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jackMost new editions of DnD come with ideas where I think "oh, that's a good idea" at the time, but it's hard to see more clearly whether they actually made things good or not.
5e introduced Advantage and Disadvantage. Basically, if you're attacking or attempting something similar in any advantageous situation, from hiding, or attacking someone impaired, or a long list of other scenarios, you get advantage -- you get to roll two d20 instead of one and choose the better. It also "turns on" some special abilities like the rogue's backstab. Disadvantage is the same but you have to choose the worse.
At first, I thought it sounded sort of gimicky and simplified. In 3.5e those would all be a +4 or a -4 or something, and would stack, and that felt real-er somehow, maybe because it's just what I'm used to.
But even though I still haven't had a chance to play much, the more I thought about it, the more I'm interested in it. I thought about the probabilities and what's interesting is that it never makes something possible or impossible, it basically halves the chance of succeeding or failing. But that actually simplifies a lot of things, it means you don't need to worry about the action being pointless or automatic, but it will *always* make it easier or harder.
That makes it easier to apply in a range of situations without worrying about the fine detail too much. And as someone pointed out, it allows a lot more free-form combat. If someone wants to swing on the chandelier, you don't have to respond, "ok, but it won't actually help", you can easily say, "sure, acrobatics check DC 15, if you succeed you'll have advantage". If they take some out-of-combat action that should help them but you're not sure how much -- advantage is probably appropriate.
In particular, 5e reduced the size of many modifiers relative to the range of a d20 dice, so many more things are within the "possible, whether likely or not" range not "always unless you roll a 1" or "never unless you roll a 20". That means, the number of +4 bonuses has to be strictly limited or players will go from "balanced" to "basically always hit" with the right shenanigans. But advantage/disadvantage doesn't have that problem, the underlying chance is the same.
I don't quite like the hack that "advantage and disadvantage cancel out" but it's probably necessary.
Vulnerability and resistance are similar, they double and halve the amount of damage dealt. That means you can have monsters or characters which care about particular damage types, but never be in a situation where it's trivial or pointless to fight.
Balance for what timescale
I struggled to put this into words, but it seems like old editions of DnD were balanced for a campaign. There are all sorts of rules that only make a difference if you expect to play the same character through all the levels, classes that are weaker early on but stronger later or vice versa. More like roguelikes than most modern roleplaying sessions.
3.5e is more balanced for a day. You recover many of your resources each night. Throughout a day, you need to judge how many spell slots and similar resources to expend and still have some in reserve. But you're not really expected to do that between days: "we had a really lucky first session so now we'll have an easier time in following sessions" whether because you found some good magic swords or found a clever way to bypass the orc army, or whatever, is the exception not the rule. And honestly, the GM should probably fudge things so each day has about the same amount of interesting challenge, not set up a campaign you play fifty sessions of and let good or bad outcomes affect the next dozen sessions -- that's fine, but it's not what 3.5e is made for.
4e is balanced for a single encounter. As much as people try to say otherwise, most of the polish goes toward ensuring that each encounter is a tactical match for the party. Just like a 2e party might shy away from a too-deadly dungeon but a 3.5e party assumes the dungeon is balanced for them, a 3.5e party might choose which encounters they can handle, but a 4e party is expected to just find all encounters at the "fun challenge" level.
4e does this very well, and I know people who've found it works fine for all the other aspects of roleplaying, but for me it just doesn't work well. It's great at tactical combat if that's what you want. But being focused on particular encounters means that the rest of the story is warped around them: it's hard to have any sneaking in anywhere or dramatic negotiating, if you always have to end in the same fight anyway.
5e zooms out to 3.5e scope again, which suits me well. I'd be interested to play an old-school campaign too, but I probably don't have time.
5e introduced Advantage and Disadvantage. Basically, if you're attacking or attempting something similar in any advantageous situation, from hiding, or attacking someone impaired, or a long list of other scenarios, you get advantage -- you get to roll two d20 instead of one and choose the better. It also "turns on" some special abilities like the rogue's backstab. Disadvantage is the same but you have to choose the worse.
At first, I thought it sounded sort of gimicky and simplified. In 3.5e those would all be a +4 or a -4 or something, and would stack, and that felt real-er somehow, maybe because it's just what I'm used to.
But even though I still haven't had a chance to play much, the more I thought about it, the more I'm interested in it. I thought about the probabilities and what's interesting is that it never makes something possible or impossible, it basically halves the chance of succeeding or failing. But that actually simplifies a lot of things, it means you don't need to worry about the action being pointless or automatic, but it will *always* make it easier or harder.
That makes it easier to apply in a range of situations without worrying about the fine detail too much. And as someone pointed out, it allows a lot more free-form combat. If someone wants to swing on the chandelier, you don't have to respond, "ok, but it won't actually help", you can easily say, "sure, acrobatics check DC 15, if you succeed you'll have advantage". If they take some out-of-combat action that should help them but you're not sure how much -- advantage is probably appropriate.
