D&D 5e has failed

[Chamomile]

Variable bonuses were a 5e optional rule in the DMG. Mearls seems to like this idea a lot.

[Pedantic]

• A fixed bonus you identify getting the bonus, and add the value to your result.
  A variable bonus you identify getting the bonus, get the appropriate physical die, roll the dice, maybe have one of the dice roll off the table and have to get re-rolled, read the dice, and add the value to your result.

Literally all the steps are there, but then there are some extra steps involving interacting with physical objects. It must take at least as long, and pretty much always takes at least marginally more time.

-Username17

I've been playing with some new players lately, and it's mind-boggling to me how tricky the habit of "roll die, add number to die, report total" seems to be to pick up. We're on session 4, and there's still frequent reminders not to report the number that was actually rolled.

Is anyone trying to solve this problem technologically? Rolling physical dice is really too integral to D&D to go away quietly, so entirely electronic dice rollers are probably out, but if there was a die with simple LED displays that you could program to just directly show totals for rolls it would make gaming so much smoother. Or maybe I should just 3d print new dice for my players "roll the red one if you're raging, blue one if you're fautigued, you've leveled up, let's get you new dice."

I've been googling around, but no one seems to have a product that solves for this particular niche.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I've been very impressed by Roll20's tools. For example, their 5e character sheet is set up so that every skill name, saving throw, and listed weapon is a button that, when pressed, makes the relevant roll (including all non-situational modifiers), totals it, and posts it in a formatted template to the chat. By default, it actually rolls and reports twice, in case you had advantage/disadvantage. For a weapon attack roll, the template contains its own button to reveal a damage roll result. It's remarkably elegant, and I cannibalized much of their code for my own sheet.


Hover the mouse for a breakdown of the total.

I've not tried using it on a smartphone or tablet for tabletop purposes, but it seems worth a shot.

[Username17]

Variable bonuses were a 5e optional rule in the DMG. Mearls seems to like this idea a lot.

Variable bonuses answer a specific game design question: if you want to provide people the ability to get better but you don't want to push entirely off the RNG, then giving a bonus which is a die that is bigger on average, but can still roll a 1 and thus doesn't actually push you off the RNG. Adding +1 uses up one of the 19 possible bonuses before you leave the RNG altogether, but changing your bonus die from d6 to d8 adds the same on average but has no effect on leaving the RNG.

Now you can ask yourself whether this is in fact a design problem that needs solving. I would submit that if you have decided to have a d20 as your RNG then you probably want the benefits of flat RNGs like easily calculated odds, and have at some level accepted the peculiarities such as the relatively small number of meaningful bonuses you can add before hitting the end of the RNG. So in a very real way, the design problem that variable bonuses solves is one that could be better solved by just using a fucking dicepool system instead. You basically get all the problems of a dicepool system by doing it anyway. Indeed, you can look at a dicepool system as a form of variable bonuses - every bonus is one die afterall.

-Username17

[souran]

Variable bonuses aren't a new idea. They aren't even a new idea for Mearls. You had various d4s and d6s and shit to add and subtract from things in Iron Heroes back in the Bush administration. It very definitely isn't faster.

• A fixed bonus you identify getting the bonus, and add the value to your result.
  A variable bonus you identify getting the bonus, get the appropriate physical die, roll the dice, maybe have one of the dice roll off the table and have to get re-rolled, read the dice, and add the value to your result.

Literally all the steps are there, but then there are some extra steps involving interacting with physical objects. It must take at least as long, and pretty much always takes at least marginally more time.

-Username17

Ok, this is not really looking at the same thing anymore and is missing the forest for the trees.

The part that is faster is adjudicating most rolls using advantage/disadvantage versus static modifiers.

Advantage/disadvantage is faster because identifying which of two numbers rolled on two separate dice is larger or smaller is faster than the act of addition.. Inspection is faster than algebra.

