DMs switching to systems that share the intellectual burden with the GM, or just stopping GM-ing entirely.

[KorvinStarmast]

No, wanting a defined number of how difficult it is to balance on a narrow ledge would somehow ruin the game of its creativity. I don't accept that. Self inflicted wound. Next time, tell me how much it hurts when you drop a brick on your foot.

[Mechalich]

(as WotC is likely anxious in not wanting to kill the goose laying the golden eggs of TTRPGs)

There are no golden eggs in the TTRPG community. D&D 5e, however successful it may be - and the actual sales claims have long been extremely dubious - the amount of money it makes it puny. Compared to WotC's MtG sales, the entire TTRPG market is an also-ran. Compared to parent company Hasbro's concerns, it's a rounding error. D&D - like the WoD before it - was and is more valuable as IP than it is as an actual game. D&D has cultural value vastly out-of-proportion to the ability to wring money from selling books, allowing it to be used to support things like videos games and movies with far greater profit potential.

[Psyren]

Right, but the protest from you and others is "players will weaponize", which strikes me as something the game can't control and, as you say, shouldn't try to control. That sounds like something that needs to be addressed OOC.

The game can still make it worse, which codification will do. Again, we have seen this exact circumstance play out for nearly a decade. (Decade and a half if you count 4e.)



But saying "no, because some people are jerks" seems unreasonable.

1) Design that mitigates human behavior will always beat design that tries to pretend it's not an issue.
2) Players weaponizing the DCs was just one of the four problems I mentioned.



"Less accessible" according to you. I haven't met the people that wouldn't be able to make use of a more robust combat system. I'd really love to see the brain scans that show how exactly a player's brain and a DM's brain can handle the magic system, but can't handle a combat system or skill system. I'm eager for a neurologist to come in here and validate these claims of inaccessibility.

"Yes, as you can see here, this is the Vancian Lobe, this is the part of the brain that interprets spellcasting systems. As you can see, it is quite robust and takes up a disproportional share of the neo-cortex. Over here, if we zoom in quite a bit, we can see this dark
shadowy region. The region is dark because it shows the absence of something. That's the "Fun Lobe", also sometimes known as the "Cool Lobe". That part of what we call the "Lizard Brain" shriveled up eons ago due to evolution. As such, players can no longer have a cool and fun combat/skill system in their D&D games."

The rhetorical position is as ridiculous as that.

So in your mind, it's a complete coincidence that the most rules-light D&D we've ever had is also the most successful its ever been? Especially among newcomers to the hobby?

[Mechalich]

So in your mind, it's a complete coincidence that the most rules-light D&D we've ever had is also the most successful its ever been? Especially among newcomers to the hobby?

5e's success can be primarily attributed to factors completely external to the game's actual properties. Certainly 5e was never intended to be a success. It was produced and run by a comparative shoestring of a design and marketing team and even today runs on a truly anemic production schedule. 5e simply happened to be the edition of D&D in existence when a series of events dramatically elevated D&D's presence in the population consciousness, mostly notably the premier of Stranger Things in 2016 while at the same time various technologies such as roll20 matured to make online tabletop easier than ever before and online streaming platforms matured to elevate TTRPG streaming into the popular consciousness.

Granted the rules-lite aspect probably was important in D&D being able to ride that wave, both because it was better suited to the quasi-freeform environment utilized by streamers and because it was easier for a younger audience enamored of Stranger Things and other references to take up the game. Still, 1e and 2e AD&D are scarcely more complex than 5e. Those editions are fairly rules-lite in a lot of ways, the key difference is that they are disorganized, muddled, and suffer from the production value limitations of the 1980s.

[NichG]

1) Design that mitigates human behavior will always beat design that tries to pretend it's not an issue.
2) Players weaponizing the DCs was just one of the four problems I mentioned.


This line of argument never goes anywhere, because its basically just rehashing personal trauma. For every DM who is afraid of players weaponizing DCs, you've got players who are afraid of DMs weaponizing rule zero, and you can go in an endless cycle of each group trying to use the rules as a weapon to bash the other group, spawning reprisal, etc.

Game rules can't save you from being jerks to one-another. DMs who abuse their power, players who try to use rules-lawyering to get what they want, those behaviors will just show up elsewhere in other angles if you try to stamp out the main ones. You might get a reprieve of a half-dozen sessions or so, but then the rules-lawyer player will realize they can argue natural language stuff just as well or better than rules tables - 'the fluff says balors prefer to open with Chaos hammer, not teleport shenanigans', 'the fluff says that people in this culture respect this particular thing, so you have to run it that way (when I'm trying to exploit it)', etc. Even to the extent of arguing 'real world logic' stuff, or things the DM has said before. The solution is OOC, not in the text. Same for controlling DMs - print as many tables as you like, a DM who wants to lord power over the players can have the king summon the royal guard to arrest the characters for a slight, bring out the rust monsters, etc.

Trying to use system design rather than conversation to resolve it just means you lessen the system for sake of something that that sacrifice can't even achieve.

[P. G. Macer]

There are no golden eggs in the TTRPG community. D&D 5e, however successful it may be - and the actual sales claims have long been extremely dubious - the amount of money it makes it puny. Compared to WotC's MtG sales, the entire TTRPG market is an also-ran. Compared to parent company Hasbro's concerns, it's a rounding error. D&D - like the WoD before it - was and is more valuable as IP than it is as an actual game. D&D has cultural value vastly out-of-proportion to the ability to wring money from selling books, allowing it to be used to support things like videos games and movies with far greater profit potential.

I meant to add “relative” to my original quote. I am well aware that selling a TTRPG is not the route to go if one wants to rake in loads of money.

[Telok]

This line of argument never goes anywhere, because its basically just rehashing personal trauma. For every DM who is afraid of players weaponizing DCs, you've got players who are afraid of DMs weaponizing rule zero, and you can go in an endless cycle of each group trying to use the rules as a weapon to bash the other group, spawning reprisal, etc.

Funny, I always felt worse about the busted up friendship when we tried to (nicely) tell a guy his D&D game was **** and help him fix it. The actual jerks you can just walk out on.

I also feel bad for my current 5e DM who seems to practically beg for us to abuse Speak With Dead. Nobody's got a useful bonus on any intelligence/knowledge type stuff and we can tell there's some whole interesting backstory & leads in the current dungeon. But while our characters can probably kill & loot anything short of an actual god they can't roll enough DC 15s to think they're way out of a wool sack, much less puzzle out anything in a thousand year old tomb of heros & legends.

But hey, at least we all fly now so the Three Stooges climb a cliff comedy skits stopped. Sadly, despite one character socialing at +6 to +10, we're still making good impressions on NPCs like a swamp monster trying to chew their faces off whenever we try to be nice. Damn dice.

[Satinavian]

Yeah, it's not like we had at least one whole edition justifying this skepticism or anything. One where they had to invent things like new feats, new skill uses and "skill tricks," all of which made the three big problems even worse.
Not sure about the irony here.

The 3.x skill system was rather bad in comparison to various non-D&D systems. It was still by far the best one any kind of D&D has ever had. Going back there would certainly be an improvement over the current situation. Through preferrably one would do even better.

[Psyren]

There are no golden eggs in the TTRPG community. D&D 5e, however successful it may be - and the actual sales claims have long been extremely dubious - the amount of money it makes it puny. Compared to WotC's MtG sales, the entire TTRPG market is an also-ran. Compared to parent company Hasbro's concerns, it's a rounding error. D&D - like the WoD before it - was and is more valuable as IP than it is as an actual game. D&D has cultural value vastly out-of-proportion to the ability to wring money from selling books, allowing it to be used to support things like videos games and movies with far greater profit potential.

MTG makes more money but the amount it exceeds D&D by is often the subject of hyperbole. Per their most recent 10-K filing (https://investor.hasbro.com/annual-report-2021), MTG's segment made about 3x as much revenue as D&D's segment (2.7B vs. 851M) - yes the former is bigger, but it's not like, tens or hundreds of times bigger. (And keep in mind, MTG's segment also includes lucrative brands like My Little Pony, Nerf, and Play-Doh that are pushing that number up further.)


Certainly 5e was never intended to be a success.

...Okay I'll bite - what is the source for this?


Granted the rules-lite aspect probably was important in D&D being able to ride that wave, both because it was better suited to the quasi-freeform environment utilized by streamers and because it was easier for a younger audience enamored of Stranger Things and other references to take up the game.

Indeed it was - my point exactly.


Still, 1e and 2e AD&D are scarcely more complex than 5e. Those editions are fairly rules-lite in a lot of ways, the key difference is that they are disorganized, muddled, and suffer from the production value limitations of the 1980s.

By today's standards they were substantially more fiddly and unintuitive, with 1e including things like only Thieves being able to climb. It's the worst kind of complexity, the kind where it's hard to see even what they were going for with some of those choices, and only the lack of competition at the time justifying some of it.


This line of argument never goes anywhere, because its basically just rehashing personal trauma.

I don't need to have experienced "personal trauma" to have empathy for other tables, nor to believe the designers who have a much broader perspective than you do.


For every DM who is afraid of players weaponizing DCs, you've got players who are afraid of DMs weaponizing rule zero, and you can go in an endless cycle of each group trying to use the rules as a weapon to bash the other group, spawning reprisal, etc.

If the choice is between erring on the side of empowering DMs or players, the former always makes the most sense to me. DMs ultimately have the harder job, and also have the most tools to modulate the experience to fit a given playgroup's style and preferences. That they are also likely to be the customers buying things like modules is just icing on the cake.


Trying to use system design rather than conversation to resolve it just means you lessen the system for sake of something that that sacrifice can't even achieve.

I'm actually in favor of using both. And you're more likely to have productive conversation when the design is open-ended rather than prescribed, because then you're working together to flesh something out rather than the DM taking something away from their players that the books had given them.


Not sure about the irony here.

The 3.x skill system was rather bad in comparison to various non-D&D systems. It was still by far the best one any kind of D&D has ever had. Going back there would certainly be an improvement over the current situation. Through preferrably one would do even better.

It was the best out of what had come before, but as you mentioned, still bad. And gave rise to all of the main problems I listed.

[Satinavian]

It was the best out of what had come before, but as you mentioned, still bad. And gave rise to all of the main problems I listed.No, it is far better than those that came afterwards as well. (at least if we exclude Pathfinder. PF1 was a slight but unambitious improvement, PF2 looks not that unappealing either though i have not had mach practice with that one)

If the choice is between erring on the side of empowering DMs or players, the former always makes the most sense to me. DMs ultimately have the harder job, and also have the most tools to modulate the experience to fit a given playgroup's style and preferences. That they are also likely to be the customers buying things like modules is just icing on the cake.Yes, DMs have a harder job.
But giving them more power and responsibility does not really make that job easier. It is pretty much the opposite which is why so many beginner GMs basically crave more rule guidance so they can concentrate on story and setting instead of being busy with rule decisions all the time.
And while you certainly could go overboard with the "empowering players" stuff, in most cases this makes players more invested in what is going on.

Im my many decades of playing i have rarely had a unexperienced GM complain about rules getting in the way of what they wanted to do. Far more often i have seen GMs feeling helpless because they had no idea how they should rule stuff.

As for who buys stuff... imE the corralation betwen buyer and table role is overblown. People buy modules for others to run. People switch DM/player roles all the time and while many DMs own at least the core rules, most players that are not newbies in their first campaign do the same. When i started many years ago as poor studend, most people in the group only owned one rulebook which was shared with all the others so together we had the whole system.

[Telok]

By today's standards they were substantially more fiddly and unintuitive, with 1e including things like only Thieves being able to climb. It's the worst kind of complexity, the kind where it's hard to see even what they were going for with some of those choices, and only the lack of competition at the time justifying some of it.

Pendantic correction: thieves were the only ones who could climb sheer surfaces without using tools. There were indeed rules for rope, piton and crampon climbing and everyone was automatically assumed to be able to climb trees and slopes. Likewise anyone could listen at doors, sneak up on people, disarm traps, and try to go unnoticed. Those all had rules. Thieves were just supposed to be capable of doing those things in situations where nobody else could possibly succeed. You just misread the rules.

[Sneak Dog]

1) Design that mitigates human behavior will always beat design that tries to pretend it's not an issue.
2) Players weaponizing the DCs was just one of the four problems I mentioned.


Oh, I want players weaponising DCs. It means they were planning to do an action, calculating the risks and rewards, figured out this was a sound decision to make and proposed it without needing to check in with the GM every step of the way slowing this whole process down to a crawl. They can just zoom to the end where they propose a course of action to their fellow players, or even straight-up declare it to the GM.

Decisionmaking is one of two things D&D has. The other being talking. Some groups barely do the talky-bits, for them making decisions is practically all of the game.

So yes, I'd love to arm players with more tools for them to make informed decisions with, without getting bogged down by asking the GM four questions while the other players are doing the same, and each player is considering multiple courses of action. Making decisions and seeing their consequences is core to the TTRPG experience.



By today's standards they were substantially more fiddly and unintuitive, with 1e including things like only Thieves being able to climb. It's the worst kind of complexity, the kind where it's hard to see even what they were going for with some of those choices, and only the lack of competition at the time justifying some of it.


Oh, if I understand correctly, in 1e anyone could try anything. Fighting man wants to unlock a lock? Got tools? Sure, go for it. Thieves just got a roll to succeed despite the odds on top of the honest attempt anyone got.

Also, on the popularity thing. Every single edition of D&D was the most popular and successful edition of D&D yet. They can make a 6e you would absolutely despise and I am convinced it will be the most popular and successful edition yet. This includes 4e, which a bunch of people have some negative feelings on. We could go on and on about what metrics we should use for success and popularity and what circumstances happened. But simply proclaiming 5e superior to any other edition due to success and popularity means 4e was the best one yet when it came out, 3e was and so on. Considering the massive differences between each, I do not consider success and system design choices such as the ones we're talking about in this thread to be strongly related.

[KorvinStarmast]

When i started many years ago as poor studend, most people in the group only owned one rulebook which was shared with all the others so together we had the whole system. Yep, seen this in a number of clubs. The neat thing about pooled resources like this is that we all had access to more supps and more games. :smallsmile:

[Psyren]

No, it is far better than those that came afterwards as well. (at least if we exclude Pathfinder. PF1 was a slight but unambitious improvement, PF2 looks not that unappealing either though i have not had mach practice with that one)

I don't see 3.5's rampant gating of abilities as any kind of benefit. For example, you need a specific prestige class to learn how to hogtie someone with rope, or a skill trick to accurately repeat something you overheard, or a skill trick to perch in a corner of two walls, or a feat to identify what square an invisible creature might be in by listening, or a feat to use your Dex to disarm a trap, and on and on - all of which encourage DMs to tell you no to that stuff if your build is missing the right bathroom pass. After all, if they wanted you to just be able to try and do it, why would they make a feat or trick for it, right?

And even the stuff they "gave you for free" (i.e. expanded skill uses) took up untold page count in untold sourcebooks. What's the DC to identify the leaders of an opposing army, or to blend into a crowd, or to haggle the price of an item, or to resist being heckled during a performance, or to freedive deep underwater, or to tell how far away a sound source is underground - 3.5 wrote rules for all of it, and they still didn't come close to covering every potential action a player might want to do. 5e does, and it does so by encouraging DMs to think for themselves rather than grind the action to a halt and dig through a dozen books trying to remember where they saw that one random DC one time.



Yes, DMs have a harder job.
But giving them more power and responsibility does not really make that job easier. It is pretty much the opposite which is why so many beginner GMs basically crave more rule guidance so they can concentrate on story and setting instead of being busy with rule decisions all the time.

As above, 3.5 makes "concentrating on story and setting instead of being busy with rule decisions all the time" far, far worse than 5e does.


Pendantic correction: thieves were the only ones who could climb sheer surfaces without using tools. There were indeed rules for rope, piton and crampon climbing and everyone was automatically assumed to be able to climb trees and slopes. Likewise anyone could listen at doors, sneak up on people, disarm traps, and try to go unnoticed. Those all had rules. Thieves were just supposed to be capable of doing those things in situations where nobody else could possibly succeed. You just misread the rules.

That kind of gating might have worked when things like monks, barbarians, rangers, druids etc didn't exist, but they do now. So the nostalgia I'm seeing for the good old days seems to be misplaced.


Oh, I want players weaponising DCs. It means they were planning to do an action, calculating the risks and rewards, figured out this was a sound decision to make and proposed it without needing to check in with the GM every step of the way slowing this whole process down to a crawl. They can just zoom to the end where they propose a course of action to their fellow players, or even straight-up declare it to the GM.

You can make those same calculations just fine by being told to make a check and the associated difficulty or DC. The only functional difference between the DM telling you to make X roll or you looking up the printed DC in the book ahead of time before deciding on an action is so you can metagame and then argue about it if they tell you a different one than what you saw.



Every single edition of D&D was the most popular and successful edition of D&D yet.

4e lost them the top spot to Pathfinder and was the first modern-era edition to only last 3 years before its replacement was announced. It's a clear outlier, and not in a good way.

[Telok]

That kind of gating might have worked when things like monks, barbarians, rangers, druids etc didn't exist, but they do now. So the nostalgia I'm seeing for the good old days seems to be misplaced.

You haven't read the 1e PH or DMG. Please do so before stating things like that and making false comparisons.

[Sneak Dog]

You can make those same calculations just fine by being told to make a check and the associated difficulty or DC. The only functional difference between the DM telling you to make X roll or you looking up the printed DC in the book ahead of time before deciding on an action is so you can metagame and then argue about it if they tell you a different one than what you saw.


