DnD 5E and FATE Accelerated

[jack]

DnD 5e

A while back I bought the 5e DnD ("DnD Next" or "DnD") player's handbook and just now have been reading through it. I actually really like it.

It reminds me of 3.5 but streamlined, with a few of the good aspects of earlier editions and 4e. That's about what I wanted out of DnD!

Many of the combat rules are simplified a bit, but look about equally balanced. Progression is simplified -- feats are more powerful, but optional, you can take them instead of a stat increase. Thus they do more to define your character and less to "here's a feat-tree you have to take".

There's no separate saves, you make a "dex save" or "con save". Your character has a single proficiency bonus which scales with level from +2 to about +5, which is added to everything you character is good at (weapons they're proficient with, skills they're trained with, etc).

They've added some fluff to the front page of the character sheet (personality trait, ideal, bond, flaw) and a suggesting for getting temporary mechanical advantage when your flaw comes into play. I have ideas for those bits up, to focus people further on the bits that actually come up in play (whether they matter mechanically or not).

The classes and races are similar to 3e -- there's the classic races (human, elf, dwarf, halfling) and further races (tiefling, dragonborn, gnome, half-orc) which don't automatically exist in all settings.

Like 4e, all spellcasters have a few infinite use cantrips which function as their standard attack options. I like that all characters have something specific to do in combat. And like 4e, fighter has some abilities beyond "hit it with my axe" to bring into play in combat -- although not many, I think that could be beefed up.

It reverts to generally winging the exact physical layout rather than using a battlemap. Which I like because combat is simpler and faster. Although I admit, it does remove some of the good effects in 4e, that there were many more tactical options for the party to work together, other than "we all hit it repeatedly".

The general power level is flatter between 1st level and 20th level, even more so than 4e. I think this is probably good, since it's almost impossible to balance things at both ends, but it does potentially mean less variation. But it has good effects that a character a few level higher than you" feels like "an adventurer like you, but more experienced" not "a demigod". And that there's less artificial scaling where every PC gets regular stat boosts to increase to-hit and damage-per-second and armour-class -- as does every monster.

It seems like, 1st level is really a tutorial level (although actually, I'd like an EVEN SIMPLER introduction for some newbies) where characters all have stuff they can do, but some of the key class features kick in at second level (eg. rogue has backstab damage at first level, but gets a free disengage/hide action from second which is nearly as class-defining). 4th or 5th feels like a typical point for experienced 3.5e players.

In addition to flattening the power level, the magic-item economy is gone. The classes are designed to be balanced mostly as-is, with a minimum amount of gold and almost no magic items. So you can run a low-magic campaign where the only magic is PC and NPC spellcasters, and add a magic sword for effect when it seems dramatic, not assume that everyone is carting around cartloads of +1 stuff else they're unplayable.

I think it could sensibly by used to run either an old-school "kick in the door and take as much treasure as you can before you die" session or a "mostly about roleplaying with some combat" session which are the sorts I enjoy the most.

4e is probably better for tactical combat -- I like that in theory, but never find it works well for me in practice.

Has anyone actually tried 5e?

FATE core and FATE accelerated

I've also been following a couple of people's suggestions and reading about FATE. IIUC it's based on ideas from FUDGE, based on a very freeform mechanics-light structure. Ideal for "here's a wacky idea about X" or "here's an existing setting (Dresden Files) with clear flavour but vague on specifics, can we adapt that to a game" and producing setting and character sheets with minimal write-up and no need to spend ages trying to balance PC activities.

Basically it sounds really fun if you want an adventure without tactical combat at all (there's still some tactics, but not based primarily on characters specific abilities).

Although some people apparently flounder if they're used to DnD -- there's definitely a "everyone should choose things that are appropriate, not always what would be most effective for the character". (Like Dogs-in-the-Vineyard, it seems it's more fun to pick character traits which come up about half the time -- but some people find it hard to resist arguing that they ALWAYS apply.)

Has anyone actually tried any of the editions of FATE?

Comments

[seekingferret]

I never played 4e but it looked a lot like it was trying to be an MMO

I've seen that criticism a good deal, but I've never thought it was quite right. 4E definitely borrows a lot of mechanics from MMOs, but that doesn't mean it plays the same way. Even mechanics that are completely identical to MMO mechanics don't end up playing exactly the same when you're at the table, and there is a lot more to 4E than just the pure mechanics.

4E is definitely a system where you ought to use a computer to generate your character sheets, but I've never found managing powers at the table very difficult. And the real meat of 4E, as with any rpg, is in how it gives you tools to inhabit characters. Fights in 4E aren't just tactical, they're flavorful, and that endows a combat-oriented game with a lot of character heft.

