The Illusion and Broken Promises of "Bounded Accuracy" in D&D (Rules Lawyer)
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- Опубліковано 30 чер 2024
- Bounded Accuracy article in the Wayback Machine:
web.archive.org/web/201407150...
"How Pathfinder’s Math Tells a Better Story - D&D vs PF2e" (Kaleb Herington):
• How Pathfinder’s Math ...
My old Rot Grub blog:
rotgrub.wordpress.com/
"The 5e monster creation guidelines are wrong" (Blog of Holding):
www.blogofholding.com/?p=7283
"A (rambling) criticism of bounded accuracy" (Reddit):
/ a_rambling_criticism_o...
0:00 Intro
4:17 The case for bounded accuracy
10:48 Unprecedented in D&D
13:30 How it works
15:51 Lack of system
18:46 Unbounded bonuses
27:03 Big gaps
32:27 Hard to challenge the party
33:43 Insignificance of leveling-up
36:10 Doesn't reflect combat skill
38:41 Few magic items
39:52 Weak monsters still become obsolete
41:21 Fights become a slog
44:07 Difficulties adjudicating
47:06 Undermines specialists
49:50 Verisimilitude suffers
51:12 Final Thoughts
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This is a critique of the 5e designers' goals with Bounded Accuracy and their execution of it in 5e. It's not a criticism of anyone's gaming preferences or of people who enjoy 5e. If anything, players and DMs would be better served if the designers were clearer and more honest about their goals with D&D and provide gamers the tools they need to accomplish them, whatever the goals are.
ADDITIONS/ERRATA:
-One more effect of Bounded Accuracy I realized after making this. (And hell the video was already too damn long):
... The decision to lessen the importance of level and rely more on "abilities, not numbers" is one reason why it's hard to balance encounters in 5e. Making level matter less for monster statistics means that what's more important are (1) the number of creatures (e.g., action economy, the reason why you must add a multiplier when there are multiple creatures when calculating an encounter) and (2) hard-to-quantify abilities (e.g., a shadow's Strength Drain ability). Some may prefer this style of monster design and don't care much for ease of balancing encounters, but this IS one effect of BA that many would find undesirable. This is not INHERENT to BA: PF2e's encounter balancing still works with its Proficiency Without Level variant. But 5e's designers, when going with BA, decided to approximate difficulty with abilities instead of numbers (with limited success), and also prompted them to "let go" of concerning themselves with balance and leave balance up to Dungeon Masters, as I say in the final part of the video.
-Looks like no one caught the joke at 0:49 yet. Bonus points if you do! (Requires knowledge from past videos)
-28:16 I should've mentioned that the scaling of monster save DCs is too aggressive in the monster chart. It assumes that EVERYONE increases their bonus with their ASI, but they can only do that with one of their 6 saving throws!
-30:15 The Banished fighter still returns if the party disrupts the caster's concentration. Still suxx tho (and the Fighter loses their agency)
-Regarding "slogs," in fairness to 5e, I should have mentioned that 5e has a tool of foregoing rolling a d20 and simply estimating how many times a large number of creatures will hit a single foe ("Handling Mobs," DMG 250). It's a rough tool (if they need to roll a 5 to hit it says EVERY creature hits, instead of 80% of them) and it has the downside of eliminating randomness entirely for to-hit chances, however.
-43:10 High-level fighters can only do 9 attacks once per short rest; however, I would still argue that 5 attacks per round shows the same problem of being a "slog" with little excitement.
-49:25 the "master thief" of at least 11th level would have Reliable Talent so would not have a chance of failing. However, this highlights another issue: only Rogues of Level 11+ can do this. One goal of the D&D Skills system starting with 3e was to provide abilities that ANY class could be good at. Also, in 5e only the Rogue can reliably do Athletics checks, which seems strange and unintended...
-@scottdouglass2 mentions that 5e's approach requires controlling DAMAGE scaling as you level, but 5e doesn't do this: "A fighter scales with level by getting more attacks, but a barbarian only gets 2 attacks, 3 with a bonus action. You can also scale with better magic items, but the core system doesn't address the topic well. Compare that to 13th age where your damage is baseline a number of dice equal to your level."
-I didn't mention it in this video because it was already too long, but I think PF2e having more degrees of proficiency (Untrained - Trained - Expert - Master - legendary) instead of an on/off binary makes it easier for the GM to say "you the Wizard auto-succeed because you're proficient enough" and "you the Barbarian can't possibly succeed because, while you picked up a few books (you're Trained) you're not proficient enough (you're not a Master)." By RAW the rules say you can require a minimum proficiency level to even attempt something. Which the DM can do in 5e, but there's less rules support for making such calls.
-I've seen a couple of comments saying "Well if the DM does X then..." Not everything should be on the DM. Why not put some responsibility on the designers?
Personally I would argue that the idea of "balancing encounters" isn't nearly as important as a lot of people like to pretend it is. Yeah, occasionally a fight will turn out to be too hard and you'll have to run away, that's just how things go sometimes. Find another way around. I think the idea that every encounter should be balanced and within a party's ability to overcome is a major flaw in modern D&D (and D&D based games). The system's origins are in adventure and problem solving, you shouldn't expect to be able to just slam head-first into everything in your path and brute force your way through.
To be clear, I'm not even a fan of D&D, and if I'm gonna play a crunchy combat-oriented game I much prefer PF2. But even so, I disagree with the idea that balanced encounters are all that important in the first place.
@@anothervagabond I don't think that's really the problem with balance. First of all, an overall balanced game doesn't mean you only ever fight things at your level. There should be difficult and easy encounters, and sometimes even encounters that are trivial or ones you have no chance of winning.
But there is a sweet spot of difficulty where things are the most fun. You want players to be in that sweet spot, putting enough effort into overcoming a challenge to be engaged, but not feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. If you flatten the difficulty distribution so that 1/5 encounters is trivial, 1/5 is easy, 1/5 is in the sweet spot, 1/5 is difficult, and 1/5 has to be run away from, you're going to get players who spend most encounters being bored or frustrated.
What balance really means is that relative level should give you a clear idea of difficulty. A perfectly balanced game, in theory, would give you perfect information on difficulty. If players are forced to run away in a perfectly balanced game, it's because the DM intentionally set the difficulty too high for them. The further you get from perfect balance, the less level serves as an indicator of difficulty. Taken to its logical extreme, a perfectly unbalanced system would be true random, with absolutely no correspondence between relative level and difficulty. That means, on average and with a sufficiently large sample size, ending up in a flat distribution of difficulties, with players being bored or frustrated 4/5 of the time.
If the range of possible difficulties is great enough, you can also get an even worse problem. I've been assuming that the worst scenario is "the players play one round of combat, realise they can't win, and run away" but in D&D it is very possible for that one round of combat to drop someone to 0 hp. Now, instead of running away, you have to try to rescue your party member. That eats all of your actions and forces you to stay in combat with a creature who can one-shot party members. Now you're in a death-spiral- a long drawn-out slog working its way inevitably and inexorably towards a tpk. In terms of engagement and fun, that is literally the worst possible difficulty level. In a balanced system, you can predict which encounters might risk that kind of "sour spot" difficulty and avoid them. But in an unbalanced system, you might say "A shade is the right difficulty for my party based on level" and end up with a long, frustrating wipe because of its strength drain ability.
@@Salsmachev The problem is that when you say "players will be bored", that assumes that players are specifically looking for a game about complex and balanced tactical combat encounters. If that's what you're looking for, you should not be playing any edition of D&D other than (perhaps) 4th edition. The core of these games is not about balanced combat encounters, it's about adventuring and dungeon delving, even PF2 has issues when it comes to encounter balance.
One major problem here is that people want to pick one system and run every kind of game in it, but that's just not going to work. Just like you can't run a deep mechanical combat game using a narrative system like Forged in the Dark, you shouldn't be trying to run a game focused on balanced combat encounters using a system designed primarily for dungeon crawling adventures. The core assumptions of a dungeon crawling game are not the same as those of a tactical skirmish game.
Either you accept that not all of your encounters will be balanced or you go find a system that's actually focused on creating balanced combat encounters.
Lawyer, é possível jogar Pathfinder 2 presencial sem usar acessórios virtuais? O bom e velho RPG com Livro Básico físico, dados, papel e lápis.
In another example of 5e having some poor implementation of what is a reasonable design goal; I feel that leaning towards "abilities, not numbers" would have worked a lot better if they, for example, made their monsters more interesting. Open any Pathfinder Bestiary (1e OR 2e) to almost any random monster (especially once you reach CR 10+) and you're just about guaranteed to find multiple interesting and unique abilities and weaknesses that you can build entire encounters around. Do the same for 5e monsters and you're lucky to get half of the options that the PF equivalents had. Similar things can be said for Pathfinder's player options vs 5e; if D&D really wanted to shift the focus of the game towards interesting abilities instead of an arms race of escalating numbers, it's kind of sad that they failed to even match, let alone outdo, their "crunchy-big-number" competitor in the exact area they hoped to specialize in.
This video does a great job breaking down one of my biggest problems with 5e. I tell people “bonuses are too small, except when they aren’t” but it doesn’t usually make sense with a lot of rambling haha
Yeah, I've never had any luck trying to explain why I liked 4Es system of skill progression over 3.xs skill ranks. In 3.x a character only really became more proficient at a severely limited number of skills. Putting cross-class skill ranks in skills was pointless because at the higher levels you'd never beat the challenge DCs. A GM for instance is not going to put a DC10 climb challenge in an L20 adventure - it's going to be a more difficult climb because of slippery surfaces or something to make it a challenge for proficient L20 characters. 4Es practice of letting every character add half their level to all skills kept those skills relevant at all levels; and it showed that an ADVENTURER became more skilled at all sorts of things besides their class repertoire of skills. For instance every character stands watch at night so everybody should become more proficient at Perception. Almost every skill becomes important at some point during the adventure points where nothing significant happens to have the GM waste time describing it; like learning a bit of survival while crossing wilderness, learning a bit of climbing getting up a steep ledge, learning a bit of swimming crossing a steam, etc. And expecting PCs to throw cross-class skill ranks at all of these is silly. Only a wizard is going to have the excess ranks to waste on that stuff. And they almost certainly don't have the ability score bonuses to support those cross-class skills.
it's been my feeling that 5e was rushed. That there wasn't much focus on balance seen in the way that magic items have no pricing is a part of that. The DC issues are part of it too. I think another possibility is that they wanted 5e to be more accessible (which i think was a component of the design of 4e honestly) but they felt there was a minimum required crunchiness for D&D to feel like D&D at all. So we instead have superficial accessibility and not well executed crunch. At the end of the day I think they'd be better served by D&D Lite and a mainline crunchier edition (i mean i probably still won't play it because i really like pf2e and other systems)
@@orifox1629 4E came out shortly after Hasbro bought WOTC, all the money that would be made on 3.x had already been made, so Hasbro wanted a new edition so THEY could make money off of their new purchase, they wanted it to be so different from 3.5 that people wouldn't just stay with 3.5 (backfired) and I suspect that they didn't understand tabletop RPGs so they wanted it to be like a computer RPG. Personally I loved 4E, but I heard so many complaints from gaming friends about tiny little things they'd heard about the game without context that I had the feeling it would be hard to win people over. Many old fans just absolutely refused to give it a chance. And after giving it over a decade to catch on they gave up and decided to go with something that would feel more like the older more popular editions, and be simpler for new players to grasp. Writing out magic items was a huge mistake; a great many of us players LOVE the aspect of finding new loot we can use. Magic items have ALWAYS been a core part of the D&D experience. Effectively removing them is going to be a hard sell for a lot of us. I bought in because I thought they were patiently playtesting everything - they spent something like four years of their Adventures League having people all over the world playtesting for them. But the adventures they ran never let us get much about L5 where we would never see where the flaws were. Just my Not-So-Humble-Opinion.
@@orifox1629 idk why, but for some reason 5e players tend to pretend crunch is a bad thing
I have started looking at PF2.0. I am getting the sense that accumulated bonuses are so large over time that the roll of the die is almost insignificant. Is this indeed the case I have yet to play PF
That's why I liked the "take ten" rule from 3rd edition (I think). When you're good enough at something, you don't have much chance to fail at it unless you're really in a crunch to do it, like when you're in a big hurry or improvising tools.
DMG 237 "Sometimes a character fails an ability check and wants to try again. In some cases, a character is free to do so; the only real cost is the time it takes. With enough attempts and enough time, a character should eventually succeed at the task. To speed things up, assume that a character spending ten times the normal amount of time needed to complete a task automatically succeeds at that task. However, no amount of repeating the check allows a character to turn an impossible task into a successful one."
You absolutely still can.
Not to mention PHB 175 "A passive check is a special kind of ability check that
doesn’t involve any die rolls. Such a check can represent
the average result for a task done repeatedly, such as
searching for secret doors over and over again, or can
be used when the DM wants to secretly determine
whether the characters succeed at som ething without
rolling dice, such as noticing a hidden monster.
Here’s how to determine a character’s total for a
passive check:
10 + all modifiers that normally apply to the check
If the character has advantage on the check, add 5. For
disadvantage, subtract 5. The game refers to a passive
check total as a score.
For example, if a 1st-level character has a W isdom of
15 and proficiency in Perception, he or she has a passive
W isdom (Perception) score of 14.
The rules on hiding in the “Dexterity” section below
rely on passive checks, as do the exploration rules
in chapter 8.
"
@@porkupineexe6862 Passive checks are good, but they aren't as broadly applicable as 3.x's rules for "taking 10". While 5e allows passive checks for representing the average result of repeated tasks and for secret results, 3.x allowed taking 10 for nearly all skills essentially any time the character wasn't in combat or under extreme duress (e.g., the fantasy equivalent of defusing a bomb).
One thing I noticed over more than 15 years DMing 3.5 is that many people forgot they _could_ take 10. When reminded, they seemed almost disappointed at not getting to gamble. The few times I got to play a PC, I was taking 10 at every possibility, which meant success without rolling. This annoyed DMs who hadn't bothered to read the rules. They disliked the removal of chance and thought it "cheap".
Perhaps this phenomenon is why the 5e team decided to take away 3.x's mechanic to passive checks. Turns out that a lot of players simply don't thoroughly read their rulebooks, which can lead to miscalibrated expectations.
Dnd5e has passive skill checks im the rules.
That beings said, the system is still weird with some skills and such
@@porkupineexe6862passive checks are absolutely the worst idea in 5e skills. You mean to tell me, I'm better off NOT intentionally watching for enemies or searching for traps because suddenly I'm able to get far worse results than I would just running through the area and looking straight ahead using my peripheral vision/ other senses?