The difference is about four to thirty minutes. Depending on how many questions there are, how familiar the players are with your DC setting process and logic, how efficient you are with setting hypothetical DCs, how much your players argue about the DCs and hypothetical boons/banes and probably some other factors.

Besides, the primary difference between a player arguing about your DC by using a printed DC or a previous DC is that the remembered one is probably remembered poorly. Because by not using printed DCs, you're just using the DC table you're constructing during the campaign. Your freedom is thrown out the window bit by bit with every DC you set. Which is a good thing.


4e lost them the top spot to Pathfinder and was the first modern-era edition to only last 3 years before its replacement was announced. It's a clear outlier, and not in a good way.

Oh, sure, a competitor was also very successful. But 4e was still the most profitable edition yet. And we could go into a whole discussion of economics and what variables we should look at to measure success. We could look at the market share, the profits, the number of customers, mayhaps adjusted to favour a wider market over a narrow one et cetera. But I'm both not good at economics nor particularly interested. Simply saying 5e is successful doesn't tell me anything relevant to this discussion.

[Ignimortis]

No, it is far better than those that came afterwards as well. (at least if we exclude Pathfinder. PF1 was a slight but unambitious improvement, PF2 looks not that unappealing either though i have not had mach practice with that one)

PF2, thus far, looks to be the only D&D-like that actually comes close to making skills as important to the game as other features you get. Most skills have a combat use and several out-of-combat uses, and while the power level could stand to be increased, there are some very good Master and Legendary feats, and a few great low-level ones, too.

In general, my take on most of PF2's design choices is that it's a potentially great system held back by its' own developers not wanting to break with people who enjoy level 1-5 gameplay and design and want to continue having those same things over 15+ levels. It just doesn't scale as well as it could (or should, in my opinion).

[Psyren]

The difference is about four to thirty minutes. Depending on how many questions there are, how familiar the players are with your DC setting process and logic, how efficient you are with setting hypothetical DCs, how much your players argue about the DCs and hypothetical boons/banes and probably some other factors.

If you deviate from the printed DCs at all then those same concerns will arise, with the added thorn of it feeling more like you're breaking a rule than making a ruling. And again, encouraging a mindset of "there's a printed rule for that" is much more likely to result in book-diving than "think for yourself."


Besides, the primary difference between a player arguing about your DC by using a printed DC or a previous DC is that the remembered one is probably remembered poorly.

You don't have to "remember DCs" at all. Determine each situation's difficulty on its own merits. The chance of you presenting the exact same situation to your players in exactly the same way twice is miniscule enough, to say nothing of the odds of then assigning a different DC to it on top of that.



Oh, sure, a competitor was also very successful. But 4e was still the most profitable edition yet. And we could go into a whole discussion of economics and what variables we should look at to measure success. We could look at the market share, the profits, the number of customers, mayhaps adjusted to favour a wider market over a narrow one et cetera. But I'm both not good at economics nor particularly interested. Simply saying 5e is successful doesn't tell me anything relevant to this discussion.

If you don't care about why designers do the things they do then I agree, but the impression I got was that you did.


You haven't read the 1e PH or DMG. Please do so before stating things like that and making false comparisons.

Those names weren't used until AD&D. Did you mean Men & Magic?

[NichG]

I don't need to have experienced "personal trauma" to have empathy for other tables, nor to believe the designers who have a much broader perspective than you do.

If the choice is between erring on the side of empowering DMs or players, the former always makes the most sense to me. DMs ultimately have the harder job, and also have the most tools to modulate the experience to fit a given playgroup's style and preferences. That they are also likely to be the customers buying things like modules is just icing on the cake.

I'm actually in favor of using both. And you're more likely to have productive conversation when the design is open-ended rather than prescribed, because then you're working together to flesh something out rather than the DM taking something away from their players that the books had given them.


I mean, I see lots of people haunt these boards taking the perspective that all DMs are jerks and must be reigned in, or that all players are out of control and only want to break games, and the more people engage with those views the more entrenched and dysfunctional things get. The choice isn't between empowering DMs or empowering players - it only looks like a zero-sum game when you view the game through an antagonistic player vs DM lens. Get out of that mindset, and instead you can view the design questions as being about how to distribute responsibility and make that distribution dynamic and adaptive such that both the DM and the players are happier with that distribution over other ways it could have been. Even better, how to make the parts of the system that do act to 'empower the DM' do so in a way that also empowers the players, and vice versa.

One of the things I think 4e did right was to move away from the design in 3.5ed that 'PCs and monsters/NPCs should be built the same way', not just because 'it empowered DMs' but because it took something that was already part of the DMs job and made it more efficient for the DM to adapt to need, in such a way that while it did in principle remove some predictability that players benefited from, the vagaries of building characters and advancing monsters and so on had already made that predictability somewhat hollow. That is to say, a player could say 'in 3.5ed I could know that seeing someone cast Stoneskin would let me know their minimum level', and there is something about that being lost, except that a 3.5 DM could have had that character engage in early entry cheese, be using a magic item, etc.

There's probably an even better way to design it, and that's the kind of direction I think is worth thinking about - not 'I reject all things that would give control to players' but 'given that we want to streamline the DM's job and not require them to build ten characters a week with full book dives for each, how do we do that while simultaneously making it easy for players to understand the regularities in the game world?'


I don't see 3.5's rampant gating of abilities as any kind of benefit. For example, you need a specific prestige class to learn how to hogtie someone with rope, or a skill trick to accurately repeat something you overheard, or a skill trick to perch in a corner of two walls, or a feat to identify what square an invisible creature might be in by listening, or a feat to use your Dex to disarm a trap, and on and on - all of which encourage DMs to tell you no to that stuff if your build is missing the right bathroom pass. After all, if they wanted you to just be able to try and do it, why would they make a feat or trick for it, right?

And even the stuff they "gave you for free" (i.e. expanded skill uses) took up untold page count in untold sourcebooks. What's the DC to identify the leaders of an opposing army, or to blend into a crowd, or to haggle the price of an item, or to resist being heckled during a performance, or to freedive deep underwater, or to tell how far away a sound source is underground - 3.5 wrote rules for all of it, and they still didn't come close to covering every potential action a player might want to do. 5e does, and it does so by encouraging DMs to think for themselves rather than grind the action to a halt and dig through a dozen books trying to remember where they saw that one random DC one time.


This is where that stuff I was saying upthread about 'what should rules actually be for?' comes in. If you view rules as a non-exclusive guarantee of something rather than as 'this is how the world functions', it suggests a way out of this.

This isn't the canonical way to play D&D, but you could use a flow-chart of play that goes something like:

- Player says 'my character is doing X'
- If the player has the specific rules reference at hand that suggests an alternate ruling or gives them explicit permission to do X a different way, they may choose bring up that reference. If so, the DM decides whether it applies, with a bias in favor of 'yes'. In the first case of a 'no' or a modification to the details of the written rule, players may ask to reallocate any character resources they invested on the assumption that the rule should hold, which the DM should generally always grant so long as this is being used in good faith, regardless of whether those resources had previously been plot-relevant, benefited the party in concrete ways.
- If the player does not introduce a rules reference, or if the DM decides that the rules reference does not apply, then the DM issues a spot ruling as to how X will be resolved, which is communicated to the player before the player is required to commit to that course of action. If the player goes ahead, that ruling applies to resolve the situation at this time.
- After seeing how the resolution played out, the player is entitled to choose either to pin the DM's ruling or discard it. If the player pins the ruling, that means that the DM formalizes how they made the ruling and the player records that (on a note-card, on their character sheet, google doc, etc...) and then it becomes that player's responsibility and not the DM's to bring it up in the future if they want that ruling to apply. If they 'discard', they surrender the right to ask for this ruling to be used as precedent in future interactions. If the ruling is pinned and this invalidates or obsoletes some other investment of character resources, players may ask to reallocate those resources and the DM should generally say yes.

This way it doesn't become the DM's responsibility to know every rule in every splatbook that could give some kind of power to a PC under some condition. If they say 'yeah, you can brace against a corner' for someone without the skill trick, that's the DM's prerogative even if there's rules text saying 'getting this skill trick guarantees that right'. The rules text lets you shop for things you can say 'I can definitively do X and this is the way I do it', whereas the DM isn't bound to interpret that as 'and no one else can ever do X without buying it the way you did'. The right to reallocate things means that while this might make some build choices become wastes, players can recoup that waste when it happens. And the fact that its the players' responsibility to track rulings means that the DM doesn't become buried under the weight of their own precedent.

[Brookshw]

Oh, sure, a competitor was also very successful.

Not 'a' competitor, singular, multiple competitors, regularly. At one low point they didn't even rank in the top 5, which, for what up to that point had been in 1st forever, was a BIG deal. I'd speculate that freaked out the powers that be and led to a clinging onto early D&D days' approach in 5e, to restore confidence, kinda like how Disney's first Star Wars movie mirrored a lot of stuff from the original trilogy to reassure it's audience they weren't going to gut the franchise

[Pex]

I don't see 3.5's rampant gating of abilities as any kind of benefit. For example, you need a specific prestige class to learn how to hogtie someone with rope, or a skill trick to accurately repeat something you overheard, or a skill trick to perch in a corner of two walls, or a feat to identify what square an invisible creature might be in by listening, or a feat to use your Dex to disarm a trap, and on and on - all of which encourage DMs to tell you no to that stuff if your build is missing the right bathroom pass. After all, if they wanted you to just be able to try and do it, why would they make a feat or trick for it, right?

And even the stuff they "gave you for free" (i.e. expanded skill uses) took up untold page count in untold sourcebooks. What's the DC to identify the leaders of an opposing army, or to blend into a crowd, or to haggle the price of an item, or to resist being heckled during a performance, or to freedive deep underwater, or to tell how far away a sound source is underground - 3.5 wrote rules for all of it, and they still didn't come close to covering every potential action a player might want to do. 5e does, and it does so by encouraging DMs to think for themselves rather than grind the action to a halt and dig through a dozen books trying to remember where they saw that one random DC one time.



Yes, 3E and Pathfinder have the problem of "You need a feat for that." Learn from that and don't gate things anyone should be able to do. Pathfinder was reamed for creating a feat about Diplomacy everyone has been using the normal skill for years about ending a fight with parley. The feat was promptly ignored.

That means diddly squat about having DC tables for skill use. Having DC tables for skill use is precisely so anyone can do it. Feats and class features aren't involved at all.

[Psyren]

I mean, I see lots of people haunt these boards taking the perspective that all DMs are jerks and must be reigned in, or that all players are out of control and only want to break games, and the more people engage with those views the more entrenched and dysfunctional things get. The choice isn't between empowering DMs or empowering players - it only looks like a zero-sum game when you view the game through an antagonistic player vs DM lens. Get out of that mindset, and instead you can view the design questions as being about how to distribute responsibility and make that distribution dynamic and adaptive such that both the DM and the players are happier with that distribution over other ways it could have been. Even better, how to make the parts of the system that do act to 'empower the DM' do so in a way that also empowers the players, and vice versa.

I agree that it's possible to empower both sides, which is why I used "erring on the side of."

The key issue though is that a set of static DCs can only represent specific scenarios/challenges - typically, the most generic, complication-free, whiteroom, spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum versions of those challenges - which are unlikely to be applicable enough just on their own, but have the added "bonus" of anchoring those challenges in both the players' and DM's minds, when they are remembered at all. If you have a "base DC" of 15 for something like "mediating a dispute between two sides arguing" then not only does that fail to take into account any of the specific circumstances of the situation at hand (who are the two sides and what is their relationship to one another? Are any of the PCs aligned with one or both factions? Have they successfully exploited the ideals, bonds and flaws of either or both sides? What if there are three or four sides? etc.) but now both the players and the DM themselves will be reticent about deviating too far from that number no matter what might be happening in the campaign itself. Instead of solely considering difficulty and perhaps the party's level, now the DM has to consider "how much harder do I have to make this before they consider 20 or 25 fair?"


One of the things I think 4e did right was to move away from the design in 3.5ed that 'PCs and monsters/NPCs should be built the same way', not just because 'it empowered DMs' but because it took something that was already part of the DMs job and made it more efficient for the DM to adapt to need, in such a way that while it did in principle remove some predictability that players benefited from, the vagaries of building characters and advancing monsters and so on had already made that predictability somewhat hollow. That is to say, a player could say 'in 3.5ed I could know that seeing someone cast Stoneskin would let me know their minimum level', and there is something about that being lost, except that a 3.5 DM could have had that character engage in early entry cheese, be using a magic item, etc.

There's probably an even better way to design it, and that's the kind of direction I think is worth thinking about - not 'I reject all things that would give control to players' but 'given that we want to streamline the DM's job and not require them to build ten characters a week with full book dives for each, how do we do that while simultaneously making it easy for players to understand the regularities in the game world?'

I broadly agree with this monster design point but I'm not sure what this has to do with ability checks, beyond monsters having ability scores and proficiencies to make such checks themselves if needed. 5e already did continue the paradigm of not designing monsters using the same rules as PCs, so mission accomplished. (And they've doubled down, as shown by the caster changes in MPMM.)


This is where that stuff I was saying upthread about 'what should rules actually be for?' comes in. If you view rules as a non-exclusive guarantee of something rather than as 'this is how the world functions', it suggests a way out of this.

This isn't the canonical way to play D&D, but you could use a flow-chart of play that goes something like:

- Player says 'my character is doing X'
- If the player has the specific rules reference at hand that suggests an alternate ruling or gives them explicit permission to do X a different way, they may choose bring up that reference. If so, the DM decides whether it applies, with a bias in favor of 'yes'. In the first case of a 'no' or a modification to the details of the written rule, players may ask to reallocate any character resources they invested on the assumption that the rule should hold, which the DM should generally always grant so long as this is being used in good faith, regardless of whether those resources had previously been plot-relevant, benefited the party in concrete ways.
- If the player does not introduce a rules reference, or if the DM decides that the rules reference does not apply, then the DM issues a spot ruling as to how X will be resolved, which is communicated to the player before the player is required to commit to that course of action. If the player goes ahead, that ruling applies to resolve the situation at this time.
- After seeing how the resolution played out, the player is entitled to choose either to pin the DM's ruling or discard it. If the player pins the ruling, that means that the DM formalizes how they made the ruling and the player records that (on a note-card, on their character sheet, google doc, etc...) and then it becomes that player's responsibility and not the DM's to bring it up in the future if they want that ruling to apply. If they 'discard', they surrender the right to ask for this ruling to be used as precedent in future interactions. If the ruling is pinned and this invalidates or obsoletes some other investment of character resources, players may ask to reallocate those resources and the DM should generally say yes.

This way it doesn't become the DM's responsibility to know every rule in every splatbook that could give some kind of power to a PC under some condition. If they say 'yeah, you can brace against a corner' for someone without the skill trick, that's the DM's prerogative even if there's rules text saying 'getting this skill trick guarantees that right'. The rules text lets you shop for things you can say 'I can definitively do X and this is the way I do it', whereas the DM isn't bound to interpret that as 'and no one else can ever do X without buying it the way you did'. The right to reallocate things means that while this might make some build choices become wastes, players can recoup that waste when it happens. And the fact that its the players' responsibility to track rulings means that the DM doesn't become buried under the weight of their own precedent.

Yikes. No thank you.

So not only are you forcing the DM into the role of defendant (or... claims adjustor?) and the player into the role of plaintiff/claimant by default - you're also asking both sides to "pin rulings," which requires tracking not just every pinned check in the campaign but also every set of circumstances behind that check so you can prove e.g. this river is the same or different than the last one the group tried to cross. Even if the player is the only one who gets to invoke that, the DM still needs to know what they could whip out.

The worst problem with this proposal is that it turns the entire resolution system on its head. The player is not supposed to be approaching problems by saying "here is what I want to roll and here is what lets me do that." That is 3.5 thinking. In 5e, the player should be saying "here is what I want to do" and the DM is the one who then says "you can but that's going to be tough, here is what you should roll." Or just as good, "no roll needed and here's why." And not only does this leave the agency in the hands of the game master, it also allows for resolutions neither side might have even considered because they're not sticking to what's prescribed for them on a page.


TL;DR 5e is meant to encourage creative thinking, make life easier for the side with the harder job (usually the DM), and cover the widest possibility space of actions available. An open-ended system does that, while a prescribed one just gets in the way.


Yes, 3E and Pathfinder have the problem of "You need a feat for that." Learn from that and don't gate things anyone should be able to do. Pathfinder was reamed for creating a feat about Diplomacy everyone has been using the normal skill for years about ending a fight with parley. The feat was promptly ignored.

That means diddly squat about having DC tables for skill use. Having DC tables for skill use is precisely so anyone can do it. Feats and class features aren't involved at all.

I agree that these things being skill uses instead of gated by feats is preferable. I was responding to the folks saying 3.5 and PF (which had bathroom passes for everything) somehow did this right.

[Ignimortis]

I agree that these things being skill uses instead of gated by feats is preferable. I was responding to the folks saying 3.5 and PF (which had bathroom passes for everything) somehow did this right.

Having abilities gated by feats isn't bad. It's only bad when you gate stuff that everyone should be able to do regardless of specialized training. But having a feat, say, that multiplies your jump distance by 10, or allows you to run on walls with a decent Acrobatics check? That's a good case for actually having those.

[Morphic tide]

Psyren, please remember you're talking about the system with Bounded Accuracy yet simultaneously has formal tiers of play. The actual hard game math is deliberately crippled in allowing for by-the-numbers scope creep despite bluntly stating the game is supposed to undergo enormous scope creep. It literally cannot support fine-grained nuance like you seem paranoid about enabling by crunch because the numbers do not go up nearly enough to support hard rules for situational DC tweaks. And there's absolutely zero incompatibility with having isolated explicit rule benchmarks as examples of what a given DC is for that double as useful abilities in their own right.