The reason 5e dice rolls play faster at the table than 3.x is because typical rolls are a d20 + a number from the character sheet. The most common modifier to rolls is advantage or disadvantage which is, again, assed as heuristically or in a "in sum the character is favorable/unfavorable"

in 3.x the most common roll is d20 + number from the character sheet + circumstantial bonuses. 3.X (especially pathfinder) typically has DM bonuses (or penalties), equipment bonuses, and class feature bonuses that are not normally included in the default value (stat + skill or whatever) that the player has on their sheet. I usually used YAPCG for my pathfinder character sheets. That character builder creates a separate page for all your conditional modifiers. Even low level characters can have more than a half a page. Here is the other thing: Even if you DO NOT have a personal conditional modifier for a roll, you probably are going to go and review your modifiers and check to make sure that you don't. This slows the game down as well.

What is faster is getting around the table getting actions resolved. Now, it doesn't provide better resolutions. Somebody already pointed out that they don't like that its biggest effect is to make you less likely to trip over your own dick on something you are supposed to be good at but doesn't ever let you exceed your regular best possible result. That is true, and if that is critical to your system then advantage/disadvantage can't do that.

Is 5E slowed down by using random modifiers for things like bless and bard inspiration? Yes. Anytime you roll multiple dice and add the results its slower than adding a flat modifier you know before hand. Then again a multiple damage dice spell or attack is slower to resolve than one that rolls a single die. But these don't make up the majority of events that need to be resolved in a typical session.

Hell, even most of this post is arguing things to out in the weeds. These edge cases are not the concern.

In table play the advantage system has 2 traits that make it faster than the flat modifiers system:

1) Establishing advantage/disadvantage is faster than establishing the all the modifiers that apply to the roll.
2) Determining which of two numbers is larger or smaller is normally faster than adding up a short string of small numbers.

Certainly you lose advantages associated with the flat modifiers system for this. If you play by post or using a computer aid then it doesn't matter at all. If you play adventurer's league or home face-to-face then I have seen multiple people comment on how 5e is "fast."

[Orca]

Is anyone trying to solve this problem technologically? Rolling physical dice is really too integral to D&D to go away quietly, so entirely electronic dice rollers are probably out, but if there was a die with simple LED displays that you could program to just directly show totals for rolls it would make gaming so much smoother.

I had a couple of 'd6s' which weren't programmable but otherwise worked like this. I also got rid of them - they made a chirping sound as they 'rolled' and one guy we game with kept rolling them repeatedly because he liked the sound, even though everyone else found it annoying. Richard's like that unfortunately.

So this is certainly technically possible and even cheap.

[Username17]

Souran, I just can't read your defense of Advantage as anything more or less than "the game is more limited in scope." 5e can't give out more than one Advantage or Disadvantage. There are some exploits involved in picking up five times disadvantage and canceling it all out with a single advantage, but at the end of the day what we're actually saying is that the game can't handle two good things or two bad things and thus most of the time there's no reason to make choices or interact with the world.

Once you have a basic magic buff or a bit of stealth there just isn't any reason to claim the high ground or grease up the floor under your opponents or dazzle them with laser beams or fucking anything. Having obtained advantage from any source at all, the only thing left to do in combat is just to spam your basic attack until you win or lose. It's awful.

It' like fucking nWoD combat. An empty die rolling exercise where combats don't really evolve after the initial setup and questions of position and intra-combat actions are essentially meaningless.

Now that's not an indefensible design. If you had a setup like Arkham Horror, where some of the characters were expected to fight and some were not and in any case the main portion of the game was supposed to be finding references to cult symbols in old journals from the historical society's archives, then sure. Go ahead and reduce combat to a tactics-less "roll your combat bigness" step so that it takes up precisely as much table time as the mechanic's action of getting the car to start. But we're talking Dungeons and Fucking Dragons. Combat is a big thing, and everyone is supposed to participate. And beyond that, the combats still aren't fast. Each Clay Golem has 133 hit points, and basic attacks do less than 20 damage. It takes the better part of an hour to do a major fight, and I honestly don't feel like I have any real choices to make during that entire period.