3.5 also had a "take 20" option in cases with both time and NO penalty for failure. Take 10 was for a moderate amount of time and/or marginal (but existing) penalty for failure. Take 20 was for guaranteed "best case success" on SOME attempt given enough time
I remember reading an article a while ago about why campaigns in D&D fizzle out after the 12th level. I hadn't played a campaign that went beyond that at that point in time, so I didn't have any personal experience to inform my opinion, and there didn't seem to be any real consensus in the comments. Watching this video, though, really opened my eyes.
I'm currently playing a campaign where we've just barely reached level 12, and so we're getting into the territory of monsters with +13 to their hit dice. In a recent battle against a dragon, the dragon could only miss our monk character if it rolled a 1 - which wasn't the best feeling for the monk! My paladin got plate mail at level 4, so with her shield, she's had a 20 AC, and as the monsters have been hitting more often, I've been increasingly wondering when we're going to find some better armor... Finding out that's not how the game works - that I've already got the best I should expect - is *really* disappointing! The idea that my character was better at avoiding enemy attacks when she was level four than she'll be at level 15 is a huge demotivator. It makes the rarity of campaigns that go beyond level 12 make a lot more sense.
Nah, campaigns fizzle out before 12th almost entirely because of things like burnout and schedule conflict. If you do last long enough to get to 12, you usually go to 20 because by that point you're engaged enough in the story, characters and group that the system and progression becomes secondary. To look at it another way - if it was people finding the tier 3 system unappealing, campaigns wouldn't be fizzling out by 12, they'd be wrapping up by 12 so the group can start a new game at lower level.
What. You only had 14 AC at 12th level? That’s a you problem I feel, considering monk gets to add Wis and dex to their armor
@@GLu-tb1pb now, while the specific example is a "you problem" you cannot deny that 3rd edition had that defect: attack scales with level, defense does not. So what do they do in 5ed? Attack scales badly with level, some (usually useless) defenses scale badly with level. Obiusly, we amntained the awful HP goes up, magic damage goes up, other sources of damages don't, just to make every combat won by the spellcaster or a slug throught a swamp.
@@MrJerichoPumpkin In 3e, though, you could get items (access to which scaled by level) that buffed your AC a lot more readily than you could buff your attack output. In 3rd, however, monster ACs scaled too high compared to martial attack bonuses, rendering them too resilient to non-caster characters, which was something that Pathfinder 1e fixed.
@@GLu-tb1pb An adult dragon has a +14 to hit, so I'm assuming that the monk has 16 AC. That does seem low for level 12 (16 in Dex and Wis at level 1 will get you to 16 AC), but the highest AC a normal single class monk is likely to have at level 12 with 3 ASI's is 19, which means the same dragon still hits on anything over a 4.
Bounded accuracy also just buffs casters. That level 20 "master" locksmith can't get that hard mundane lock? Well this level 3 wizard got you.
That's the same take away I was having.
Magic gets to trivialize physical problems that a martial character never gets the ability to exceed at. The fighter never gets to jump a gorge, but the wizard can get the party to fly over it like its nothing.
@@DarthChocolate15 That's kind of the point, magic lets you cheat. Magic is supposed to let you do things you can't do normally.
@@Klaital1what's the point of martials then? Are they just inherently inferior?
@@Klaital1by level 5, martials are supposed to be superhuman, by level 11, martial are supposed to be able to do the impossible, yet IRL commoner humans can do better long jumps, open any locks, any lock even our modern locks in less than 1 action, lift over 4,000 lbs. Run faster, punch harder, etc. A RL commoner in our world is more powerful than any level 20 martial. Martials ARE underpowered. As a GM, I thrive to fix this by making martials more powerful.
a level 20 rogue cannot roll lower than a 22 on a thieves' tools check... what are you talking about
it seems a hilarious amount of 5e's issues are solved by doing what 4e did
I beleive it was Jason Boleman that was actually also a designer for 4e!
Edit: it was Logan Bonner, not Jason! Sry everone, and thank you for catching that 🤜🤛
@@aimanbenkhadra644 I'm 99% sure Logan Bonner was too.
@@devcrom3 -Buhlman wasn't on the 4e team, but Logan Bonner definitely was, and Seifter wasn't a 4e designer, but he was extremely proficient at it.
5e gets homebrewed until it becomes 4e or PF2e
Stephen Radney-Macfarlane (another 1/4 of the cover authors) also worked as a dev on 4e.
it is extremely weird to hear that the game with extradimensional travel and wish also wants to be a game where kicking down a door remains a hard task, even for a guy who"s slain a dragon lmao
I've concluded that this is because of the cognitive dissonance between High Fantasy and Low Fantasy games. D&D was originally High Fantasy, based on it's inspirations. However, Low Fantasy is a much more prevalent genre in our time, and this latest generation of game makers was trying to bend toward that without really realizing the genre blending going on there.
To put what I mean in practical terms, Gilgamesh probably wouldn't struggle to bash down a reinforced door, but John Wick might not be able to physically force it open.
Well really, how experienced you are has little do with how well you kick down a door, that's more an issue of strength. Just because you're highly skilled doesn't mean you're necessarily strong. Look at Elric of Melnibone, the dude killed gods, but without strength boosters he could be super weak and barely able to move in his own armor.
It's only really frustrating because those "real world" elements in D&D games only remain a struggle without magic. I.e., it makes magic more "impressive", but means mundane characters like most rogues/fighters are hampered by doors and balancing on logs. Wizards and druids trivialize all of the things they used to be really lousy at. Casters get to overcome any or all obstacles, but "fighting men" are still restrained by physics.
That works for some people's idea of verisimilitude, but it doesn't work for a game, and hardly works for most stories. Imagine reading a book about Fairy Dotter, the secret sorcerer, who has to rely on his large half giant friend to (literally) carry him through their early adventures and lessons, to then have Fairy Dotter have to carry Vagrid through the final chapters of their stories together, if Vagrid can even help anymore. The first 4 levels of the game/story expect casters to have to rely on martials to survive and succeed, and the last 16 levels require casters to empower the martials, or solve the challenges themselves. Many PCs in 5e need to take a multiclass or subclass that gives them magical powers, or they just can't contribute outside of hitting something hard.
@@kevinbarnard355 A lot of that problem simply comes from the fact of how perfect D&D magic is. You can fail at hitting a target with a sword, but a fireball spell never fails, you never manage to just not cast it correctly. And it unerringly producing extremely predictable results, to the point of being an area you can precision target into a melee. It doesn't sometimes come out a little dud fireball. And someone in your face as you're casting is barely a problem.
To make matters worse, there's no supernatural restrictions placed on magic or wizards, and wizards get super versatile magic. You don't have to pick if you want to be an elemental wizard, a necromancer or a master of illusion. You get to be all those at once.
D&D magic is utterly perfect in every conceivable way.
@GummiArms
It was low fantasy and the one spell magic user died from a stiff breeze
This explains so many problems I have with my current 5e PC. I'm playing a Artificer/Rogue multiclass. I quickly learned that this is a terrible build, but I loved the character, and stuck with him through the rough combats, and inability to contribute to a lot of rolls. Eventually, I shifted from a poorly-optimized dual-dagger wielder, to a switch-hitting ranged AC tank thanks to the Armorer subclass of Artificer. It's cool that I can do that, but I'm still miles behind our Wizard, Bard, and Barbarian who are all monsters in combat.
A huge part of this problem is because our DM throws a lot of monsters at us that force saving throws rather than targeting AC. Few of these were Dex or Int saves, which were my proficient saves from my first level in Artificer. Instead they mainly required Con, Wis, and Cha saves. My Cha has been 16 since the start of the campaign, since the character is a pretty good diplomat, but because I am not proficient in Cha saves, the save has _never_ grown past +3. Making matters worse, my Wis and Con scores are 11 and 10 respectively. Oh dear.
The Barbarian hasn't hardly cared about these saving throws because she has resistance to basically everything, and the Bard and Wizard are either not in the way because they don't want to be in melee, or are proficient in the saves.
My character's martial incompetence was even crap at low levels because a core Rogue ability I chose was rendered irrelevant by the party. Both casters continually selected save-or-suck spells, which target enemy DCs, and the Barbarian uses Reckless Attack to gain advantage on everything, which negates the Master of Tactics feature from, the Mastermind Rogue subclass, which lets me help allies on attacks from 30 feet away. That doesn't work on spells that force saving throws, and it advantage doesn't stack with itself, so the Barbarian doesn't need it.
Now, our DM is incredible. They are a master storyteller, and have even worked at an indie TRPG dev studio. They get the math of the system. This isn't the DM's fault, these are core weaknesses baked into 5e.
All of this crystalized for me in a "greatest hits" fight our DM set up for us. A crazy Fey Lord created illusory versions of our past set-piece fights to keep us distracted while he did nefarious things. Our DM expressly told us that the fights were _exactly the same_ as what we encountered at lower levels. While we trivialized the replay of our very first major combat encounter of the campaign (from when we were level 3), our next big set-piece fight (from level 5) was incredibly challenging for us (now at level 12)! We actually did _worse_ in the illusory version of that fight, despite having two extra DMPCs with us the second time around!
This is, frankly, ridiculous. D&D is a heroic fantasy system where your characters are supposed to grow dramatically in their combat prowess. At level 12 we should not have been greatly challenged by a major boss fight from level 5. This isn't a system like GURPS which is built in a way where starting threats can remain incredibly threatening for an entire campaign. This is D&D, and even my poorly built Artificer/Rogue should be able to look at a squad of enemy soldiers, at level 12, and not think to himself it might be time to run.
I think the Numenera/Cypher System Rules implementation of Bounded Accuracy is a great example of achieving all of D&D 5e's goals -- less magic items, but offering a more clear sense of progression as you level up with their Effort and Edge mechanics.
I agree - Bounded accuracy is not the issue in 5e .... it's the way they implemented it, and then undermined it as they went on ...
The bit about the door is telling. They cite providing a moderate challenge for high-level characters as the reason to have a door be solid adamantine warded with arcane sigils. This misses the point entirely!
The reason that the door is so strong is that it explains why _low-level_ characters haven't opened it. If busting the door down only requires a DC 17 check, then we're presented with a plot hole: Why hasn't a first-level character busted down this door already and absconded with the treasure? Verisimilitude failure right in the article that introduced bounded accuracy as a boon to verisimilitude.
Good point!
Right if there's no time limit you can just keep at it and get it eventually
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 Even with a time limit, it takes on average less than 20 tries to open that door, and that discounts all the modifiers. A small band of orks would have gone through that super high security door in an afternoon.
and why build an adamantine door if anybody can break it down?
The essential problem is that d & d originally represented the effect of armor as making the target harder to hit. That's not actually how armor works. It reduces damage. The AC system is not fixable. I should probably be able to hit a dragon with a pen knife, but the damage shouldn't get through its scales.
"After a short period of GMing…" or they could print a table for me to read. 5e really has some strange stuff.
"After you've fucked around in the dark for 2-6 sessions, probably about a month or more of sessions if you play weekly, you can start having fun!" Thanks WotC! :DDDD
@@Shenaldrac It's like playing Noita, without the fun of Noita.
Something I've learned about the math of Pf2e, which you somewhat addressed, is that level added to progression and non-stacking bonuses means that "on level" challenges basically cancel out those increasing bonuses, meaning success or failure on those "on level" challenges primarily comes down to the actions you take in the encounter, whereas the significantly higher or lower level encounters become commensurately impossible or trivial, providing (IMO) a great balance of palpable power growth AND action/die rolls mattering.
TL/DR: Every +1 matters means that "on level" encounters rely on tactics and decisions, but adding level to proficiency means that low or high level enemies FEEL like they are lower or higher level than the players.
On the topic of being "rules light", it *could* be considered "rules light" in the sense that it has fewer codified rules than games like Pf2e and 3.5, but it substitutes rules for rulings in a variety of situations. The thing is, "rulings" are simply "rules" that players didn't know until they try something - so as you play and need rulings to supplement the lack of rules, you then create those rules, which then become subjective to the DM and tabke rather than objective to the game itself. So, to be glib, its "rules light" until you play the game.
5e is "rules light" because 70% of anything an real person playing would try is described with "idk ask your DM lol", and other 20% are "you get this one universal bonus / penalty. This doesnt scale, never, stop trying making actually complicated strategies cause you'll only get the same as if you did just good enough".
Well, the advantage of using "rulings" as a substitute for rules is that you'll only then have as many "rules" as you need for what your players actually do. The DM doesn't have to memorize rules for all sorts of actions their players might take, even if most of them never get used, or else have to search to find the relevant rule when a player does something they didn't anticipate.
So it's "rules light" in that most "rules" don't exist unless they need to.
@@benl2140 You don't need to rememeber those rarely usuful rules, but having them actually makes things much easier. I run pathfinder 1e. I don't need to remember underwater fighting rules - but the fact they exist mean I can just google them if I want to use them or have to use them because I didn't expect pcs to jump into the lake instead of waiting for the dragon to come out of it. Actually having written rules is also a good thing for players - if they come up with a way to force an enemy into an underwater fight, they don't have to ask me how that works - they can just check the rules to know that bbeg would deal only half damage with their massive club while their spears would still be fully effective if they fought underwater. The same is true for every other fringe rule, it helps both players and game masters, and if the rule is dumb you can still ignore it.
your perception of rules vs rulings is wrong.
@@albertonishiyama1980 man I don't even play 5e anymore but at least I didn't fail to understand the system and then just fucking lie about it after lol.
wtf are these comments.
I love the idea of certain things remaining difficult like the door. For example, I don't imagine that Gandalf could kick down an iron door, despite being a powerful wizard. But I would also be very disappointed to watch Gimli or Aragorn, two seasoned warriors, having to spend 10 minutes kicking at a door before they could get through. So I get what they were going for.
But by giving the dice roll so much weight compared to your stats/skills, you've added an absurd amount of RNG into the game. It kills immersion and story-telling on a regular basis. I mean here I am giving a detailed description like, "My grizzled fighter, his muscles like iron and his gaze like steel, approaches the small dilapidated shack. After weeks of tracking, questioning, bribing, and more than a few threats, he has finally tracked down his mark to this address. Unconcerned, he takes a long swig from his flask, sniffs, spits onto the dusty road, then raises a heavily booted foot to kick down the door- an action he has performed more times than he could remember over his many years bounty hunting... Unfortunately, he isn't able to kick in the door because of the 25% chance of failure, so after a couple more tries, he eventually ends up just breaking a window and half-crawling, half-falling inside so he can do the combat."
Every party basically becomes the robbers in Home Alone, comedically incapable of performing routine tasks.
I think perhaps you're just rolling too often.