Plus, with the example of crossing a river, you can easily go with just depth, width, and flow speed for a formulaic DC, provided you actually have a bonus large enough to tolerate meaningful penalties, which 5e deliberately doesn't. And social skills being nonsense is just fundamental to how D&D handles skills, d20+modifiers binary pass-fail cannot produce a sensible result for the primary subject of raw roleplaying. They were a horrible mistake to have in the first place in 3e, they're still a horrible mistake to have in the first place now.

And again, the basis of this argument is not actually "is the skill system sensible in its own right?", it's very specifically "is the skill system viable space to compete with spellcasters?" Because the topic of this thread is the Caster vs. Martial balance, in particular, not skill systems in general. Your fuzzy-logic "rulings, not rules" push is wholly incapable of this, because the spellcasters don't need rulings to make all but the most carefully or ham-fistedly designed campaigns roll over like a pet.

[NichG]

I agree that it's possible to empower both sides, which is why I used "erring on the side of."

The key issue though is that a set of static DCs can only represent specific scenarios/challenges - typically, the most generic, complication-free, whiteroom, spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum versions of those challenges - which are unlikely to be applicable enough just on their own, but have the added "bonus" of anchoring those challenges in both the players' and DM's minds, when they are remembered at all. If you have a "base DC" of 15 for something like "mediating a dispute between two sides arguing" then not only does that fail to take into account any of the specific circumstances of the situation at hand (who are the two sides and what is their relationship to one another? Are any of the PCs aligned with one or both factions? Have they successfully exploited the ideals, bonds and flaws of either or both sides? What if there are three or four sides? etc.) but now both the players and the DM themselves will be reticent about deviating too far from that number no matter what might be happening in the campaign itself. Instead of solely considering difficulty and perhaps the party's level, now the DM has to consider "how much harder do I have to make this before they consider 20 or 25 fair?"


Again though, if you take first the perspective that 'rules about DCs/etc exist to provide players the ability to determine on their own that their character can do something', then its clear you shouldn't write a rule like 'Mediating a dispute between two sides is a DC X' unless what you're trying to do is to promise players that they get to determine 'this dispute is resolved'. That's why that in particular is shooting yourself in the foot, whereas saying e.g. 'you can walk across slippery ice without falling with a DC 15 Balance check' doesn't cause the same sorts of problems. It's why 'your character can move 30ft with a move action' doesn't cause the same sorts of problems. If you just treat rules as enumerations of all things which might need to possibly be resolved, yes, you will get in trouble. If you treat rules as opportunities to give resolution over to the player for things which you want them to be able to confidently reason about, you don't write this kind of stupid rule in the first place.

For social things, the kinds of table entries I write are things like: 'It's a DC X or opposed by Bluff check whichever higher to determine whether the other person would accept a lower offer', 'It's a DC Y or opposed by Bluff check to receive a short sentence describing this person's priorities in this negotiation', 'its a DC Z or opposed by Bluff check to take back something you just said'. Never 'It's DC X to get someone to agree with you' or 'It's DC Y to resolve a situation'. Because I do know that when multiple characters are involved, there will be hidden information and the dynamic I want is for that information to not be something the players can bypass - that isn't an ability I'm trying to give them. On the other hand, I do want players to know e.g. 'I will be able to get some dirt on this guy if it exists' or 'I will be able to walk back a bribe attempt if it turns out the guy I was trying to bribe is super prideful about stamping out corruption and I didn't know that'.

Each rule or table entry should be saying 'this is an ability I want to give out, and I want the players to be able to believe that this ability will work and understand what it will cost'



I broadly agree with this monster design point but I'm not sure what this has to do with ability checks, beyond monsters having ability scores and proficiencies to make such checks themselves if needed. 5e already did continue the paradigm of not designing monsters using the same rules as PCs, so mission accomplished. (And they've doubled down, as shown by the caster changes in MPMM.)


I mention it to contrast with ability checks. Monsters and NPCs are part of the DM's job, so because of that it makes sense to prioritize those things being easier for the DM to work with, over prioritizing making them say easier for the players to control. The cost to the DM versus the cost to the players is such that you can, metaphorically, give the DM 10 points of value by costing players 1. Ability checks are about what a character can do, so that puts it in the players' area of responsibility. Prioritizing DM control in an area where players have the difficult job means you're charging the players 10 points of value to give the DM 1. It's a bad trade-off.



Yikes. No thank you.

So not only are you forcing the DM into the role of defendant (or... claims adjustor?) and the player into the role of plaintiff/claimant by default - you're also asking both sides to "pin rulings," which requires tracking not just every pinned check in the campaign but also every set of circumstances behind that check so you can prove e.g. this river is the same or different than the last one the group tried to cross. Even if the player is the only one who gets to invoke that, the DM still needs to know what they could whip out.


I'm not asking the DM to pin rulings at all. Nor is the DM the 'defendant'. The DM does not have to justify their rulings in this model, they always have the option to say freely 'nope, it doesn't work'. They don't have to prove precedent or refer to rules text or even ever have read the rules if they don't want to. They can say 'this gun does 3d6 damage' and then the next time it comes up, they can say 'this gun does 1d6 damage' if that's what they'd like to do. What the 'pinning' thing is about is that it gives the players the ability to say 'specifically, for this ruling, I am invested in this being the same way in the future - I will pay for that investment by taking over the responsibility for tracking it'. It also lets the player explicitly acknowledge 'I'm not invested in this ruling being the same next time, feel free to forget about the details'.

It is a system designed for approaching the activity at the table not as an adversarial thing where the player brings up a rule to mess with or thwart the DM, but rather where the rules explicitly exist to offload resolution to the players who are most invested in the particulars of that element of resolution. It is a system for collaborative play, designed to work very well when you do have trust and good-faith interactions at the table. And in that case, it neatly resolves a lot of the problems with 3.5ed style lists of specifics.

If you get stuck in an adversarial mindset, this is 'a nice thing that we cannot have'. Access to this sort of design space is the cost of insisting on trying to prioritize control and stupid power struggle stuff.



The worst problem with this proposal is that it turns the entire resolution system on its head. The player is not supposed to be approaching problems by saying "here is what I want to roll and here is what lets me do that." That is 3.5 thinking. In 5e, the player should be saying "here is what I want to do" and the DM is the one who then says "you can but that's going to be tough, here is what you should roll." Or just as good, "no roll needed and here's why." And not only does this leave the agency in the hands of the game master, it also allows for resolutions neither side might have even considered because they're not sticking to what's prescribed for them on a page.

TL;DR 5e is meant to encourage creative thinking, make life easier for the side with the harder job (usually the DM), and cover the widest possibility space of actions available. An open-ended system does that, while a prescribed one just gets in the way.


As a DM, I would rather - and have - run the thing I just posted than run 5e. Because it allows cool stuff to be repeated, it absolutely encourages creative thinking, because if you try a stunt and you happen to like the way that stunt was resolved, it gives a method for the player to add that to their sheet as a thing they can do from now on.

[Psyren]

Having abilities gated by feats isn't bad. It's only bad when you gate stuff that everyone should be able to do regardless of specialized training. But having a feat, say, that multiplies your jump distance by 10, or allows you to run on walls with a decent Acrobatics check? That's a good case for actually having those.

Even that is dangerous however. Because you're now implying that without that feat (or an equivalent feature), nobody can jump 10x or run on walls. Maybe that's reasonable for your table, and that's fine, but perhaps you can see why WotC themselves might be reluctant to cap everyone's fun this way, even just implicitly.


Psyren, please remember you're talking about the system with Bounded Accuracy yet simultaneously has formal tiers of play. The actual hard game math is deliberately crippled in allowing for by-the-numbers scope creep despite bluntly stating the game is supposed to undergo enormous scope creep.

I find it helpful to view bounded accuracy as a moving window. The difficulty numbers may stay the same, but the things you can accomplish without a check, as well as the results of success/failure, don't have to stay static as you level. This is perfectly in line with DMG 237.



Plus, with the example of crossing a river, you can easily go with just depth, width, and flow speed for a formulaic DC, provided you actually have a bonus large enough to tolerate meaningful penalties, which 5e deliberately doesn't. And social skills being nonsense is just fundamental to how D&D handles skills, d20+modifiers binary pass-fail cannot produce a sensible result for the primary subject of raw roleplaying. They were a horrible mistake to have in the first place in 3e, they're still a horrible mistake to have in the first place now.

The river example only furthers my point - all those attributes you mention are independent of one another. What's the difficulty of a calm, but wide and extremely cold river? How about normal temperature rapids? Are they the same? If not, how fast or wide before they are?

Rather than waste both DM and designer time on sussing out this kind of math, just say "fast enough/wide enough to be Hard, or Moderate, or Easy, depending on how I want to challenge my players." And then do the same for the next river, and the next, and the next.



And again, the basis of this argument is not actually "is the skill system sensible in its own right?", it's very specifically "is the skill system viable space to compete with spellcasters?" Because the topic of this thread is the Caster vs. Martial balance, in particular, not skill systems in general. Your fuzzy-logic "rulings, not rules" push is wholly incapable of this, because the spellcasters don't need rulings to make all but the most carefully or ham-fistedly designed campaigns roll over like a pet.

Spells have limitations of their own though. Sure, charming someone can get them to listen to me without needing to uncover their ideals/bonds/flaws and craft a winning argument or emotional appeal. But an hour after doing that, I probably have a new enemy. If I could even use it in the first place, due to creature type or range or their saving throw.

[Satinavian]

I agree that these things being skill uses instead of gated by feats is preferable. I was responding to the folks saying 3.5 and PF (which had bathroom passes for everything) somehow did this right.
You might remember that i also wrote that 3.x's skill system was bad in comparison to competitors.

Of course it had problems. Many, many problems. Gating too much stuff was indeed one of them. It has been a trap some other systems have fallen for as well : People are tasked to write cool abilities for mundandes, take inspiration from cool things mundane characters do in films or other fiction and unintentionally instead of making a cool new thing possible, they gate something.

However i do find this admittedly pretty bad system still better than what we get from 5E.

[Psyren]

However i do find this admittedly pretty bad system still better than what we get from 5E.

Cool. I definitively don't.

[Ignimortis]

Even that is dangerous however. Because you're now implying that without that feat (or an equivalent feature), nobody can jump 10x or run on walls. Maybe that's reasonable for your table, and that's fine, but perhaps you can see why WotC themselves might be reluctant to cap everyone's fun this way, even just implicitly.

At that point, you might very well just migrate to a narrative rules-lite system. If the main priority of the system is to avoid in-built limitations, you are going to end up at Magical Tea Party-style games. And, frankly, that is a possible direction for neo-D&D, seeing as (IME) half the people discussing D&D online (not on this forum, but on more casual sites like Reddit or social networks or something) do not actually play D&D. They play a class-based game that uses a d20, but otherwise it might not work anywhere near like the rulebook.

[Psyren]

At that point, you might very well just migrate to a narrative rules-lite system. If the main priority of the system is to avoid in-built limitations, you are going to end up at Magical Tea Party-style games. And, frankly, that is a possible direction for neo-D&D, seeing as (IME) half the people discussing D&D online (not on this forum, but on more casual sites like Reddit or social networks or something) do not actually play D&D. They play a class-based game that uses a d20, but otherwise it might not work anywhere near like the rulebook.

The way 5e currently works means it has no choice but to become a narrative rules-light Magical Tea Party? That seems off to me. (Is that moniker an actual thing or a pejorative?)

[Morphic tide]

I find it helpful to view bounded accuracy as a moving window. The difficulty numbers may stay the same, but the things you can accomplish without a check, as well as the results of success/failure, don't have to stay static as you level. This is perfectly in line with DMG 237.
So you're saying that you are actually violating the core resolution mechanic of the entire game to enable your understanding of the skill system as is present exclusively in 5e? Because everything else even in 5e is binary pass-fail off d20+modifier. The results of failure are not variable this way anywhere else, if you do not meet the DC you have failed. Period, end-of-the-check, you did not do the thing you tried to do and there is no partial-success for a close call. That is how it works for everything else in the game, what is the reason to have all non-spell out-of-combat interaction be so at odds with the enormous majoirty of the rules?


The river example only furthers my point - all those attributes you mention are independent of one another. What's the difficulty of a calm, but wide and extremely cold river? How about normal temperature rapids? Are they the same? If not, how fast or wide before they are?

Rather than waste both DM and designer time on sussing out this kind of math, just say "fast enough/wide enough to be Hard, or Moderate, or Easy, depending on how I want to challenge my players." And then do the same for the next river, and the next, and the next.
...How in the world have you lost all notion of stackable Circumstance penalties? The DM sees players with bonus X, wants success rate Y, and thus knows to construct DC Z. It's all of a minute or two to do the basic addition and subtraction to use those parts to make a DC from a half-dozen conditional modifier tracts, which can easily be rolled into a single lookup table per skill with rows for modifier degree and columns for when a given source causes that modifier in the midst of just a page or two of explanations.


Spells have limitations of their own though. Sure, charming someone can get them to listen to me without needing to uncover their ideals/bonds/flaws and craft a winning argument or emotional appeal. But an hour after doing that, I probably have a new enemy. If I could even use it in the first place, due to creature type or range or their saving throw.
Meanwhile, Animate Dead just gives you skeletons as long as you have slots and bodies to fuel it, Teleport lets you cut a fixed amount of days to weeks of travel, and of course Charm Person is one binary save that keys to a specific known quantity with the limitations right there in the spell instead of every single layer of its function being up to DM adjudication like you insist on skills having. Spellcaster utility either Just Happens without any question, or has fairly tightly defined properties. The extreme fuzzy-logic of 5e's skill system, especially as you're interpreting it, doesn't compete with that because it makes any hope of even being allowed to try dependent on "DM-may-I?" When dealing with rulings versus rules for altering the narrative of the campaign, rules always win because the user knows for a fact what they are getting and thus gets to do it over and over again, in varied conditions, with full risk-assessment information.

In summary, you seem to be actively wanting incoherent mechanics for the sake of a blank check for DMs to tailor the game to their table's exact needs. D&D started from there, gaining complexity because the standard for rulings was to create rules. This single-handedly created multiple major crises early in the game's history because no two tables were inter-operable, so the community came in a hundred fits and starts of social groups buying the book and playing their own way. AD&D's insistent convolution was devised to bring order to this chaos so that a group with no two members being from the same sate could pull out their books and play D&D at the convention and actually have a good time because of the books giving them consistent expectations, thus making the community a far larger and more coherent block comprising the near totality of the customers.

Can you please leave D&D and go move to Powered by the Apocalypse, GURPS, or another intentionally-tailorable system? Put in the effort to find the systems that are literally ground-up collaborative storytelling to the point of "class features" being what parts of the setting you get to define or something? Because D&D's history right up until 5e got co-opted by parasocial exposure away from all the brands' traditional customers was constantly getting more crunchy with narrow expectations, to the point of intense complaints about 4e feeling like a computer game for how tied down it was.

[Psyren]

So you're saying that you are actually violating the core resolution mechanic of the entire game to enable your understanding of the skill system as is present exclusively in 5e? Because everything else even in 5e is binary pass-fail off d20+modifier.

I'm not "violating" anything. Defining what a success or a failure ultimately gets you is the DM's job.

DMG 242, Resolution and Consequences: "You determine the consequences of attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws."


...How in the world have you lost all notion of stackable Circumstance penalties?

I'm aware of those. Stacking a bunch of fiddly bonuses and penalties is exactly what 5e was trying to avoid. Why on earth would I bring them back?


Meanwhile, Animate Dead just gives you skeletons as long as you have slots and bodies to fuel it, Teleport lets you cut a fixed amount of days to weeks of travel, and of course Charm Person is one binary save that keys to a specific known quantity with the limitations right there in the spell instead of every single layer of its function being up to DM adjudication like you insist on skills having. Spellcaster utility either Just Happens without any question, or has fairly tightly defined properties.

Every single spell you just listed has even more caveats and drawbacks to consider. Yes, spells are uniquely effective, but if you never make situations where those drawbacks matter, then of course casters at your table are going to be miniature gods. But the solution is to... not do that.


Can you please leave D&D and go move to Powered by the Apocalypse, GURPS, or another intentionally-tailorable system?

No. Thanks for the suggestion though.

[Ignimortis]

The way 5e currently works means it has no choice but to become a narrative rules-light Magical Tea Party? That seems off to me. (Is that moniker an actual thing or a pejorative?)
No, right now 5e still has a bunch of rules that act as limitations to what you can do in the game. But if your primary goal when designing rules is to avoid limitations, the end result logically will be an MTP game where rules will most likely consist of little more than "roll dice, ask the GM if it worked, and have fun", because the rules exist specifically to act as limitations to what fits in the game and what doesn't.

It is a sort of pejorative. I am unaware of any actual Magical Tea Party game, but it should still be pretty clear what it means.

[Pex]

If you deviate from the printed DCs at all then those same concerns will arise, with the added thorn of it feeling more like you're breaking a rule than making a ruling. And again, encouraging a mindset of "there's a printed rule for that" is much more likely to result in book-diving than "think for yourself."



You don't have to "remember DCs" at all. Determine each situation's difficulty on its own merits. The chance of you presenting the exact same situation to your players in exactly the same way twice is miniscule enough, to say nothing of the odds of then assigning a different DC to it on top of that.



If you don't care about why designers do the things they do then I agree, but the impression I got was that you did.



Those names weren't used until AD&D. Did you mean Men & Magic?

