Why don't 1s/20s autofail/pass on Saving Throws?

[Cheesegear]

I pointed out martials that can do higher concentration saves, and ones that cannot, and your response is "just be another class", I guess? Not really very helpful there. Didn't know that paladins were mandatory for higher level content, but the more you know I guess.

When it comes to breaking Concentration; It's better to use single, high-damage attacks. Such as the massive burst from a Paladin's Divine Smite. Or a Rogue's Sneak Attack.
Multiple attacks doing 10-15 damage apiece might end up dealing 60 damage overall. But a hostile creature with Con +9 can pass DC 10 checks all day. Is that the issue?

EDIT: An actual fix might be; At the end of the turn in which a creature took damage, that creature makes a Concentration save based on the total damage they took during that turn. This could work spectacularly because players might Ready their attacks so that they land on another's player's turn. In effect, a creature could take several turns of damage in the one turn using Readied Actions. Which is near-guaranteed to break Concentration. But it would require teamwork.

Therefore the ST must have at least 2 different outcomes.

If you do not have Bless, you may pass on a 20. Because there must be two outcomes. Success and Failure.
If you do have Bless, you don't pass on a 20, because a 20+1 is 21. The DC is 22. You could have rolled 19+3, or 18+4. But 20+1 is a failure because there are other ways to pass.

I don't think that's what you're meaning to argue.

[Amnestic]

When it comes to breaking Concentration; It's better to use single, high-damage attacks. Such as the massive burst from a Paladin's Divine Smite. Or a Rogue's Sneak Attack.
Multiple attacks doing 10-15 damage apiece might end up dealing 60 damage overall. But a hostile creature with Con +9 can pass DC 10 checks all day. Is that the issue?

It's an issue, or so I think. That's why I brought it up.

EDIT: An actual fix might be; At the end of the turn in which a creature took damage, that creature makes a Concentration save based on the total damage they took during that turn. This could work spectacularly because players might Ready their attacks so that they land on another's player's turn. In effect, a creature could take several turns of damage in the one turn using Readied Actions. Which is near-guaranteed to break Concentration. But it would require teamwork.

I find your framing of 'actual' fix disingenuous, but if you wanted to change concentration to be an end of turn save vs. total damage done/2 then...sure, probably wouldn't be against that. I'm sure someone else can run the maths, but I expect it'd generally cause a more failed concentrations overall than autofail/pass.

[Salmon343]

EDIT: An actual fix might be; At the end of the turn in which a creature took damage, that creature makes a Concentration save based on the total damage they took during that turn. This could work spectacularly because players might Ready their attacks so that they land on another's player's turn. In effect, a creature could take several turns of damage in the one turn using Readied Actions. Which is near-guaranteed to break Concentration. But it would require teamwork.

I quite like this. Using teamwork to break concentration on a tricky spell would be a nice bit of tactics in action. Especially as the ready action has limits - concentration for spells, and martials can only take one attack - so your decision has a cost. (And thus, requires tactical thinking to make.)

[Cheesegear]

It's an issue, or so I think. That's why I brought it up.

So that's the problem?

A character that does multiple small-damage attacks can't break Concentration, and that's why Nat 1s need to fail. Or let's say I make Conjure Animals to summon a bajillion cats doing 1 damage each. I can't break Concentration on the hostile caster using a bajillion cats. What gives?

Okay I don't agree that's an issue.

I'm sure someone else can run the maths, but I expect it'd generally cause a more failed concentrations overall than autofail/pass.

As I said I'm not interested in gambling. I'm not interested in my strategy being Hoping the DM rolls a '1' out of the four or five times I made them roll the dice. As has been said; That's planning to fail. And forget about whether or not the hostile has Advantage or some other way to mitigate it.

My plan would revolve around "Make them take a high DC saving throw, preferably with Disadvantage." ...Mage Slayer and a lot of damage will do nicely.

[Rukelnikov]

If you do not have Bless, you may pass on a 20. Because there must be two outcomes. Success and Failure.
If you do have Bless, you don't pass on a 20, because a 20+1 is 21. The DC is 22. You could have rolled 19+3, or 18+4. But 20+1 is a failure because there are other ways to pass.

I don't think that's what you're meaning to argue.

Well, that's technically fine, as long as the possibility of success is there I'm fine with it.

I do think just making 20 auto pass makes for a more elegant rule, because otherwise you can have a scenario like you roll at -5 against a DC 21 and have bless, which is the case that gets ascended to pass status? 20 +4? 20+ anything? 14+2? It's less arbitrary if 20 is just settled as the auto pass face of the die.