-Username17

[infected slut princess]

Variable bonuses aren't a new idea. They aren't even a new idea for Mearls. You had various d4s and d6s and shit to add and subtract from things in Iron Heroes back in the Bush administration. It very definitely isn't faster.

I had forgotten all about Iron Heroes and then you had to go and mention it and now my day is ruined. Iron Heroes was such shit and it is a testament to the retardation of this industry that it was considered a laudable part of Mearls' CV.

"feat mastery" LOL! Fuckin Mearls.

[Eikre]

Is anyone trying to solve this problem technologically? Rolling physical dice is really too integral to D&D to go away quietly, so entirely electronic dice rollers are probably out, but if there was a die with simple LED displays that you could program to just directly show totals for rolls it would make gaming so much smoother.

I had a couple of 'd6s' which weren't programmable but otherwise worked like this. I also got rid of them - they made a chirping sound as they 'rolled' and one guy we game with kept rolling them repeatedly because he liked the sound, even though everyone else found it annoying. Richard's like that unfortunately.

So this is certainly technically possible and even cheap.

So, what, not gonna link us to something?

[OgreBattle]

If you have a system where static modifiers are almost never fiddled with at the table, but advantage/disadvantage rerolls are the main way to apply temporary modifiers then I could see a strength to it.

I think the FF Star Wars game only uses additional dice for temporary bonuses and penalties

[Whiysper]

Okay, so I'm gonna need you to break this one down Whiysper. Because that sounds like some broken cheese and I need to know how you're doing it.

Apologies for the late reply - was on a beach without internet .

Winged Tiefling - racial variant, lose the crappy casting for 30' flight.
Blade Pact - you can make any weapon your 'Pact Blade'. Even, say, a bow.
Hexblade - add Cha to hit and damage with your Bonded Weapon and/or Pact Blade.

I may have the Blade Pact and Bonded Weapon mixed up as to which allows ranged weapons, but one or the other definitely allows it. I think Bonded, on reflection, but not 100% sure (and AFB with no SRD). Came online at level 3 for me - Archetype and Pact by that stage, which combined to give me +4TH and Damage at bow range. Not bad, and it's magical weapons rather than magic (which my DM was busy nerfbatting into the floor for plot resaons - many 'totally magic immune' things. But arrows that hit like Eldritch Blasts work just fine ).

At low level, Eldritch Blast is probably just better, honestly, but you're not flying in medium armour while being a wizard . And when Crossbow expert and/or Sharpshooter kicks in, you're dropping multiple very nasty arrows on people (Multi-attack, bonus action for another shot - 3/round, and you're looking at 10 from Sharpshooter, 1d6 from Hex, +1-3 for weapon, +5 for Cha)

If you're serious about flying archery, I think Brute Fighter3/Hunter Revised Ranger3/HexBlade Warlock14 will take the cheese home (most of Warlock spellcasting, and 1d4+1d6 bonus damage, plus Close-quarter Fighting and Archery style for another +3 TH). I could do the maths - but I find 5e theorycraft is like trying to gorge at the salad bar - kind of disappointing in the lack of substance. If anyone super cares, I'll try and scrape together an actual progression one of these evenings .

Hope that helps.

[Hadanelith]

OgreBattle: Only kinda? The FFG Star Wars RPGs (and now their generic, settingless RPG, called Genesys) have a really *weird* dice system. No numbers. The dice are custom, with 3 kinds of positive symbols, and 3 corresponding negative symbols, which all cancel out, and you only care about the net result for each symbol type (why yes, without a dice app, working out the results for a sizeable dice pool takes forever (which they realized, and so they capped stats and skills to keep dice pools smaller...and then put no real limit on dice pool modifying traits)).
You can't *quite* say that the system only adds dice for temp bonuses and penalties, unfortunately. There are many abilities you can get that solely exist to remove penalty dice, or downgrade one kind of negative die to a weaker version. And they frequently stack. Mind you, it can take quite a while to get enough xp to *really* bend the dice system over your knee, but by the rules it's possible to remove something like 10 penalty dice from specific skill checks, if you focus your character build on it. And that's all BEFORE we include any kind of Force shenanigans, which can just throw everything into chaos and madness.

