That's something I've never understood : 1 gp is only 100 cp, and the cp is the smallest unit of money you can have, so how can 1 gp be that much ? It's like saying that 10 cent is nothing, but $10 is a large amount of money : that makes no sense.CapnTthePirateG wrote:Well, we have the starting wealth by class, the basic coins - electrum pieces came back for some reason, but astral diamonds didn't - and a gold piece is once again a huge amount of money to your average peasant.
Angry Sober Review: 5e PHB
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An unskilled worker's wage is 2.5cp/hour and a pint of ale costs the same. The tavern doesn't sell ale in pints though:
instead you get one of these for 4cp. Or, presumably, one of those but half full for 2cp. The 5e economy in general doesn't really support the purchase of very small amounts of turnip economy goods, which is probably fine since historically peasants just run up a tab at the store and pay it off when the harvest comes in and players probably don't care about making day to day purchases on a peasant economy scale.
instead you get one of these for 4cp. Or, presumably, one of those but half full for 2cp. The 5e economy in general doesn't really support the purchase of very small amounts of turnip economy goods, which is probably fine since historically peasants just run up a tab at the store and pay it off when the harvest comes in and players probably don't care about making day to day purchases on a peasant economy scale.
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
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Well, the work week is over, but the book is still here...
Chapter 6: Character customization
Now, before we begin, I need to point out that these options are all prefaced with "the DM decides whether these options are available in your campaign". There are two: multiclassing and feats. Yes, feats are an optional subsystem in this edition, and have been getting surprisingly little web support, unlike the hordes of new spells released in web companions for various adventures.
Anyway, the chapter opens with multiclassing. Multiclassing works very similarly to 3rd edition, but in this edition requires you to meet stat prerequisites before you can actually take levels in the class. Then you only get some of the class's starting proficiencies - because I guess letting a wizard get heavy armor in addition to extra actions in each encounter would be totally overpowered - and then your class features. Class features are where things start to get really, really weird.
See, some class features interact in weird ways with others, and there's a short list of special snowflake function calls where extra attacks don't stack and the warlock extra attack doesn't stack (but the barbarian frenzy does) and channel divinities from various classes add together and give you more options but not more uses. Spellcasting has this weird thing where you get a unified spell slot table, but learn and prepare spells as a single-classed member of each class. Now, I don't have any clue how this actually works with the wizard's spellbook, where you can copy down spells you find.
This also has bizarro accounting where instead of actually just adding the levels together, you add various percentages of levels based on your noncasting classes and cross-reference that with the table to get your actual caster level. This fails on so many levels - the accounting is weird, you end up with higher-level slots to cast lower level spells that you don't care about because very few spells are worth casting in higher level slots, and new classes need to figure out how every one of their special snowflake class features interact in a unique way and how much of a bonus they give to casting. These rules read as though someone was given instructions to not allow multiclass characters to be good and then handed their work off to another person whose game got wrecked by a 2e fighter/mage. While you can do some interesting things like maybe cast level 9 wizard spells as a wizard 1/cleric 19, multiclassing is very much an unbalanced mess of trap options combined with looting front-loaded classes.
Next up is feats. Feats work...in a very special manner in this edition. See, each class gets +2 bonuses to ability scores at various levels. However, you can trade out your numeric bonus for a feat! Now, if anyone has ever played any kind of point-based character building game they'd know that this ends in one of two ways: Either the abilities you get are more powerful then a numeric bonus and taking the bonus is for suckers, or it doesn't matter because having the abilities doesn't make up for staying on the RNG.
That being said, these feats aren't too terrible. Some of them only give the bonus of a +1 to an ability score and an ability, some give actually useful bonuses, and others you don't actually give a crap about. For instance, polearm master is probably worth trading a +2 to strength for because it gives you an extra attack with all your damage bonuses and whatnot in addition to allowing you to threaten your entire reach.
However, this basically underscores the problem with the ability score reliance and crappy point buy system because this is basically WINMOAR. To best take advantage of the feat system, you don't want to actually use their point buy and make difficult decisions, you want to show up with the half-orc who has max strength and awesome stats that you "rolled at home", or keep cycling through rolled characters until you land a character who has sufficient stats to buy feats. Remember, this is a bounded accuracy system, so those +1s are actually really valuable to stay on the RNG. This doesn't force hard decisions or opt-in complexity, this just encourages people to play stupid games with the stat generation system or be a human for that one feat they need. It's just bad all around.
With that, we come to part II: Playing the game.
Chapter 7: Using Ability Scores:
So one of the big design things of this edition, from the Legends and Lore column that's no longer around, is that adding things to ability scores is really difficult so we should just use the raw scores instead. In that vein, this chapter is all about using ability scores to perform tasks. So you might think there'd be something like a table of stuff you can do with Strength, and the DCs, right?
Well, there's a broad list of stuff you can do with certain ability scores and a list of skills that are tied to ability scores that you can have proficiency in. Now, I could go into how some of the social skills are redundant, or how some overlap (Performance is a charisma check but playing a stringed instrument is a dexterity check) but the biggest thing is there are no sample DCs or benchmarks for characters to have some understanding about what they can actually do. You can roll a dexterity check to stay up on a tightrope, but you have no actual idea what the DC is and whether you have a good chance from just having a +3 Dex bonus (and being really dextrous) or whether you need proficiency or rogue inspiration or what. The hiding rules get special mention for being unusable because the criteria for entering stealth is literally "the DM decides". This entire section is a joke, and not in a good way. The game is supposed to be based around the 3 pillars of "combat, exploration, and roleplaying", but many of the classes have abilities that are only usable in combat aside from Mother May I. To quote Mike Mearls in his recent reddit AMA:
What I will point out is that if any other industry tried to put out a product like this, they'd be fired. If you sold software with half the localization text missing and instructions to put it in on the spot, you'd be fired and your product would be widely despised. If you designed a bridge with no safety features with instructions to put it in on the spot, you'd be fired. You can compare this to a toolkit, but even then something like a plane model is going to include all the material you need to build it. This is the equivalent of a do-it-yourself chair kit, but instead of wood and nails and stuff you get half a blueprint for the chair back but no actual designs for the legs and seat except for a paragraph telling you to make it feel like a chair. Then again, this is brought to us by the man who spent years trying to fix 4th edition skill challenges and got nowhere, the RPGPundit, and a man I will not name with the annoying habit of assuming his poorly defined houserules will fix everything and then goes off onto a bizarre rant about trolls and how he would put them all to death.