In other words, it's all Mother May I. There is no consistency so players cannot rely on their abilities. It's not even about lack of consistency between games but consistency within the same game. This is horrible for a player to be unable to rely on what his character can do.

[Brookshw]

Because D&D's history right up until 5e got co-opted by parasocial exposure away from all the brands' traditional customers was constantly getting more crunchy with narrow expectations

3e did this, and only 3e (well, maybe 4e, I don't remember). Everything else was completely made up. I already pointed out how skills were utterly subjective before that point. 5e is mostly a return to form in a lot of ways.



It is a sort of pejorative. I am unaware of any actual Magical Tea Party game, but it should still be pretty clear what it means.

http://www.maidrpg.com/

[Psyren]

No, right now 5e still has a bunch of rules that act as limitations to what you can do in the game.

Yes and no. It establishes defaults, and then lets you exceed those defaults via ability checks under some circumstances.

For example - your strength score determines how high/far you can jump without a check, but you can make an Athletics check to exceed both (PHB 182). The DM decides the consequences of that check, such as how high/far you can ultimately get, whether doing so might have negative consequences such as dropping an item etc.


In other words, it's all Mother May I. There is no consistency so players cannot rely on their abilities. It's not even about lack of consistency between games but consistency within the same game. This is horrible for a player to be unable to rely on what his character can do.

The player controls their character's actions, but at the end of the day they're not the DM. They don't craft the challenges they'll be up against, the DM is responsible for that.

[Morphic tide]

I'm not "violating" anything. Defining what a success or a failure ultimately gets you is the DM's job.

DMG 242, Resolution and Consequences: "You determine the consequences of attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws."
You are unironically relying on Rule 0 in a game that has retained exceptionally clunky and crunchy combat comprising very nearly every single rule outside the skill system to support the notion that the approach is desirable. If you're relying on this line, there is no system, because that is a completely unrestricted "you can do whatever" clause. Did you not post a homebrew decision-making flowchart? If I'm remembering that right, even you think the game is giving too little structure, if only in not having adequate explanation of what's technically there, going off that being used in your defense.

Argue hard rules, like the pages upon pages for combat, or concede the point. Do not rely on instances of Rule 0 that make it "perfectly fine" to throw out literally everything. Seriously, multiple paragraphs defining degrees of success and failure are on the exact same page as what you quoted. The only conclusion I can take about how you're arguing from this is that you either shallowly looked for the first thing that gave you something to stand on, or memorized a catchall "I can do what I want!" line to deploy whenever you see pushback. I cannot comprehend this statement as anything other than you fundamentally not caring about what's in the book in favor of making things up as you go along, because I don't see how you'd come upon this argument if you did.


I'm aware of those. Stacking a bunch of fiddly bonuses and penalties is exactly what 5e was trying to avoid. Why on earth would I bring them back?
You keep arguing as if such measures do not exist despite setting DCs by them being just a minute or two of basic addition or subtraction. Unless there's piles of situational modifiers or incredibly broken progression making the player bonuses unpredictable, as was the case with almost exclusively 3.5, it's very much favorable in a community-coherence and brand-stability sense to have formulaic DC construction over "the DM feels like it" ad-hoc judgements that run almost entirely on social contract leading to rapid playgroup atomization.


Every single spell you just listed has even more caveats and drawbacks to consider. Yes, spells are uniquely effective, but if you never make situations where those drawbacks matter, then of course casters at your table are going to be miniature gods. But the solution is to... not do that.
The problem is that this incredibly rapidly bends the campaign over backwards around the spells the casters have. You have to very routinely screw with rest timings or field rather narrow enemy types to deal with Animate Dead, plan your deadlines around Teleport with either ridiculously specific pathing or assuming it's going to be used, and Charm Person still leaves you with an hour of drastically screwing with social scenarios you have to plot end-runs around. That is explicitly adversarial problem-solving of the DM having to react to the casters' toolbox forced by hard rules with zero advice on how the hell to keep a mystery plot alive through all the Divinations or the scheduling results of the variety of travel acceleration spells.

You are complaining intensely about handfuls of ten-year-old level math to finalize encounters and events after the designers have crunched over the really tedious parts to pre-emptively balance the formulae as the job they are payed for (and given how many can afford living in San Francisco and the like at all, payed well), while being perfectly fine with leaving 50 pages of homework on magic-proofing things with no mention it's actually a massive historic problem of the brand still bothering people in the current version.


No. Thanks for the suggestion though.
There are systems that are in fact designed around fuzzy logic like you want the skill system and you don't have a bone-anchor of a slow mess of a combat system murdering session pacing with dice to decide whether you roll dice, single actions provoking dice from multiple targets, one-entity-at-a-time sequential resolution, and sundry other resolution slowdown properties. Let D&D be just D&D that plays like D&D in particular regardless of the DM running it. Stop insisting that it has to be a blank canvas to paint over as you feel circumstances demand, because that is annihilating large chunks of the common ground essential for pick-up groups.

And again, the question is Martial vs. Caster supremacy. As mentioned above, the workload for spellcasters is dozens of varieties of running numbers on fundamentally unrelated constraining factors, some of them partially randomized, with many of them being very strict cases of making use of the spell mandatory or totally useless with no in-between, as plot-level decision-making. Whereas the skill workload can be reasoned down to a 30 second flowchart and combat design can fit on a postcard or two. Methinks the casters here have a bit much influence on the course of the campaign if it has to bend over pre-emptively to get away with them not calling most of the shots yet nothing demands more than five minutes to set up for the Martials.


3e did this, and only 3e (well, maybe 4e, I don't remember). Everything else was completely made up. I already pointed out how skills were utterly subjective before that point. 5e is mostly a return to form in a lot of ways.
...What part of "Advanced" Dungeons and Dragons or "Expert" Dungeons and Dragons ever gave you the idea they weren't gradually adding rules? Are you under the belief that Nonweapon Proficiencies or Thief Skills existed at the start of the game? That the Thief and Cleric classes were there day one? I call it a trend, 3e had more of it than AD&D 2e, but in turn AD&D 2e had more ruleset coverage than AD&D 1e or the BECMI line. And the entire point of the BECMI line was that each set added to ruleset coverage and possessed higher power than the last. And 4e's rigidity is the single most common complaint about its functionality, usually for how it creates surface-level similarity to MMOs between the formally-declared combat roles and treadmill scaling.

[Sneak Dog]

I find it helpful to view bounded accuracy as a moving window. The difficulty numbers may stay the same, but the things you can accomplish without a check, as well as the results of success/failure, don't have to stay static as you level. This is perfectly in line with DMG 237.

You might find this helpful, but it's false. A DC determines failure or success at a task. It is not dependant on level. The things you accomplish do practically stay static as you level because bounded accuracy says your ability score + proficiency bonus stays nearly static. 4e had PC's gain significant bonuses to all skill checks as they levelled, so they could achieve higher DCs and automatically succeed harder tasks as they levelled.

Besides, doesn't this fail the moment the players catch on, and ask for DC's for tasks that include the actual outcome they want? Instead of tasks that leave the outcome up for this level of interpretation.


I'm not "violating" anything. Defining what a success or a failure ultimately gets you is the DM's job.

DMG 242, Resolution and Consequences: "You determine the consequences of attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws."

A good way to go about a setting a DC is:
Can the task fail? Can the task succeed? (If either cannot, no DC.)
Can the task just be repeatedly attempted with no cost until it succeeds? (If it can, no DC. Time by itself isn't a real cost, only if that time costs something.)
How difficult is the task?
What is the outcome of a success? What is the outcome of a failure?
Now actually tell the players the DC and the parts about the outcome/task they would know.

And within this process, your suggestion would sort of fail. Because you would only figure out what the outcomes are after it's been decided who attempts it. Then when someone else is about to attempt it instead, you have to stop them to tell them the adjusted outcomes.

In essence, it sounds like you are subtly adjusting the task's outcome based on your view of what a specific character should be able to do, without the system supporting this beyond rule zero.



You don't have to "remember DCs" at all. Determine each situation's difficulty on its own merits. The chance of you presenting the exact same situation to your players in exactly the same way twice is miniscule enough, to say nothing of the odds of then assigning a different DC to it on top of that.


You don't have to remember DCs at all. You just have to consistently set them, in a reliable way, because your players will remember them. This so that the players can figure out their characters' capabilities and play their characters accordingly. But if you present two similar situations with wildly different DCs with arbitrary reasons, you break the ability for the players to figure out their characters' capabilities. This knowledge is necessary for them to proclaim their characters' actions. So you get 'GM could I?' before they do anything. And if they plan something, you get thirty of those. Or the player doesn't feel like asking thirty 'GM could I's and instead just goes to hit it with a sharp stick or a spell. Because at least those can be relied upon.

[Psyren]

You are unironically relying on Rule 0 in a game that has retained exceptionally clunky and crunchy combat comprising very nearly every single rule outside the skill system to support the notion that the approach is desirable.

Narrating the results of the players' actions (including their rolls) is the heart of D&D. It is actually Rule 3, not Rule 0. PHB pg. 6:

"How to Play
The play of the Dungeons and Dragons game unfolds according to this basic pattern.

1) The DM describes the environment
2) The players describe what they want to do (<--- the die roll occurs during this step)
3) The DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions."



You keep arguing as if such measures do not exist despite setting DCs by them being just a minute or two of basic addition or subtraction. Unless there's piles of situational modifiers or incredibly broken progression making the player bonuses unpredictable, as was the case with almost exclusively 3.5, it's very much favorable in a community-coherence and brand-stability sense to have formulaic DC construction over "the DM feels like it" ad-hoc judgements that run almost entirely on social contract leading to rapid playgroup atomization.

While 3.5 was indeed the worst offender, 4e had too many fiddly bonuses too. Armor, ability, circumstance, enhancement, feat, item, power, proficiency, racial, shield... and much like 3.5, the expectation was to stack and track as many of these as you could. (The tightly tuned math made this even worse, as missing a couple of these categories as you leveled could put you well behind the curve.)



The problem is that this incredibly rapidly bends the campaign over backwards around the spells the casters have. You have to very routinely screw with rest timings or field rather narrow enemy types to deal with Animate Dead, plan your deadlines around Teleport with either ridiculously specific pathing or assuming it's going to be used, and Charm Person still leaves you with an hour of drastically screwing with social scenarios you have to plot end-runs around. That is explicitly adversarial problem-solving of the DM having to react to the casters' toolbox forced by hard rules with zero advice on how the hell to keep a mystery plot alive through all the Divinations or the scheduling results of the variety of travel acceleration spells.

Managing teleport isn't that difficult. Most villain lairs are probably going to fall under "Description" or at best "Seen Casually," unless your plot allows for extended reconnaissance (in which case it isn't particularly urgent.) And even when they're on target, that target might be the only part of the dungeon they're sure about, i.e. the entrance. In the worst case scenario, stick it on a demiplane and now the party has to locate a suitable portal or tuning fork.

Teleport can still be useful in skipping the wilderness trek, but it doesn't invalidate the adventure.


And again, the question is Martial vs. Caster supremacy. As mentioned above, the workload for spellcasters is dozens of varieties of running numbers on fundamentally unrelated constraining factors, some of them partially randomized, with many of them being very strict cases of making use of the spell mandatory or totally useless with no in-between, as plot-level decision-making. Whereas the skill workload can be reasoned down to a 30 second flowchart and combat design can fit on a postcard or two. Methinks the casters here have a bit much influence on the course of the campaign if it has to bend over pre-emptively to get away with them not calling most of the shots yet nothing demands more than five minutes to set up for the Martials.

You mean challenging a party needs to take their magical capabilities into account? Who would have thought?


A DC determines failure or success at a task. It is not dependant on level.

The DMG quite literally instructs you to take level into consideration when setting a DC (DMG 238.)

The previous page also reminds you that the dice don't control your game - you do - and that you have the right to declare automatic success (or even just advantage) at any time and for any reason.



Besides, doesn't this fail the moment the players catch on, and ask for DC's for tasks that include the actual outcome they want?

I'm not sure what you mean by "ask for DCs." The players state what they want to do (rule #2 above), not what DC they want. If a roll is required, you decide the DC, not them.



A good way to go about a setting a DC is:
Can the task fail? Can the task succeed? (If either cannot, no DC.)
Can the task just be repeatedly attempted with no cost until it succeeds? (If it can, no DC. Time by itself isn't a real cost, only if that time costs something.)
How difficult is the task?
What is the outcome of a success? What is the outcome of a failure?
Now actually tell the players the DC and the parts about the outcome/task they would know.

And within this process, your suggestion would sort of fail. Because you would only figure out what the outcomes are after it's been decided who attempts it. Then when someone else is about to attempt it instead, you have to stop them to tell them the adjusted outcomes.

As noted above, you decide/narrate the outcome after the roll, not before.
It sounds like you're advocating deciding the outcome of a roll before calling for one, which seems odd.


In essence, it sounds like you are subtly adjusting the task's outcome based on your view of what a specific character should be able to do, without the system supporting this beyond rule zero.

I'm determining the outcome (DMG 242) - not adjusting it. The dice are an input to that determination, perhaps the most important one - but ultimately I run the game, not them (DMG 237).


You don't have to remember DCs at all. You just have to consistently set them, in a reliable way, because your players will remember them. This so that the players can figure out their characters' capabilities and play their characters accordingly. But if you present two similar situations with wildly different DCs with arbitrary reasons, you break the ability for the players to figure out their characters' capabilities. This knowledge is necessary for them to proclaim their characters' actions. So you get 'GM could I?' before they do anything. And if they plan something, you get thirty of those. Or the player doesn't feel like asking thirty 'GM could I's and instead just goes to hit it with a sharp stick or a spell. Because at least those can be relied upon.

I'm not advocating different DCs for the same situation at all. DCs are set based on the difficulty of the task.
What I'm advocating is determining the consequences of rolls, and not letting the dice take control of the game.

[Brookshw]

...What part of "Advanced" Dungeons and Dragons or "Expert" Dungeons and Dragons ever gave you the idea they weren't gradually adding rules?

Adding rules is not the same as providing structure to them. DMs we're still responsible for deciding if and when a check should happen, as well as make up whatever bonuses or penalties they felt appropriate (including making them effectively impossible without a perfect roll), mirroring conceptually the current format of DMs deciding on easy/normal/hard/etc. Going from, "no skills, just make it up", to "sure, here's a list of skills, make up how they work" is pretty shallow for a trend.

[KorvinStarmast]

Those names weren't used until AD&D. Did you mean Men & Magic?
Incorrect. Monk was in OD&D Supplement II, Blackmoor.

[Psyren]

Incorrect. Monk was in OD&D Supplement II, Blackmoor.

The names I was referring to there were "PHB" and "DMG."

[Tanarii]

The 3.x skill system was rather bad in comparison to various non-D&D systems. It was still by far the best one any kind of D&D has ever had. Going back there would certainly be an improvement over the current situation.
Absolutely not. The 3e skill system, revolutionary as it was at the time, was improved on for very good reasons.

[Pex]

Absolutely not. The 3e skill system, revolutionary as it was at the time, was improved on for very good reasons.

Improved upon, yes, but not necessarily ignored. Have skill points but not be dependent on an ability score. Everyone gets the same amount with getting more as a class feature such as for rogues. No cross-class nonsense, but choose proficiencies ok. Do not gate specific skill uses behind feats. To keep Bounded Accuracy cannot spend more ranks on one skill than proficiency bonus. For the math to work maybe not get skill points every level. Apply DC tables as appropriate. Devil in the details. Do not allow skills to be used for other skills. For example, no jumpomancer to replace jumping for diplomacy.

Alas, that's still more complicated than likely desired in general player population. All that's really needed now are example DC tables with values not a multiple of 5 and having a mean of 10 so that those who have +0 or +1 forever are not discouraged from trying. DMs are also taught to think around DC 10 when adjudication is needed for events not specifically mentioned in a table once it has already been determined a roll is called for. Make Take 10/Take 20 more clear.

[Tanarii]

Devil in the details.
Indeed, plenty of room for improvement. Even trashing the system and trying something entirely new.

The dependency on ability scores for all of combat, class features, and skills could well be a place to start. For example, all Cha casters also being good at social skills and all Wis casters being good at worldly/personal awareness is just weird. The one that gets me in the current edition is: why are Clerics always good at Animal Handling and Survival?

Of course, on topic of the thread, a real issue always comes back to primary warrior Martials when it comes to skills. No matter what skill system you use, if they're supposed to be the best at combat and that is why they lack to one degree or another in skills and magic, then they need to be really good at combat compared to primary skill monkeys and primary casters. Even at the highest levels, their combat skills should be better.

Similarly, primary skill monkey Martials should always be the best at skill monkeying. (As a side note, based on reading but not play testing. I really like the way PF2 Skill Feats seem to work.)

Either that, or primary spell casting needs to have strict combat limitations (traditionally glass artillery), strict limitations on resource use, or have some kind of cost associated. Or some combination. Especially for offensive & utility casting. It's okay for a spell to outshine occasionally in combat or skill monkeying once in a while or at a cost or to be difficult to pull off.

I don't think the martial caster disparity is significant when playing without variant rules. But there's plenty of room to jigger things on several fronts.

[Ignimortis]

Indeed, plenty of room for improvement. Even trashing the system and trying something entirely new.

The dependency on ability scores for all of combat, class features, and skills could well be a place to start. For example, all Cha casters also being good at social skills and all Wis casters being good at worldly/personal awareness is just weird. The one that gets me in the current edition is: why are Clerics always good at Animal Handling and Survival?