[jack]

What did you like about the flavour?

I've only played 4e briefly, but some things I definitely liked, that fighters could be as interestingly specialised as wizards, that enemies were statted to be fun to play against, not to use the same system as PCs, that everyone's powers were clearly spelled out on the character sheet, etc.

But the things that bugged me were things that seemed to put mechanics front-and-centre and inhibit anything else. There was a low-level power that dropped an enemy through a portal to a hell-dimension, and then brought him back having suffered 1d6 damage less than a turn later. I was just like, how can you EVER do that and not think "well, maybe it would be more effective if I _didn't_ bring her back"?

And I loved the idea of minions, of streamlining combat against low-level enemies, but it's the sort of thing where your character loses out unless they choose powers based on specific knowledge of the game mechanics, which is hard to make flavourful.

[seekingferret]

I was just like, how can you EVER do that and not think "well, maybe it would be more effective if I _didn't_ bring her back"?

It's not that hard to make sense of that. Perhaps it takes magical energy to keep them in the hell dimension, and you're not so much bringing them back as stopping keeping them there. As soon as you release the portal, they revert back. There are ten other explanations I could come up with... the 4E powers are specific, but they're not THAT specific that they don't give you room to imagine how they work. My favorite 4E GM liked to ask his players after they first deployed a power, "What does it look like to you?"

What I like about 4E's powers in combat is that in earlier versions of D&D, there's lots of flexibility outside of combat, but once you're in combat, there's not all that much you can do but "I hit it with my axe". Ben Lehman had a post on G+ a while back where he argued that old school D&D was effectively a game about figuring out the most creative ways to avoid combat. And sure, there are many techniques you can use to make an old school D&D fight more dynamic. You can describe how when you're rolling your attack roll, you're really jabbing with your left hand, or swinging your axe over your head, or feinting to lure in your opponent and then counterstriking, but mechanically it'll always be the same. In 4E, by default, every move you make in combat is flavorful. Every move you make is a specific maneuver that is part of the larger story, and the more moves you make, the more colorful and interesting a fighter you are.

And that means that even the kinds of players who are purely gamist, tactical players, who are just into D&D for the optimization and the beating monsters and aren't that interested in advancing stories, are enlisted in the storytelling. They can't help it- the rules require them to do storywise interesting things.

The thing that gets people stuck on 4E, though, is the way the rules enforce a hard line between in-combat and out-of-combat. And that is a problem, and I think it's a rule that ought to be ignored. By RAW you get into the weird situation where you can cast an encounter power fireball that does X damage, but if you're not in combat and you need to get through an ice wall, you don't have any tools to apply. Every 4E DM, IMO, needs to figure out a set of adjudications for using encounter powers in non-combat encounters that actually works.

[seekingferret]

This is the Ben Lehman post I was thinking of: https://plus.google.com/117301572585814320386/posts/VGrEHakDC9g

[rysmiel]

The memories that brings back are not all good ones.

On the one hand, getting experience for treasure never sat all that well with me because what my players were getting for treasure was treasure, with which they were not shy about buying stuff. On the other, without that ridiculous imbalance, you kill an awful lot of rats and bats (and the blatantly obvious "this is here to provide something at rat or bat levels of dangerous that isn't a rat or a bat" like stirges, and... I'm not recalling how old darkmantles are but they're the only other example to come to mind) before you're ready to take your chances with anything more interesting.

If I were running a campaign like the ones I used to run now, I'd socially embed it from the start, I'd give a fair amount of role-playing and story-advancing XP and I'd make fights infrequent and not the most exciting aspect of the campaign. Presuming I used old-style XP at all, rather than either "you get 3 XP for defeating a stronger opponent, 2 for an even fight, 1 for defeating a weaker opponent, 0 for a much weaker opponent because you learn nothing from it and 0 from a much stronger opponent because if you defeat a much stronger opponent that's Plot" or "I have the overall shape of my campaign mapped out and I am going to cut it into twenty roughly even chunks lengthwise and level you up when you reach the end of each chunk."

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I mean, bear in mind Lehman is a well-known indie rpg designer whose most famous game uses the XP mechanic "Whenever you betray your ideals, you gain an experience point." He's not writing in defense of treasure as XP, just arguing that XP mechanics drive gameplay and sometimes not in the obvious ways we'd expect it to.

I know some people who have tweaked treasure as XP in various ways to serve slightly different incentive goals, such as requiring players to spend the treasure in order to book the XP... I've been thinking lately about trying to use Profit as XP in a colonialist fantasy setting I sometimes run where I want players to weigh potential XP sources against potential externalities.

[rysmiel]

That sounds like an interesting setting; are you writing it up anywhere ?