This section also points out that all the ability scores can be used as saves now. Yes, this means that classes that rely on hitting AC suck more than classes that have save-or-sucks against every save (wizards). Yes, once again this rewards "rolling at home" or constantly switching characters. Why the hell would you expect any different?
Next time is Chapter 8: Adventuring. It will be done later because I am really beginning to hate this book.
Chapter 6: Character customization
Now, before we begin, I need to point out that these options are all prefaced with "the DM decides whether these options are available in your campaign". There are two: multiclassing and feats. Yes, feats are an optional subsystem in this edition, and have been getting surprisingly little web support, unlike the hordes of new spells released in web companions for various adventures.
Anyway, the chapter opens with multiclassing. Multiclassing works very similarly to 3rd edition, but in this edition requires you to meet stat prerequisites before you can actually take levels in the class. Then you only get some of the class's starting proficiencies - because I guess letting a wizard get heavy armor in addition to extra actions in each encounter would be totally overpowered - and then your class features. Class features are where things start to get really, really weird.
See, some class features interact in weird ways with others, and there's a short list of special snowflake function calls where extra attacks don't stack and the warlock extra attack doesn't stack (but the barbarian frenzy does) and channel divinities from various classes add together and give you more options but not more uses. Spellcasting has this weird thing where you get a unified spell slot table, but learn and prepare spells as a single-classed member of each class. Now, I don't have any clue how this actually works with the wizard's spellbook, where you can copy down spells you find.
This also has bizarro accounting where instead of actually just adding the levels together, you add various percentages of levels based on your noncasting classes and cross-reference that with the table to get your actual caster level. This fails on so many levels - the accounting is weird, you end up with higher-level slots to cast lower level spells that you don't care about because very few spells are worth casting in higher level slots, and new classes need to figure out how every one of their special snowflake class features interact in a unique way and how much of a bonus they give to casting. These rules read as though someone was given instructions to not allow multiclass characters to be good and then handed their work off to another person whose game got wrecked by a 2e fighter/mage. While you can do some interesting things like maybe cast level 9 wizard spells as a wizard 1/cleric 19, multiclassing is very much an unbalanced mess of trap options combined with looting front-loaded classes.
Next up is feats. Feats work...in a very special manner in this edition. See, each class gets +2 bonuses to ability scores at various levels. However, you can trade out your numeric bonus for a feat! Now, if anyone has ever played any kind of point-based character building game they'd know that this ends in one of two ways: Either the abilities you get are more powerful then a numeric bonus and taking the bonus is for suckers, or it doesn't matter because having the abilities doesn't make up for staying on the RNG.
That being said, these feats aren't too terrible. Some of them only give the bonus of a +1 to an ability score and an ability, some give actually useful bonuses, and others you don't actually give a crap about. For instance, polearm master is probably worth trading a +2 to strength for because it gives you an extra attack with all your damage bonuses and whatnot in addition to allowing you to threaten your entire reach.
However, this basically underscores the problem with the ability score reliance and crappy point buy system because this is basically WINMOAR. To best take advantage of the feat system, you don't want to actually use their point buy and make difficult decisions, you want to show up with the half-orc who has max strength and awesome stats that you "rolled at home", or keep cycling through rolled characters until you land a character who has sufficient stats to buy feats. Remember, this is a bounded accuracy system, so those +1s are actually really valuable to stay on the RNG. This doesn't force hard decisions or opt-in complexity, this just encourages people to play stupid games with the stat generation system or be a human for that one feat they need. It's just bad all around.
With that, we come to part II: Playing the game.
Chapter 7: Using Ability Scores:
So one of the big design things of this edition, from the Legends and Lore column that's no longer around, is that adding things to ability scores is really difficult so we should just use the raw scores instead. In that vein, this chapter is all about using ability scores to perform tasks. So you might think there'd be something like a table of stuff you can do with Strength, and the DCs, right?
Well, there's a broad list of stuff you can do with certain ability scores and a list of skills that are tied to ability scores that you can have proficiency in. Now, I could go into how some of the social skills are redundant, or how some overlap (Performance is a charisma check but playing a stringed instrument is a dexterity check) but the biggest thing is there are no sample DCs or benchmarks for characters to have some understanding about what they can actually do. You can roll a dexterity check to stay up on a tightrope, but you have no actual idea what the DC is and whether you have a good chance from just having a +3 Dex bonus (and being really dextrous) or whether you need proficiency or rogue inspiration or what. The hiding rules get special mention for being unusable because the criteria for entering stealth is literally "the DM decides". This entire section is a joke, and not in a good way. The game is supposed to be based around the 3 pillars of "combat, exploration, and roleplaying", but many of the classes have abilities that are only usable in combat aside from Mother May I. To quote Mike Mearls in his recent reddit AMA:
Now, I might quibble with this. I might cynically point out that all this "DM empowerment" is quite similar to not having any rules at all. I might point out that the designers of this game are being paid actual, real money to write rules and they completely dodged it in favor of dumping the work on the consumer. I might point out that this actually makes my job as a DM harder, because now I need to figure out how to fairly adjudicate, say, an athletic man rock climbing, something I personally have no experience with. I might wonder how after 2 years of development, the skill system remained "make shit up" after a supposedly comprehensive playtest and design cycle. I might point out that the book is priced at $50, and so far the actual, usable rules have been far outnumbered by suggestions of "make shit up," something I can do for free and that other people should stop asking for money for. If I'm DMing, I don't want to write my own skill system, I'd rather focus on things like "plot" and "characters" that this is supposedly to empower me to do.If you need every DM to run the game exactly the same, 5e is probably the wrong game for you. 5e is focuses [sic] on giving DMs the tools and flexibility to run the game they want.