[Segev]

Big singleton bruiser-casters such as dragons getting auto-pass due to high Constitution saves for their Concentration checks actually fully sells me on the RAW for 5e. That seems a good reason to keep it. Making the dragon's Tasha's hideous laughter or dominate monster or silence spell all the scarier because breaking concentration becomes that much harder is great. It makes the caster/bruiser combo actually scary, rather than unfocused.

And imagine how good it would feel to be the odd wizard who really pumped up his Constitution save and then stood next to his Paladin buddy to make sure that he only breaks concentration on truly massive damage.

[Telok]

Just a point of info. The 'three round combat' doesn't really seem to be a thing past level 10.

Across 48 sessions & 103 combats in a level 10 to 17 campaign (that's when I started keeping track) my character had 624 turns. Call it an average 6.5 rounds per combat.

Specifically: this character turns per combat @ mean 6.06, max 17, min 3, median 5, mode 4.

[Cheesegear]

It seems to me that the issue is "Doing low amounts of damage to high-level casters doesn't seem to have any effect."

...Yes. Correct. I don't see the problem.

At a certain point (usually Level 7), Concentration as a mechanic basically just serves to prevent Casters from having multiple (powerful) spells active at the same time. Mid- and high-level characters just don't have the same problems Level <5 characters do. A Dragon shouldn't break Concentration.

The other issue at the high end, is "The strongest creatures in the game are too strong for certain characters or builds." the example given in the OP, at least, being an actual Deity-tier hostile.
Okay. Again. I don't understand the problem. But I looked into it, because I felt the Deity-tier hostile was a bit of a hyperbolic example.

"If you have a low or even negative Wisdom modifier, an Ancient Dragon's fear-effects will annihilate you."

Uhh...That still sounds fine, to me. You're up to fighting an Ancient Dragon, and at no point in the last 10 levels have you figured out how to counter Frightened? This is on you.

[rel]

The real issue for me is not the specific nature of saving throw mechanics, but the presence of effects that immediately remove a character from the fight, save or no.

I think the game is improved if effects like that simply do not exist.

At no point, should a player be unable to participate in the game no matter how badly they roll or how their character was constructed.
Steps were taken to reduce the frequency with which this happened in 5e, when compared to earlier editions, but I don't think they went far enough, and some of those efforts were actually walked back over time.

The issue isn't saves, it's the effects you have to save against.

How many times in stories are princes turned into frogs or champions turned to stone? Those elements are very much part of medieval fantasy stories and should be present in the game, if some groups don't like those kinds of effects they shouldn't use them, but their presence in the spellcasting chapter and monster manual is more than warranted.

I agree that such effects can exist within the game. However, I hold that the combat minigame would be improved if such powerful all or nothing effects were removed from within it specifically.

By all means allow the evil wizard to turn the prince into a frog with a long magical ritual, or bewitch him into an eternal slumber by getting the hapless young man to eat a poisoned apple.
My issue is the ability to deploy that kind of effect on a hero of renown with a finger snap in the middle of combat.

And I have a whole seperate argument about the issues of putting such effects in a spellcasting chapter accessible only to some classes, but this thread isn't really the place for it.

Terrain can remove a character from a fight. A bad Initiative roll removes a character from a fight - the fight is over before you even get a turn.

Something, something...Surprise round.


Down this road leads "Conditions shouldn't exist, and the only way to remove Creatures from the game is to do Hit Point damage."

That game gets boring pretty fast. Unless you follow up with "The players should be allowed to, but the DM can't..."



An Ancient Black Dragon has a Breath Weapon with a DC of 22.
On a failed save, it can fairly moderately do around 100 damage. It Recharges.

It doesn't paralyse. It doesn't petrify. The Breath Weapon just does hit point damage. Is this what you want everything to be?

Terrain completely removing a characters ability to act; Not curtailing it, not forcing the use of different tactics, but flat out "your character can't take any actions, your turn is over" is also something I would deem a failure of the combat minigame.
Ditto the combat ending before a player even gets the chance to act.
And I do have ways to address these issues too, although I won't go into detail here as they are a bit off topic.

Let me elaborate on my issues with conditions as written, since you're clearly confused as to my argument: I'm not saying conditions shouldn't exist, I'm saying that conditions that completely negate action shouldn't exist.
Blind and prone are fine, stunned and paralysed are not.