This is why 2E had a whole column for max press, open doors, bend bars / lift gates and so on. To take the game away from this d20 based ecosystem into a "what is suitable to evaluate this challenge" system.
It's not intuitive in modern gaming because it's a set value at each strength value a player must roll under - but it lends to narrative story telling in a way that failing a "DC" doesn't (DC fails make the hardened adventurers feel like goofs, rather than heroes).
@@CJWproductions No doubt. If there's a 25% of failure, the DC is likely 5 over the character's passive Strength or Athletics or whatever score. Commend him on being epic enough to not have to roll for it and move on and don't make the burly dude feel like a failure.
@@CJWproductions That's an OSR attitude
@@TacticusPrime There's a reason OSR is fairly popular. The core issue here is that dice are being rolled to determine one of two outcomes; one of which we've established is terrible narrative that adds literally nothing to the game. Why should a DM call for a player to make that roll purely to introduce a 25% chance of the game being temporarily ruined? Heck, I'm pretty sure this isn't even an OSR thing and the DMG says something to this effect too - players only make a skill test if the DM asks for one. Stop asking for skill tests when one of the two outcomes is nonsense.
This issue cannot be fixed on a design level. It can only be fixed by the DM gettin gud. Just think about it for 2 seconds. How on earth would unbounded accuracy, or any action resolution mechanic solve this? Either the chance for failure, however small, still exists - thus the possibility of your game being temporarily ruined is still there. Or it doesn't exist, in which case the entire check was a massive waste of everyone's time and processing power, because the check was predetermined - what was the point of rolling it?
I'd be really curious what the results would be like if we surveyed players with questions like How likely is it that... a sneaky thief should be able to sneak by an unskilled guard? or a level 5 fighter win a fight against two level 1 fighters. I'm curious how people feel the probabilities should work instead of how they do.
Great survey idea! I’d love to see that.
I really felt this when getting into BG3: bounded accuracy in 5e made the dice more important than my skill/ability than the bonus at virtually every level.
Also my biggest complaint of 5e. The difference between a brand new lv1 character and a lv11 character that is well seasoned is only 4 with out magic items or temp bonuses. A lv1 gets a +5 to their focus and a lv 11 gets a +9. Get a party that coordinates temp bonuses and a few magic items or class features and the balance completely breaks.
The D20 is simply to large of a Die for 5E’s original target for bounded accuracy. The goal should of been focused on the removal of floating math bonuses, not making everything smaller or a Die bonus instead of flat for fixing the problems from 3e and 4e.
Replace the D20 with a D12, lower all DCs and ACs by 5, be careful of handing out to many magic item bonuses, and only allow 1 bonus Die to be added to rolls to prevent bonus stacking and the system works out better. But that a lot of changes to fix the core foundation of the game.
And that's after Larian reworked SO MANY 5E RULES to try and duct tape it together into a working system.
larian made it even worse by adding the critical fumble house rule, making missing checks where you have a huge bonus much more likely
this is fine for some things where it can lead to hilarious consequences, but is also just annoying AF for many things
@@JacobYaw Isn't that what everyone does? In a way, it is a part of the fun. The DM is encouraged to change and bend rules to fit the characters and the campaign. The 5e rules have always been a scaffold that you build around, and they are a pretty good scaffold I think.
The dice always have the same impact, no matter the size of the modifier.
What is relevant is the difference between the DC and the modifier, and the range of modifiers the system is designed to handle. In pf2e the modifiers are designed in such a way that trained quickly becomes a binary possible/not possible so in that way the skill modifier is less relevant, but the degrees of proficiency does increase the range of modifiers accessible in normal play, which increases the significance of the skill modifier.
But that has nothing to do with the skill modifiers getting above 10, 20, 30 or whatever number you think sounds significant. If 5e added your level to your skill proficiency (and task DCs) it wouldn't change the relative importance of the skill modifier and the dice.
What I really never understand is this strange yearning for the goblins you fight at level one to be a challenge the entire game. Like, even in Monster of the Week shows, the mooks our heroes fight are eventually more of a distraction to the main show of the villian. I would personally be annoyed if I kept fighting the exact same enemies throughout a campaign. I'd rather be fighting clearly improved goblins, and the ones we were fighting flee at the sight of the party.
also, attacks improving while AC does not feels real bad. I had gotten two AC boosting items in 5e and it felt like it never mattered.
@AmewTheFox Right. By level 5, your Fighter gets full plate. They're not at AC 18. Enemies hit around 35%. Then, by level 20, with +3 Plate, it's 21. Enemies hit roughly 65%. Your armor is half as effective despite getting the best possible ones. You would require a +1 Ring, +1 Cloak, and +2 Animated Shield (not a thing btw) to reach the same same hit average. For a game that "doesn't require magic items", magic items are necessary to keep the math in check
I think it is a matter of style and genre.
There will be some who say it's for the sake of keeping game material valid for a longer amount of game time - I can see that, but I do not agree that to be the main reason.
For me, the attractive aspect of having Goblins still be a threat at higher levels was to make the world feel consistently dangerous without continually having to 1-up the threat, and also to avoid certain threats of the world (which are threats because they are perceived as such by the NPC general population) to become comedic, corny, or lacking verosimilitude. I'll try to frame with some examples (also keep in mind, examples will be generic because of the potential vast nature of the topic).
1) Making the world feel consistently dangerous - the PCs save the village of Mudville from the Goblin threat, then move towards the village of Dirtville. In a system without the pretense of having Goblins still be a threat for the PC, the enemies of Dirtville have to be upgraded on the threat level (either Orcs, Gnolls, special Goblins...), which brings a series of problems: why didn't the threat already destroy Dirtville? Is Dirtville better protected than Mudville? Does it mean that Grassville (the next village) will be even more strong and protected? Does it mean that the ecology of threat follows a linear growth in power that starts from Mudville and spreads outwardly through the region?
In the context of a game that decides to have Goblins be still a consistent threat at higher levels (let's call them the Dirtville levels), the threat ecology of the world can be managed more realistically - or better, it can work more realistically within the context of a game that assumes the PCs will increase in power, but not enough that Goblins will stop being a threat that they can BELIEVE the people of Dirtville and Grassville need help with (and which makes the effort acceptable for 2-3 sessions).
2) Tone dissonance - there is worth, I believe, in retaining a certain coherence of tone for what danger and threat represent in the game. Our PCs in Mudville were scared of the Goblins because the mechanics of the Goblin and the narrative of the Goblin were aligned in making them a believable threat. If we assume to be playing in a system which does NOT aim for the Goblins to remain a threat, then when the PCs move to Dirtville, the tone will become progressively less coherent - because the Goblins which we may want to present in the same way they were in Mudville will be narratively just as dangerous, but mechanically less so. And that further increases in Grassville.
Now this may sound as if I necessarily approve of that, but in time I became quite disillusioned with the fact myself, that this type of fantasy is suitably represented by D&D 5e and its bounded accuracy (or by Pathfinder, for that matter, in any of its iterations). To put it simply, the sort of pseudo-realistic narration of the Goblins remaining consistently threatening in various moments of the game is not what fits the mold of the power fantasy that these games purport to represent.
Which leads to the final conclusion: Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2e have retained a honest approach towards the sort of game they were. Whether one likes them or not is not really the point! On the countrary, I feel as if D&D 5e decided to implant this pseudo-realistic scaling system which is ultimately against its tone or genre, and that it stuck to its decision so much that some people have found themselves playing Curse of Strahd (a D&D module which presents as horror themed) with a system completely unsuited to represent horror.
The core issue to me remains with die-hard system adherence by groups, which is of course supported by D&D 5e's implied statement of adaptability to any genre and setting.
It's not exactly a challenge for the entire game, but more so just that it doesn't get eliminated as a challenge within a few levels. One trend with 4E especially is that you really couldn't use monsters of different levels, you had to stick to a very narrow range near the party to make the battles tolerable. It's why they created minions, solos, elites, etc. Because if you just say "the boss is 7 levels higher than you", then nobody can hit the thing, and it's a boring slog. Similarly if you use low level monsters they just become the whiff brigade, so minions were invented.
That was one of my issues with 4E. There was just too narrow a range at which things were usable, and I can understand them overcompensating to fix the problem in 5E.
It's a marker of progress. A rotating cast of characters with the similar percentage to-hit, and a similar number of his to kill makes the difference between the enemies feel purely cosmetic. Occasionally going back and wrecking house against an enemy that once gave you trouble is a tangible sense of progression (that isn't just a number going up).
Hot take: it's a good thing to trivialize the d20 roll. It was one of the strong points of 4e. At some point, your bonus got so high, that the d20 roll got less and less important. Which is a good thing, as your character got more and more competent. You don't want your demigod to be constantly at the whims of RNGsus.
I always thought that the highest possible difference between the naked skills of two characters at the same level being
@donovanmarks1865
Yeah, the fact that level bonuses counter each out perfectly is good. actually.
People get stuff on the bonus itself being meaningful, but rolling 1d20+5 vs target number of 15 is the same as 1d20+105 vs 115.
Why use 4e as an example here? It's categorically the most hated system, with undeniably the worst combat design in the game. It's boring to play, a chore to run, and stands as a stain on the history of the game.
3.5 was massively superior, and stayed popular long after 4e came out for a reason. It Also increased skills and combat abilities proportionately to level, yet was a garbage fire of a game besides.
@@Necroes I don't know which 4e you ran, but I had a blast running and playing it for years. Building characters was great fun and flexible. You gained a feat every other level with which you could personalize your character in any way you wanted. Even in the core rules you had the choice between several abilities on each second level up, instead of only getting one fixed one like in 3.X. And it was actually balanced, no save or die mechanics, no overbearing wizards, and while every class maintained their area of competency, group play was highly encouraged. It was really easy and fast to create balanced encounters, adjust them on the fly and even create new monsters on the fly, which is often a gambit in 3.X. And running the game was fun, too. No intricate tracking of effects that last 1d4 rounds, as every effect resolves itself after one round (ever tried to run a hydra in 3.X? Then you know what I'm talking about.) Every player has one quick action, that is resolved with one dice roll and then it's the next player's turn. Coming from 3e, 4e was suddenly fast to play! All my players were like "What, is it my turn already again?" No looking up rules in the book, as you had your power cards laid out before you and could easily track which powers you already had used. If I hadn't started writing an adventure for 5e, I had never switched from 4e.
And to answer your actual question: In 4e you gained bonuses much quicker and much more consistent than in other D&D Editions I had played before and after. On level 1, the d20 matters a lot, as your bonus is only about 5-8 for your most important actions. On level 10, your average bonus is already 10-18, and it just goes up from here. Once you reach a new tier (which happens every 10 levels) you can more or less automatically succeed on most trivial tasks from the previous tier, but at the same time get new challenging tasks fitting your tier. Unlike 5e or even 3.X, as you here can still fail on a trivial task on max level, if you didn't optimize your character for it.
@@HalasterBlackmantle Friend, you're blatantly ignoring reality. Even if You had fun, you can search "why was 4th edition bad" into Google and get dozens of articles and videos with collective millions of likes/upvotes/etc. that makes it abundantly clear that the game was awful.
More over, the numbers don't lie.
Advanced D&D held popularity for 13 years before the next edition came out. 2nd edition was Also around for 13 years before the next edition followed. 3rd edition was around for 7 years before the next edition, and on top of that, Pathfinder (which is an updated ruleset for 3.5 by another name) came out two years after the launch of 4th edition and outsold it by a landslide for its nine year run, giving 3rd edition a collective 16 year runtime.
4th edition lasted for 5 years before 5th edition came out in 2012, which is STILL being played to this day, 12 years later.
It had the shortest run time of Any edition of D&D, because it was the worst one, by far.
What's more, Roll20, the most popular online TTRPG tool-Which supports all four games-shows that 3rd edition and Pathfinder are Still more commonly played (by a lot, and individually) than 4th edition is, and 5th edition is played by more people than all three systems combined.
I think power creep is probably an important thing worth mentioning. I would imagine if you were running 5e with just the core rules and core rulebooks--no Tasha's, Xanathar's, no variant rules like multiclassing or feats, etc.--I imagine that the whole thing probably holds together a lot better. But as the newer books added more variants and abilities and powerful subclasses to the game without changing the underlying math or assumptions, it gets harder and harder to keep the system from collapsing.
I also think that the fact that D&D seems to work best at levels 3-8 is probably tied to this... the system isn't actually robust enough to cover the entire level range, and both players and DMs kind of intuitively feel there's a sweet spot in this range where the balance mostly works, and outside this range the system is much more unstable.
Sounds like BX with its range of 1-14 was probably the least problematic set of rules.
Yes, it does work better closer to core, and disallowing feats + multiclassing. Still not as solid as the TSR era game though.
You're probably right, but I don't think that lets WotC off the hook for it. If they wanted to have a bounded accuracy system that worked, they should done their level best to maintain that even with new content. If they wanted to make content that didn't quite fit in with their original goals they had when they introduced bounded accuracy, then they should have adjusted/replaced that system appropriately. They did neither. The cynic in me thinks they simply allowed power creep because they knew more powerful options would be a more attractive purchase.
A little bit, but a lot of what breaks bounded accuracy in the is available in the phb and DMG. They just never really committed to it. In some ways the later inclusions were more balanced (though still more powerful).
@@uggron666 A lot of the problem comes with having a ton of different creators producing material who have wildly different ideas about how the game works because 5E is so reliant on DM intervention. Two people can be writing the same book and assume they have a mutual understanding of how things work, while having massive unspoken disagreements about different parts of the game.
Wow. I had forgotten how 4e did the saving throw thing. My groups really didn't enjoy the "daily powers" for martial classes, but they really seem to have done EVERYTHING else really well. Edit: Also, parrying with a weapon or a sheild is a skill, it makes sense that more experienced fighters are harder to hit. Part of the bounded accuracy problem is the D20. 5% chance is not really "nearly impossible." 2d10 would have 5x the ganularity.
Depending on what actually matters. 1d20 allows 20 possible results. 2d10 allows 19. A +1 bonus on a d20 roll is +5 percentage points. A +1 bonus on 2d10 ranges from +1 percentage point to +10 percentage points. So it ranges from half as precise to five times as precise, with bonuses making the most difference on the average task and the least difference on the easiest and hardest tasks. For my money, I prefer the ease of use of a consistent scale, and it's easy to apply Advantage when you want the scale provided by multiple dice.
The 4e Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses were nice in that it let you avoid a few things that seem to crop up in 5e. Almost nobody in 5e takes a low Wisdom, because you're going to get wrecked the moment any kind of 'mental' effect comes up; nobody not wearing heavy armor takes a low Dexterity modifier if they can avoid it, because that precious AC is essential. This means that even the typically studious Wizard is probably pretty acrobatic and can throw a knife with reasonable accuracy, and the headstrong Bard that makes bad decisions in RP all the time is still "wiser" than the typical person.