What I will point out is that if any other industry tried to put out a product like this, they'd be fired. If you sold software with half the localization text missing and instructions to put it in on the spot, you'd be fired and your product would be widely despised. If you designed a bridge with no safety features with instructions to put it in on the spot, you'd be fired. You can compare this to a toolkit, but even then something like a plane model is going to include all the material you need to build it. This is the equivalent of a do-it-yourself chair kit, but instead of wood and nails and stuff you get half a blueprint for the chair back but no actual designs for the legs and seat except for a paragraph telling you to make it feel like a chair. Then again, this is brought to us by the man who spent years trying to fix 4th edition skill challenges and got nowhere, the RPGPundit, and a man I will not name with the annoying habit of assuming his poorly defined houserules will fix everything and then goes off onto a bizarre rant about trolls and how he would put them all to death.
This section also points out that all the ability scores can be used as saves now. Yes, this means that classes that rely on hitting AC suck more than classes that have save-or-sucks against every save (wizards). Yes, once again this rewards "rolling at home" or constantly switching characters. Why the hell would you expect any different?
Next time is Chapter 8: Adventuring. It will be done later because I am really beginning to hate this book.
OgreBattle wrote:"And thus the denizens learned that hating Shadzar was the only thing they had in common, and with him gone they turned their venom upon each other"
-Sarpadian Empires, vol. I
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AcidBlades
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It suddenly occurs to me that a lot of my feelings of 5e not being that bad may be due to the fact that I didn't actually pay money for any of the books. It's a decent game when compared to the free online rulesets, but honestly terrible when compared to a game you'd pay 150$ for.
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
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CapnTthePirateG
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One of the things I personally despise is willful incompetence. If you want me to absolutely hate you as a person, show up and do something completely wrong and then refuse to listen to any criticism and do it again incorrectly.RelentlessImp wrote:How did it take you this long?I am really beginning to hate this book.
Chapter 7 of this book is basically the developers of 5e throwing the fact that they had two years to develop a skill system and didn't do shit right in the reader's face. This is coming off the heels of 4e, where these same people did the exact same thing with their skill system. I'm not gonna pretend 3e's skill system was perfect or even good, but it had a baseline of "stuff you could do with this" that 4e and 5e honestly lack.
OgreBattle wrote:"And thus the denizens learned that hating Shadzar was the only thing they had in common, and with him gone they turned their venom upon each other"
-Sarpadian Empires, vol. I
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RelentlessImp
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A friend posted on FB about how the grapple rules are one of the things to like about 5e. I took a look at the grappling handbook they linked to and... it looks almost exactly the same as 3.X, but with a couple fewer rules and worse terminology ("this is a special attack action," "this is not an attack roll, it's an ability check"). Is this accurate?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
It just dawned on me that the "there are no stealth rules!" comments are, essentially, referring to the absence of example DCs.
But the answer also seemed to be "the perception of who you're rolling against".
Im guessing example DCs for climbing and such are suppose to be in the DMG?
But the answer also seemed to be "the perception of who you're rolling against".
Im guessing example DCs for climbing and such are suppose to be in the DMG?
Phlebotinum : fleh-bot-ih-nuhm • A glossary of RPG/Dennizen terminology • Favorite replies: [1]
nockermensch wrote:Advantage will lead to dicepools in D&D. Remember, you read this here first!
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CapnTthePirateG
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Well the thing with the stealth rules is that the DM decides if you can stealth at all or not. That's it. You don't check line of sight or concealment or whether you're hidden, it's a straight DM call. Likewise, stealth ends when you make a noise...which is a straight DM call again. Yes, stealth checks are against perception, but you don't get to make a stealth check unless the DM arbitrarily allows it. The entire process is Mother May I with a side of fuck you, stealth rules are hard so we're just going to not write them.
Grappling I will get to when I hit the combat chapter.
Grappling I will get to when I hit the combat chapter.
OgreBattle wrote:"And thus the denizens learned that hating Shadzar was the only thing they had in common, and with him gone they turned their venom upon each other"
-Sarpadian Empires, vol. I
Thing about this edition is a number of people will argue very hard about how there are totally rules for everything and that the writers never say 'make shit up'. What I don't get is why they didn't just revert to 3e. With the whole thing where numbers don't get very big and the fact that they don't want PCs to ever do anything really amazing with skills it seems like they could've just copy-pasted what they wrote for 3e, change a few words, and called it a day.
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Username17
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The feats thing, or rather the lack of a feats thing is traceable to the 5e team working with (or at least liaising with) RPGPundit and the OSR crowd. Those clowns get a little thank you as additional consultants in the credits. And their main contribution seems to have been to point out that there were too many fucking feats to sort through in 4th edition (true) and that the proper answer should be that they should be able to throw the baby out with the bathwater like they were playing AD&FuckingD (wrong). Garbage in, Garbage out. They requested consultation from regressive assholes, they got stupid regressive suggestions, and they chose to implement them. It's exactly what you would expect to happen once you realized what a lazy and understaffed clown show the design team actually was.
On the stealth thing, it does indeed go way beyond the lack of definition for what DCs mean. As pointed out, a stealth check is an opposed check - the DC is obviously just the other guy's check result. The problem is that there are no defined inputs or outputs. You can attempt to Stealth whenever the DM says you can and not at other times. When you succeed at stealthing... I have no idea. Does it make you undetected or merely unseen? I don't know, it doesn't fucking say! The actual consequences of successfully hiding are not defined. And then the undefined hidden condition ends when you give yourself away - and one of the examples of doing that is an accident which the game rules present no means of generating. Fuck it, let's just go through this shit sentence by sentence. Questions raised are in Red.