There's actually a large unexplored space of potential conditions that curtail action without flat out negating the ability to act: Forcing a character to stay at distance or remain in melee, weakening the DC's of spells and other powers to force a change of tactics, reducing damage output (perhaps selectively) to again encourage a change in tactics, denying the use of a hand preventing the use of two handed weapons or spells that have material and somatic components, applying disadvantage to certain kinds of action, partial negation of action such as the loss of the move or bonus actions, and so on.

Then you can further enhance things by having conditions which can be removed or mitigated in various ways, that have an enhanced effect in certain terrain or under certain conditions or that grow more dangerous over time.

There's plenty of room for interesting conditions that are not hit point damage and are also not some variant of "your character can't act. Your turn is over. Next player."
Which honestly seems about as boring as hit point damage to me.


In short, if at some point a player can't participate in the game for an extended period because their character is incapacitated, and they may as well go get the pizza because they certainly aren't going to be playing then I see that as a failure of the games system. One so egregious it needs to be corrected with house rules.

[Cheesegear]

I'm not saying conditions shouldn't exist, I'm saying that conditions that completely negate action shouldn't exist.
Blind and prone are fine, stunned and paralysed are not.

So once again, I reiterate, down that road simply leads to "The only way to remove someone from a combat is via Hit Point damage."

What are the consequences of failure? Hit Point damage? Please. One Short Rest and I'm back in business.
My opinion is that that's lame. You can heal Hit Point damage.

Oh wait. You can heal Conditions, too. As I said previously; At a certain point, you, being Incapacitated for any length of time, is your teammates' fault.

There's plenty of room for interesting conditions that are not hit point damage...

But are they complicated nonsense that slows down game play?

You're Paralysed. Make a saving throw.

You've got one hand tied behind your back and one foot is also caught in a trap. You have half movement unless you Dash, but if you rip yourself out of the trap you can take some damage, but also you can spend your Action to get out safely but you can't move whilst you do that. You can attack normally with one-handed weapons but not with two-handed weapons. You can add your Dex to your AC against ranged attacks, but not melee attacks...And...

Can I just be Paralysed, please?

In short, if at some point a player can't participate in the game for an extended period because their character is incapacitated, and they may as well go get the pizza because they certainly aren't going to be playing then I see that as a failure of the games system. One so egregious it needs to be corrected with house rules.

If we enter a roleplaying portion of a session, and they have Charisma as a dump stat and/or just a poor roleplayer in general, they may as well go get the pizza.

If there's a Dragon 30 ft. in the air, flying and dropping Breath Weapons and Fear; Whose fault is it that the Fighter doesn't have Javelins?

[Zuras]

Every time I have run into ridiculous DC saves being a problem, I considered it a failure of the 5e stat based saving throw system at high levels, not a reason to give every roll a 5% auto failure or success chance. By way of comparison, a 7th level OSE fighter has a 55% chance to ignore any paralysis type effect. By 13th level it’s up to 75%.

Old school D&D’s complete lack of scaling save difficulty by opponent has its own issues, but the relative incompetence of 5e martials in the face of mental attacks really deviates from the source material. That’s a bigger discussion, though—I know some popular 3rd party 5e supplements that add partial effect conditions, which I like much better than high DC hard control.

Many of them explicitly build on the model of Drow sleep poison (fail, you get a bad consequence, fail by 5 or more you get an out of action consequence). That plus some version of Savage Worlds’ explicit acknowledgement of low-level plot armor for PCs and major NPCs would be an improvement over the existing system. It’s just easier to do cleanly in an exploding dice system.

[gijoemike]

Man, everyone here is just stuck on DC21+ saves. Cheesegear above came closest to my line of thinking when they mentioned bless. Forget BUFFS. The key to this discussion are DEBUFFS.

Bards cutting words, Druid's woe ability, the spell bane

PCs throw out a spell with a DC 20 with the creature in question has a +0 or DC 19 with a save of -1. One of the abilities above are used.

The PCs are using resources to increase the odds of success. The creature would have succeeded on a nat 20 only. But if 20 auto succeeds anyway the abilities and use of the DEBUFF are meaningless.

Sometimes you cannot succeed a roll. Especially when powers/abilities are used to specifically make one fail.


Flip side
The big bad wizard casts the curse of doomed sleep on the kingdom. "MWAHHHHHAHA my revenge hath come at last.... wait why is 1/20 of the population still walking around completely unfazed by my powerful ritual? Only the heroes of legend who wield the chime of awakening should be able to withstand this spell." roughly 4 mins later. Everyone is awake.