In 4e your headstrong Bard relied on pure force of personality for their willpower and the Wizard thinks smarter through their defenses (although their AC is pretty low still). Also, adding half your level to virtually every attack and save and check meant that you really did level past things. A 21st-level Paladin bare-handed and wearing nothing was going to be harder to hit than a plate-armored 1st-level Paladin.
They weren't afraid to make every 20th+ level character godlike and didn't give the tiniest crap about "but can a Goblin still hurt them" because that's basically just an irrelevant question nobody's going to play through. Few DMs are going to waste the time of epic-level characters to clean up a nest of goblins, no matter how many there are: it's just not interesting to resolve.
The daily powers were really just Boss Fight powers. The group I played 4E with for about 16 years loved getting to throw those out in boss fights and when they worked it was immense fun. Even the Encounter Powers were crazy. I played a Melee Bard Leader and my favorite power through MANY levels of the game was Earthquake Strike: On a hit the target falls prone. Until your next turn any ally within ten squares does extra damage = to your con bonus on a hit, and can choose to knock their target prone.
@@donovanmarks1865given the "5x granularity" statement, 2d10 was meant to mean 0-99 rather than 2-20 (one die represents 10s field, one represents 1s field).
As an example of the failing of 5e's bounded accuracy:
In a recent game, DM has the party(level 13) go through a stealth segment to avoid detection by a cult. The shadow monk casts Pass without trace on us, and so even my half-plate artificer gets over a 20 stealth despite rolling a 4(+7 Stealth from proficiency, +10 pwt) Then because more than half of us can fly now, and the ones who can't have dimension door, we teleported/flew into the final room to confront the boss directly.
A good example of why campaigns fizzle out after 11th level.
That is not a failing of bounded accuracy. That is called being a 13th level party that's learned how to counter its weaknesses for a short time when it really counts.
Jesus that sounds lame you definitely need to challenge a god of the universe at even lvl 13 😂
Sounds like the dm and people playing need to seek or have harder challenges to face.
@@jeffrey4905that example wasn't about countering a boss's weaknesses. It was about mid level parties trivializing the math of the game. Also, some people don't want a system where (spoiler for Descent Into Avernus)
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A level 13 party can "counter the weaknesses" of an Archdevil of Hell, thus leaving an entire portion of the game unsupported. "Just give harder challenges" is harder than it sounds
At the end of the day, my biggest problem with this system is the assumption that more HP is the best way to make higher level fights interesting. It isn't. It just makes them take longer; sometimes, a lot, lot longer.
The best way, in truth, is to give them more actions.
I am that player who played every edition from B/X up to 4E and got pushed away during the 4E days by the game just, not feeling like an RPG anymore.
5E promised a return to simplicity and a return to traditional games modes. It could not possibly have delivered more poorly. It doesn't even get an honorable mention on my "Top 5 favorite editions of D&D" list.
I've been playing a PF2E campaign for the last few months and it, despite also being complex, delivers so much better. My character concept was kludgish as can be and it *feels* complete at level 2 after getting one archetype feat. 5E can't do that, not even with a pretty straightforward character concept.
The way forward, for me, is not through WotC.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Agreed on all points!
WOTC is saddled by the game's success ... The pressure on it not to turn away anyone leads it to be a very unfocused game that can't say what it's going for, most exemplified recently by the current "playtest" process. It is leading to another edition where every DM needs to season to taste, with varied results.
I remember the promise of simplicity in 5e, then you look at even the phb rules and you have subclasses for every class with special abilities associated with each. It doesn't seem simplified at all.
At the same time you've lost a lot of useful mechanics
You got an archetype feat at 2? So you're playing with the free archetype variant rule?
One issue I have with D20 systems that can impact this that I don't believe you mentioned is the dice itself. Players expect that in general you'll get a middling roll but the extremes are just as likely as the averages. Those extreme rolls can make play more exciting for some but it does also contribute to the issue of low level characters having a decent chance to succeed and high level characters having a decent chance to fail which is a problem that kept coming up in the video.
In quite a few other systems I've seen the use of two dice instead of one for rolls (with the result being the sum of the two rolls) which naturally results in more middling rolls and less extremes. In playing those systems I found that this helps a lot to mitigate that issue of low level characters achieving what they shouldn't too much and high level players failing what should be an easier task too often.
This is true. Another tool is having degrees of success baked in, to reserve the extreme results to extreme ends of the scale, like in PF2. PbtA games use both tools at the same time: rolling 2d6 with degrees of success. It makes "every +1 matter" even more than in PF2!
Crits is half the memorable stories
I hate hate hate the d20. (Still play 5e though). I hate that for the first few levels a +3 to a skill really doesn't do much to overcome the d20. Because of all the various bonuses mentioned in the video, I think players and DMs alike have a tendency to scale up DCs. DC15 seems reasonable to most people. Well, when you only get +3 to skill, you start feeling like it doesn't matter. Yeah yeah yeah, by the math you are 15% more likely to succeed, but when a roll of 1-10 means you still fail, it just doesn't feel good. I hated when my character who had a background in, and was skilled at, Survival/Nature, failed to find the animal tracks, but the city dweller had no problems rolling a 17. Just feels stupid. Would much prefer a bell curve.
I honestly really like the idea of bounded accuracy. 5e however just failed at implementing it.
it could work indeed
I think it's a matter of clearly stating your design goals. Bounded accuracy is compatible with some design goals and incompatible with others. It's incompatible with the sort of world assumed by in most D&D settings. (Unless you allow other numbers like HP and damage to scale into realms requiring scientific notation.)
I'm going to guess that other systems like Shadow of the Demon Lord and Savage Worlds etc. succeed more at keeping the math relatively flat and making it more about your abilities than your math. The problem for 5e is that it was saddled by the fact that it's a game that has spells like Fireball and Wish and Simulacrum, and a tradition of very high powered fantasy of taking on demon lords etc. Bounded Accuracy is at odds with the power fantasy traditionally furthered by d&d
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Absolutely correct! (And something I and others were saying as soon as this article dropped.)
Even before you assign any numbers, you can easily draw out situations that demonstrate inconsistencies _in principle_ with the fiction. For instance, "just increase the numbers" works both ways. If a high level party can be defeated by a large enough group of low level monsters, then a high level monster can be defeated by a large enough party. As you point out in the video, why should the king give up treasures of the kingdom in order to hire heroes when he can just send a battalion of archers to slay the dragon? Maintaining as large as possible a corps of first level archers and mages becomes the strictly dominant military strategy. Heroes are obsolete, because they aren't needed. (And in fact are to be distrusted, because they're harder for the ruler to control.)
@@PedanticTwit Well the fiction can have problems either way. Because remember, you also have to explain why the dragon hasn't burned the village down, and if the dragon can just get in there and be essentially untouchable, then the adventurers don't have any time to get there. Having a bunch of archers fight off a dragon in an open air fight is probably what you want. Because the dragon is fast and can fly away when hurt, and if they actually go to its lair they're fighting in dungeons, where having a bunch of archers isn't really optimal, because not all of them can line up a shot. Remember the fiction also has to explain "why haven't the monsters already destroyed civilization?" as well as asking "why hasn't the town already handled the problem?"
I love the idea of bounded accuracy in 5e, but as demonstrated by a character I built to be a "dodge tank" for a campaign I was unhittable and therefore unkillable, but only for the first 4ish lvls until monster scaling caught up to my start point and due to bounded accuracy I wasnt able to keep getting harder to hit, so by ~lvl6 I was just getting knocked out in the first or second round of combat every encounter due to taking CON as a dump stat thinking that high AC an bounded accuracy would be sufficient to keep the character alive unless the enemy got lucky.
CON dump in 5e lmao. One of the first things I noticed in 5e is that HP is the most important resource because there's such a torrent of completely unavoidable damage. One of the reasons druid is so busted strong. Even if your AC scaled in line with monster accuracy you'd still be getting shredded by spells.
Though I think it certainly says something that literally every class/concept I've ever built it's always prioritising the Primary Ability Score first, then CON. I've found it impossible to justify other options.
What you say about D&D 5e being "rules light" near the end really strikes at the core of why I went back to 3.5e after playing only the starter box adventure in 5e. The game is heavily streamlined and cut down, and in doing this it dumps most of the decisions on the DM that were clearly laid out in older editions. It's so much harder to DM as a result, not even counting the horrible imbalance between player power and monster power.
The problem with inbalance I think its undeniable, 5e really dropped the ball on the numbers and implementation of a concrete system for balance.
However Id strongly disagree on the front that its much harder on the DM but thats mostly because I've had runs with groups where the players are far more active participants in the rule and action of play than in a game where every little thing has a rule or number like PF or 3.5
Perhaps im a bit more biased than I should but in my 5e games with a particular group I had, the DM job didnt go beyond just preparing the potential encounters and variables before game because everyone fell into this very active dynamic of finding alternatives to rolls and proposing solutions that didnt require insane rule lawering and the DM often would let us roleplay and become very excited with the solutions we proposed/found with their guiding/allowance
But that worked perfectly because the players were in on the game as much as the DM. Which Ill argue a number crunch game like PF2 would also suffer if the players had poor to no interest/experience on preparing and respecting the math. At the end of day, any system will work on a willing group
I think rules atrophied would be a better term.
With it being "rules light" comes the problem - the possibility space of what your players can try to do hasn't really shrunk, 5e just doesn't give you a lot of guidance on how to resolve it. I understand not wishing to burden players with endless rules (looking at you 3.5e grappling rules) but there's got to be a better space.
MCDM's RPG looks promising - showing off rules like "what if you bodyslam a guy into a wall?" to answer questions PCs have asked and never had a clear answer to in 5e.
There's an interesting phenomenon in PF2 that doesn't occur in 5E as well that you didn't mention under slog. In 5E, those "bag of hitpoints" monsters lead to very long combats. Meanwhile, most PF2 encounters only last about three rounds even when a big bad in involved unless the party is just absolutely not equipped correctly for the monsters involved. Occasionally combat will go longer, but it's not frequent and every round past the third gets more and more unlikely.
Ehh not really even in 5e (recently switched to PF2 and really enjoying it) both as a GM and a player its been super rare to have any fights past level 8 or so last longer than a couple rounds if both sides know how to play the system, because you know that youll hit >85% of the time on either side you can dish out absurd dmg by stacking your bonuses to degrees to deal over 100 dmg on the first round at level 10 easily, (this is largely an issue with fighter action surge but i digress) making the system into basically fire emblem. One thing I like about PF2 is that attack rolls have a realistic miss chance meaning fights arent just counting down the number of turns that the DPS gets to attack knowing that even the BBEG of this arc is only going to have at most like 300hp since a tarrasque is at 600 at cr 25.
@@cspaulding9715 but see, you have the caveat there that the players have to really know the system in 5E, meaning they're min/maxing their characters. The need to do that doesn't happen in PF2, just basic preparedness.
@@ShadowDrakken oh definitely the degree too which you can break the game open in 5e is much higher since the game is so inconsistent I was mostly commenting to say I actually enjoyed the fact that fights last longer in pf2 as it was one of my biggest gripes dming 5e
That's part of what made this video very hard to make. Cuz we're dealing with the intention (which was NOT to have longer combats at higher levels due to HP bloat), their fumble on the execution where HP outpaces damage, AND the fact that they allowed for huge variance between characters AND between tables. So it's like arguing against a whole variety of experiences. This video is not only about play experiences but tries to start with the designers' goals, the execution, and play experiences which vary widely AND were shaped by the designers' goals and flawed execution.
@@ShadowDrakken Strong disagree there. You absolutely need to know the PF2 system, it is incredibly easy to make a defective useless character in PF2 if you aren't paying attention or don't know how abilities are supposed to stack together. Whereas 5e is a lot more stable there (at least outside of full spellcasters), since there is a lot less choices in building a character so far less opportunity to build one wrong.
The more this video went on the less this seemed like an issue with "bounded accuracy" itself and more a bunch of smaller issues surrounding it such as monster design, saving throw design, bonuses.
All which have been implemented better in other systems.
It was difficult planning this video because some of the problems weren't inherent to Bounded Accuracy but in 5e's implementation of it, while other problems were. But on top of that, I think some of the unnecessary problems were bound up with the decision early on to say "We are no longer 'engineering' our game with math since we have BA and are 'empowering the DM,' and so we'll leave monsters and magic items and other systems up to each DM to balance for their own group" - i.e., the two things aren't separate.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG imo bounded accuracy is also just wrong from the getgo, the goals they mentioned all just seem like bad ideas
Like, having Joe Random be able to contribute in the field of someone who is supposed to be a specialist is just a stupid idea. let the specialist be good at the thing he wants to be good at for the love of god.
Why should the int dumping barbarian with no profiency in arcana be able to play in a similar ballpark than the 16 int, arcana proficient wizard.
I remember running 5e and trying to figure out what was going on with the monsters in the manual. It didn't make sense, there seemed to be no system behind it. Then I realized that you were supposed to choose a CR for the monster, and derive everything from that, rather than make the monster and derive a CR from its stats.
I gave up, made monsters the 3e way, TPK'd parties, and haven't looked back. I gave 5 a fair shake, but B/X is the way god intended us to play D&D.
This explains a lot of the complaints I've had about the system for years. It also explains why multiclassing is so strong in the system. That's usually the only way to get proficiencies you didn't already have. Including saves, and the ability to acquire expertise that some classes just simply don't ever get access to.
How are you gaining save proficiencies?
@@CodyEthanJordan It is possible but there's very few options. 7 levels of Gloomstalker Ranger or Samurai Fighter, or 6 levels of Transmutation Wizard. 15 levels of rogue also gives a save proficiency, and 14 levels of monk gives proficiency in all saves. But if you have 14 or 15 levels in a class, that's your main class. Realistically the Resilient feat is the most practical way but that is not multiclassing.
The problem is that on the table-top in old school the DM rulings were arbitrary. Later the players wanted to have RAW adjudications. So, there is no way to do that on the table, while having it be inpartial.
The problem is 5E punishes multiclassing in so many other ways: IE every benefit that used to come with total character level now only comes with a specific level in ONE class. IE: ability score bonuses come every four levels in ONE class; gaining a second attack only comes with 5 levels in ONE class. In 3.x it was only the casters that got gimped by multiclassing, now every class is gimped by it.
@@WickedPrince3D While that is true, there are handful of multiclasses that break the 5e.