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On the stealth thing, it does indeed go way beyond the lack of definition for what DCs mean. As pointed out, a stealth check is an opposed check - the DC is obviously just the other guy's check result. The problem is that there are no defined inputs or outputs. You can attempt to Stealth whenever the DM says you can and not at other times. When you succeed at stealthing... I have no idea. Does it make you undetected or merely unseen? I don't know, it doesn't fucking say! The actual consequences of successfully hiding are not defined. And then the undefined hidden condition ends when you give yourself away - and one of the examples of doing that is an accident which the game rules present no means of generating. Fuck it, let's just go through this shit sentence by sentence. Questions raised are in Red.
I give the Hiding section an F. Literally every single statement in the entire section except the numeric example of calculating a passive perception bonus raises more questions than it answers. These aren't finished rules. They aren't even rules. This is meeting notes from people having a design committee meeting defining high level goals of what the Hiding rules should do. And they are pretty sad even for that.5e PHB wrote:When you try to hide, make a Dexterity (Stealth) check. Until you are discovered or you stop hiding, that check's total is contested by the Wisdom (Perception) check of any creature that actively searches for signs of your presence.
We seem to have skipped a bit. What does it mean to be hiding? We are told the die roll to make when we try to hide, but not the effect of succeeding or failing on that die roll.
You can't hide from a creature that can see you, and if you make noise (such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase), you give away your position.
Wat. There are two examples of giving away your position: one is deliberate action and the other is an accident. What would cause a character to accidentally knock over a vase? There is no roll in the game that outputs that, but it's one of the only two examples of something that gives away position. DM call? Did we have critical failure rules we forgot to mention, what the fuck?
More subtly, I don't know about you but I usually try to hide when I don't want someone to see me. The word "can" in this statement is ambiguous and unparseable. If I succeed at not being seen I can attempt to not be seen but I fail to not be seen I can't attempt to not be seen? WTF?
An invisible creature can't be seen, so it can always try to hide.
That strongly implies that hiding does something other than keep you from being seen, since otherwise I have no idea why a creature that already couldn't be seen would care about doing it. What does it do?
Signs of its passage might still be noticed, however, and it still has to stay quiet.
Are there any rules for leaving signs of passage? No? What about this "staying quiet" thing? Also no? And again, if being actually invisible still requires you to do anything to be "hidden" in addition to invisible, it presumably does something more to be hidden than simply unseen. What?
In combat, most creatures stay alert for signs of danger all around, so if you come out of hiding and approach a creature, it usually sees you.
What if in the incredibly likely event that we want to approach a creature without coming out of hiding?
However, under certain circumstances, the Dungeon Master might allow you to stay hidden as you approach a creature that is distracted, allowing you to gain advantage on an attack before you are seen.
Wait. You just gave fucking combat as an example of a situation where a creature would usually see you. How is being stabbed in the god damn face something less than being "distracted?"
Passive Perception. When you hide, there's a chance someone will notice you even if they aren't searching. To determine whether such a creature notices you, the DM compares your Dexterity (Stealth) check with that creature's passive Wisdom (Perception) score, which equals 10 + the creature's Wisdom modifier, as well as any other bonuses or penalties. If the creature has advantage, add 5. For disadvantage, subtract 5.
The mean of a no advantage roll is 10.5, the mean of an advantage roll is 13.82, the mean of a disadvantage die is 7.17. Disadvantage or advantage on actually rolling dice is worth about +/-3.3, why is it worth +/-5 on a passive roll? This isn't unclear or anything, it's just that the authors are obviously really bad at math.
For example, if a 1st level character (with a proficiency bonus of +2) has a Wisdom of 15 (a +2 modifier) and proficiency in Perception, he or she has a passive Wisdom (Perception) of 14.
What Can You See? One of the main factors in determining whether you can find a hidden creature or object is how well you can see in an area, which might be lightly or heavily obscured, as explained in chapter 8.
I personally think that if you introduce "one of the main factors" in determining something that you should perhaps say what the other main factors are. Maybe not right there, but ever in the book. That seems like it would be really useful.
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Username17
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More generally, imagine for the moment that you are attempting to do a thing in a palace that the guards would try to stop if they knew about it. Now, there are lots of levels of not knowing that the palace guards might have. Consider how different it is if:
It's actually kind of amazing. Pretty much every edition of D&D has had bad stealth rules. But these are the worst. I genuinely didn't think you could write stealth rules that were this unhelpful.
-Username17
- The Guard doesn't know you exist.
- The Guard doesn't know you are in the palace.
- The Guard doesn't know you are in the reliquary room in the palace.
- The Guard doesn't know where you are in the reliquary room.
- The Guard doesn't know which statue you are behind in the reliquary room.
- The Guard doesn't know what you are doing behind the statue of Emperor Ixakotl in the reliquary room.
It's actually kind of amazing. Pretty much every edition of D&D has had bad stealth rules. But these are the worst. I genuinely didn't think you could write stealth rules that were this unhelpful.
-Username17
Up to now, I didn't consider this part ambigous. I think it means that you can't hide while a creature can see me - so if it has line of sight and I don't have cover or concealment, I can't hide. I think this is to clarify that you can't just "dissappear" from plain view if you beat your opponents skill check.FrankTrollman wrote: You can't hide from a creature that can see you, and if you make noise (such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase), you give away your position.
More subtly, I don't know about you but I usually try to hide when I don't want someone to see me. The word "can" in this statement is ambiguous and unparseable. If I succeed at not being seen I can attempt to not be seen but I fail to not be seen I can't attempt to not be seen? WTF?
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Username17
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The problem of course is that if it has line of sight then it can see you. If you have cover, it can see you. If you have concealment, it can see you. The book doesn't say that you can't hide if they can see all of you, or that you can't hide if they are currently watching and keeping track of you, it just says that if they can see you that you can't hide.Aharon wrote:Up to now, I didn't consider this part ambigous. I think it means that you can't hide while a creature can see me - so if it has line of sight and I don't have cover or concealment, I can't hide. I think this is to clarify that you can't just "dissappear" from plain view if you beat your opponents skill check.FrankTrollman wrote: You can't hide from a creature that can see you, and if you make noise (such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase), you give away your position.