[jack]

there's lots of flexibility outside of combat, but once you're in combat, there's not all that much you can do but "I hit it with my axe".

Yeah, I definitely agree with this, I think I agree what 4e does better but would maybe have called it something else.

My favorite 4E GM liked to ask his players after they first deployed a power, "What does it look like to you?"

Yeah, I agree this works really well, but what bothers me is that you can explain it, but the default seems to be a flavour I don't like that much.

[seekingferret]

My point is that 4E may look like you just use a bunch of preprogrammed moves like an MMO, but the actuality of play tends to drive you to be storyful and flavorful and creative.

What about the default flavor doesn't work for you?

[jack]

What about the default flavor doesn't work for you?

I've tried to describe it and couldn't get it across, I may just have to accept it works well for some people and not for others.

I think partly that I tend to like games where the flavour is more classic fantasy, vaguely tolkien-y, where magic is at least a little bit of a big deal, not assuming that 3/4 of the party will be spamming magic attacks every six seconds. And partly that, most of the spells are described specifically in how they affect combat, to the extent it's hard to decide what they do elsewhere (I think rituals were supposed to be for this but we didn't figure it out?).

Even things like the proliferation of player races mean that it's difficult to play a world other than "massive cosmopolitan with a mix of every possible race everywhere" because one warforged or half-dragon or fae-elf means that that has to all exist in the world. (Also see my comments on battlemaps below.)

But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with 4e style, it was just very much not what I was expecting at the time. I'm curious how it _does_ work for other people -- do you still have fairly fixed combat vs non-combat distinction or do you manage to transition into combat spontaneously without a prepped map? Do you manage to have non-combat actions during combat? Do you find you can do infiltration-type stuff if needed?

[seekingferret]

do you still have fairly fixed combat vs non-combat distinction or do you manage to transition into combat spontaneously without a prepped map?

The combat vs. non-combat distinction is reasonably hard to fight, but 4E skill challenges can let you bleed between the two... A good 4E skill challenge is hard to design, though, and just about impossible to improvise.

Do you manage to have non-combat actions during combat?

The beauty of skill challenges and the action point economy in 4E is that non-combat actions during combat are actually accounted for in the system's tactical balancing. YES, you are supposed to be doing non-combat actions during combat in 4E combat, and YES, you as the DM are supposed to be presenting opportunities for players to gain advantages in combat through non-combat actions, and YES, if players come up with creative uses of skills and non-combat actions, you ought to encourage it.

Do you find you can do infiltration-type stuff if needed?

Yes. The skill system is not as robust as 3/3.5, so there aren't as many adjudications available for infiltration type stuff, but it's certainly available and used. On the other hand, with the way combat and XP is balanced in 4E, infiltration isn't as rewarded as it is in earlier systems per Lehman's post, so I'm sure there are situations that the typical 4E player wouldn't bother with stealth and an earlier system player might.

Even things like the proliferation of player races mean that it's difficult to play a world other than "massive cosmopolitan with a mix of every possible race everywhere" because one warforged or half-dragon or fae-elf means that that has to all exist in the world

True, but I'd much rather than that a default human world with a random sprinkling of elves. These days my tendency is to ban human characters altogether from my own homebrew worlds more often than not.

(I think rituals were supposed to be for this but we didn't figure it out?).

Rituals is one of my biggest disappointment about 4E. It ought to do exactly what you say, but I've never seen anyone make good use of them for non-combat magic.

[rysmiel]

On the whole, I favour default humanoid player options (and that's easiest with default humanoid societies), for a relatively narrow range of variation in scale, if I am using a D&D-like ruleset at all - by all means have tengu and sasquatch if you find them more interesting than elves and dwarves yet again, but I tend not to favour having lots of half-dragon or warforged around or playable because it's so easy to fall into endless minutia of which weapons they can use and which magic items don't work for them and what to do for balance when everyone other than the mermaid has seven-league boots and so on.

Not that that prevents adventures going on adventures to parts of the world that are very different (or other worlds even more so, and if I wanted warforged in a setting, they'd almost certainly be native to that solar system's Mercury-equivalent.)

[jack]

Thank you, hearing someone else's experiences is really useful!

A good 4E skill challenge is hard to design, though, and just about impossible to improvise.

I loved the principle behind 4e skill challenges, it was one of the things I liked most that it introduced, even though it seemed the execution was usually bungled. I saw some suggestions for how to do the same thing better, but nothing really systematic.

I've a feeling for how I want it to work, but I haven't converted that to any actual specifics. I think the problem is where the players can't just "try anything that seems sensible", they have to play "guess which skills are involved". Whereas a skill challenge should be a way TO model "the players do whatever plan seems sensible" not replace it.