First, I think bounded accuracy was an admirable goal. 3.5's modifiers completely outstripped the range of a D20 die roll, making the roll irrelevant. It also encouraged ridiculous specialization from PCs. For example, I ran a 3.5 campaign through to 20th level and the druid hyper focused on Spot and Listen so that, with magic, he had around a +65 to +70 to those skills. Add that to speadsheets needed to track bonuses and the ability of PCs to extend durations enough to cast buffs, sleep, regain spell slots, and cast more buffs before combat even started and we ended up with players with 50-70 spell effects on them at one time. Now, throw enemies with Greater Dispel Magic at will and you had the means of 2-3 hour combat rounds. Not fun! Also, I had PCs with such high ACs that any creature that had a chance to hit them auto-hit any other PCs who did not max out AC.
5e fixed a lot of this. Unfortunately, it could not get around the fact that massive hit points are not fun. I get why they changed from AC as the prime defense determinant to hit points as the prime defense determinant. It's more fun for a player, especially one who waits 30 minutes for his or her turn, to hit something and at least do a bit of damage as opposed to swinging and missing. And the idea raised by The Rules Lawyer that this increase in hp at the expense of AC wrecks the narrative idea of swinging and missing or parrying fails to recognize that hit points are an abstraction. A 20th level fighter with 150 hit points is not getting chunks of flesh ripped out of him every time he takes 20 points of damage. That PC is literally parrying or dodging successfully when he takes 20 damage. But more hp also turns every single combat into a slog. They also rip the stakes and urgency out of every combat as well as a great many other situations. They wreck verisimilitude (oh...you just fell down a 100-foot pit onto the hard stone floor and took 35 damage and have 115 hit points left...how do I explain that narratively?).
The answer is to move to a system where hit points are static and reasonable, like BRP/Runequest. In that system, you can make yourself harder to hit. You can wear armor to reduce damage if you are hit. But, because you have so few hit points, every swing matters. Every swing can bring you down. Combat, therefore, must be well considered, engaged tactically, sometimes run away from, and is often short and quick. In BRP/RQ, a goblin still matters to a "high level" PC because that goblin coming at you with a 2-foot-long sharp blade might (not likely, but might) get past your parry, find a seam in your armor, and pierce your jugular vein. That's the proper way to keep low-powered monsters relevant at all play levels and keep every combat important and exciting. That's the best way to impose bounded accuracy, by emphasizing the accuracy part.
The hit point phenomenon also has implications outside of combat, as it affects roleplaying. Is the local farmer protective of his daughter's virtue? In D&D, a 10th level fighter doesn't give a crap. If that farmer, angry at the PC, comes up behind the PC in town and swings a two-handed axe at the fighter, there are no real consequences. Even if the fighter is not wearing any armor. Even if the farmer has complete surprise. Even if the farmer gets advantage. Even if the DM house rules that the farmer automatically criticals without having to roll to hit and does maximum damage....it still doesn't matter. Even if the farmer is beefy as hell. A 20 STR farmer who max criticals with a battle axe does 21 damage. The 10th level fighter with a 14 CON (which is substandard) will have 58.5 hit points remaining on average. He will turn around and waste the farmer. Because of this, the PC has no need to fear the farmer's threats about respecting his daughter's virtue. Actions have few immediately grave consequences in D&D.
Finally, as an aside, the advantage/disadvantage system is broken in 5e. It works fine at the middle of the dice roll bell curve but gets destroyed at the ends. A person who needs to roll an 11 on the D20 to hit someone has a 1 in 2 chance to hit. With disadvantage, he or she has a 1 in 4% chance to hit. That means disadvantage cuts the chance of success in half. That feels right. But now assume the person needs to roll a 20 and has a 1 in 20 chance to hit. With disadvantage, that drops to a 1 in 400 chance to hit. That's ridiculous. And if they have the dreaded Luck Feat, that drops to 1 in 8,000 chance to hit. I DM'd for a Bladesinger whose entire build was made to max AC and impose disadvantage. Yeah, I could get him in other ways, like forcing a CON or CHA saving throw on him, but there was basically no chance for him to be hit (he had the Shield spell as well, of course). Bounded accuracy is supposed to stop BS like this, but given the many ways to break AC limits by PCs and the weird math surrounding disadvantage, even the auto-hit on a 20 rule became meaningless for him.
Very good points. And I'm reminded why lower-level monsters stayed more relevant in old-school D&D: PCs were more vulnerable.
"And the idea raised by The Rules Lawyer that this increase in hp at the expense of AC wrecks the narrative idea of swinging and missing or parrying fails to recognize that hit points are an abstraction."
I understand your point, but in practice the abstraction doesn't really work out in 5e. Because of probability, there really is no uncertainty or excitement in seeing that HP bar tick down. The large number of HP, the relatively small amount of damage done by each attack, and the large number of attack rolls basically means that most of the randomness has been removed. HP works more like an exhaustion timer of "what level you are," and compromises the ability of HP to be an abstraction of what should be a tense and unpredictable exchange.
Funny how all of these problems (and more) were pointed out by the mathematically inclined fans of 3.5.
3.5 was fun and I played it throughout, but it was terribad. I couldn't stand the broken builds and the damage control I had to do as a GM just to make fights challenging. Only so many wraithstriking dragons I can use before it becomes silly. Too much bloat, too many splat books that upped the power ceiling. Bad bad bad.
@@Miggy19779Whether 3.5 was good or bad is irrelevant to the critique of bounded accuracy.
@@Miggy19779 It was better than this, and in a lot of ways better than 4e. It didn't appeal to the control-freak GM types, though, and that's who they're advertising to now. They want passive consumers, not creatives.
Great video. I think there's a mix of problems here. Some are stylistic to how bounded accuracy works and some are the implementation of bounded accuracy in D&D. I'll describe two of the latter:
1) Times the designers forgot they were doing bounded accuracy. These are usually (but not always) from spells that are too powerful. I think two of the clearest examples are guidance (which has no business being a cantrip in a game with bounded accuracy as a goal) and pass without trace (which makes everyone in the party a high level sneaky character). You have numerous more examples, but it really creates a problem when you are deviating from your baseline immediately. It also makes features that tweak bounded accuracy very powerful (e.g., paladin aura).
2) They forgot to include the class features (other than spells) that are supposed to advance your character. I don't think a level 20 wizard who's never been interested in physical fitness should be able to jump a 15 ft gap, which they can in all numbers go up systems. However, they have multiple class features they could have opted into to deal with this problem in the form of spells (jump, misty step, fly, etc.). A fighter as you note does not automatically succeed this jump. This to me is not a problem with bounded accuracy, but with the design of the fighter. In general the non-spell casting classes do not have sufficient class features that let them achieve goals outside of bounded accuracy and thus achieve the desired fantasy.
On point #2, one possibility is letting Fighters have the equivalent of Reliable Talent in certain skills. Btw, "numbers go up" systems don't have to allow the Level 20 wizard jump a 15-foot gap. That was true in the Pathfinder 2e playtest, but not in the final version - in PF2 you only add your level if you are proficient in a skill. You are automatically proficient in AC and all saves, but not all skills.
51:12 alternative title
'adventurers not needed, the townsfolk can kill the dragon themselves.'
If you look at _The Hobbit_ / _Lord of the Rings_ (the *Gold Standard* for Swords and Sorcery fiction), the people of Lake Town were totally ineffective against the Ancient Red Dragon. It took a single (high level ?) character with some magic granted knowledge (a thrush that can speak) to kill it.
If Tolkien was using 5e rules the people of Lake Town would have easily taken care of Smaug. If fact, the Dwarves of Lonely Mountain would have been able to dispatch it easily.
no, the dragon just stays out of their range and kills most of them with a single AoE attack
Youre completely forgetting townsfolk are also people with lives and fears, not just chances to hit and skill checks. Its hard to rally a group of people let alone an entire village to send them into a scenario where most if not all might die (and i think part of it is some dms reducing thst into one check is at fault here) and where you were worrying too much about numbers you forgot how illogical it would be
Adventurers are the townfolks who can kill a dragon
@@user-tc9sk4ei9y, writes _"Adventurers are the townfolks who can kill a dragon"_
The point being made in this video is, in 5e that's everybody. You don't need "Adventurers" to kill the dragon, just a militia or army.
Excellent video. Magic items do indeed shift the balance a lot once you start distributing them. One last thing (maybe a future video topic?) : some spells and abilities are overly powerful at low levels in D&D.
It would be a little out of the scope of this video, but it’s telling how many of these stacking spells are low level, broadly applicable, and without higher level alternatives that supersede them, so you’re encouraged to just keep doing the same thing level after level but more. Extra attack causes a similar problem.
@@jonathanl3945 well, at higher levels you get enhance ability
PF2e with proficiency without level and automatic bonus progression kind of accomplishes a lot of what 5e set out to do but much better.
Or five e but bileveling skill choices
5e's approach to items goes against almost every lesson I have learned from both BG3 and the DND movie. Outside of roleplay, the most enticing aspect of BG3 was hunting down rare and powerful items to complete my character builds, and felt like it had far more depth and flexibility than class customization. Meanwhile, the D&D movie basically managed to make all of the MCs' problem solving far more interesting by just adding a magic item that was, honestly, above the party's level, but gave them a unique and powerful way to solve their problems. Making players deal with weak gear doesn't make the small bonuses more important, it just makes the boring-as-hell class system even more dominant, and robs beginner DM's of the opportunity to give their characters interesting or exciting loot.
I see what you did there at 0:49 @TheRulesLawyerRPG. A tip of my glasses to your resilience and this community.
Finally somebody noticed! =D
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I have a question that is totally off topic to the video above. As someone who is a lawyer--how does your knowledge of law and legal theory impact how you run justice codes in medieval fantasy worlds? Do you have things like a chain of being? Or trials by ordeal and by combat other like things when there are crimes where there are no witnesses? I'd really be interested in how you present those sorts of things in your campaign world, or how you might imagine someone implement them in a logical way to deepen the sense that even in republics the world is a pre-liberal society.
What am I supposed to be seeing?
@@AgingFlux His background moves. But I don't know what that's supposed to mean.
@@lordcirth Thanks for the attempt but still zero clue what I'm supposed to see, lol.
Bounded Accuracy makes Dragon's hide not so tough, Will-o-Wisps not so fast, complex locks less confusing and tricky, and massive leaps shorter. By making the numbers stay the same, you make the impossible feats less impossible, and thereby making the moment when the heroes become strong enough to do the impossible, significantly less impactful.
I’ve felt for so long that DnD (above maybe 5th or 6th level) felt way too much like everything was a damage sponge. It always broke my immersion for the “evasive rogue” to never seem to get better at avoiding attacks, only better at having a big hp number. I never considered that bounded accuracy could be to blame!
Yep! Some would counter that hit points are an abstraction; that isn't the foe actually hitting your rogue. But mechanically it ends up functioning as a countdown on your character's (or the monster's) health, since the randomness of hitting/missing has been removed. So it doesn't really work out the way some say it does.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I agree, it homogenizes characters, at high levels endurance in battle of both barbarian and rogue will mainly be dependant on HP, with rogue having a few ac more and 10-30% less HP, they will both get hit pretty often with little difference. If for example rogue had half or less HP of a barbarian but had much higher ac due to abilities, circumstance etc.. you could feel that rogue really dodges attacks and any hit can be very dangerous, but barbarian can shrug off enemy attacks because he is much more durable, but still won't dodge them. Instead right now it all relies on an rp side(rogue barely dodges a hit and loses HP and barb loses HP too, but he just endures the pain unwaveringly), not on mechanics, because they are too streamlined.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG The 3.x vitality/wounds system did a good job of that.
Still blows my mind that wotc not only abandoned game balance as a core design goal but that they admitted it openly.
Personally, I really don’t mind. I didn’t know they admitted it, though, but still, fine with me. 4e and PF2e are balanced to the point of meaninglessness - I would rather not play a game and use my time differently than play either. But hey, different strokes for different folks!
Because literally day one of properly sitting down and analysing any D&D-based system, you realise that game balance doesn't even make sense as an objective that's how far away from achievable it is. You shouldn't really need more than the Wizard level table, the rules text for Hold Person and the rules text for Hold Monster to understand that.
@@dombo813 It's not a competitive game, so balance is not required per se, but if they don't do it they're putting it on the GM (and to a certain extent the players). I'd much rather play a different game that doesn't require me to do some lazy-ass designer's job for them.
Bounded accuracy would be perfectly fine in 5e if it also included conditional auto successes and powerful features that more or less read "you can do X" without a check needed. It doesn't make sense for a god-slaying PC to get bogged down in knee deep mud so they gain a feature that simply states they're immune to it along with other similar effects. The monk's wall run is a good example of the kind of thematic feature every class should get in spades. Barbarians should eventually be able to lift and throw tremendous weight, jump around like the hulk, be immune to non-magical damage, and basically become Hercules by the time they're level 16. Being able to use a giant stone pillar as an improvised weapon and leaping up to smack a dragon out of the sky is the kind of thing needed to really sell the idea of being powerful. And in the case for attacking and saves there should be cut off points based on the HD of creatures. What I mean is as a PC levels up their attacks and spells automatically succeed against creatures of a certain HD or lower with max damage. Should a level 10 wizard really fail to cast hold person on a 1 HD goblin? No, they're competent enough at this point that it's trivial.
"5e might appear like a rules-light system, but this impression relies on the DM doing the heavy lifting." (paraphrased from around the 1hr mark)
This is it exactly in a nutshell. Well done.
For me the best part of DMing pathfinder has been knowing that level is absurdly good at telling how difficult a fight will be. My 3rd level party just faced a 6th-level ghost, and even alone it was a really tough boss encounter. The new GM Core even has a few combos that make encounter building take seconds.
"If you want an easy framework for building an encounter, you can use one of the following basic structures and slot in monsters and NPCs.
• Boss and Lackeys (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, four creatures of party level - 4
• Boss and Lieutenant (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, one creature of party level
• Elite Enemies (120 XP): Three creatures of party level
• Lieutenant and Lackeys (80 XP): One creature of party level, four creatures of party level - 4
• Mated Pair (80 XP): Two creatures of party level
• Troop (80 XP): One creature of party level, two creatures of party level - 2
• Mook Squad (60 XP): Six creatures of party level - 4"
Because of Unbounded Accuracy, all of this works suprisingly well. Enemies who used to be tough are now just standard creatures, and will become lackeys over time. Just like how Dark Souls bosses eventually become standard enemies.
42:06 5e actually ahs rules on handling fights with lots of enemies. Simplifying it a lot consists on asuming that the average number of enemies that will hit the PC hit.so for a gorup of 8 enemies, you may determine that each round the character will be hit 3 times according to his AC and the attack bonus of the creatures.roll that damage and keep going rather than rolling 8 attack rolls.