More subtly, I don't know about you but I usually try to hide when I don't want someone to see me. The word "can" in this statement is ambiguous and unparseable. If I succeed at not being seen I can attempt to not be seen but I fail to not be seen I can't attempt to not be seen? WTF?
Any concept of obstructed views or partial visibility or something is just mind caulk on your part. The actual text merely presents a binary condition where the enemy can either see you or they cannot. And honestly, if they can't see you I don't know why you'd need to hide and if they can see you hiding is apparently impossible. So what good is hiding? What does it do? What circumstances could you use it where it would be in any way helpful? No one knows!
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So, on the one hand, we know that this is what they meant:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/hide.htm
Their failure to say all of that is a result of lazyness and stupidity, an insult on their part to the tiny number of people who shelled out money for their rules. But it's a hack's failure to account for "can see" != "is observed" is what borked these particular rules.
OTOH, while those rules meet the low "when can you hide" bar Frank describes, it's not like the SRD rules are *fantastic*. So my guess would be, they stripped it out with an intent to fix the "mathematically impossible to hide from 12 guys" problem, and then gave up and spat out garbage because of everything they'd done to make the problem worse.
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/hide.htm
Their failure to say all of that is a result of lazyness and stupidity, an insult on their part to the tiny number of people who shelled out money for their rules. But it's a hack's failure to account for "can see" != "is observed" is what borked these particular rules.
OTOH, while those rules meet the low "when can you hide" bar Frank describes, it's not like the SRD rules are *fantastic*. So my guess would be, they stripped it out with an intent to fix the "mathematically impossible to hide from 12 guys" problem, and then gave up and spat out garbage because of everything they'd done to make the problem worse.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
I'm not sure how you can make a handbook out of 4 short paragraphs and a grappled condition that is 3 bullet points long, with 2 of those bullet points being things that can end the grapple.Prak wrote:A friend posted on FB about how the grapple rules are one of the things to like about 5e. I took a look at the grappling handbook they linked to and... it looks almost exactly the same as 3.X, but with a couple fewer rules and worse terminology ("this is a special attack action," "this is not an attack roll, it's an ability check"). Is this accurate?
In fact this is what 'grappled' actually does in full to a creature 5e:
You can also drag/carry it with you at (basically) half movement, but that's it. I suppose that's as much of an improvement as anything in 5e where not having real rules is considered awesome, so yeah it being a stupider simpler 3.x grappling is about right.5e PHB wrote:A grappled creature’s speed becomes 0, and it can't benefit from any bonus to its speed.
The rules were hiding, apparently
Ok, you got me. I've been sucked into this argument. I've been reading this review and it's finally driven me up a wall. The 5th edition D&D rules aren't great, and stealth is a great example of why. But most of the answers are actually in the damn text if anyone read it with the level of dedication that people read the SRD. I'm going to bite the biggest bullet of the lot first, stealth & hiding.
Can't See, Don’t Care
Chapter 8 has the rules for Vision and Light in the "Environment Section" that lay out the foundations of sight and hiding. First, you have two possible degrees of obscurity1: Lightly Obscured things can be seen but it's hard, Heavily Obscured things can't be seen at all. Next we jump ahead to chapter 9, Unseen Attackers and Targets2. The “Hide” action under Actions in Combat pointed us in this direction. The rules here are written poorly, so I’m going to read this section backwards. If you think I’ve read these rules incorrectly this is a great place to call me out on it! Starting from the third paragraph
Depths of Ignorance
We’ve established three levels of combat awareness so far. Unobscured targets are obvious, no departure from basic rules. Unseen targets are harder to hit, but you know roughly where they are. Hidden targets that you aren’t sure exactly where they are but can take a stab at anyway. The next level up from there is surprise. Once again, we go backwards to figure out what surprise means and then to figure out how we achieve it. Last paragraph of Surprise in chapter 9 says
Six Degrees of Unawareness
Bringing this back to Franks list of “obscurantism” we can see where the game marks out each section. The difference between the 1st dot and the 2nd would be something like renown or notoriety, but it’s out of scope for hiding. The 2nd dot and the 3rd are a question of alert. My reading was that the guard knowing you’re in the palace but not which room doesn’t help him that much. This is admittedly the weakest part of my position. It could mean that surprise is impossible or that it makes no difference or some other weird variant4. There isn’t really textual support for either other than to say “the GM Decides”. Between dot 3 and 4 is much clearer. If the guard knows you’re in the room and that you intend to stab his face when he goes in there, you can’t surprise him. This is clearly in the “hidden” valley. The difference between dot 4 and dot 5 is just what his chances are of making an accurate guessed attack at you, you’re still hidden. Dot 5 and 6 is the line between hidden and unseen.
Hiding from the Customer
This is all me guessing about designer intent, just skip to the next section if you don’t care. A lot of the design decisions of 5E seem less based on laziness than cowardice. The peasant rail gun was embarrassing to the developers of 3rd edition. Exploits like the Diplomancer were sudden and loud compared to the fuzzy non-combat proficiencies of 2nd edition. The new rules didn’t have as many ambiguities and added a ton of material, all of which had immediate consequences in people’s games. Bullrush, trip, charge, sunder, grapple; all were suddenly available to all attackers at all times. So 4th edition went out with the directive to lock all that down; everyone’s combat options are strictly enumerated in lists that fit on a single sheet of paper, no using skills to get around or out of fights the DM planned, no open ended spell effects. People hated it, and a big part was gutting the skill system. “Just roll whatever until the DM says stop” is arguably the ONLY rule involved in a skill challenge.