So hear me out here, just throwing an unbaked idea out. What if...combat effectiveness, in most circumstances, did not depend on ability scores? I.e. you'd have an attack bonus coming from your class, an AC from your class and potentially worn armor, saves determined by your class and an ability/spell DC coming from your class...and that would be it. You could potentially be a STR 10 DEX 10 Fighter and still be better at combat than a STR 30 DEX 30 spellcaster, with such a setup.

Or, if you don't want to get as radical, just make skills progress faster for non-casters. So your Sorcerer might have a +5 to Diplomacy from their CHA and +5 from their skill ranks/proficiency tier (there needs to be more tiers than non/proficient/expertise), but the Fighter (not even the Rogue) has +0 CHA and +12 from their skill ranks/proficiency tier?


Yes and no. It establishes defaults, and then lets you exceed those defaults via ability checks under some circumstances.

For example - your strength score determines how high/far you can jump without a check, but you can make an Athletics check to exceed both (PHB 182). The DM decides the consequences of that check, such as how high/far you can ultimately get, whether doing so might have negative consequences such as dropping an item etc.
And it's inconsistent in that, too. There are more direct rules that set the DC as the result of the opposed check, and give you a clear effect (using Athletics/Acrobatics to escape a grapple is not supposed to have any DM deliberation, only the binary yes/no of the check result).

[Hytheter]

So hear me out here, just throwing an unbaked idea out. What if...combat effectiveness, in most circumstances, did not depend on ability scores? I.e. you'd have an attack bonus coming from your class, an AC from your class and potentially worn armor, saves determined by your class and an ability/spell DC coming from your class...and that would be it. You could potentially be a STR 10 DEX 10 Fighter and still be better at combat than a STR 30 DEX 30 spellcaster, with such a setup.


Tread carefully, friend. Down that road lie questions about whether we need Attributes at all. :smallamused:

[Satinavian]

Either that, or primary spell casting needs to have strict combat limitations (traditionally glass artillery), strict limitations on resource use, or have some kind of cost associated. Or some combination. Especially for offensive & utility casting. It's okay for a spell to outshine occasionally in combat or skill monkeying once in a while or at a cost or to be difficult to pull off.
Generally a good idea. We could even do different kinds of "limiting casting power" to make different classes. Have a glass-canon-artillery blaster, a distinct utility/ritual mage who can't do anything magical in combat but is not frail either and can use weapons and maybe a heavy limited ressource based class that has always to make tough decisions. Or maybe not the last one, those are annoying to balance if you don't restrict campaign types as well.



Of course, on topic of the thread, a real issue always comes back to primary warrior Martials when it comes to skills. No matter what skill system you use, if they're supposed to be the best at combat and that is why they lack to one degree or another in skills and magic, then they need to be really good at combat compared to primary skill monkeys and primary casters. Even at the highest levels, their combat skills should be better.Yes, someone specializing in combat above all else should be the best in combat.

But to do that, D&D has to stop being a combat game with some barebone excuses for other stuff. The more the game is about combat, the less it is justifiable to have specialized combat characters who are better at it than everyone else. A proper skill system and more non-combat content would help a lot.

I mean, it is not a problem that the Streetsam is better in combat than most other archetypes in SR (not going into various exploits and problems in certain editions. SR was never that balanced). Because in SR combat is important, but not that important. D&D could do that as well.



So hear me out here, just throwing an unbaked idea out. What if...combat effectiveness, in most circumstances, did not depend on ability scores? I.e. you'd have an attack bonus coming from your class, an AC from your class and potentially worn armor, saves determined by your class and an ability/spell DC coming from your class...and that would be it. You could potentially be a STR 10 DEX 10 Fighter and still be better at combat than a STR 30 DEX 30 spellcaster, with such a setup.
That doesn't sound that ideal. It would be a huge step towards "the only important thing about a character is its class" which i hate.

But i have seen several systems tie all secondary abilities, skills, class abilities etc on several ability scores at once while making it easier to raise lower abilities than higher ones. That thoroughly kills the SAD-Meta as well.

[Ignimortis]

Tread carefully, friend. Down that road lie questions about whether we need Attributes at all. :smallamused:
Yes, at that point you might just remove attributes at all, so probably not the best idea...



Yes, someone specializing in combat above all else should be the best in combat.

But to do that, D&D has to stop being a combat game with some barebone excuses for other stuff. The more the game is about combat, the less it is justifiable to have specialized combat characters who are better at it than everyone else. A proper skill system and more non-combat content would help a lot.

I mean, it is not a problem that the Streetsam is better in combat than most other archetypes in SR (not going into various exploits and problems in certain editions. SR was never that balanced). Because in SR combat is important, but not that important. D&D could do that as well.
I support this, but I know a ton of people who would detest that, unlike, say, a proper skill system that nobody I know would be against. I like niche-based games, but they have certain issues, such as decker pizza time, astral smoke break and the general idea that everyone has to have their spotlight, which often leads to street samurai not getting any spotlight if they actually play well and don't mess up - in a stealth-focused game, not getting detected means no combat, so you've specced for something that doesn't happen until things go bad.



That doesn't sound that ideal. It would be a huge step towards "the only important thing about a character is its class" which i hate.

But i have seen several systems tie all secondary abilities, skills, class abilities etc on several ability scores at once while making it easier to raise lower abilities than higher ones. That thoroughly kills the SAD-Meta as well.
I hate praising PF2 so much. I really do, because at the end, it's not really satisfying to me (don't get me wrong, neither is 5e). But that is also another problem it has solved. You get a +2 to four stats every 5 levels, so you can keep up your main stat, your CON, and two other stats of your choice.

The only problem that remains, number-wise, is that PF2's math is extremely tight (which is actually bad for a TTRPG after a certain point) and the game assumes that any task is being handled by someone with the best possible proficiency tier and stat value possible at level X - in a system where every +1 is critical.

[Xervous]

The only problem that remains, number-wise, is that PF2's math is extremely tight (which is actually bad for a TTRPG after a certain point)

So tight my impression is they don’t want you to get away with anything, including having fun features at reasonable levels. PF2 does not in any way make me excited to play Fighter in attack mode and shuffle my way through anything not combat without unique, level appropriate ways to Fighter through even a bare handful. PF2 was a great place to have them as optional doohickeys to choose from, but unique stuff was kept as the province of magic users.

[Ignimortis]

So tight my impression is they don’t want you to get away with anything, including having fun features at reasonable levels. PF2 does not in any way make me excited to play Fighter in attack mode and shuffle my way through anything not combat without unique, level appropriate ways to Fighter through even a bare handful. PF2 was a great place to have them as optional doohickeys to choose from, but unique stuff was kept as the province of magic users.
I wouldn't say that martials don't get unique stuff, but it's still way more about "my numbers are very good" and less "I do the thing that nobody else can do".

It is pretty obvious that PF2 is geared towards organized play and to avoid any possible repeats of how PFS functioned in PF1 (a lot of stuff was banned for being too strong). Frankly, most of PF2's parts are great, but how the math works out and how the classes are written (please, please, if you're making a D&D-like, stop redoing the 3e PHB, it was bad and half the classes in it are extraneous and unnecessary, you could do so much more with the same number of classes) puts a massive damper on enjoyment. At times it feels like playing a wargame where you control one unit only instead of a TTRPG.

[KorvinStarmast]

The names I was referring to there were "PHB" and "DMG." Sorry, about that you are correct.

So hear me out here, just throwing an unbaked idea out. What if...combat effectiveness, in most circumstances, did not depend on ability scores?
Like in the original game? :smallwink:

Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities:
(Low score is 3-8; Average is 9-12; High is 13-18)

Prime requisite 15 or more: Add 10% to earned experience
Prime requisite 13 or 14:Add 5% to earned experience
Prime requisite of 9 - 12:Average, no bonus or penalty
Prime requisite 8 or 7: Minus 10% from earned experience
Prime requisite 6 or less: Minus 20% from earned experience
Constitution 15 or more: Add +1 to each hit die
Constitution 13 or 14:Will withstand adversity
Constitution of 9 - 12: 60% to 90% chance of surviving
Constitution 8 or 7: 40% to 50% chance of survival
Constitution 6 or Less: Minus 1 from each hit die*
Dexterity above 12:Fire any missile at + 1
Dexterity under 9:Fire any missile at -1

* minimum score of 1 on any die

[Tanarii]

At times it feels like playing a wargame where you control one unit only instead of a TTRPG.
Those aren't the same thing? :smallamused:

[Ignimortis]

Those aren't the same thing? :smallamused:
One could think so, but actually, not really. At least in my experience, TTRPG characters are (and are supposed to be) far more versatile, free in what they can do, and have much less attachment to the base rules than wargame units. PF2 straddles the line, because a lot of characters you are expected to make fulfill one role, at best two, out of the following list: melee damage, ranged damage (it is actually hard to provide good melee and ranged damage at the same time), area of effect damage, buffs, debuffs, healing, crowd control (action denial).

Contrast that to, say, a PF1 PoW Harbinger who can do everything on the list aside from healing, and be pretty decent with every single one. Or any full caster in PF1. Add to that the fact that PF2 is incredibly stingy with stuff like tactical teleportation, flight, or any abnormal movement mode at all, and has a very clear delineation of "martials don't get good AoE, casters don't get good single-target damage", and generally tries to pigeonhole every build into a specific niche.

For example, a 2H melee build is expected to be the most simplistic "brute smash" thing around, because they cannot access any tactical maneuver, since someone at Paizo is very enamored with the idea of 1H+free hand melee combatant, so much so that they made Shove and Trip and Disarm require a free hand - apparently I can't sweep the leg or shoulder tackle or hit someone on the arm to make them drop a weapon. Same with anyone dual-wielding - except their damage is supposed to come from a series of quick hits instead of one big hit, but they are also deprived of tactical maneuvers unless their weapons have proper traits (and that comes at the expense of doing better damage). So you pick a very narrow niche and you stick with it. Switch-hitting sucks because ranged weapons are DEX-based, and DEX-based builds are worse in melee (worse AC than heavy armor, don't get as much damage to their attacks even if they keep up STR), and retrieving a bow will take two actions (one to stow, one to draw).

[warty goblin]

I read through PF2, and found it to be one of the least engaging RPGs I've ever picked up. It felt like the designers had one idea of fun; pull some game lever that gave you a bonus or penalty to pulling the next lever. There was absolutely no sense of a world being represented, just pages upon pages of different abilities you could take to get some new levers to pull, or give your current levers bigger numbers. It looked just miserable to play, because all I'd be doing is working out the optimum sequence of lever-pulls, and tracking the endless fiddly modifiers those gave me. I want to interact with a game world, not cosplay a speadsheet.

Also the art was ugly.

[Brookshw]

I read through PF2, and found it to be one of the least engaging RPGs I've ever picked up. It felt like the designers had one idea of fun; pull some game lever that gave you a bonus or penalty to pulling the next lever. There was absolutely no sense of a world being represented, just pages upon pages of different abilities you could take to get some new levers to pull, or give your current levers bigger numbers. It looked just miserable to play, because all I'd be doing is working out the optimum sequence of lever-pulls, and tracking the endless fiddly modifiers those gave me. I want to interact with a game world, not cosplay a speadsheet.

Also the art was ugly.

Did Todd Stewart leave them? I always thought he did a fantastic job with settings and lore.

[KorvinStarmast]

I want to interact with a game world, not cosplay a spreadsheet.
Touché. :smallsmile:

[warty goblin]

Did Todd Stewart leave them? I always thought he did a fantastic job with settings and lore.

No idea. I find lore in RPG books universally dull, so I just gave that section a cursory glance; it seemed fine I guess?

My complaint was much more about the rules. I have a pretty strong bias towards sinulationism, or at least a legible sort of representationism, where I can tell what an action is supposed to represent, and there's a discernable logic to how the rules are using the basic building blocks of the system to do that. One of the chief appeals of an RPG to me is that it gives a flexible way to do this dynamically and based on the current situation, rather than needing to pre-specify everything. PF 2e loves to pre-specify, otherwise it can't give you a special ability, followed by like three ways to give that ability higher and/or different numbers. I seriously would not have been surprised to find a feat that let you tie your shoes faster, and a second feat that let you tie your shoes with Int instead of Dex.

[Willie the Duck]

Indeed, plenty of room for improvement. Even trashing the system and trying something entirely new.

The dependency on ability scores for all of combat, class features, and skills could well be a place to start. For example, all Cha casters also being good at social skills and all Wis casters being good at worldly/personal awareness is just weird. The one that gets me in the current edition is: why are Clerics always good at Animal Handling and Survival?

Of course, on topic of the thread, a real issue always comes back to primary warrior Martials when it comes to skills. No matter what skill system you use, if they're supposed to be the best at combat and that is why they lack to one degree or another in skills and magic, then they need to be really good at combat compared to primary skill monkeys and primary casters. Even at the highest levels, their combat skills should be better.
I think making sure the skill monkeys are really good at skills is an important first step*, but I think also necessary is that what skills can do is more broadly clarified to be expansive and useful in the ways that spells and direct application of violence is. Not just DCs, processes.
*side caveat: if we stopped having primary warrior Martials and primary skill monkeys be separate things, it would go a long way to addressing caster-martial.



So hear me out here, just throwing an unbaked idea out. What if...combat effectiveness, in most circumstances, did not depend on ability scores? I.e. you'd have an attack bonus coming from your class, an AC from your class and potentially worn armor, saves determined by your class and an ability/spell DC coming from your class...and that would be it.
I've certainly mulled over the option of removing attributes from the to-hit, damage, initiative, and so on metrics and explicitly make them for skills, ability checks, maybe saves, and some odds&ends like encumbrance, languages known, etc.

Tread carefully, friend. Down that road lie questions about whether we need Attributes at all. :smallamused:
No, just make them for skills and such, and let class, level, subclass, feats, and maybe a new separate mechanic (I've toyed with having three metrics-melee, ranged, and spell, which you can divvy +1s) determine the things which class and level are designed, and let attributes be this side thing (like, as Korvin points out, the game started).

What this does is allow players to more easily play against type (Intelligent fighter, burly wizard), actually play someone who is the 'not innately good _____ making do anyways' role (think Taran from Chronicles of Prydain -- a perfect low-to-moderate Str fighter), get rid of these weirdnesses like all clerics being good with animals handling, and generally allow more variety in character presentations.


I hate praising PF2 so much. I really do, because at the end, it's not really satisfying to me (don't get me wrong, neither is 5e). But that is also another problem it has solved. You get a +2 to four stats every 5 levels, so you can keep up your main stat, your CON, and two other stats of your choice.

The only problem that remains, number-wise, is that PF2's math is extremely tight (which is actually bad for a TTRPG after a certain point) and the game assumes that any task is being handled by someone with the best possible proficiency tier and stat value possible at level X - in a system where every +1 is critical.
I feel bad for not enjoying PF2 more than I do. PF2 (to me) reads as someone listening to everyone bemoan that 3e/pf has such potential, but have such issues, and 'if only someone could buckle down and do the hard calculations and balance everything, it would be the perfect game.' So they buckle down and do the hard calculations and when tweak #345276 breaks balance 456981 going back and recalculating that and so on until everything is 'perfect.' Only once all that is done, people looked at it and said, 'huh, I guess doing all that doesn't actually make it the perfect game*. Oh well.' only to have the poor sod who did all the work staring at them with mixed sense of betrayal and defeat. It ought to feel better as a system. At the same time, the notion that the only thing the 3e system needed was perfecting the balance and math to be perfect is not reasonable (D&D is a hodge-podge mongrel system which will always have jankiness and weirdness and any given implementation will work best under only one set of assumptions despite the base using it for multitudes and no one system is going to ever feel 'perfect' for even a narrow slice of the base....).
*IMO, the perfect game exists in the ideal more than any one ruleset.

[Selion]

I think making sure the skill monkeys are really good at skills is an important first step*, but I think also necessary is that what skills can do is more broadly clarified to be expansive and useful in the ways that spells and direct application of violence is. Not just DCs, processes.
*side caveat: if we stopped having primary warrior Martials and primary skill monkeys be separate things, it would go a long way to addressing caster-martial.



I've certainly mulled over the option of removing attributes from the to-hit, damage, initiative, and so on metrics and explicitly make them for skills, ability checks, maybe saves, and some odds&ends like encumbrance, languages known, etc.

No, just make them for skills and such, and let class, level, subclass, feats, and maybe a new separate mechanic (I've toyed with having three metrics-melee, ranged, and spell, which you can divvy +1s) determine the things which class and level are designed, and let attributes be this side thing (like, as Korvin points out, the game started).

What this does is allow players to more easily play against type (Intelligent fighter, burly wizard), actually play someone who is the 'not innately good _____ making do anyways' role (think Taran from Chronicles of Prydain -- a perfect low-to-moderate Str fighter), get rid of these weirdnesses like all clerics being good with animals handling, and generally allow more variety in character presentations.


I feel bad for not enjoying PF2 more than I do. PF2 (to me) reads as someone listening to everyone bemoan that 3e/pf has such potential, but have such issues, and 'if only someone could buckle down and do the hard calculations and balance everything, it would be the perfect game.' So they buckle down and do the hard calculations and when tweak #345276 breaks balance 456981 going back and recalculating that and so on until everything is 'perfect.' Only once all that is done, people looked at it and said, 'huh, I guess doing all that doesn't actually make it the perfect game*. Oh well.' only to have the poor sod who did all the work staring at them with mixed sense of betrayal and defeat. It ought to feel better as a system. At the same time, the notion that the only thing the 3e system needed was perfecting the balance and math to be perfect is not reasonable (D&D is a hodge-podge mongrel system which will always have jankiness and weirdness and any given implementation will work best under only one set of assumptions despite the base using it for multitudes and no one system is going to ever feel 'perfect' for even a narrow slice of the base....).
*IMO, the perfect game exists in the ideal more than any one ruleset.