In particular, 5e reduced the size of many modifiers relative to the range of a d20 dice, so many more things are within the "possible, whether likely or not" range not "always unless you roll a 1" or "never unless you roll a 20". That means, the number of +4 bonuses has to be strictly limited or players will go from "balanced" to "basically always hit" with the right shenanigans. But advantage/disadvantage doesn't have that problem, the underlying chance is the same.
I don't quite like the hack that "advantage and disadvantage cancel out" but it's probably necessary.
Vulnerability and resistance are similar, they double and halve the amount of damage dealt. That means you can have monsters or characters which care about particular damage types, but never be in a situation where it's trivial or pointless to fight.
Balance for what timescale
I struggled to put this into words, but it seems like old editions of DnD were balanced for a campaign. There are all sorts of rules that only make a difference if you expect to play the same character through all the levels, classes that are weaker early on but stronger later or vice versa. More like roguelikes than most modern roleplaying sessions.
3.5e is more balanced for a day. You recover many of your resources each night. Throughout a day, you need to judge how many spell slots and similar resources to expend and still have some in reserve. But you're not really expected to do that between days: "we had a really lucky first session so now we'll have an easier time in following sessions" whether because you found some good magic swords or found a clever way to bypass the orc army, or whatever, is the exception not the rule. And honestly, the GM should probably fudge things so each day has about the same amount of interesting challenge, not set up a campaign you play fifty sessions of and let good or bad outcomes affect the next dozen sessions -- that's fine, but it's not what 3.5e is made for.
4e is balanced for a single encounter. As much as people try to say otherwise, most of the polish goes toward ensuring that each encounter is a tactical match for the party. Just like a 2e party might shy away from a too-deadly dungeon but a 3.5e party assumes the dungeon is balanced for them, a 3.5e party might choose which encounters they can handle, but a 4e party is expected to just find all encounters at the "fun challenge" level.
4e does this very well, and I know people who've found it works fine for all the other aspects of roleplaying, but for me it just doesn't work well. It's great at tactical combat if that's what you want. But being focused on particular encounters means that the rest of the story is warped around them: it's hard to have any sneaking in anywhere or dramatic negotiating, if you always have to end in the same fight anyway.
5e zooms out to 3.5e scope again, which suits me well. I'd be interested to play an old-school campaign too, but I probably don't have time.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 08:25 pm (UTC)Also, I know this is near-heresy to past-me, but the Vancian magic thing never really worked because you just filled up with whatever did the most damage - sure, all kinds of utility spells _could_ be useful under the right circumstances, but except in the rare case where you know what circumstances are going to come up, you're better off with a Fireball because there will probably be someone to cast a Fireball on.
3e eased this pain a lot for clerics with the ability to cast any prepared spell as a healing spell. If I were running D&D tomorrow, I'd probably have magic-users assemble two lists; if RAW you have n spells of this level, you pick n damage spells and n non-damage spells, cast a total of n. This lets you have some utility spells and see if the right circumstances do arrive.
In Vance (and The Dying Earth RPG) you can only memorise one copy of each spell. That might be going too far (low-level 3e magic users with bigger quotas per day might even not be able to fill all their slots) but I think there might be something to be said for some limit along those lines, especially now clerics are no longer wanting to take n-1 Cure Serious Woundses and maybe something else.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 01:07 pm (UTC)Yeah, indeed. Although I seem to remember (not first hand) that you might have a single lucky charm person swing a session if you got a new ally.
I know this is near-heresy to past-me, but the Vancian magic thing never really worked because you just filled up with whatever did the most damage
Yeah. I think in theory it was another example of "planning for a campaign, not a session": that you got a big leg up if you prepped right, so the dungeon was hard the first time when you didn't know to expect frost creatures, and a lot easier when you took the effort to load up on them in advance.
But in practice, I think campaigns where that happened became (or always were) less common. So prepping for the best loadout every day was what you did.
I like your variant to ensure a mix. 5e has shifted towards this with:
* cantrips (mostly attacks) you can cast any number of times, so you always have a "normal" attack and some utility available without prepping them separately
* prepping a list of spells, but being able to spend your spell slots on any of them, not preparing a fixed number of each (so you can prep one good fire spell and some utility spells and use N fire spells, or N-2 fire spells and two utility spells)
* ritual spells -- for spells for which it makes sense, you can instead take some time (10 minutes?) to cast it, but without expending a spell slot or needing it prepared, so you don't need to worry about preparing for utility situations much, even though you'd want to prepare if you thought you might need it in a hurry.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:51 am (UTC)I'm not sure I have ever run a dungeon that was not either a) in a setting that would give a reasonable amount of contextual clues from the beginning ("You've been hired to get rid of the frost giants who live up on this snowy mountain" striking me as a reasonable hint that fire spells will likely be more use than ice ones) or b) allowed the capacity for going in and scouting it out enough to learn that sort of thing and then going home again to equip appropriately. (Not that a sufficiently timid or gung-ho group of characters can't scupper such planning entirely.)
I do like those different kinds of casting as a paradigm, though my mind tends to drift towards specialists in each particular modality as interestingly different to play.