So as we come to 5E we see the scars of past trauma. They were afraid of strictly laying out all the bonuses, penalties and thresholds for skill DCs because they lacked the skill to insure they didn’t produce nonsense results, and they knew it. They couldn’t just toss the system out again, since they got reamed for it in 4th and that could not be allowed to happen again. So they wrote rules anyone could ignore. The stealth rules are that you can only hide if you’re heavily obscured, and hiding lets you keep your exact location secret from observers by staying silent. Hints and implications are tucked all over the book so that when the DM sits down after reading it, they all mind caulk the same spot. But they don’t just outright say it because they don’t want to get nailed down on anything. Look at Crawford’s tweets; he frequently replies to “Yes or No” questions with a bald statement, often only obliquely including the original question. When he does give straight answers they’re usually contradicted by a tweet from Mearls, often on the same day. This maximizes the ammunition for a DM who wants to run skills contrary to mutinous players. If a player creates an assassin and uses surprise crits to trivialize encounters, there’s room for the DM to say “Well these guys aren’t surprised anymore because word has spread throughout the land and now everyone’s always expecting you.” And the player doesn’t have any recourse but to stand up from the table.
But When Can I Hide
Having slogged through all this, we can now return to the Hiding callout box in chapter 7. “You can’t hide from a creature that can see you.” To be unseen by a creature you either have to be in a Heavily Obscured area, Invisible, or the creature needs to be Blinded. The “Skulker” feat, Halfling racial feature “Naturally Stealthy” and Wood Elf racial feature “Mask of the Wild” extend this limitation to allow you to hide when you aren’t otherwise unseen5. Your stealth check is opposed by either the active Perception check of an opponent using the Search action, or a passive Perception Check. If you succeed, you’re hidden until something happens to reveal you. If you make a noise audible to observers, that reveals you. Aren’t sure if a noise was sufficient to reveal you? That’s what the stealth check is for. If you make an attack, that reveals you6. Once you’re revealed, you are no longer hidden. You have to decide to move stealthily if you want to surprise anyone. You can’t surprise people currently in a fight, or who expect one is about to break out.
There are still quite a few missing elements here; do you always succeed at stealth checks against deafened targets? Is losing the conditions that let you hide (Heavy Obscure, Invisible or Blinded) considered “coming out of hiding”? Is Total Cover sufficient for hiding? But these are binary questions; a DM can make up an answer and then stick with it. These rules are horribly organized, vaguely phrased and actively misleading. They are not vaporware.
1 three if you count "not obscured"
2 never claimed the rules were well organized, just functional
3 granted, this is a remarkably tortured reading
4 Guard makes an active perception roll, rather than passive?
5 This doesn’t change those conditions to treat you as unseen without a successful stealth check.
6 Skulker again provides a very limited exception to this rule
Can't See, Don’t Care
Chapter 8 has the rules for Vision and Light in the "Environment Section" that lay out the foundations of sight and hiding. First, you have two possible degrees of obscurity1: Lightly Obscured things can be seen but it's hard, Heavily Obscured things can't be seen at all. Next we jump ahead to chapter 9, Unseen Attackers and Targets2. The “Hide” action under Actions in Combat pointed us in this direction. The rules here are written poorly, so I’m going to read this section backwards. If you think I’ve read these rules incorrectly this is a great place to call me out on it! Starting from the third paragraph
This section lays out the two factors of hiding, unseen and unheard. You can't attempt to hide from a creature that can see you, and you cease being hidden if it hears you. This is affirmed in the paragraph before it “This [attack with disadvantage] is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see.” There’s the implication here that when attacking a hidden target you have to guess where they are, and if you guess wrong you miss automatically. You CAN still attack creatures that are hidden, so clearly you can be aware of a hidden creature. So what we’re left with is that hiding is about concealing where you are. Just being unseen means that nearby observers can’t see what you’re doing.D&D Basic Rules wrote:When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden – both unseen and unheard – when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses.”
Depths of Ignorance
We’ve established three levels of combat awareness so far. Unobscured targets are obvious, no departure from basic rules. Unseen targets are harder to hit, but you know roughly where they are. Hidden targets that you aren’t sure exactly where they are but can take a stab at anyway. The next level up from there is surprise. Once again, we go backwards to figure out what surprise means and then to figure out how we achieve it. Last paragraph of Surprise in chapter 9 says
From this paragraph I take away a few things. First; surprise is about combat as a whole, rather than a particular circumstance being surprising. If you realize there’s a threat present then you aren’t surprised, even if it comes from an unexpected angle or with unexpected timing. This means surprise mid-combat is impossible; you’re already in a fight. Second, surprise is decided by each individual’s awareness of a situation. Each fighter in a combat either knows it’s about to roll initiative, or it doesn’t. Once again, we roll back through the section to reaffirm this reading. “Any character or monster that doesn’t notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.” Continuing we lay out how to establish surprise; Stealth Check opposed by Passive Perception. The passive part implies that, if they knew to search for you, they’re not going to be surprised3. The take away is that Surprise is about being aware or not of an eminent threat.D&D Basic Rules wrote: “If you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can’t take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren’t.”
Six Degrees of Unawareness
Bringing this back to Franks list of “obscurantism” we can see where the game marks out each section. The difference between the 1st dot and the 2nd would be something like renown or notoriety, but it’s out of scope for hiding. The 2nd dot and the 3rd are a question of alert. My reading was that the guard knowing you’re in the palace but not which room doesn’t help him that much. This is admittedly the weakest part of my position. It could mean that surprise is impossible or that it makes no difference or some other weird variant4. There isn’t really textual support for either other than to say “the GM Decides”. Between dot 3 and 4 is much clearer. If the guard knows you’re in the room and that you intend to stab his face when he goes in there, you can’t surprise him. This is clearly in the “hidden” valley. The difference between dot 4 and dot 5 is just what his chances are of making an accurate guessed attack at you, you’re still hidden. Dot 5 and 6 is the line between hidden and unseen.