49:45 I think it's ok that the circus performer, can still slip and make a mistake. I see that as a feature, not a problem.
I was about to mention this! But a lot of people don't know about this rule because it is an optional rule packed away in the middle of several others.
Say what you might about the level scaling issues in D&D 3, 3.5, and Pathfinder 1 (and there were many), the Take 10 / Take 20 rules helped avoid a lot of the skill challenge problems you outlined in the latter part of this video.
Was sad to see a lot of the 3rd edition innovations like this (and the initiative rules) thrown out in the switch to 5th.
Also D&D 3.5e has three Saving throws, but Ability checks are still a thing. So 3.5e actually has nine checks to 5e's six.
The loss of taking 10/20 outside of optional rules was a genuine travesty, especially in a system that otherwise encourages simply bypassing tasks that offer little meaningful challenge.
@@al8188, writes _"The loss of taking 10/20 [...] was a genuine travesty"_
Agreed. They were put into place to encourage not having to roll for easily completed tasks.
Player: "I use the key to unlock the door".
DM: "Roll an _Open Lock_ check".
Player: "What?" I take 10!"
DM: "You unlock the door".
I've been theorycrafting a lot of 5e characters recently for fun, and it' hilarious how often I've looked at the Rogue's "Reliable Talent" and the Circle of Stars Druid's dragon constellation abilities, and thought "wow, those are convenient. Why do they look familiar?"
Instant like. I’ve been complaining (in quiet) about 5E’s attempt at bounded accuracy for ages, and I’m happy to see others spotlighting its issues.
I've been complaining vocally for ages about how 5e doesn't do certain things well. And I think this video might have the best explanation of how heavy swing in numbers affects my worldbuilding as a DM, suspension of disbelief on either side of the screen, and lacks direction as to what the given difficulties mean in the term "difficulty class." And how all of those issues stem from the system's bounded accuracy.
(Though it's been a while since I've watched videos on the subject. I might be forgetting some good ones.)
@@metagames.errata7777 For all the points you’ve listed (especially the effect on worldbuilding and verisimilitude), that’s precisely why I grew away from ever wanting to run 5E myself as I got more familiarized with the system.
Well-said, friend!
Absolutely. I'm not against bounded accuracy as a whole, rather I'm quite fond of it - but the more I played 5e the more I realised how badly it fumbled the ball here.
@@WolforNuva Also agreed! The concept is one I’m quite fond of; but 5E’s application of it leaves much to be desired.
my personal opinion on Bounded Accuracy is that it's fine for attacks and AC and could maybe work for save DCs and saving throws with some modifications, but is simply completely unworkable for skill/tool checks, whether those are for physical or mental tasks. The fact that a wizard who can cast Wish and Meteor Swarm has only +6 to Arcana over a wizard whose best spells are Shield and Magic Missile is insane to me, given that a wizard's power is supposed to come from _study._
Absolutely fantastic video. I just wanted to add that the unreasonable potential of level 1 players is also why many DMs essentially run the skill check system as being entirely limited to tier 1 feats of skill. A level 20 barbarian can't be allowed to rip the gates off a castle or pull an entire pirate ship ashore because that allows a level 1 barbarian with the right team composition to consistently create an effect equivalent to a 5th+ level spell (fabricate, in the first case). It's puts DMs in the uncomfortable position of effectively banning an entire portion of the character sheet after a certain point because the range from 1 to 20 allows anyone to potentially do anything at any point.
Because of this I know many DMs that fervently believe simply making up DCs as you go, essentially scaling the "feat of skill" separately from the DC (so a DC 15 check at level 1 is an iron banded door and at level 20 it's that adamantine door with rune wards). When I told them that the game seems to indicate that DCs are intended to remain mostly stationary, I got several reactions as though I were a crazy person and even one who told me not to spread around ideas that were so clearly against the intended functionality of the system (humorous, as they clearly understood the system well enough to know what I was suggesting destroyed skill expert characters and consider it painfully obvious to the point they assumed the system compensated for that with the power of DM fiat).
Edit: To add one last point, a regular large village or small town, one with enough people to have a small box of gold, can easily kill an Adult Red Dragon with bows. In their example of rallying the villagers, the heroes aren't needed. That town should have at least 40 combatants between guard and hunters who are proficient with bows. I mathed it out once and the dragon dies before its breath attack comes off cooldown. Even hit and run doesn't help it with the range of longbows.
As much as I'm enjoying this video in general, I have to just say I love the fact that there's a Pathfinder 2e monster that can _honest-to-God Naruto ninja-log you._
PF2e also has a spell that does this actually. Unexpected Transposition. It's a spell that's a reaction, so you can actually use the spell on someone else's turn, and it automatically succeeds against a willing creature, while giving an unwilling creature a Will save to negate. It's a Rank 6 spell (approximately Level 11-12 characters).
@@jordanledoux197 Oh that's awesome :D
On troops - Ironsworn, while being a solo-first design and based on PbtA (so, focusing on horizontal rather than vertical growth) strongly encourages running... I think it's 5, might be 4... of the same enemy in an encounter as a group, clustering them together and upping the difficulty rating of them by one. And then again when you get five of clusters. (I think it has appropriate names for the clusters to norse fantasy).
As a side note, I'm not sure 'bounded accuracy' and 'zero to hero' power progression are really compatible design goals. At least not without going into the realms of hp bloat comparable to a Final Fantasy game. There's nothing wrong with the idea that a monster that's a threat to a party in session 1 should still be a threat to a party in session 30 - but the times I've seen it work tend to be games that focus on horizontal growth, so you gain more options but those options aren't intended to be more powerful than your existing options, and your stat growth - if present at all - is going to be in the order of a couple of +1s while keeping all the stats within a tight -1 to +3, range over the entire campaign to distribute among your five stats. A different framework for character progression across a campaign (And one I'd say I prefer except I'm currently prepping to run Animon Story which is a game that takes inspiration from Digimon. And as such... Yeah it has a very vertical form of character growth...)
Yeah monsters are categorised as troublesome, dangerous and formidable. Basically easy medium hard for your party. If there are reasons why they should be bumped up or down (size of PC party or amount of the monsters) they will go up or down a tier.
However ironsworn PC stats don’t grow with level they just gain the ability to get “advantage” on their rolls to more activities horizontally
More on that, I think dagger heart will be interesting mix of dnd and ironsworn together. basically adding vertical growth to the ironsworn framework and 2d12 will bell curve the whole d20 thing. Making random chance more predictable. Therefore forcing ability , proficiency, HP and AC growth as the main stats to worry about .
@@SkittleBombsDaggerheart from what's been revealed in previews looks like a very interesting mix of influences, and I can definitely see some... Not necessarily ironsworn but certainly storygame style 'mixed successes' with the 'with hope' and 'with fear' stuff, yeah.
So I do think that 5e’s more “Bounded Accuracy” is, as was said, easier for DMs/GMs to get started with. And for a brand new DM, anything to make things easier for them, I approve of. But I do think that both Players and GMs will, over time, want an experience similar to 2e’s system unbounded.
Also, I do think 6 different saving throws is ridiculous, 3 is much more reasonable
Honestly I think 5e is actually worse for DMs at the start, the modifiers are much less consistent and DCs much more varied than they are for Pathfinder (assuming you're starting both at the beginning) in 5e the DCs you need to face a level 1 party are much more varied and harder to gauge the range on than for a level 1 party in PF2e, not to mention the variations in modifiers players can achieve at level 1.
I realy startet my DM journey with 5e and from the beginning i was fighting with the combat encounters. They nerver were as challanging as i expected them to be (by the written rules in die DMG). It just never worked to the point that i though i must be a bad DM. Only through a lot of research i learned that the system just doesn't work. And i startet to do what ever i want 3x deadly to 5x deadly + add an extra damage die +3 to every attack. And still it felt off and it nearly killed my fun doing roleplay. Doing all the DM work to prep en encounter that should be an epic end to a campaign that was in the end just a cakewalk felt bad for me and for the players.
Thx to the OGL debakle i started testing other systems including PF2 an so far i just worked. And I'm sure if I would have been so much more easy to start DMing with a working system.
Some systems are easier than others and for others in different ways. I think for DMs/GMs the most important thing is having clear explanations and tools for what to do in a given situation. Which 5e fails miserably at! So many actions have small exceptions to the rules, the CR system simply does not work, the lack of advice for higher level play, and the sub systems they introduce are severely underdeveloped. All of this leads to putting a lot of weight on the person running the game to figure out how to make these ideas come to life.
@@JD-wu5pfI totally accept that homebrewing in 5e is easier for you. I want to ask though, that must be coupled with handwaving some things mid-fight, yes? (Adding/subtracting HP, fudging rolls, ignoring abilities, adding reinforcements, etc.?) Because inevitably sometimes the fight is unexpectedly much harder or much easier than you expected it to? And also, do you think your players are doing a good job using tools at their disposal to defeat their foes (strong spells like Hypnotic Pattern, Force Cage, etc.)?
@@JD-wu5pfAbsolutly true. But it depends on what you want. I like the "combat as sport" aproach. So i value a solid encounter building system way higher.
A friend is running a westmarch style campaign in 5e, with regions that are way more dangerouse than others. It works good because encaunter balance is not the focus.
I never bothered making a monster myself in dnd, when i wanted something special i just reskinned a similar monster and flavored my discription.
I feel like I've actually listened to a professional lecture on game design, well done
Bounded systems: One set of numbers goes _vroom!,_ turning your characters into nearly unstoppable demigods of mayhem.
Unbounded systems: Another set of numbers goes _vroom!,_ turning your characters into nearly unstoppable demigods of mayhem.
It's really just a question of where on your character sheet you want the frustratingly-large numbers to be, and which of the many math calculations you will need a calculator for.
I've thrown CR based encounters out of the window after party reached level 7, it became inconsistent and monsters were usually too weak offensively and defensively. If I used that monster stat by cr table, monsters had too much hp and combat was a slog. I now use "Heroic Homebrew Monster Maker" by AHero and finally combats have proper difficulty and length.
Beyond a certain level I halved monster HP and doubled their damage, otherwise combats took ages
@@neji2401 Teams with barbarians and moon druids are huge damage sinks. Efective hp of barbarian is twice its hp in most combats. Druid has hp of themself and all wildshape uses combined. Add to that summons and enemies have big pile of hp to damage through.
Bro's singlehandedly lawyering his way into Pathfinder 2e sucess and D&D 5e's demise.
I really like both games, but I must stop and applaud you for the way you studied carefully each of your arguments to point exactly weak spots that would shine what you had to say.
Bro, you're a genius.
Most of the issues you point out with bounded accuracy come from the core mechanic of D&D: the use of the D20. A D20 has a flat probability curve: all numbers are equally likely. If you use 3D6 instead, you will be rolling numbers in the 8 to 13 range 80% of the time. A +11 with 3D6 means you will fail a DC 15 check only if you roll a 3 (about 0.5% chance), making a specialist actually good at stuff (for comparison, DC 15 would be 9.25% chance with +0).
* if you want a very flat game, then why do a class and level system?There are lots of games that are built around flat systems where advancement is not so general, like Savage Worlds. One of the points I like about class and level systems is that you can go from a guy on the street to somebody shifting around the planes and dealing with cosmic threats.
* It is so fun in PF2 to fight a monster that used to be a boss monster, but is now just one of the new boss's minions!
* the idea of just increasing the hit points is practically saying "We want higher level play to be a slog where you just keep doing the same thing for longer."
* While 5e is built on being stingy with magic items and not having a "magic item shop", one of their game worlds is Eberron, which specifically has a dragonmarked house that makes and sells magic items.
Not just magic items, the cr system is not designed with feats in mind either, and many groups use dice rolling for stats, meaning they can get higher than normal stats. Any one of these things can stress the CR system, 2 of them break it, amd all three annihilate it. You must account for that by increasing the encounter levels - you need to treat players as if they were 1-2 levels higher than their level suggests when building encounters if you want them to be a challenge.
@@Miggy19779 And you have to then modify it for the exact capabilities of your party.
Actually in 5e you can end a TPK encounter at level 5.
I put 2 potentially deadly or TPK level encounters infront of my party last week. The Bard used hypnotic pattern and not a single NPC made the save.
The only NPC still standing was the one with legendary resistance and she was dealt with easily despite my plan for her to leave when the party was mostly dead.
So yeah. It wasn't a great session on my end, but the players had a lot of fun. Eventually it will probably get boring though.
For some players gets boring. I play a bard in my weekly session, we're at a point that I don't even bother using my bard shenanigans anymore. It just slows the fighter steamrolling enemies with all his dice throwing and the artificer blasting through everything. I get my fun by doing crazy stuff, and trying to be the comic relief.
Just keep respecting your players agency like that and they will most likely stay interested.
Yeah that's the deal with 5E. It's pretty much a player power fantasy and a godawful slog for the DM. Players don't recognize how overpowered they are compared to the monsters. Meanwhile the DM is baffled how they can not just get bored with obliterating everything.
They also couldve made the save and then continued to murk the party.
Don't make the mistake of letting the party engage in combat with important NPCs that you need for later, keep those at least a day away from any combat encounter and let them fight their henchmen.
The CR system isnt exactly good at evaluating monster power so I wouldnt put too much faith there.
Players being OP lets DMs get a bit creative and reckless with encounter design.
There are a lot of design tools in DnD that you can use to empower monsters and challenge players.
Letting enemies wield the magic items that you are going to award the party after the fight is great and so is having the big bad's plan involve some way to strengthen his army via magic or potions that the players learn about and then encounter in combat.
@@luminous3558 wild and reckless is how you go from an Deadly encounter done in one round to a TPK from easy? It isn't about wild, it is about consistancy in the game. All of those things you suggested are in other games, sometimes better and with actual rules.
Just wanted to say I've loved your videos. Really glad I found your channel. I like how you are very technical and detailed in your analysis of various playsets and rules. I'm a scientist in my career, and I think science and law both require some level of analytical thinking, though perhaps applied in different ways. I love theory crafting, numbers, finding functions and correlations between different variables, etc., and there's a lot of that in tabletop games! I feel like if we sat down to have tea or beer or something that we could have some very interesting conversations.
Anyways, glad to find your content and hope to learn a lot from you!
I firmly believe that dice rolls should always matter. The whole point of having dice at all is so that there can be genuine tension in the game. Otherwise it's just like playing pretend or reading a book. There may be stakes, but the outcomes are predetermined by either the story or the math. It sucks that sometimes you might fail at a task you should be really good at, but if there wasn't some chance of failure, the dice shouldn't have even been rolled to begin with.