[VladtheLad]

Would 5e break if you could have multiple advantage/disadvantage (3+ dice)?

[Chamomile]

Nope. That house rule removes the biggest problem with the advantage/disadvantage system with only minor drawbacks: Rolls with lots of advantage or disadvantage will take a little bit more time to resolve because you need to compare more and more numbers against each other, but we're still talking 5-10 seconds and you won't usually have that much advantage so it's not a big deal, and they will require a bunch of extra d20s, but most gamers have big dice collections anyway.

[nockermensch]

Would 5e break if you could have multiple advantage/disadvantage (3+ dice)?

Dicepools! I warned you!

[Jefepato]

So, I've been playing a few sessions of 5e with my gaming group (better mediocre gaming than no gaming, I guess).

When we left off last night, our 2nd-level party was facing a bunch of CR 1/2 gnolls who...each have more HP than even our toughest PC. It wasn't going well.

The numbers don't seem to add up. Granted, our tactics probably aren't the best (several of the players are inexperienced with RPGs in general and D&D in particular), but I can't think of anything particularly stupid we did, and we were getting our asses kicked slowly but surely.

Are the CR numbers suppose to mean something different in 5e? I glanced at the DMG's bit on encounter design and it didn't sound any different than I remember, but I'm pretty sure CR 1/2 monsters never had 22 HP in 3.x.

[Whiysper]

IIRC, Gnolls are the ones with the gangbang buff and massive HP compared to the PCs, yes?

CR in 5e is meant to indicate... well... think of it more like a rough indication of what level spells you might want to use on them. Or the square root of their shoe size.

It's basically useless. Minimal relation to actual ass-kicking potential. Gnolls, Bugbears, Intellect Devourers - all low CR, all potential TPKs.

Having actually RUN 5e (for my sins), you have to basically ignore it, and just look at the numbers, work out the odds yourself. No other good alternative.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Are the CR numbers suppose to mean something different in 5e?

No, it's meant to mean the same thing.

This shows the average level of a party of adventurers for which one creature would make an encounter of moderate difficulty. Assume a party of four fresh characters (full hit points, full spells, and equipment appropriate to their levels). Given reasonable luck, the party should be able to win the encounter with some damage, but no casualties.

A monster’s challenge rating tells you how great a threat the monster is. An appropriately equipped and well-rested party of four adventurers should be able to defeat a monster that has a challenge rating equal to its level without suffering any deaths.

It's just that the 3e designers did math and rigorous playtesting, and the 5e designers didn't.

[Username17]

5e Challenge Rating is just about the worst piece of design in all of 5e. Which is really truly an achievement considering how bad so much of the game actually is. So there was a half-formed idea that 5th edition Challenge Rating was supposed to be the level where a monster challenged the party and was an appropriate monster to face with difficulty but still probably have everyone survive. So at first glance, 5e CR is kinda supposed to mean 3rd edition's CR+1 or +2. So a CR 5 monster in 5e is what you'd call a CR 6 or 7 monster in 3rd edition.

So that's already a terrible idea, because the difference between CR 6 and Cr 7 was already pretty large and calling creatures from both sample sets "CR 5" is needlessly confusing and quite hard to explain. And of course, making your normal encounters "hard" makes it so that you don't have a lot of room to increase threat when you genuinely want to make encounters hard. And abandoning the pretense of character/monster threat/level fungibility makes crafting encounters for larger or smaller parties more difficult with no offsetting advantage at all. And you lose the Same Game Test because there's no longer any indication of what challenges an individual should be able to overcome.

And it's incomplete. Yeah it's great that you've said that 1 actually means 2 or 3, but the CR table didn't stop at 2! For fuck's sake, there are monsters that are CR 1 or even CR less than 1 in 3rd edition and now those fuckers get gifted with weird fractional CRs that don't make any fucking sense. A CR 1/2 monster doesn't actually fit into anything if you've defined the monsters as being a reasonable challenge for a party of that level. Parties are never level 1/2. They start at level 1. Which means that the encounter guidelines hit an undefined divide by fruitbat error when 1st level parties encounter groups of Orcs. For reals.