Hiding from the Customer
This is all me guessing about designer intent, just skip to the next section if you don’t care. A lot of the design decisions of 5E seem less based on laziness than cowardice. The peasant rail gun was embarrassing to the developers of 3rd edition. Exploits like the Diplomancer were sudden and loud compared to the fuzzy non-combat proficiencies of 2nd edition. The new rules didn’t have as many ambiguities and added a ton of material, all of which had immediate consequences in people’s games. Bullrush, trip, charge, sunder, grapple; all were suddenly available to all attackers at all times. So 4th edition went out with the directive to lock all that down; everyone’s combat options are strictly enumerated in lists that fit on a single sheet of paper, no using skills to get around or out of fights the DM planned, no open ended spell effects. People hated it, and a big part was gutting the skill system. “Just roll whatever until the DM says stop” is arguably the ONLY rule involved in a skill challenge.
So as we come to 5E we see the scars of past trauma. They were afraid of strictly laying out all the bonuses, penalties and thresholds for skill DCs because they lacked the skill to insure they didn’t produce nonsense results, and they knew it. They couldn’t just toss the system out again, since they got reamed for it in 4th and that could not be allowed to happen again. So they wrote rules anyone could ignore. The stealth rules are that you can only hide if you’re heavily obscured, and hiding lets you keep your exact location secret from observers by staying silent. Hints and implications are tucked all over the book so that when the DM sits down after reading it, they all mind caulk the same spot. But they don’t just outright say it because they don’t want to get nailed down on anything. Look at Crawford’s tweets; he frequently replies to “Yes or No” questions with a bald statement, often only obliquely including the original question. When he does give straight answers they’re usually contradicted by a tweet from Mearls, often on the same day. This maximizes the ammunition for a DM who wants to run skills contrary to mutinous players. If a player creates an assassin and uses surprise crits to trivialize encounters, there’s room for the DM to say “Well these guys aren’t surprised anymore because word has spread throughout the land and now everyone’s always expecting you.” And the player doesn’t have any recourse but to stand up from the table.
But When Can I Hide
Having slogged through all this, we can now return to the Hiding callout box in chapter 7. “You can’t hide from a creature that can see you.” To be unseen by a creature you either have to be in a Heavily Obscured area, Invisible, or the creature needs to be Blinded. The “Skulker” feat, Halfling racial feature “Naturally Stealthy” and Wood Elf racial feature “Mask of the Wild” extend this limitation to allow you to hide when you aren’t otherwise unseen5. Your stealth check is opposed by either the active Perception check of an opponent using the Search action, or a passive Perception Check. If you succeed, you’re hidden until something happens to reveal you. If you make a noise audible to observers, that reveals you. Aren’t sure if a noise was sufficient to reveal you? That’s what the stealth check is for. If you make an attack, that reveals you6. Once you’re revealed, you are no longer hidden. You have to decide to move stealthily if you want to surprise anyone. You can’t surprise people currently in a fight, or who expect one is about to break out.
There are still quite a few missing elements here; do you always succeed at stealth checks against deafened targets? Is losing the conditions that let you hide (Heavy Obscure, Invisible or Blinded) considered “coming out of hiding”? Is Total Cover sufficient for hiding? But these are binary questions; a DM can make up an answer and then stick with it. These rules are horribly organized, vaguely phrased and actively misleading. They are not vaporware.
1 three if you count "not obscured"
2 never claimed the rules were well organized, just functional
3 granted, this is a remarkably tortured reading
4 Guard makes an active perception roll, rather than passive?
5 This doesn’t change those conditions to treat you as unseen without a successful stealth check.
6 Skulker again provides a very limited exception to this rule
-
RelentlessImp
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 701
- Joined: Tue Mar 09, 2010 11:03 am
Yeah, I just see one part to discuss in that wall of text:
There isn’t really textual support for either other than to say “the GM Decides”.
That's the fucking problem with the rules. The MC is expected to answer all of the questions the rules are supposed to answer. Moreover, it's a really goddamned simple question: When can I hide? Alternately, what do I use Stealth checks for? I would say answering the questions your fucking text raises is part of what makes a rules system a rules system, and not a "make shit up" freeform game. I can play freeform games without spending $150; why should I give them my money for something I'm going to have to fix? If I wanted to do that, I'd go buy a DIY kit model airplane. At least then I'd be having fun.a DM can make up an answer and then stick with it
Last edited by RelentlessImp on Wed Sep 09, 2015 12:55 am, edited 3 times in total.
Re: The rules were hiding, apparently
Shit, they should have had you edit their draft.Vaegrim wrote:
Ok, you got me. I've been sucked into this argument. I've been reading this review and it's finally driven me up a wall. The 5th edition D&D rules aren't great, and stealth is a great example of why. But most of the answers are actually in the damn text if anyone read it with the level of dedication that people read the SRD. I'm going to bite the biggest bullet of the lot first, stealth & hiding.
Can't See, Don’t Care
Chapter 8 has the rules for Vision and Light in the "Environment Section" that lay out the foundations of sight and hiding. First, you have two possible degrees of obscurity1: Lightly Obscured things can be seen but it's hard, Heavily Obscured things can't be seen at all. Next we jump ahead to chapter 9, Unseen Attackers and Targets2. The “Hide” action under Actions in Combat pointed us in this direction. The rules here are written poorly, so I’m going to read this section backwards. If you think I’ve read these rules incorrectly this is a great place to call me out on it! Starting from the third paragraphThis section lays out the two factors of hiding, unseen and unheard. You can't attempt to hide from a creature that can see you, and you cease being hidden if it hears you. This is affirmed in the paragraph before it “This [attack with disadvantage] is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see.” There’s the implication here that when attacking a hidden target you have to guess where they are, and if you guess wrong you miss automatically. You CAN still attack creatures that are hidden, so clearly you can be aware of a hidden creature. So what we’re left with is that hiding is about concealing where you are. Just being unseen means that nearby observers can’t see what you’re doing.D&D Basic Rules wrote:When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden – both unseen and unheard – when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses.”