One of the things that bugged me the most about 5E is the level 1 characters being able to do "nearly impossible" things. The math basically allowed a village of non-leveled NPCs take down a ancient dragon with archery. Yeah there will be a lot of losses, but even a level 0 character can get a nat 20, and enough of those will whittle the dragon down.
PF2 has no such problem. A level 1 character rolling a nat 20 against an ancient dragon is still likely to be missing the dragon.
Thinking back, this was actually how it worked in the old AD&D gold box games, where you would be walking around w high level party and running into 100-200 kobolds and having to fight your way out was really a thing. they probably aren't going to kill you, but you will be taking damage and losing resources, and the context (wandering around in areas where you could get ambushed when resting) meant that being efficient every encounter mattered, or else you'd eventually be overwhelmed.
that was intentional. the designers said, one of the common complaints -especially in 2e, 3e was the creature tiers. you couldnt use many creatures below, lets say level 10 (without either powering up the pcs with plot armour or much higher gear than normal). So Dms had to do more work to make sure they were using correct creatures etc. Now, you can use higher tier creatures for a larger range. They didnt want creatures that are so powerful, they are untouchable for the average party until they are 15+. And the side effect of that, to make more stuff usable since most camaigns dont go that high, was to lower the power curve on the higher end stuff so they are still somewhat usable. (note: this doesnt impact me: i run 2e and 3.xe/pf1e .. just pointing out this was a major issue that was raised to wotc)
I would say part of the fiction is that 5e does Bounded Accuracy to recreate that, but I think in older editions (which did NOT have BA) it had more to do with greater lethality period. In both scenarios, a well placed spell can nope the army of low level creatures. But 5e's spellcasting system makes spellcasting much more flexible and the loss of resources (spell slots) much less impactful (i.e. less interesting decisions). Plus a single arrow hitting a caster would interrupt that spell in old d&d, no check required.
Dragons are the weirdest example to use for that. Ain't no way an army of peasants is taking down a dragon because dragons can fly. If they see five hundred people with longbows they just aren't going to be going anywhere near that. Dragons are intelligent creatures who are smarter than most humans are, if they go anywhere near the army they're going to be doing so by grabbing a boulder and flying up hundreds of feet beyond their range and pelting them until they give up. They can fly. You need to remember that dragons can fly.
@@matthewgagnon9426isnt that a staple from old legends/myths/religious text where tons of ppl grouped together to stop some rampaging beast/monster, etc? yes, it doesnt really make much sense (if dragons are used properly) but most games i find (speaking to newer 5e players) dont necessarily play games where DMs run stuff 'how they should'. especically cause the monster manuals dont detail lots of stuff like that. they dont necessarily want everything to be lethal but want fun ideas to succeed
When I ran 5e, I really struggled with balancing encounters. It seemed more an art than something that I could calculated, and ended up relying on buffing or nerfing enemies on the fly depending on how the combat happened. Since we switched to Pathfinder 2e its been much easier to actually math encounter balance.
I appreciate this entire post and the nod with the "big damn heroes!" reference. Very nice!
So deeeeep. I love it! Thanks for putting words to what I never could have and helping me understand the art and science of game design at a whole other level.
as far as your point at 41:19. You're absolutely right. However intellect devourers can be added to that small list as well.
I've long clung to bounded accuracy as a primary redeeming quality of 5e, and the source of my hesitancy to embrace PF2. Listening to you break it down... well, I'm convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.
It's really difficult to see when you haven't experienced it yet, but once you play a game with PF2e, I think most people very quickly come realize that WotC was basically trying to gaslight people with bounded accuracy because they didn't want to do the hard work of actually balancing their game. Paizo DID do that hard work with 2e, and it's not until you play a game in a system that has been properly balanced that you really feel the difference.
Just play PF2e with Proficiency Without Level (and Automatic Bonus Progression). It's literally better than 5e in every way.
@dnominic *If you play martials. Pf2e martials are much more fun than 5e martials. Spellcasters are just plain unfun at lower levels, and they don't get much better at higher level
The DM is supposed to ask for the rolls, and can choose not to. DMs don't use the "take ten" rule nearly enough. It's meant to get around the tactic of "I try this over and over for an hour", but it can and should be used to handwave trivial rolls. If the stakes are high and it's interesting, dramatic, or funny, make people roll even if it's small. But ultimately you never _have_ to make a player roll.
It's worth noting, I believe the 5E DMG does have simplified rules for running groups of monsters, but it's a somewhat obscure variant rule.
Zee bashew has a video on it, 5e mob combat I think
Thanks for reminding me! I was looking at it and it seems like a pretty rough tool, and simply consists of estimating the % chance of creatures who will hit a single target. I imagine some beleaguered DMs will come up with this on their own (which I did when one of my players started summoning 8-16 velociraptors who had Pack Tactics, lol). However, out of fairness to 5e I should have mentioned it. I added it to the pinned comment.
True, but the fact that it's an obscure variant rule really speaks ill of the 5e DMG. I loathe the way they chose to write the Dungeon Master's Guide for 5th Edition; it prioritizes the front of the book for really ambitious worldbuilding projects. That's kind of cool for experienced DMs to do, but a terrible place for the novice DM to start!
It also seems to be a profoundly strange choice for a company that makes money selling books of pre-written adventures.
Great analysis.
Boy I wish PF2e remaster had adopted the 4e "Highest of 2" for saves. The tyranny of Con, Wis, Dex triumvirate must be stopped!
BUFF, SUAVE NERDS UNITE! We have nothing to lose but our vulnerabilities to fireballs, mind control, and frostbite! ✊
The highest of 2 thing would also allow PF2e to get away with like, Dex not being terrible? Like, Dex sucks. You can't use it to jump _or_ for combat maneuvers. And not being able to disarm or trip using Dex is simply incorrect. Disarms are the entire _thing_ rapier wielders do in every media ever, but you can't use Dex to disarm in PF2e. And tripping someone is simply a matter of skill, much moreso than physical strength. Do the technique right and it doesn't matter if your opponent is stronger than you.
If Dex wasn't a Necessary Stat because you could just take Int instead, then Dex could have nice things that make a _lot_ of class fantasies more supported in the rules.
Part of the problem with 5e's "bounded accuracy", from what I can see, is having items and abilities that just stack numerical bonuses onto those rolls. Everyone's got a 20 in their ability score and a +4 proficiency bonus? Great, so everyone's got a +9 to hit... oh, except the fighter with the archery style and a +2 longbow, he's got +13 to hit...
The bounded accuracy was... unbounded from the start...
When you mentioned troops at 42:12 , I immediately thought of minion monsters from 4e. Not only do they have only a single hit-point, but the damage they deal is precalculated and static, so they are easy to run in large numbers.
If anything, the main complaint people had with 4e was that, unlike other versions, there was strict mathematical progression and bounds, and it made it feel game-y for some.
30:20
Good thing fighters have Indomitable to cover this gap somewhat, although it would be nice if it was basically legendary resistance.
43:10
Fighters do not get to do up to 9 attacks "per round". Maybe on one turn once per rest. Realistically it's 4-5 attacks.
49:00
Again, ignoring a very pertinent class feature: Reliable Talent. Your 10th level circus peformer turned master thief isn't failing that DC 15 Acrobatics check.
The problem with indomitable is that it doesnt help you with DCs that are greater than you can beat. For an ancient red dragon, a fighter with a +0 wisdom is just literally incapable of making the save, even if they're level 20.
And reliable talent is a feature that only 1 class gets, so in my opinion it just really shows how flawed the implementation of bounded accuracy is. Rogues (and bards) get to have bonuses that are way higher than anyone else, and the rogue even goes further and gets reliable talent. Why does only the rogue get to auto-succeed at acrobatics, and not the monk? The monk, who has spent their entire life working towards achieveing physical perfection gets a +11 bonus to acrobatics at level 20, while the rogue gets to have a +10 bonus as early as level 5, and then automatically succeds on any check with a DC lower than 22 as soon as they reach level 11. The level 20 monk is more likely to fail a balancing check than a level 11 rogue. I dont think that's balanced.
@@Ben-ld8bl Overall, yeah, there are definitely questionable design decisions when it comes to mismatched mechanics to themes in 5e. Although, I think in one of proto Tasha UAs they almost gave monks an ability to expend ki points to augment certain skill checks, which would have been another way to address that.
Thanks, I'll add some of these to my pinned comment.
I still think 4-5 attacks per round is an example of the same problem.
I actually wasn't thinking of a Level 20 rogue in that example, but a "master thief" could be anyone who has several levels. I still think there's an issue where only Rogues of Level 11+ can do this. One goal of the D&D Skills system starting with 3e was to provide abilities that ANY class could be good at. Also, in 5e only the Rogue can reliably do Athletics checks, which seems strange and unintended...
@@Ben-ld8bl in addition, Indomitable description explicitly says that you MUST use the new result. So if you failed a check that you can probably pass you decide to roll again. But you rolled even lower and, surprise-surprise, this is a graded check, where if fail the check by more than 5 points, the consequences are even worse. You spent your one-every-long-rest big ability just to worsen your life.
Ive written the bounded accuracy rant to some of my friends a few times. Fundamentally I just dont like it, if you want a system where sometimes a character can be REALLY good at something, that just needs to be inherrent to the system rather than locked down to a few scenarios like expertise which just break the rest of the skill system. Fundamentally it sucks that in most contexts, your character can "fail" to do things 20+% of the time that someone similarly experienced in real life would fail less than 0.1% of the time.
That all being said, my favorite roleplaying system is savage worlds, so I dont mind something a bit more stripped down. I just think 5e creates some really perverse incentives where every individual +1 is really swingy and so, rather than being more free to make whatever character build choices you want, you are actually less free because every "buff" or possitive effect you leave on the table has a huge impact on your statistical success or failure
Excellent job on packing this into a 1-hour video. I'm surprised it's so short, but you covered everything important. I feel like I've discussed parts of this so many times but never encompassing all salient points, and it's good to now have a single video that we can point to in the future where it's explained in detail.
Cheers to that. I also work in game design, so analyses of games to this depth of detail is very helpful in helping people make better games.
Very thourough, I like it.
A thing I've been doing in my campaign is let the party have higher ACs and as they hit Tier 3 of play I realised that the monsters "appropriate" for their level couldn't hit them most of the time and that the monsters that could via abilities targeting saving throws would be able to take out half their hit points in one go.
Once this happened for the first time one of the players got freaked out thinking I was trying to kill their character outright. I wasn't (I had calculated it so that even full damage would leave them with a sliver), but it taught me that I needed to readjust by homebrewing monsters and enemies.
And thanks to this video it's clear to me how: Allowing the beasties to have better To Hit bonuses and ACs while tuning down the damage by about 1-3 dice depending on the ability... And coming up with a way to improve the party's saving throws. I will now commence the deep dive into magic items that improve saves, which will of course also help the baddies in the fight against the party.
The only issue I had with this video was using an AD&D module and the treasure it gave to reference the "low vs high" amount of magic items in a game. In AD&D the exp system was very different, where only a fraction of your exp came from killing monsters. Most of your exp came from the treasure you found (1/2 the value if you kept it and the value you get if you sold it was converted 1:1) while also requiring you to pay a fee (and time) to level up based on the level you are advancing to. For that reason, a lot of adventure paths (and DMs in general) will actually give out a fair amount of treasure and simple magic items knowing that a fair bit of it will be sold off for exp or used to pay for leveling, two things that 5e doesn't have in its system.
Great video and good comprehensive numbers, though! I love how 'simple' 5e was made, its a great starting point for new players. Just wish the RUNNING of the game was as simple and accessible, haha.
Thanks! On the module, it was a Basic D&D module, which I don't think rewarded XP for magical treasure
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG That is very possible. I just remember that as a new DM learning AD&D with 3.x as my foundation in HS, it seemed odd how random the loot was in any module I read until I got my brain wrapped around that "GP to XP" conversion. Always fun reading any of my old TTRPG books and seeing how things changed, evolve, and developed over the decades. Oh the horrible ideas and the lost gimmicks that may never see the light of day again, haha!
I like the idea off keeping stuff small so that numbers don't balloon out of control** ... but Bounded Accuracy had to compensate by ballooning HP.
**: Eventually, everything in 3.5 had "Natural Armor" to keep ACs competitive.
And natural armor led to issues of its own. Because spell attacks used the same base attack bonus as weapon attacks, WotC was faced with a catch-22. If wizards are good at hitting with spells, they'll also be good at hitting with weapons, but if they're bad at hitting with weapons, they'll also struggle to hit with spells. So the solution was to create touch AC and let wizards bypass armor. But because natural armor was used for balancing, this meant that TAC wasn't just *low*, but that in some cases, like great wyrm red dragons, it was exactly 0. So to remedy *that*, you had a proliferation of spell resistance. But because spell resistance applies to all spells, this made all the other spells even less reliable, because you essentially had to succeed twice to hit with something like Fireball
@justineberlein5916 Yeah, I remember learning AC was affected by size, and thinking how cool that was, then learning about Natural Armor when I became a GM and thinking, "So you created a solution to a problem YOU created?"
3.0 Harm versus was a dragon was insane
I'm proficiency without level kind of guy so I actually like bounded accuracy idea. However that's my personal taste, and I can see why other people have other preferences. It's much like taste in food, some like ti sweet, some like it salty and some like it spacey.
Static DC's create benchmarks for players to overcome and get better. 3.x did this to great effect. The numbers eventually got so high that you couldn't fail at a certain task anymore. However, there is a narrative advantage to this that some people overlook.
For example: At level 1 in 3.x a rogue cannot consistently balance on a surface that is less than 2 inches wide (DC 20) and is only comfortable making the attempt out of combat when he isn't distracted and may use a balancing pole to gain a circumstance bonus.
At level 5, that same rogue can now confidently balance on that same surface and can do so in combat with a reasonably small amount of risk. In addition, he is no longer considered flat-footed while balancing on said surface (5 ranks in balance negates the penalty).
At level 10, that same rogue can balance on that same surface even when it's slippery or foggy out. In 3.x you can take a -5 penalties to balance to move at full speed instead of at half-speed. At this level, he can succeed at that in normal or mildly hazardous conditions regularly.
At level 15, that same rogue cannot fail to balance on that same surface at all in any normal or mildly hazardous condition. This is the point where people often say, "Why have numbers so large if you can't fail?", but imagine he's taken some DEX damage, and he's sickened. So he has two stacking penalties. It's during a blizzard, and he can barely see (severely obstructed +5 to DC) and the surface is made of ice (extremely slippery +5 to DC). The story being told here is that he's got to find shelter, and he needs to balance on the narrow icy surface over a cliff in order to do so. He's dizzy from his cold, but he is so good at balancing normally, that even under extreme conditions, there is still a chance he can pull it off.