Before 5e, PF1 was my favorite system.
I gave PF2 a try, i don't know exactly why, but i feel there's something off. Mechanics seem solid, options are there, there are some really good ideas (multiclass system!!!), but characters feel bland, there isn't anything that screams "i want to play THIS", which is instead what happens every time i read some new class or some new spell in 5e.
Also, i found this video particularly insightful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_582tbKz4E0
Complexity in mechanics doesn't always come with complexity in resulting actions, PF2 is a more constrained game than it seems, you are a one trick pony, pumping bonuses to be able to perform that one routine that has some chances to produce a meaningful effect.
In comparison, in 5e characters can operate more freely out of the schemes, a wizard without spell-slots can still try to shove a hellknight down to a precipice, it's unlikely, but
it's maybe the right option in that situation, and the likelihood of success is slim, but it's not zero

[Ignimortis]

No idea. I find lore in RPG books universally dull, so I just gave that section a cursory glance; it seemed fine I guess?

My complaint was much more about the rules. I have a pretty strong bias towards sinulationism, or at least a legible sort of representationism, where I can tell what an action is supposed to represent, and there's a discernable logic to how the rules are using the basic building blocks of the system to do that. One of the chief appeals of an RPG to me is that it gives a flexible way to do this dynamically and based on the current situation, rather than needing to pre-specify everything. PF 2e loves to pre-specify, otherwise it can't give you a special ability, followed by like three ways to give that ability higher and/or different numbers. I seriously would not have been surprised to find a feat that let you tie your shoes faster, and a second feat that let you tie your shoes with Int instead of Dex.
There's a thing that absolutely ruins any simulationism in PF2. Everything is a button, and not in a good way. You can only ever press one button at a time. Power Attack is not a modifier, it's a special attack that cannot be combined with other attacks or anything that says "make an attack". Therefore, you can't make a move hit harder - hitting harder is it's own separate move. And it's like that...for everything at all times. You can't say "I run there, jumping over that stone in the middle, and then hit the monster with my sword" - because that would be three actions, you can't jump (even the "safe" non-skillcheck jump), you make a Stride, and then you have to end it, Leap, and make a new Stride afterwards. Even if your Stride is long enough to move you the same distance and then some, it's just not possible.

It's like a videogame sometimes, and in the worst possible way. Combined with the thing I describe below, it's why PF2, despite making it 90% of the way, is wholly unsatisfying for me.


Before 5e, PF1 was my favorite system.
I gave PF2 a try, i don't know exactly why, but i fell there's something off. Mechanics seem solid, options are there, there are some really good ideas (multiclass system!!!), but characters feel bland, there isn't anything that screams "i want to play THIS", which is instead what happens every time i read some new class or some new spell in 5e.
Because PF2 somehow managed to make the already dull core classes of D&D seem even duller. Now, I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I play TTRPGs in part to play someone special. Not the footsoldier #8945, not the average Hogwarts student, not the guy with the faulty flashlight that dies 5 minutes into the movie - I'm here to play a hero (in the classical sense, not necessarily a just and noble person). And a hero has to be at least somewhat special compared to the world around them. A prototype super soldier, the sole surviving adept of an ancient martial art, an heir to a magical bloodline prophesied to save the world or bring it to ruin, the man who died and came back with spooky powers - pick your poison, but never a "just another guy off the street".

PF2's classes are not special. They're the average adventurers (the phrase itself should be a blasphemy, but there it is). They're the statistically average murderhobos, the people in the background of every fantasy tavern. Their abilities do not feel heroic, their classes do not feel heroic, and especially their dynamic compared to enemies (who are often pretty cool, actually) does not feel heroic. Numbers-wise, they're almost always the underdogs who can't win without working together and planning every action beforehand - unless they're fighting something that's too easy to be fun. Ability-wise, they're unimpressive and basic. There are a few standout abilities, but they do not function properly until you're level 15 or so.

It's a part of why I dislike most of 5e's classes already, but PF2 really went further than that.

[Tanarii]

*side caveat: if we stopped having primary warrior Martials and primary skill monkeys be separate things, it would go a long way to addressing caster-martial.
I'm not sure D&D players are ready for all Martials to be Barbarian-Rogues. :)

OTOH part of the problem is that Wizards are traditionally lore-masters, or at least studious people that know things, as well. Similarly Warlocks and Sorcerers are highly skilled in social situations. Partly because they have Int/Cha based casting, and party because they have 2 class skills that are focused in the appropriate area.

[Pex]

. . . I want to interact with a game world, not cosplay a speadsheet.


hahahahahahahahaha

[PhoenixPhyre]

hahahahahahahahaha

What, Eve Online isn't your idea of a perfect time either?

But I agree with the assessment of PF2e. Balance is good and useful, but chasing that too far can result in bland blandness.

--------

As for skills, I've been thinking about it.

I think that, if I were in charge, I'd want something like

Ability checks are for things anyone can do, at least in potential. They're the fall-back. And very loosey-goosey. No one has better access than anyone else, although some may have proficiencies (or points) in different areas. But no expertise, no "specializations". And no spells that directly buff ability checks. Which means rogues, for instance, aren't the "skill masters" via having bigger numbers in the ability check system.

Instead, areas of mastery/specialization come from class features that
1. set baseline situations where you don't need to roll at all
2. allow you to do certain things via some sort of roll (could look like an ability check, but doesn't directly implicate them) that no one else can do
3. Etc.

So it's not "rogues get bonuses to picking locks", it's "anyone who has and knows how to use a thieves kit can pick a lock. But a thief rogue can do so without a check and without setting off any traps because he's just that good." Or "anyone can jump X feet without a check or further with a (varying) check, but a level Y barbarian can jump up Y (for Y >> X) feet and land safely without a check." Etc.

That way the numbers work for the base level (ie non-specialists) and true mastery or specialization can come from specifically-worded exceptions to the general case. And no more "the best way to use the ability check system is with heavy amounts of spells. Or being a bard." Rogues would have to get some other notional niche other than "the skilled ones". But that was a poor niche to begin with.

I think. Maybe.

[Mechalich]

OTOH part of the problem is that Wizards are traditionally lore-masters, or at least studious people that know things, as well. Similarly Warlocks and Sorcerers are highly skilled in social situations. Partly because they have Int/Cha based casting, and party because they have 2 class skills that are focused in the appropriate area.

Indeed, it is difficult to get around the link between Academic pursuits (including religious ones, such as theologians), and magical power. That appears to be a fairly highly correlated set of traits across all human societies, from simple hunter-gatherer bands (the shaman is a mystic, but also a master of medicine, herb lore, and oral history) to the most complex states (mysticism, whether Daoist or Buddhist, was simply part of the curriculum of Chinese scholar-gentlemen). I mean, Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientific minds to ever live and one of the most occult-obsessed at the same time.

Just being a member of the educated elite - especially in quasi-medieval societies where the educated elite was small and mostly cloistered - is a highly valuable trait even without tying magical powers to membership, but its very much a thing most settings are going to link in the fluff.

[Pex]

What, Eve Online isn't your idea of a perfect time either?

But I agree with the assessment of PF2e. Balance is good and useful, but chasing that too far can result in bland blandness.

--------

As for skills, I've been thinking about it.

I think that, if I were in charge, I'd want something like

Ability checks are for things anyone can do, at least in potential. They're the fall-back. And very loosey-goosey. No one has better access than anyone else, although some may have proficiencies (or points) in different areas. But no expertise, no "specializations". And no spells that directly buff ability checks. Which means rogues, for instance, aren't the "skill masters" via having bigger numbers in the ability check system.

Instead, areas of mastery/specialization come from class features that
1. set baseline situations where you don't need to roll at all
2. allow you to do certain things via some sort of roll (could look like an ability check, but doesn't directly implicate them) that no one else can do
3. Etc.

So it's not "rogues get bonuses to picking locks", it's "anyone who has and knows how to use a thieves kit can pick a lock. But a thief rogue can do so without a check and without setting off any traps because he's just that good." Or "anyone can jump X feet without a check or further with a (varying) check, but a level Y barbarian can jump up Y (for Y >> X) feet and land safely without a check." Etc.

That way the numbers work for the base level (ie non-specialists) and true mastery or specialization can come from specifically-worded exceptions to the general case. And no more "the best way to use the ability check system is with heavy amounts of spells. Or being a bard." Rogues would have to get some other notional niche other than "the skilled ones". But that was a poor niche to begin with.

I think. Maybe.

Devil in the details but fine. However, I sense a very hard sell to convince DMs that any PC, even if he has to be a specific subclass of a specific class, can ignore traps. Maybe as a thief rogue despite no magic can still find and disarm magical wards.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Devil in the details but fine. However, I sense a very hard sell to convince DMs that any PC, even if he has to be a specific subclass of a specific class, can ignore traps. Maybe as a thief rogue despite no magic can still find and disarm magical wards.

Sure, I was just spitballing off the top of my head. But that sort of "you can do X that no one else can without rolling" thing. The sort of thing that's currently mostly relegated to spells.

[Tanarii]

Sure, I was just spitballing off the top of my head. But that sort of "you can do X that no one else can without rolling" thing. The sort of thing that's currently mostly relegated to spells.
The downside is you need to memorize or scour the rules on all the things that can be done without a roll, so you know everyone else has to roll. Or establish that doing anything requires a roll.

[awa]

I'm not sure D&D players are ready for all Martials to be Barbarian-Rogues. :)


lets be fair a relatively generic barbarian could logically be expected to have climb, jump, swim, spot, listen, survival, knowledge nature, and intimidate. Balance, sense motive and search would not be unreasonable to have as well even if they would likely be at a lower rank.
Others like ride and animal handling might not be for every barbarian but are certainly not wild outliers.

Thats a lot of opportunities to spend skill pts without deviating from the barbarian archetype

[Satinavian]

There's a thing that absolutely ruins any simulationism in PF2. Everything is a button, and not in a good way. You can only ever press one button at a time. Power Attack is not a modifier, it's a special attack that cannot be combined with other attacks or anything that says "make an attack". Therefore, you can't make a move hit harder - hitting harder is it's own separate move. And it's like that...for everything at all times. You can't say "I run there, jumping over that stone in the middle, and then hit the monster with my sword" - because that would be three actions, you can't jump (even the "safe" non-skillcheck jump), you make a Stride, and then you have to end it, Leap, and make a new Stride afterwards. Even if your Stride is long enough to move you the same distance and then some, it's just not possible.

It's like a videogame sometimes, and in the worst possible way. Combined with the thing I describe below, it's why PF2, despite making it 90% of the way, is wholly unsatisfying for me.

Yes, i share this feeling about PF2 characters.

The building process itself feels is actually quite good : Choices at every level, prequesits streamlines and easy to keep up on when wanted, proper multiclassing that allows to fish for any particular ability you need but is still limited enough, a skill system that deserves this name to go along with it, with the skills not hard linked to certain classes and that includes many nice skill based abilities...

But for all the many improvements and good ideas, the end results hardly ever fail to disappoint. If you want to be good at something, you need to concentrate and then you don't hve much choice left. And the system expects you to.

If i take a regular PF1 class like the Inquisitor, then that gives me 6-level spells from a pretty good list (that feels like cleric but with many of the abusable options missing), a good weapon and armor selection that includes enough martial ones but lacks the flexibility of actual martial proficiency, teamwork bonus feats encouraging me to do more tactical maneuvers and positioning, whopping 6 skill points and a huge list of skills meaning you could build a lot of very different inquisitors, judgements, which are nice situational combat options with a minor bonus, again allowing you to adapt to circumstances, not overpowering them. And then a domain. Which again allows you to customize even more by modyfying your spell list and getting a gimmick.
And then we have the archetypes, most doing a similar thing as the PF2 multiclassing.

I can't build anything like that in PF2, not even remotely. The flexibility and versatility of this PF1 base class overshadows them all. And i haven't even touched PF1 multiclassing, feats or race options.

But the PF1-Inquisitor is not even particular strong. It is just a very flexible, very fun class that lacks all the real power options. It is good enough that all the many things it can do stay relevant, but not impressive. There was no need to make PF2-characters as boring as they are just to maintain balance.

[NichG]

What, Eve Online isn't your idea of a perfect time either?

But I agree with the assessment of PF2e. Balance is good and useful, but chasing that too far can result in bland blandness.

--------

As for skills, I've been thinking about it.

I think that, if I were in charge, I'd want something like

Ability checks are for things anyone can do, at least in potential. They're the fall-back. And very loosey-goosey. No one has better access than anyone else, although some may have proficiencies (or points) in different areas. But no expertise, no "specializations". And no spells that directly buff ability checks. Which means rogues, for instance, aren't the "skill masters" via having bigger numbers in the ability check system.

Instead, areas of mastery/specialization come from class features that
1. set baseline situations where you don't need to roll at all
2. allow you to do certain things via some sort of roll (could look like an ability check, but doesn't directly implicate them) that no one else can do
3. Etc.

So it's not "rogues get bonuses to picking locks", it's "anyone who has and knows how to use a thieves kit can pick a lock. But a thief rogue can do so without a check and without setting off any traps because he's just that good." Or "anyone can jump X feet without a check or further with a (varying) check, but a level Y barbarian can jump up Y (for Y >> X) feet and land safely without a check." Etc.

That way the numbers work for the base level (ie non-specialists) and true mastery or specialization can come from specifically-worded exceptions to the general case. And no more "the best way to use the ability check system is with heavy amounts of spells. Or being a bard." Rogues would have to get some other notional niche other than "the skilled ones". But that was a poor niche to begin with.

I think. Maybe.

I do generally like this direction of design. But I think it will be necessary to not just harvest those things from real-life sorts of activities or even just simple scaling-up of real-life activities.

E.g. have a low-ish level rogue be able to automatically say what someone has in their inventory from 30ft away in a crowd. Have a high level rogue be able to do that for their holdings, even if they're in another country - literally get a sense of 'this guy hoards magical artifacts, that guy is all about lost art, and, uh, lets avoid that guy over there because he's giving me a 'I collect bodyparts' kind of vibe right now'. For traps, make it level-based rather than DC-based and have a rogue never set off a trap by mistake, allow them to automatically detect the trigger of traps up to level+X, automatically disarm traps up to their level if they take 10 minutes, up to their level-X as a single round action - traps above their level+X they 'get a bad feeling about the room' regardless of the level of the trap but can't pin it down more than that. Not too hard to convert trap levels to standard DCs if a non-rogue wants to detect/disarm with a check rather than an environment interaction.

Let paladins go a bit further than just casting Detect X and have them be able to see the state of people's souls in detail - curses, blessings, worries, sins, corruption, dire fates, etc - and to basically do anything 'being able to see someone's soul' would let a person do. Let them have a bat-signal like sense of people in need, so long as the need is aligned with their deity's ethos, as well as an innate sense of the sacred and the profane.

Let fighters know the level/HD of their opponents automatically. Let them treat creatures of larger size categories than themselves as terrain, fully enabling the whole 'jump from dragon to dragon during a sky battle' thing with no iterative chances of failure. Give them an 'honor and renown' ability where whenever they defeat a unit with a certain number of HD, they can bank that victory and use it to either automatically intimidate/demoralize one of their enemies up to that HD+X in the future (either combat-wise or narratively), or use it to get an appropriate boon or consideration when interacting with friendly society. A fighter enslaved to be a gladiator in the arena can literally use their victories to force their captors to grant their freedom, and a commander of a unit can force a king who personally hates them and wants them dead to still promote them up the ranks due to the weight of their deeds.

[Satinavian]

I do generally like this direction of design. But I think it will be necessary to not just harvest those things from real-life sorts of activities or even just simple scaling-up of real-life activities.

E.g. have a low-ish level rogue be able to automatically say what someone has in their inventory from 30ft away in a crowd. Have a high level rogue be able to do that for their holdings, even if they're in another country - literally get a sense of 'this guy hoards magical artifacts, that guy is all about lost art, and, uh, lets avoid that guy over there because he's giving me a 'I collect bodyparts' kind of vibe right now'. For traps, make it level-based rather than DC-based and have a rogue never set off a trap by mistake, allow them to automatically detect the trigger of traps up to level+X, automatically disarm traps up to their level if they take 10 minutes, up to their level-X as a single round action - traps above their level+X they 'get a bad feeling about the room' regardless of the level of the trap but can't pin it down more than that. Not too hard to convert trap levels to standard DCs if a non-rogue wants to detect/disarm with a check rather than an environment interaction.

Let paladins go a bit further than just casting Detect X and have them be able to see the state of people's souls in detail - curses, blessings, worries, sins, corruption, dire fates, etc - and to basically do anything 'being able to see someone's soul' would let a person do. Let them have a bat-signal like sense of people in need, so long as the need is aligned with their deity's ethos, as well as an innate sense of the sacred and the profane.

Let fighters know the level/HD of their opponents automatically. Let them treat creatures of larger size categories than themselves as terrain, fully enabling the whole 'jump from dragon to dragon during a sky battle' thing with no iterative chances of failure. Give them an 'honor and renown' ability where whenever they defeat a unit with a certain number of HD, they can bank that victory and use it to either automatically intimidate/demoralize one of their enemies up to that HD+X in the future (either combat-wise or narratively), or use it to get an appropriate boon or consideration when interacting with friendly society. A fighter enslaved to be a gladiator in the arena can literally use their victories to force their captors to grant their freedom, and a commander of a unit can force a king who personally hates them and wants them dead to still promote them up the ranks due to the weight of their deeds.
I think stuff like that would have worked really good in a PF2-like system as class-ability-feat. I have seen several paladins literally never casting "detect X". Baking this stuff hard into the class basics makes characters too samey again and you don't want a whole subclass for each ability.