Depths of Ignorance
We’ve established three levels of combat awareness so far. Unobscured targets are obvious, no departure from basic rules. Unseen targets are harder to hit, but you know roughly where they are. Hidden targets that you aren’t sure exactly where they are but can take a stab at anyway. The next level up from there is surprise. Once again, we go backwards to figure out what surprise means and then to figure out how we achieve it. Last paragraph of Surprise in chapter 9 saysFrom this paragraph I take away a few things. First; surprise is about combat as a whole, rather than a particular circumstance being surprising. If you realize there’s a threat present then you aren’t surprised, even if it comes from an unexpected angle or with unexpected timing. This means surprise mid-combat is impossible; you’re already in a fight. Second, surprise is decided by each individual’s awareness of a situation. Each fighter in a combat either knows it’s about to roll initiative, or it doesn’t. Once again, we roll back through the section to reaffirm this reading. “Any character or monster that doesn’t notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.” Continuing we lay out how to establish surprise; Stealth Check opposed by Passive Perception. The passive part implies that, if they knew to search for you, they’re not going to be surprised3. The take away is that Surprise is about being aware or not of an eminent threat.D&D Basic Rules wrote: “If you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can’t take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren’t.”
Six Degrees of Unawareness
Bringing this back to Franks list of “obscurantism” we can see where the game marks out each section. The difference between the 1st dot and the 2nd would be something like renown or notoriety, but it’s out of scope for hiding. The 2nd dot and the 3rd are a question of alert. My reading was that the guard knowing you’re in the palace but not which room doesn’t help him that much. This is admittedly the weakest part of my position. It could mean that surprise is impossible or that it makes no difference or some other weird variant4. There isn’t really textual support for either other than to say “the GM Decides”. Between dot 3 and 4 is much clearer. If the guard knows you’re in the room and that you intend to stab his face when he goes in there, you can’t surprise him. This is clearly in the “hidden” valley. The difference between dot 4 and dot 5 is just what his chances are of making an accurate guessed attack at you, you’re still hidden. Dot 5 and 6 is the line between hidden and unseen.
Hiding from the Customer
This is all me guessing about designer intent, just skip to the next section if you don’t care. A lot of the design decisions of 5E seem less based on laziness than cowardice. The peasant rail gun was embarrassing to the developers of 3rd edition. Exploits like the Diplomancer were sudden and loud compared to the fuzzy non-combat proficiencies of 2nd edition. The new rules didn’t have as many ambiguities and added a ton of material, all of which had immediate consequences in people’s games. Bullrush, trip, charge, sunder, grapple; all were suddenly available to all attackers at all times. So 4th edition went out with the directive to lock all that down; everyone’s combat options are strictly enumerated in lists that fit on a single sheet of paper, no using skills to get around or out of fights the DM planned, no open ended spell effects. People hated it, and a big part was gutting the skill system. “Just roll whatever until the DM says stop” is arguably the ONLY rule involved in a skill challenge.
So as we come to 5E we see the scars of past trauma. They were afraid of strictly laying out all the bonuses, penalties and thresholds for skill DCs because they lacked the skill to insure they didn’t produce nonsense results, and they knew it. They couldn’t just toss the system out again, since they got reamed for it in 4th and that could not be allowed to happen again. So they wrote rules anyone could ignore. The stealth rules are that you can only hide if you’re heavily obscured, and hiding lets you keep your exact location secret from observers by staying silent. Hints and implications are tucked all over the book so that when the DM sits down after reading it, they all mind caulk the same spot. But they don’t just outright say it because they don’t want to get nailed down on anything. Look at Crawford’s tweets; he frequently replies to “Yes or No” questions with a bald statement, often only obliquely including the original question. When he does give straight answers they’re usually contradicted by a tweet from Mearls, often on the same day. This maximizes the ammunition for a DM who wants to run skills contrary to mutinous players. If a player creates an assassin and uses surprise crits to trivialize encounters, there’s room for the DM to say “Well these guys aren’t surprised anymore because word has spread throughout the land and now everyone’s always expecting you.” And the player doesn’t have any recourse but to stand up from the table.
But When Can I Hide
Having slogged through all this, we can now return to the Hiding callout box in chapter 7. “You can’t hide from a creature that can see you.” To be unseen by a creature you either have to be in a Heavily Obscured area, Invisible, or the creature needs to be Blinded. The “Skulker” feat, Halfling racial feature “Naturally Stealthy” and Wood Elf racial feature “Mask of the Wild” extend this limitation to allow you to hide when you aren’t otherwise unseen5. Your stealth check is opposed by either the active Perception check of an opponent using the Search action, or a passive Perception Check. If you succeed, you’re hidden until something happens to reveal you. If you make a noise audible to observers, that reveals you. Aren’t sure if a noise was sufficient to reveal you? That’s what the stealth check is for. If you make an attack, that reveals you6. Once you’re revealed, you are no longer hidden. You have to decide to move stealthily if you want to surprise anyone. You can’t surprise people currently in a fight, or who expect one is about to break out.
There are still quite a few missing elements here; do you always succeed at stealth checks against deafened targets? Is losing the conditions that let you hide (Heavy Obscure, Invisible or Blinded) considered “coming out of hiding”? Is Total Cover sufficient for hiding? But these are binary questions; a DM can make up an answer and then stick with it. These rules are horribly organized, vaguely phrased and actively misleading. They are not vaporware.
1 three if you count "not obscured"
2 never claimed the rules were well organized, just functional
3 granted, this is a remarkably tortured reading
4 Guard makes an active perception roll, rather than passive?
5 This doesn’t change those conditions to treat you as unseen without a successful stealth check.
6 Skulker again provides a very limited exception to this rule
If they had managed to organize the book, that they sold to people for real money, even remotely as well as your post... people would've needed to work a little harder to be angry.
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nockermensch wrote:Advantage will lead to dicepools in D&D. Remember, you read this here first!