Having breakpoints where you no longer have to roll is only a problem if the game doesn't give you tools to modify the challenge. This admittedly comes with increased complexity and a steeper learning curve.
This is actually one of my absolute favourite features of PF1e and it's why it's still my favourite system. I also like the skill points system even though it's a little easier to screw up with compared to PF2e proficiencies because you can do things like drop 1 or 2 ranks in Knowledge (local) to get it to +5 and never need it any higher than that for roleplaying purposes. Take 10 for 15 means you easily know or find out all the basics about local culture wherever you go and can avoid making basic social faux pas, for example. It also makes roleplaying easier if I'm allowed to know basic things about the world without having to risk rolling a 2 and not knowing something stupidly basic.
These are all great examples of important milestones of ability. The only exception I want to make is that it makes a lot more sense to players if you give these out *as abilities,* instead of *as numbers on a scale* that you have to reference somewhere else to understand what it means. The monk can run on water at level 9, because they get an ability that allows it, not because their skill bonus reached +12.
@@donovanmarks1865 I think you're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about skills or abilities that you get. The point is that there needs to be benchmarks to test your character against. Gaining new abilities is a fine way to do it, but only in the context that the ability demonstrably showcases growth against a static benchmark.
Hi! I'm a game designer. I wrote the Rags to Riches RPG system, and have acted as a consultant for a couple of indie companies (though usually on the side of historical content rather than quality control).
Watching this video has spelled out some of my own specific issues with D&D's numbers in way that I hadn't quite put into words before. It's insightful and I agree with it completely. It's also given me inspiration to get back to work on my own d20 system, which is something I put aside many years ago due to my own disillusionment with the RPG industry.
I don't know if you'd be interested in partnering up at some point in future, I feel like you'd make a wonderful QA guy even if you have limited experience with other systems. But I definitely wanted to say because of you it's given new life to an old project which I'm quite happy with, so thank you.
The idea that the same monsters can present a consistent threat to the party just sounds so bizarre. Imagine this: You're John Fighterman, and you recently left you hometown with your grandpa's longsword to join up with a group of adventurers. You're level 1, and currently getting rolled by goblins in a cave. Now, fast forward to the end of your adventure. The evil dragon lays slain at John's feet, its caustic blood coating John's sword. John Fighterman has become a legend, a warrior without peer, the very peak of what mortal kind are capable. His songs are sung far and wide, his deeds echoing into the future, inspiring a new generation of brave heroes. John decides to visit his old hometown, adorned in all the splendors of Faerun, intent to return his grandpa's longsword. You're level 20, and currently getting rolled by goblins on a roadside ambush. Sure, you have so many hitpoints you can't really be killed by them, but you're also supposed to be the best in the world. Despite being level 20, the goblins can still block your blade, the blade that felled a dragon. Despite being level 20, the goblins can still strike through your armor, the armor that blocked dragon claws. The threats your supposed to face are battles for the fate of the world, foes that set the gods atremble, and yet you can still be hurt, and eventually killed if you're really unlucky, by goblins.
I quite like the AC 40 dragon it means "hard to damage" it is quite straightforward, directly threathening. Hitpoint based math is just wrong: 5000 hitpoins dragon is about cheesing it with an army of cheap peasants, you will need more than 12 goblins if AOE fireball is available, or you need "smarter" goblins, to challenge abilities of lvl5 party... and smarter goblins can just be different creature than the stupid lvl1 ones....
The bigger numbers exist there to simplify the calculation. AC is just amalgamation of chance to evade, chance to block chance to resist the damage. But its "universality" breaks back to variants what players want to do anyway and what makes sense: Flat footed AC, spell AC (touch attack AC), damage reduction... It is balancing between too much to calculate for the attack and between the boringness of always doing the exactly same chance roll.
Honestly how are these dragons getting "cheesed" by an army of peasants? The dragon is way faster than the peasants and an army is extremely visible. If the dragon sees an army of 1000 archers standing ready it can just... not attack. The dragon isn't stupid, he's just going to attack where your massive army isn't and given those longbows only have a max range of 150 ft without disadvantage, that's a lot of city to burn.
As far as "cheap" not so much. Fielding 500 peasants with just longbows is going to cost you 25000 gp for the bows alone. That's not paying the peasants, feeding them, or giving them any kind of armor or equipment, that's purely equipping them with longbows.
There's a lot of good arguments against bounded accuracy, but the peasant army killing a dragon isn't one of them.
This video helped me to put words to some frustrations that I've felt about D&D 5e, as a DM, since my party reached level 8-10. I've had some difficulty challenging my party in combat without creating fights that are only slogs, while at the same time certain skill tasks feel really "swingy" - things that shouldn't be hard for an expert sometimes fail inexplicably for that character, and sometimes things that should be almost impossible are overcome by a lucky die roll. To a certain degree, that can be fun, but it's happened enough that it starts to stretch verisimilitude. I know there are some things I can do to help mitigate that (allowing experts to 'take 10' automatically for easier skill checks, borrowing homebrew/3rd party monsters such as those from MCDM's book), but until now I'd thought that maybe the issue lied more with me as a relatively inexperienced DM. It was helpful to understand that a lot of the problems actually come from the math of the system itself, which explains why things that help fix it are typically homebrew rules and third party content.
I love this so much!! I'm a long time TTRPG player, but I don't have the head for maths, so a lot of the issues I have with 5E's proficiency progression is hard to put into words.
My impression is that the designers were not really trying to solve the problems they thought they were trying to solve. The real issue is a much older schism, between High Fantasy and Low Fantasy.
D&D had its roots much more firmly in the High Fantasy genre, which is why the rules can seem so outlandish at times. In practical terms, you're taking characters who are well trained in their given fields starting out, becoming heroes of the caliber of The Fellowship of LoTR in the mid levels, and in the high levels they're super heroes, demi-gods, and the like, who would be the subject of epic poems in ancient times.
This completely flies in the face of Low Fantasy where you start out as an incompetent pretender, and might be able to fake it until you make it at the mid levels. If you survive to the high levels then you're John Wick or Liam Neeson in Taken, which is to say you're a total bad-ass with a scary reputation but death is always just one mistake away.
The problems arise when these two genres start to conflict with each-other, because the genres are mutually exclusive. It sets up conflicting expectations between all of the players at the table, and even within each and every player's understanding of the game. As I have said before, if you try to play Aragorn (a high fantasy character) in Game of Thrones (a low fantasy setting), you'll end up with Ned Stark. (a man who met a very undesirable end because he didn't really understand the rules of the game he was playing)
I suspect that the bounded accuracy was meant to drag D&D 5e toward the Low Fantasy end of the spectrum, because that is much more reflective of modern culture and storytelling in the mainstream now. However, D&D still has it's roots mired in its high fantasy origins, and the mechanics still reflect that origin. The designers failed to grasp what they were trying to accomplish so they ended up with a patchwork mess of rules. They were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
If I'm being honest, the schism between the two genres is such that they would be better served coming up with an entirely different set of rules for low fantasy games, say a handbook for it that revises all of the classes and gives means of making monsters and challenges more grounded toward that style of play. Just my opinion there, though.
2:52 A lawyer being thorough, I’m Jack's complete lack of surprise. Of course you’d be thorough. If is kind of helpful to those of us that are not so inclined. Thank you!
Rok the level 36 (minus one experience point) monk born without arms, in a setting where metals are extremely rare, with weapons nor armor by build and even ethics, who has NEVER SEEN AN ANVIL BEFORE, tried making a horseshoe for a quest, it was suitable for greater DIVINE enchentment and arcane enchantment! He became a GOD OF SMITHING. Then he tripped over a branch.
about the grimoire of arcane and amulet of the devout requiring a level dip...
1- for spell caster a level dip can hurt a lot.
a wizard 10/cleric1, sure he grab the armor proficiency from the cleric and have access to healing spell that wizard cannot learn and still has 6th level spell slot.
But here what everyone forget: he is now a level 11 character. a level 11 wizard would be able to cast level 6 spell (which are more powerful then upcast level 5 spell) but now he only have access to 5th level wizard spell at best.
2- Then also remember you are limited to 3 attuned item, so if you have a grimoire of arcane and an amulet of the devout, you only have 1 attunement slot remaining: what will it be? a staff? a wand? a defensive ring? you can only have 1.
3- The DM decide what item are given to the party. The DM control which item can be found. If the DM give a amulet of the devout AND an grimoire, it's the DM fault (or the cleric of the party gave his item to the wizard, so yeah you got a super powerful wizard but a weaker cleric, if your party want to play League of Legend and feed all the power to a single character, as the DM you can easily show them the flaw of that tactic by sending a monster who resist the wizard (imagine a Rakshaza who is immune to spell lower then 6th level, against our wizard10/cleric1 who cannot learn 6th level spell and the party gave him all the magic item)
Loved the video and thoroughly enjoy you content in general, even if I am not a particularly strong adherent of Pathfinder 2e.
From a couple of comments I noticed you seem to agree (please, correct me if I am wrong) with the idea that some of the choices made by D&D 5e design (such as the bounded accuracy) feel dissonant because they do not fit with the traditional power fantasy that the system allegedly aims to represent.
Were that the case, did you ever consider making videos examining other RPG systems that better fit other styles and genres of roleplay? I think a very interesting set of videos could emerge from analyzing how other systems accurately decided to represent a certain genre, or make a certain narrative statement, by virtue of well designed mechanics.
It's a great idea! But it will be a while coming as I've wanted to have direct experience with other systems before covering them. Lancer/ICON and Shadow of the Weird Wizard and Savage Worlds have been on my radar. Also of course MCDM and DC20. I've been hesitant to cover systems and make opinions without the authority that comes from having played them yet, meanwhile.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPGThat's fair and dandy. My personal advice is towards systems that are, either by design or cultural influence, somewhat "other" compared to D&D and Pathfinder. I would direct you specifically towards most of the material from Free League (Swedish Company), which can offer lots of interesting games!
It's funny how I disagree on a fundamental level with literally every single argument in that article
The only thing I really disagree with the article about is where they say 5e does it.
Older GMs straight up capped Hp at level 7
Trying to combine the competing goals of (a) zero to hero growth (b) consistent, persistent challenges, & (c) non-complex math does indeed require a balancing act. A mechanism I use when creating custom-brewed magic is to require attunement & also imbue them with a "cost."
Examples:
(1) a ring of falling; when attuned: grants falling damage resistance & disadvantage on insight checks.
(2) gauntlets of power; when attuned: +2 STR & consume 4x rations per day.
(3) dwarven belt; when attuned: +2 social rolls with dwarves; -5 social rolls with elves.
Excellent video. IME it's almost impossible to explain to a player who wasn't heavy into the math of 3.x/pf -and- sees the trainwreck in 5e's bounded accuracy setup. It's great having a single source video that just goes down the list kicking over failure after failure before a player can say "but but bounded accuracy was made to do $NextThing not that"
I think you have overstated the issues here, probably due to liking Pathfinder’s style. Dnd does have some balance issues - especially around monsters.
But for the most part, the system does work as you are stating it should.
Characters at level 20 are exponentially stronger than at 1, not marginally.
While your AC only goes up 2 or 3 and your “to hit” by 6, other things go up. Your HP will be many times higher, and you gain extra attacks as well as damaging effects for those attacks. And spell power rises at a similar rate.
Good video though. 👍
Half the complaints here are "I don't like that style," and "I think most groups agree with me."
Not to suggest that 5e is fine as is. It has problems. Vomiting every possible interpretation of what is wrong with the system clouds the issues because many of the different complaints are about the same underlying problem.
I understand that this is fundamentally a PF > D&D video. My complaint is that's all it ends up being. And it doesn't really do a good job being that. Had it spent more time focused on contrasting how PF2e handles what 5e does poorly, rather than reiterating by calling out different forms of the same root problem, it would have been a better video.
If you want to promote a "better" system you have to do more than just trash talk. Make a case for what's better.
(I also understand that the real money is in stirring up as much conflict as possible in the comments, but an actual contrast between the systems would have the same effect on the partisans and result in similar levels of engagement.)
Excellent video. I'm actually thinking of making a video on my house rules that attempt to 'unbound' 5e math. This is a great reference point.
Savage Worlds doesn't call what it does "bounded accuracy" but it does a passable imitation of what D&D 5 sets out to do, IMO. As you Advance, you're likely to pretty quickly reach the upper levels of "raw numbers" in your core stuff. (Most Traits max out at d12, though you can get higher with certain Advancement options.) And there's a chance for any character (or enemy) to get a stupidly high result on a Trait test or damage roll because (almost) all dice explode. You can absolutely reach a high rank, and wade through masses of goblins who would have massacred you and your friends 10 or 20 sessions ago. BUT those goblins, too, might roll specially high on their damage. It isn't likely, but it CAN happen. The part of the system where characters (PC and otherwise) are distinguished, is in Edges: this is how one character is distinguished from another with a similar function. The term I usually hear is "lateral" advancement (vs. D&D's "vertical" advancement).
4e was alot better and more fun system. More choices and more abilities other than swing your sword 2 times. Never played a campaign where at high lvl you didn't have +3 weapons and armor. Most fighter/paladins had high 20's ac. Mainly paladins cause they outshine fighters easy.
it's big issue was that players often don't invest enough effort into the game to know what their abilites do adn would often be overwhelmed by choice
"I swing my sword twice" is great for people who show up and think about the game for the 2-3 hours a week they are playing it and not past that.
(I say this as someone who LOVES 4e and just wrapped up a 2 year long campaign of it)
Well basically the problem with built-in magic items is that it essentially forces you to then have a magic item shop, which really makes magic items feel less special. It also kinda screws with NPC balance as well, because if you equip NPCs with competitive magic items comparatively to a PC, after the PCs kill them, they get a massive wealth jump. So your NPCs are always either woefully underequipped (and weak), or become walking treasure hoards.
@@taragnor once the players have all of their equipment slots filled (which in my 4e games is quite quickly) it’s incremental growth on items they loot from enemies. And the enemies items generally have abilities that arnt jusy “do more damage” they are like
“Shift x squares” “gain resist a damage type for a round”
5e edition is solved by playing a different game.
Advantage/Disadvantage plays a big part in the problem. It’s equivalent to a +5/-5 bonus. If you assume players can negotiate advantage, that means an average task becoming near certain and a nearly impossible task becomes very possible. In older versions of D&D a common best practice was that “advantage” was +2 and “disadvantage” was -2. So the unbounded systems had lower modifiers than the supposedly bounded system.
I've heard the complaint that "D&D 5e only pretends to be rules light by making the DM do extra work" before, but this is a really good breakdown of (at least one of) the reasons why. Excellent job!