Yeah, if your encounter guidelines do one thing it should be to tell us how many Orcs it is reasonable to encounter in an easy, normal, and difficult encounter for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level characters. Seriously, if it can't do that, it's utterly worthless. And 5e's encounter guideline system cannot even do that.

Essentially, each encounter is supposed to have an XP budget, and monsters are worth XP based on their CR. But also you're not supposed to use monsters with a CR that's higher than the party's level. But none of that makes any fucking sense, because the numbers also don't add up anywhere. So for example: at 1st level a "Medium" encounter has a budget of 50 XP per character - which is a total of 200. Each CR 1/2 creature has an XP cost of 100 and each CR 1 creature has an XP cost of 200. So your basic encounter is supposed to be 2 Gnolls or 1 Spy. And then there's the elephant in the room where actually 2 Gnolls is way more threatening than 1 Spy. It's seriously not remotely close.

TL;DR: The problems with 5e Challenge Rating are:

• The numbers mean inconsistent things.
• The outputs are nonsensical and do not discourage TPKs.
• It's actually way more math to design encounters this way than it is to use 3e's CR system.
• The XP budgets are presented in a way where it looks like they mean stupid things, but what they actually mean is stupider than that, so whatever.

The real bottom line is that 5e's attempt to revamp the CR system is worse than simply removing the encounter guidelines altogether and going the full AD&D "sometimes you have to run."

-Username17

[Kaelik]

In addition to the problems with the CR system, 5e seems to aggressively gone out of there way to present monsters at CRs that mean fucking nothing. There are CR 1/4th creatures with 4th level spell attacks. There are CR 8s with the numbers you had at level 1. It makes no fucking sense.

[Chamomile]

There's a fairly simple formula for determining monster CR in the DMG. It naively assumes that having low defenses can compensate for high attacks in any combination, ignoring the drop-off point where a monster's AC and HP are already low enough that it simply does not care how many defenses it has to drop in order to get more attack power, or for that matter, allowing a monster with CR 20 HP and CR 1 AC have a defense CR of 10, but thanks to bounded accuracy, it's far closer to being a CR 20 threat. You can do the same thing with damage and attack rolls/save DCs on the attack end, especially since adding more attacks increases accuracy yet the formula treats it purely as though it is an increase only to damage.

I don't know if the Monster Manual actually uses this formula, but it would explain things like monsters with 4th level spells being considered CR 1. If their defenses are sufficiently abysmal, they'll be CR'd like a low-level generalist, even though they are obviously a mid-level glass cannon.

[Username17]

There's clearly no formula at all. Monsters are supposed to have CRs based on what level they would be overly threatening at, but actually the CRs are just completely fucking random. Let's take a walk around CR 4.