[Ignimortis]

Yes, i share this feeling about PF2 characters.

The building process itself feels is actually quite good : Choices at every level, prequesits streamlines and easy to keep up on when wanted, proper multiclassing that allows to fish for any particular ability you need but is still limited enough, a skill system that deserves this name to go along with it, with the skills not hard linked to certain classes and that includes many nice skill based abilities...

But for all the many improvements and good ideas, the end results hardly ever fail to disappoint. If you want to be good at something, you need to concentrate and then you don't hve much choice left. And the system expects you to.

That's why I said that it's somewhat similar to a wargame. You get a function, maybe two, but you cannot do everything in the game even middlingly well (not like a 3.5 Wizard, more like a 3.5 Bard or decently-built Rogue), because the game 1) does not really have a way to break its' math 2) has math that expects someone to be the best they can be, and THEN tailors the success rate of 60-65% to that number, so someone who's behind even by 2 points (down a proficiency tier, has a stat at 16 instead of 20, doesn't get as fast a progression in a thing) is gonna have a success rate of 50% and crits only on a 20. It's a bit like 4e in that regard - it's a game that expects you to fish for every possible bonus, optimize your build for whatever single function you want to have, and then does everything around that assumption and tailors all the math towards the top end instead of middle or bottom. Except PF2 doesn't do +1 feats, and instead treats buffs/debuffs as semi-mandatory. If the target isn't being flanked, you're not doing melee right. If the target doesn't have Frightened or Clumsy or any other debuff you have to apply manually, you're doing combat wrong.

And, well, yeah. Any PF1 2/3 caster, martial adept, anything at all that isn't a plain low-OP Fighter - is more capable than PF2 characters. In fact, it seems that one of the design goals was to make Fighter the star of the show - and numerically, they certainly are, because their +2 to hit at all levels is about the only thing that the system does not take into account, thus they hit on 5+ and crit on 15+, but they also get legendary combat perception/initiative at level 7 (other classes get legendary perception no sooner than 13), get to wear heavy armor by default (which is the best armor this time around), switch Fighter feats every day, and so on. Which doesn't change one thing - they're still the people who say "I attack" every turn, except it's "I Power Attack' or "I Double Slice" or "I raise my shield and then attack". And that's the worst possible way to make martials and casters balanced - to balance them to the Fighter style of play with 1-2 options per turn.

[KorvinStarmast]

I'm not sure D&D players are ready for all Martials to be Barbarian-Rogues. :) Conan wept. :smallfrown:

I more talking about can they achieve balance in a D&D game with casters that have robust, creative, dynamic, and open ended spells? All D&D would have to do is rebuild the magic system from scratch. :smallsmile:

[NichG]

I think stuff like that would have worked really good in a PF2-like system as class-ability-feat. I have seen several paladins literally never casting "detect X". Baking this stuff hard into the class basics makes characters too samey again and you don't want a whole subclass for each ability.

I guess the way I'm thinking about that particular one is to really lean away from 'this is a spell-like ability that the character uses' and rather run it as 'this is something that happens to your senses when you get invested as a paladin by your deity', as well as to angle it away from alignment-dar and more to generally 'those connected to the gods have the ability to see and interact directly with souls'. I mean heck, you could even run it as something similar to the life-sight or life-sense that some undead get, except it would be soul-sight. In a broader sense what I'm trying to do with that is to take things where 'you need a spell to interact with that bit of metaphysics' and make those interactions, if not mundane exactly, be something that at least some people can just do with body and mind directly - so that it becomes part of the set of 'things people can do with skill/ability checks'.

[Tanarii]

Conan wept. :smallfrown:
Glad somebody got it. :smallbiggrin:

[PhoenixPhyre]

I guess the way I'm thinking about that particular one is to really lean away from 'this is a spell-like ability that the character uses' and rather run it as 'this is something that happens to your senses when you get invested as a paladin by your deity', as well as to angle it away from alignment-dar and more to generally 'those connected to the gods have the ability to see and interact directly with souls'. I mean heck, you could even run it as something similar to the life-sight or life-sense that some undead get, except it would be soul-sight. In a broader sense what I'm trying to do with that is to take things where 'you need a spell to interact with that bit of metaphysics' and make those interactions, if not mundane exactly, be something that at least some people can just do with body and mind directly - so that it becomes part of the set of 'things people can do with skill/ability checks'.

I've been thinking toward a model where things like detect magic and, yes, Divine Sense, become extensions on senses that everyone has already, instead of "things you can only do with feature X".

I already run detect magic (and Divine Sense) as being much more nuanced than they are by default--detect magic gives more information including about inactive magic or passive, non-spell magic and Divine Sense gives you readings on people who have been around <creature type> as well. Things like "that person stinks of devils" for someone who traffics with them.

But this would expand on that--

Everyone would have some form of innate "magic sense". Not tons, but enough to detect active spell workings at close range (unless suppressed by something like Subtle Spell). You may not know what's being cast or even necessarily who is casting (if you can't see/hear the casting), but at close range you can feel magic in use.

Those who pay attention can figure out more, and can detect weaker signals. So if you're going through a trove of treasure carefully, you'll be able to pick out what things are magical and what aren't. And anyone can make appropriate ability checks to figure out more.

Those with some connection to magic (spell casters, certain races, people with specific training, etc) are more attuned to certain types of magic. The druid might be able to sense the trees and natural spirits being agitated. The wizard might recognize a dangerous arcane buildup before anyone else. Etc.

Actively using a special ability (detect magic, Divine Sense, detect evil and good) gives you more insight into specific areas and may compensate for weak ability checks or give more focused information.

As a note, my paladins constantly use Divine Sense. And get good value out of it. And detect magic is a staple--the invocation to cast it at will is one of the most common for warlocks in games I've played with.

[Satinavian]

I guess the way I'm thinking about that particular one is to really lean away from 'this is a spell-like ability that the character uses' and rather run it as 'this is something that happens to your senses when you get invested as a paladin by your deity', as well as to angle it away from alignment-dar and more to generally 'those connected to the gods have the ability to see and interact directly with souls'. I mean heck, you could even run it as something similar to the life-sight or life-sense that some undead get, except it would be soul-sight. In a broader sense what I'm trying to do with that is to take things where 'you need a spell to interact with that bit of metaphysics' and make those interactions, if not mundane exactly, be something that at least some people can just do with body and mind directly - so that it becomes part of the set of 'things people can do with skill/ability checks'.
I have not a problem with making it an ability instead of a spell. That is why i meantioned the PF2 class feats, which are basically non-andatory class features.
The paladin has over the edition had so many different abilities, that the whole class idea is not particularly consistent. Sure, some might want it to be someone who can find evil and smite. Others might want someone who protects allies with auras and heals them with lay-on hands. Another might want to be an impervious bulwark with heavy armor and divine grace. and the forth one wants a knight in shining armor with a very special mount. And there are probably even more.

I mean you could probably try to make each paladin a subclass, but it might be better to go more modular altogether. Your idea of a powerful special sense couls be such a module. I certainly wouldn't want it as an important ability in the base paladin, considering how many paladins don't care at all about their special senses and how many tables downplay alignment.

[LibraryOgre]

I keep thinking of advanced skills in Mass Effect 2 and 3.

So, you have your skills, and for the beginning levels, everyone with that skill gets the same effect. But, when you hit the higher levels, you get to choose from several special effects related to the skill. So, for example, Warp Ammo levels 1-3 are the same for everyone. At level 4, though, you get a choice between "Your warp ammo does more damage" or "everyone in your squad gets the advantage of warp ammo".

This could easily be applied in a lot of systems, and in different ways. In 5e, for example, you might say that, if you're proficient in a skill, you can choose one "special effect" per point of proficiency bonus. Athletics might have options to climb quickly, or swim longer, or improve your base movement speed. In effect, they'd be "mini-feats" related to your skill proficiencies... not enhancing your chances, but giving you a specialization that others might not have pursued... I picked swimming, you picked running.

Though, of course, it's another layer of complexity.

[NichG]

I've been thinking toward a model where things like detect magic and, yes, Divine Sense, become extensions on senses that everyone has already, instead of "things you can only do with feature X".

I already run detect magic (and Divine Sense) as being much more nuanced than they are by default--detect magic gives more information including about inactive magic or passive, non-spell magic and Divine Sense gives you readings on people who have been around <creature type> as well. Things like "that person stinks of devils" for someone who traffics with them.

But this would expand on that--

Everyone would have some form of innate "magic sense". Not tons, but enough to detect active spell workings at close range (unless suppressed by something like Subtle Spell). You may not know what's being cast or even necessarily who is casting (if you can't see/hear the casting), but at close range you can feel magic in use.

Those who pay attention can figure out more, and can detect weaker signals. So if you're going through a trove of treasure carefully, you'll be able to pick out what things are magical and what aren't. And anyone can make appropriate ability checks to figure out more.

Those with some connection to magic (spell casters, certain races, people with specific training, etc) are more attuned to certain types of magic. The druid might be able to sense the trees and natural spirits being agitated. The wizard might recognize a dangerous arcane buildup before anyone else. Etc.

Actively using a special ability (detect magic, Divine Sense, detect evil and good) gives you more insight into specific areas and may compensate for weak ability checks or give more focused information.

As a note, my paladins constantly use Divine Sense. And get good value out of it. And detect magic is a staple--the invocation to cast it at will is one of the most common for warlocks in games I've played with.

I almost think this should be a separate thread: 'Alternate narrative explanations than spells for people interacting with the supernatural'

After all, the actual mythology and superstition out there is very rich in this kind of thing. Ghosts in popular culture give people a sense that something is wrong in the room, create a sudden feeling like the temperature dropped, induce brief hallucinations or shared perceptions with whatever trauma spawned the ghost, things are visible in mirrors, in the dark, in liminal perceptual environments, etc. Often altered states of consciousness are associated with getting a glimpse into the supernatural in general - drug-induced, near-death experiences, premonitions, deja vu, etc. Interpreting omens or signs of the way that the supernatural deforms the world (and holding that the supernatural is always actively deforming the world by its presence, just in metaphorical or indirect fashions) is another popular culture thing - tarot reading, tea leaves, shattering a mirror being bad luck, etc.

Sensing is one thing, but the next big leap is manipulation or active interaction. Not in the sense of trapping it down into a 'proper spell', but even things like being able to intentionally enter into a receptive or non-receptive state to supernatural things surrounding the person. We already have stuff like 'you can choose to waive a saving throw' or 'you can lower your SR intentionally' that are kind of supernatural muscles as it is, so why not expand that. Someone who bothers to practice the trick of it can 'invite an ambient supernatural effect in' or 'nudge it out of the way with their presence of spirit', and if they get really good at it can change the attitude of their soul like putting on a costume in spirit, such that supernatural things perceive them differently or form different connections.

And if you have the 'seed' of all these things establishing that it is possible for a mundane person to interact with supernatural things without needing to cast magic, then you can have classes represent specific training or practice that could more permanently deform someone's relationship with supernatural forces. The average person can dabble in being a ghost whisperer and could get very good at it, but someone who invites a ghost in and has them rewrite their body and soul to be closer to the other side is not just getting more skilled, they're doing something permanent to their nature to change the ways they can apply their skills. Being able to tell the state of someone's soul by gazing deep into their eyes, hypnotizing them, and having them manipulate a tarot deck could go really far, but inviting a deity to share a sliver of its soul-perception with the character or contracting a minor demon to ride shotgun on the character's soul is going to allow them to more directly engage with what's going on.


I have not a problem with making it an ability instead of a spell. That is why i meantioned the PF2 class feats, which are basically non-andatory class features.
The paladin has over the edition had so many different abilities, that the whole class idea is not particularly consistent. Sure, some might want it to be someone who can find evil and smite. Others might want someone who protects allies with auras and heals them with lay-on hands. Another might want to be an impervious bulwark with heavy armor and divine grace. and the forth one wants a knight in shining armor with a very special mount. And there are probably even more.

I mean you could probably try to make each paladin a subclass, but it might be better to go more modular altogether. Your idea of a powerful special sense couls be such a module. I certainly wouldn't want it as an important ability in the base paladin, considering how many paladins don't care at all about their special senses and how many tables downplay alignment.

I don't actually think it should be modular. Rather I'd say it should be worked into the core fiction that 'a paladin shares some of their deity's senses', independent of specific mechanical abilities or utilities. Then people can take that core element of the fiction and do different things with it to specialize - some can use it to find evildoers, some can use it to diagnose and treat harms to the soul, etc. But the underlying 'why' about paladin abilities shouldn't be an optional add-on thing.

And I did have a reason to say 'soul' here rather than 'alignment'.

[JNAProductions]

I don't actually think it should be modular. Rather I'd say it should be worked into the core fiction that 'a paladin shares some of their deity's senses', independent of specific mechanical abilities or utilities. Then people can take that core element of the fiction and do different things with it to specialize - some can use it to find evildoers, some can use it to diagnose and treat harms to the soul, etc. But the underlying 'why' about paladin abilities shouldn't be an optional add-on thing.

And I did have a reason to say 'soul' here rather than 'alignment'.

Paladins aren't beholden to deities. You're thinking of Clerics.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Paladins aren't beholden to deities. You're thinking of Clerics.

I think this is more of the usual Playgrounder's Mistake, thinking that 3e is still relevant all discussion of D&D is about 3e.

[LibraryOgre]

Paladins aren't beholden to deities. You're thinking of Clerics.

That varies by edition and setting. 5e is not the only D&D.

[JNAProductions]

That varies by edition and setting. 5e is not the only D&D.

Isn't this in the 5E subforum?
*Looks up*
Alright, that's my bad.

A more universally applicable note, then, would be that if you're gonna bake the fluff into the classes harder, they need to have well-defined fluff.

Currently, I can make an atheist Cleric; a brave, honest, and naïve Rogue; a weakling Barbarian; or a nature-hating Druid without any real issue in 5E. (Okay, there's ONE LINE in the Druid proficiencies section that'd make it weird. But I hate that line.) And that's cool-it's definitely against the default fluff of the classes, but the fluff and crunch aren't wholly as one.

If you want to make them more in-tune with each other, you'd have to both make sure the classes' fluff was better defined, and have enough classes to cover more possiblities.

[PhoenixPhyre]

and have enough classes to cover more possiblities.

Or decide that you don't value being generic and go for a more limited spectrum that you can cover better. But that gets in the way of MORE BOOKS, so it's a no.

[animorte]

Or decide that you don't value being generic and go for a more limited spectrum that you can cover better. But that gets in the way of MORE BOOKS, so it's a no.

This 100%. It is a company looking to make a profit after all. He who has the gold makes the rules, or some such. In this case, quite literally.

[KorvinStarmast]

They will never achieve that balance.

I just viewed the "1 D&D" video from WoTC as they announce 'the new edition' and of course the "more spells" spiel was a part of the message.

They have no interest in balance, but they do love them some bloat.

Tanarii (I think it was he) figured out that between races and classes and sub classes there are something like 2000 variations on that theme in the PHB alone.

When I hear "But we want more options!" as a complaint, I find its credibility to be low.

[NichG]

Isn't this in the 5E subforum?
*Looks up*
Alright, that's my bad.

A more universally applicable note, then, would be that if you're gonna bake the fluff into the classes harder, they need to have well-defined fluff.

Currently, I can make an atheist Cleric; a brave, honest, and naïve Rogue; a weakling Barbarian; or a nature-hating Druid without any real issue in 5E. (Okay, there's ONE LINE in the Druid proficiencies section that'd make it weird. But I hate that line.) And that's cool-it's definitely against the default fluff of the classes, but the fluff and crunch aren't wholly as one.

If you want to make them more in-tune with each other, you'd have to both make sure the classes' fluff was better defined, and have enough classes to cover more possiblities.

I generally think that 'things should mean something'. Fluff should have teeth.

But I'd separate personality trait fluff from 'what is the narrative explanation for the abilities' fluff. Like, you could have an atheist paladin sure, but that wouldn't change the fact that some divine force jammed a bit of itself into their soul, or that they aligned so perfectly with some cosmic principle that for a moment the universe didn't distinguish between them, and now it's just a thing they're living with. They might hate that fact of course...

So similarly, you could have a naive, brave, honest rogue, but if they have 20 levels of Rogue they've gone through a lot of training and practice and life experience - they might choose never to lie, or choose to believe the best about people, but they don't get to actually be incompetent or incapable. You could have a Lv20 Barbarian who never bulked up, but they've still unlocked the part of their brain that lets them control and channel instinctual rage, etc. They could choose not to use that of course.

[PhoenixPhyre]

They will never achieve that balance.

I just viewed the "1 D&D" video from WoTC as they announce 'the new edition' and of course the "more spells" spiel was a part of the message.

They have no interest in balance, but they do love them some bloat.

Tanarii (I think it was he) figured out that between races and classes and sub classes there are something like 2000 variations on that theme in the PHB alone.

When I hear "But we want more options!" as a complaint, I find its credibility to be low.

I agree. But I think the bold clause holds more generally for WotC at this point. And in general, what people want isn't "more options", it's more strong, broken, superior options.

[Ignimortis]

They will never achieve that balance.

I just viewed the "1 D&D" video from WoTC as they announce 'the new edition' and of course the "more spells" spiel was a part of the message.

They have no interest in balance, but they do love them some bloat.

Tanarii (I think it was he) figured out that between races and classes and sub classes there are something like 2000 variations on that theme in the PHB alone.