Sometimes the big bad needs to actually pose a threat. That means that regular people just cannot resist the magic. You the PC roll up with a cloak of protection, ways to get advantage, prof in saves, magic spells, and a singing bard. You have a good chance to pass the DC 21 effect.


Now let's have a DC of only 17 with a +2 save. The save is made on a 15. So the bard uses cutting words and rolls an 6 on the die. In theory the creature would still fail even if a 20 due to how lucky and awesome the bards use of that ability was. Why are we arguing against the PC being awesome when using a variable power correctly and rolling well?

What if the druid uses Woe, the bard cutting words, and bane was on the target. Rolling 4, 5, 4. That's right the target has a -13 save. PC powers should be useful and work in the cases where they should work. How about we let teamwork .... work.



tl;dr: allow debuffs to have effect against mooks. Let bad person actually be kind of competent in their specialized area. Only achievable if we get rid of 1 fails/20 succeed.

[rel]

Terrain completely removing a characters ability to act; Not curtailing it, not forcing the use of different tactics, but flat out "your character can't take any actions, your turn is over" is also something I would deem a failure of the combat minigame.
Ditto the combat ending before a player even gets the chance to act.
And I do have ways to address these issues too, although I won't go into detail here as they are a bit off topic.

Let me elaborate on my issues with conditions as written, since you're clearly confused as to my argument: I'm not saying conditions shouldn't exist, I'm saying that conditions that completely negate action shouldn't exist.
Blind and prone are fine, stunned and paralysed are not.

There's actually a large unexplored space of potential conditions that curtail action without flat out negating the ability to act: Forcing a character to stay at distance or remain in melee, weakening the DC's of spells and other powers to force a change of tactics, reducing damage output (perhaps selectively) to again encourage a change in tactics, denying the use of a hand preventing the use of two handed weapons or spells that have material and somatic components, applying disadvantage to certain kinds of action, partial negation of action such as the loss of the move or bonus actions, and so on.

Then you can further enhance things by having conditions which can be removed or mitigated in various ways, that have an enhanced effect in certain terrain or under certain conditions or that grow more dangerous over time.

There's plenty of room for interesting conditions that are not hit point damage and are also not some variant of "your character can't act. Your turn is over. Next player."
Which honestly seems about as boring as hit point damage to me.


In short, if at some point a player can't participate in the game for an extended period because their character is incapacitated, and they may as well go get the pizza because they certainly aren't going to be playing then I see that as a failure of the games system. One so egregious it needs to be corrected with house rules.

So once again, I reiterate, down that road simply leads to "The only way to remove someone from a combat is via Hit Point damage."

What are the consequences of failure? Hit Point damage? Please. One Short Rest and I'm back in business.
My opinion is that that's lame. You can heal Hit Point damage.

Oh wait. You can heal Conditions, too. As I said previously; At a certain point, you, being Incapacitated for any length of time, is your teammates' fault.

If the only consequence of failure is hit point damage (or death, being turned into a tortoise, or some other variant on 'you can no longer play the game') then I would say the game needs to be structured better.
None of those seem like particularly interesting consequences to me.

But are they complicated nonsense that slows down game play?

You're Paralysed. Make a saving throw.

You've got one hand tied behind your back and one foot is also caught in a trap. You have half movement unless you Dash, but if you rip yourself out of the trap you can take some damage, but also you can spend your Action to get out safely but you can't move whilst you do that. You can attack normally with one-handed weapons but not with two-handed weapons. You can add your Dex to your AC against ranged attacks, but not melee attacks...And...

Can I just be Paralysed, please?

No, I haven't found those conditions I've actually tested to be particularly onerous to track or use at the table. And I don't see any reason why my other suggestions which I have not yet had the chance to test would be either.
In my experience custom conditions slow down play less than existing complex powers like spells which often require referencing a seperate book for spell rules text and then the base rules of spell casting or the conditions index for clarification.

Obviously, no rule, official or otherwise will see universal approval, but changes like those I proposed are popular at my tables; They reward players for paying attention to the state of the battlefield and changing their tactics in response to changing circumstances.

If we enter a roleplaying portion of a session, and they have Charisma as a dump stat and/or just a poor roleplayer in general, they may as well go get the pizza.

If there's a Dragon 30 ft. in the air, flying and dropping Breath Weapons and Fear; Whose fault is it that the Fighter doesn't have Javelins?

I also have house rules to help keep people involved during the exploration and social pillars of the game, and ways to gently remind a player that a lack of optimal gear doesn't prevent them from participating.

But again, this thread is for people who have an issue with the existing combat mechanics, specifically saves, and ways that the system might be altered to alleviate them.