• The Gnoll Fang of Yeenoghu has 65 hit points and an AC of 14. He also has three attacks at +5 to-hit for reasons, two for d8+3 and one for d6+3 damage. He is almost literally the same as having three standard Gnolls, who each have 22 hit points and an AC of 15, having one attack each at +4 for d6+2 damage with a bonus attack that does d4+2 damage. The bulge this guy has over a group of 3 standard gnolls is very small, and he's clearly and obviously less threatening than 4. But because he is CR 4, he takes the place of eleven standard Gnolls.
• The Lamia is a spellcaster who has charm person, geas, suggestion, and scrying with a few charges per day. The DC is only 13, but that's pretty hard core. Also it has major image with an unlimited number of charges per day, which basically means you probably can't fight it at all until she runs through her entire complement of seven mind affecting enchantments and could very plausibly also use its intoxicating touch that gives disadvantage on Will saves before doing that. I mean, very clearly the authors have no idea how ridiculously powerful at will major image is, but whatevers. After it runs through its spells and has a significant chance of straight up charming the entire party, it then personally has 97 hit points and an AC of 13 and gets two attacks at +5 for 2d10+3 and d4+3 (yes, one of it's attacks is three times the size of the other, fucking deal with it). Despite being basically better than the Fang of Yeenoghu even in a straight fight and also having a very powerful set of spells that has a good chance of straight up enslaving the whole party, this is also a simple CR 4 with the same XP budget as the Fang.
• The Lizard King is a proper bruiser. 78 hit points, AC 15. Gets two attacks at +5 to-hit for d8+3 damage and if either or both of them hit it does an extra 3d6 life drain where the target takes 3d6 damage and the Lizard King gets 3d6 temp hit points.
• I'm not getting into the nitty gritty bullshit of alternate forms, but the 78 hit point Wereboar and the 120 hit point Weretiger are both CR 4.
• The Bone Naga is either a 5th level Cleric or a 5th level Wizard as a caster, and either way it has 58 hit points and an AC of 15. Also it has a poison bite that is +5 to-hit and does 5d6+3 damage (3d6 of which is poison damage if you care - which generally speaking you will not). Obviously it's way more threatening for a damage dealing monster to cast lightning bolt than bestow curse, and you'll note that for the same casters on the PC side one is a cloth wearer and the other is not. But there's no change in threat level depending on whether it has evocations or not.
• The Black Pudding has 85 hit points and AC 7, which isn't all that impressive, but it's essentially immune to non-magical melee weapons and lots of spell types, which severely limits what you can do about it. Also it attacks at +5 for d6+3+4d8 damage.

So what's the take home? The Monster Manual is incredibly disciplined about making sure all the monsters have exactly +5 to-hit. But damage per round is still all over the fucking place because those attackers are sometimes doing 3 dice of total damage if everything hits and sometimes doing 5, and some of those dice are d4s and some are d10s. And the defenses are simply all over the place as well. And of course, as far as I can tell monsters are paying absolutely nothing for special abilities like "is a 5th level caster" which is not remotely defensible.

The fact that there's a distint number for a creature's challenge rating and for their XP value means that at some point someone had the idea of setting Challenge ratings based on where creatures fit on the bounded accuracy treadmill and setting XP value based on how much of the encounter they were supposed to be - essentially like how 4th edition had Level 4 Minions and Level Elites. But then that was too much work and they ended up just assigning identical XP values to everything at each CR. Which makes the XP budget spending thing a completely pointless set of extra math and also gives us situations like where the Lizard King is just massively massively more threatening than the Fang of fucking Yeenoghu and they both have the same CR because they both have +5 to-hit with their grossly differently threatening attacks.

-Username17

[EightWave]

Is any of that surprising? While people tend to obsess over the PHB, there's a strong argument to be made that the MM is the book that defines DND. It's also a shit ton of completely unglamorous work and a massive blind spot for the majority of players. So of course we're going to get blog posts about the art design for halflings while the monster manual gets punted.

[Ignimortis]

There's clearly no formula at all. Monsters are supposed to have CRs based on what level they would be overly threatening at, but actually the CRs are just completely fucking random. Let's take a walk around CR 4.

Oh, there is a formula. It's just bad.
5e DMG has it on page 274. It takes into account...AC, HP, to-hit bonus and damage per round OR spell save DC. So basically all those monsters are CR 4, because their HP/AC is within the "appropriate" range for that CR, and they all have +5 to-hit and deal similar damage per round with their melee attacks.

There are NO lines describing how spellcasting or special abilities or non-standard defences like resistances/immunities can affect CR. None.

That's why Shadows with their "resistance to basically everything people can throw at them before level 5 and immunity to some more" and STR-drain which can kill a character permanently in 2-3 swings are CR 1/2. Because their AC is bad, their HP is average and their actual HP damage is comparable to a greatsword.

[Whiysper]

You're then meant to eyeball the other abilities in line with the huge chart-o-special rules at the end of the monster tweaking chapter. What I'd point out, though, is that even rebuilding some basic MM monsters using their stats from the MM and features from the MM gives different results if you calculate them from the DMG.

Again with the monkeys. I've seen someone claim that the DMG system was built after the MM to look 'about right', rather than to deliver on the actual needs. I'd believe it.