When I hear "But we want more options!" as a complaint, I find its credibility to be low.

People who say they want more options are perfectly valid in their opinion. Do you know why? Because out of those 2k variations, there are maybe 10 general playstyles total, and I'm being generous with that estimate. There is too little variance between most options presented to actually bother having them. Fighter, Ranger and Barbarian all play the same with very minor variations in actual decision-making and options that they have in play. Most prepared casters play very similarly.

We've discussed this before in this very thread - if D&D actually used its' 12 core classes properly, you wouldn't recognize most of them. But right now we have classes that barely differ enough to warrant playing them after already having played a similar one. You can pretty much exhaust 5e in three or four characters.

[PhoenixPhyre]

People who say they want more options are perfectly valid in their opinion. Do you know why? Because out of those 2k variations, there are maybe 10 general playstyles total, and I'm being generous with that estimate. There is too little variance between most options presented to actually bother having them. Fighter, Ranger and Barbarian all play the same with very minor variations in actual decision-making and options that they have in play. Most prepared casters play very similarly.

We've discussed this before in this very thread - if D&D actually used its' 12 core classes properly, you wouldn't recognize most of them. But right now we have classes that barely differ enough to warrant playing them after already having played a similar one. You can pretty much exhaust 5e in three or four characters.

I disagree. The whole "must have an entirely unique mechanical subsystem to be meaningfully different" thing is just so overly overblown. I can play 10 different heavy-armor, champion fighters and still have different characters.

If the only thing someone cares about is the mechanics, video games do that way better. With prettier graphics as well. The mechanics of a character are the least important, least meaningful parts IMO.

[NichG]

I mean, to be honest, the only reason I'd purchase an RPG these days is if it contained a lot of novel inspirations and ideas - setting, fluff, mechanics, etc. I personally at least have no reason to buy books that are 'like what came before, but we polished up the stuff that wasn't working'. I'm also not representative of the profitable part of the customer base of course. Since everything I run or play is really heavily customized anyhow, I'm looking for inspirations to steal from rather than specific boxed gameplay.

So in that sense it wouldn't be so much 'more options' for me as 'show me something I haven't seen before'. Or show me a way of doing something that is really elegant and that I didn't realize it could be done that way. I bought the 2nd edition of 7th Sea and I've never run or played it, but I've absolutely cribbed ideas from it about how to run things where rather than rolling to see if you succeed, you roll to see how many details about your success you get to control or augment. And the specific way they handle villain power bases is interesting enough I want to steal that at some point and use it for something.

[Ignimortis]

I disagree. The whole "must have an entirely unique mechanical subsystem to be meaningfully different" thing is just so overly overblown. I can play 10 different heavy-armor, champion fighters and still have different characters.

If the only thing someone cares about is the mechanics, video games do that way better. With prettier graphics as well. The mechanics of a character are the least important, least meaningful parts IMO.
If I'm gonna be spending 50%+ of the average session in combat, darn right I'm gonna care about mechanics, because that's what drives combat and what the game tends to be about. Roleplaying is all good and nice, but the mechanical base of the game is exactly that, mechanics. Otherwise we could just roleplay over some barely related dice rolls and resolve combat in five minutes, not an hour and a half.

And any decent character also uses mechanics to interact with the world outside of combat, too. Having access to at-will teleportation significantly affected how I played my Harbinger in one campaign. Having a passive Perception of 30+ significantly affected how I played my Monk in another campaign. Being a Sorcerer instead of a Champion Fighter significantly affected how I approached solving problems in yet another campaign.

[Satinavian]

I think this is more of the usual Playgrounder's Mistake, thinking that 3e is still relevant all discussion of D&D is about 3e.
I don't think so, namely because 3e paladins don't need deities either except in certain settings or as options.

[KorvinStarmast]

You can pretty much exhaust 5e in three or four characters. Not really, since you aren't playing a solo game - you are playing a team game. The various play tests and one shots I played let me experiment quite a bit - it showed the variety nicely.

[Ignimortis]

Not really, since you aren't playing a solo game - you are playing a team game.
And what does that change? Classes don't have that much interplay that a different group setup seriously changes how you're playing things. At best you can have more or less melees and then have to be more or less careful with your area effects, and I don't consider that to be an exciting and new gameplay shift.

Perhaps my perception of how similar the classes are is different from a lot of people, but I do think that D&D could learn quite a few things from videogames without becoming one. Having a number of both valid (as in, effective and somewhat equally beneficial) and cool (as in, not just doing something you could've done back at level 1 of any class, even if you do more of it) choices each turn is one of those things.

[KorvinStarmast]

And what does that change? Classes don't have that much interplay that a different group setup seriously changes how you're playing things. At best you can have more or less melees and then have to be more or less careful with your area effects, and I don't consider that to be an exciting and new gameplay shift. Your perspective here is single PC faced, and I get the feeling that we simply are not going to be able to get past this.

[Ignimortis]

Your perspective here is single PC faced, and I get the feeling that we simply are not going to be able to get past this.
I still don't understand what the point is supposed to be. Different party compositions do not actually impact the game strongly unless they're very arcane or especially focused on being unbalanced in a certain way. I've played in parties without a healer, in parties without any melee characters but me, in parties with mostly melee characters, etc. I am sure that if I had a 5e game on offer, I would probably decline simply because I wouldn't be enjoying the mechanical part at all and I don't see a way to make something that I would find enjoyable without homebrewing a whole class for myself.

[Pex]

I disagree. The whole "must have an entirely unique mechanical subsystem to be meaningfully different" thing is just so overly overblown. I can play 10 different heavy-armor, champion fighters and still have different characters.

If the only thing someone cares about is the mechanics, video games do that way better. With prettier graphics as well. The mechanics of a character are the least important, least meaningful parts IMO.

They may be of low value to you but not others. I can agree at some point a game could have too many different mechanics, but the mechanics part of D&D is part of the fun. The buttons players press to activate their class abilities is the fun along with the roleplay. D&D is a game, not glorified Improv.

[Mechalich]

They may be of low value to you but not others. I can agree at some point a game could have too many different mechanics, but the mechanics part of D&D is part of the fun. The buttons players press to activate their class abilities is the fun along with the roleplay. D&D is a game, not glorified Improv.

I think it's important to differentiate between individualized mechanics and whole mechanical systems.

Spellcasting is a mechanical system, while each individual spell - being ad hoc creations with specific rules for each one - is a mechanic. Spellcasting also shows how a single flexible mechanical system can support a truly immense number of individual mechanics (and also how doing so takes balance out back and beats it over the head). With regard to balance, it matters whether a system is available to all PCs - such as the skill system - or only to certain builds - such as spellcasting.

One of the problems D&D's balance related problems is that is has long attempted to achieve balance by giving different classes different levels of power within certain systems. Rogues get more skills, Fighters get more feats, etc. The problem with that is both that this has never been done effectively, and the overall power level between systems is not even close to equal. Spellcasting has traditionally absolutely dwarfed systems like Skills and Feats and while systems more or less equal in power to spellcasting have been offered - ex. psionics - these powers have usually been assigned only to alternative 'caster' types, not martials.

Tome of Battle was a notable exception in this regard and it represents a way to bridge the balance gap, which is to give 'martials' access to a system of their own that offers mechanics roughly equal in power to spellcasting. The problem with this, currently, is that the power level set by spellcasting is so high that any sort of 'maneuver system' or 'combat trick list' or basically anything else is unable to match that power level while retaining the veneer of not being superpowers (it is lower in 5e than 3e, which means you get a greater proportion of the overall power scale, but the impact still hits eventually).

[Dwarf 007]

The discrepancy between casters and martials, is real. One idea I've had, is to tell every PC to play 2 characters; 1 caster, and 1 martial. Then I don't want to hear constant bickering; because everyone gets to play both types. Best of both worlds, without the need to Multiclass. Or, you can allow multiclassing.

[LibraryOgre]

The discrepancy between casters and martials, is real. One idea I've had, is to tell every PC to play 2 characters; 1 caster, and 1 martial. Then I don't want to hear constant bickering; because everyone gets to play both types. Best of both worlds, without the need to Multiclass. Or, you can allow multiclassing.

You have recreated Ars Magica's troupe system, with Magi and Consortes.

Ars Magica makes no bones about it... the magi are the powerful ones. But the game is seldom everyone playing their magi. Instead, your magus takes part in a story they're interested in (for example, your Merinita magus is probably going to be taking part in stories involving Faerie), and one or more players use their consortes who may or may not be interested in a Faerie story, and the rest play Grogs... regular people who are working for the magi; they may be bodyguards, they may be clerks, or stablehands. I once played a maga's maid, because we were doing a political story and her having a maid made sense, and I could interact with the OTHER grogs and get information.

[Tanarii]

Tanarii (I think it was he) figured out that between races and classes and sub classes there are something like 2000 variations on that theme in the PHB alone.
5e Sub-Race / Class / Background has 2197 combinations, if you count a Str Fighter and Dex fighters as two different things and don't include Drow. That's before accounting for subclasses.

[Pex]

5e Sub-Race / Class / Background has 2197 combinations, if you count a Str Fighter and Dex fighters as two different things and don't include Drow. That's before accounting for subclasses.

Mathematically true, but I'm not convinced realistically true unless I read you wrong. A dwarf ST fighter champion and a human ST fighter champion are technically different due to racial differences, but they play close enough the same the difference is unnoticeable. Perhaps your math is not using factorials?

[Tanarii]

Mathematically true, but I'm not convinced realistically true unless I read you wrong. A dwarf ST fighter champion and a human ST fighter champion are technically different due to racial differences, but they play close enough the same the difference is unnoticeable. Perhaps your math is not using factorials?
No, because:
- That wasn't my intent, I calculated it originally for a different purpose.
- Distinguishing what plays close enough to another to be unnoticeable is a personal judgement, and would have to be done by each individual.

If someone want to make that distinction, they'd probably want to include subclasses instead of just classes, then determine value judgements of what are close enough to be unnoticeable within each of races, sub/classes, and backgrounds. And then possibly another pass with value judgement of specific combos.

For example, I wouldn't make a value judgement that a Mountain Dwarf and Half-Orc might as well be indistinguishable. But I might make one that when the Mtn Dw medium armor won't be used and the primary score & Con will start at the same value due to PB, they are, if I didn't care about possible in-world situation for the races and possible racial tendency personality differences that I'd account for. Similarly I wouldn't call all backgrounds indistinguishable but I'm sure some people would say they are all indistinguishable enough in terms of replay value, as in of course they could play a Human Fighter Hermit and Human Fighter Acolyte different, but they're close enough they wouldn't want to play both.

[Lucas Yew]

(caution: uses some HERO System terms)

Personally, I treat each Level as having an ascending set total of Character Points. Each ability, be it spells or feats, have a set ceiling in the form of maximum Active Points, and a floor of minimum Real Points; both ceiling and floor will rise base on your character Level, of course.

In this allegory, the current D&D "mundane" classes seem to either have a heap pile of unused CP for their character, AND/OR each power they have not meeting the desired ceiling/floor allotment for a not-overshadowed performance. All this not by their own choice.

[vasilidor]

I honestly feel as though that RIFTS managed to achieve game balance, by ignoring it.
Everyone got big huge explody attacks or invisibility or whatever.
Yes, I am well aware that they game is a headache to play or run.
D&D has a problem of trying to keep martials to "guy at the gym" without actually bothering to see what people are capable of doing in real life and at the same time trying to pit these guys against dragons. WOTC developers need to spend some time watching athletes on youtube for a while. I figure anything athletes can do with regularity, that is not particularly impressive to other athletes, is a DC 15 at worse in 5e. Things that do impress athletes or they have trouble doing with regularity would be 20 to 25.
Tools often make otherwise impossible feats possible, so tools should really provide more than just advantage in 5e. Sometimes they remove the need to make a skill check all together.
"But sometimes things go wrong and people die" you say. Yes, but most incidents happen less than 1% of the time with professional athletes. a 5% risk factor minimum for every challenge is actually huge compared to what actually happens with mountain climbers, free runners & etc. even before modern equipment was a thing. Heck, a lot of mountain climbers and free runners forego the use of equipment and still have an incident rate of less than 1%. This is why a D20 roll is a poor representation of skill checks and hazards. This is why having 1s auto-fail is a bad thing for skill checks. Heck, this is why having skill checks for most things is actually a bad idea, just reserve them for things that do have a failure rate. Which is not climbing a mountain with pitons and rope or clearing 10ft wide pits.
RIFTS had a 2% hard coded failure rate for skill checks, and that is still too high for what professionals do on a regular basis.
Spell casting allows casters to side step the whole skill check thing.

[Willie the Duck]

I honestly feel as though that RIFTS managed to achieve game balance, by ignoring it.
Everyone got big huge explody attacks or invisibility or whatever.
Yes, I am well aware that they game is a headache to play or run.
That's kinda similar to how TSR-era did things -- it clearly wasn't balanced, but everyone got a chance to do a thing that the other classes didn't, and maybe (depending on the campaign being played) even the 'suboptimal' options got a chance to shine. I agree that it is a way of addressing things, and also yeah that it is a big headache to play.


D&D has a problem of trying to keep martials to "guy at the gym" without actually bothering to see what people are capable of doing in real life and at the same time trying to pit these guys against dragons. WOTC developers need to spend some time watching athletes on youtube for a while. I figure anything athletes can do with regularity, that is not particularly impressive to other athletes, is a DC 15 at worse in 5e. Things that do impress athletes or they have trouble doing with regularity would be 20 to 25.
I kinda find unlikely this notion which keeps coming up that the devs somehow don't know what every Tom, Richard, and Harry here on the forums knows on these subjects like IRL athletics and the like. Just like I'm sure they know studded and ring mail armors weren't really a thing, I bet they know that the martial tasks (especially lifting and jumping) aren't realistic, but don't consider it a priority. D&D has always had issues with this (it was perhaps a little on the 'so gamist as not to bother discussing' back when encumbrance was in coins and movement was 120 feet/yards per 1 minute round and the like). I have to say, I don't know that that in particular would change much if it were made. I suspect most jumps aren't really 'exactly 8 yards' nor statues which might be lifted actually 800 lbs, so much as it is a 'hard' jump and a super-hard lift. That brings me back to my main point -- D&D won't be able to use these physical acts as a good balancing metric unless/until it decides emphatically what spot on the realism-epic scale it wants to be -- something I think they accurately have determined is not in their best interest because the player base is all over the map on the topic and any one choice would please much less than half of them. They took baby steps towards that in 3e (choosing low-epicness for magic-unaided physical acts in an edition where the effects of magic soared, biting them in a way that I'm sure has influenced to subsequent edition's physical activity rules).


Tools often make otherwise impossible feats possible, so tools should really provide more than just advantage in 5e. Sometimes they remove the need to make a skill check all together.
Fundamentally, short of my pie-in-the-sky suggestion of fundamentally re-assessing non-combat/non-magic activities in the game and creating a more rigorous framework for such a system overall, I think this is what the skill/task system needs overall. Greater Guidance on when to roll, when things obviate rolls, when it no longer becomes necessary (or interesting) to roll, when something ought to enhance the outcome rather than merely modify the roll, and so on.


a 5% risk factor minimum for every challenge is actually huge compared to what actually happens with mountain climbers, free runners & etc.
Again clarity needs to be added to the skill systems. It should be made obvious that skill checks should only apply to tasks where the outcome is unknown and the chance of failure (at whatever component of the activity has this chance of failure) is supposed to fall into a 5-95% range. d20, percentile, and even 3d6 dice checks are set up to model the common activities of the adventurers, where they attempt things they do not know they will succeed. That there are activities/edge cases that don't fit that model is not (specifically) a critique of the given system, but nor does it mean one should try to shoehorn those edge cases into the primary system. Drive to and from work without an accident? No (standard d20, %, or 3d6) check. Attempt something you should have no reasonable chance of success, but it isn't impossible, no check. In either case, if you want to set up some sort of roll (not a d20, %, or 3d6), sure, but that's up to you and should not be bound by the normal metrics.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Again clarity needs to be added to the skill systems. It should be made obvious that skill checks should only apply to tasks where the outcome is unknown and the chance of failure (at whatever component of the activity has this chance of failure) is supposed to fall into a 5-95% range. d20, percentile, and even 3d6 dice checks are set up to model the common activities of the adventurers, where they attempt things they do not know they will succeed. That there are activities/edge cases that don't fit that model is not (specifically) a critique of the given system, but nor does it mean one should try to shoehorn those edge cases into the primary system. Drive to and from work without an accident? No (standard d20, %, or 3d6) check. Attempt something you should have no reasonable chance of success, but it isn't impossible, no check. In either case, if you want to set up some sort of roll (not a d20, %, or 3d6), sure, but that's up to you and should not be bound by the normal metrics.

Yeah. You've supposed to have already trimmed out the "shouldn't fail" and "shouldn't succeed" (as demanded by the fiction and tone) cases, as well as "success not interesting" and "failure not interesting". Ability checks aren't designed to model every interaction between any character and the world--they're not the physics of the world. Instead, they're an uncertainty resolution system for narratives involving heroes. NPCs only make them when there's something implicating the PCs' interests involved (ie "on screen"). The village baker doesn't make a Profession (Baking) check every morning; the evil vizier doesn't make various social checks to work his evil wiles on the king before the game starts (although once the PCs are there and involved, there might be utility in checks so that the PCs can respond). Like everything else in the rules, it's a game-interface convention. Just like MMOs (and games generally) have really weird, unrealistic maps (how many farms are there in the entirety of the area around Stormwind in WoW? Like 4? And most of them are tiny and in trouble?). It's game convention for playability, not an attempt to accurately model a fictional reality.