Eg. a one person three successes before three failures skill challenge, a player is hurriedly repairing a ray gun. First success, notice a shorted out component (tech skill). Second success, recharge dead charge cells (tech skill). Third success, reboot controller (tech skill or hacking). First failure overall, means "shower of sparks, reflex save vs 1d6 damage". Second failure overall, "electricity arcs from the power pack into your body, 3d6 damage or fort save for half". Third failure overall, whole thing blows up.

You could also mix up the order of the tasks, or allow/require a perception or tech roll to identify further tasks which could take the place of one of them, or reduce the penalty for failure. But the key is, the player doesn't need to know the "special rules for skill challenges", and yet the encounter isn't completed in one die roll, they know roughly what the risk and benefit is at every stage from the descriptions.

Eg. being pursued across the wilderness. Three successes = reach safety. Each failure = 33% stumble on encounter in wilderness or 33% get caught up by outriders and have to escape again or 33% both. Each two failures = require extra success to find way again.

[seekingferret]

My platonic ideal skill challenge use is how Chris Perkins uses it in the first combat of the adventure he ran for the Robot Chicken writers on youtube when 4E first came out... There's a magic ballista attacking the players, and there are several available skill options they can use to try to deactivate the ballista, including Arcana checks to seize control of it, Disable Device to deactivate it, plus whatever other ideas players can think of. Meanwhile, the ballista is attacking them, and there are other monsters in the room, so there is serious time pressure and a need to do cost/benefit analysis to weigh the benefits of the skill challenge against participating in the combat.

My favorite 4E DM used to do something that was not quite as platonically elegant, but that worked pretty well. He would have multiple objectives/obstacles/traps in a room, each with a number of successes/failures set, that could be approached with the skill challenge mechanics. And he generally set a rule that no two players in a row could use the same skill, and no player could use the same skill twice, but that any skill that could be justified as useful in helping to overcome an obstacle could be rolled, with justification. And generally, a failure would have some consequence that would affect the other obstacles in the room.

So this approach accommodated your theme that the players' plan drives the skill rolls rather than the DM's vision, and it accommodated penalties for failures that still allow for the overall success of the challenge.

Your ideas also make sense, I think, but what makes the whole thing tricky is that it's a lot of options to figure out how to balance. Really elegant and fun when it works right, but just about impossible to improvise well, I think.

[jack]

my tendency is to ban human characters altogether from my own homebrew worlds more often than not.

I am tempted too! :)

I think, I'm not set on THOSE original four races, a world that actually is a mix of dragonborn and warforged is great. But I want to be able to channel a campaign into "these choices are normal, these choices are more unusual".

It ought to do exactly what you say, but I've never seen anyone make good use of them for non-combat magic.

Alas. I don't even know how it worked in 4e, but I quite like it in 5e.

The 4e adventure we finished, the most-experienced player used one ritual, something that told him how to find a way forward through a secret door, and it was pretty cool, even though that was the only use.

(And the rest of your post, I mostly agree but don't have anything to add.)

[rysmiel]

that enemies were statted to be fun to play against, not to use the same system as PCs

Heh. This may reflect our age difference, but the "hey, you can give character levels to monsters" innovation in 3e over the 2e "First you'll be up to fighting goblins, then orcs, then hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, trolls, and hill giants in that order. Theoretically you could have gnolls or people of lizard instead of the orcs but from the context that would pretty much require an understanding of the wilderness rules and nobody likes those. Dragons do come in different sizes, but that range goes from terrifyingly dangerous to really terrifyingly dangerous so do not expect to see one any time soon." paradigm was a real plus. I can see the point of having a streamlined mechanism for generating mooks and minions so that every 4th-level henchman of the 10th-level villain doesn't take as long to stat up as a PC, but you can do that within the broad ambit of 3e with things like Pathfinder's non-player classes.

[jack]

"hey, you can give character levels to monsters" innovation

:) Yes, I've no experience what it was like before that. It definitely makes sense to have extra options for more varied and more powerful monsters, especially for recurring antagonists where a suit of powers the players learn to respect is exciting.

But I'd like to be able to pull from that pool when it actually adds something, and not pretend that starting with six stats really adds anything to the design of the monster you end up with. (And also that having a grab-bag of skills and powers the GM has to remember to use makes it harder for the GM to run the monsters, and makes the challenge much more variable depending on the GM's whim...)

[rysmiel]

It definitely makes sense to have extra options for more varied and more powerful monsters, especially for recurring antagonists where a suit of powers the players learn to respect is exciting.
But I'd like to be able to pull from that pool when it actually adds something, and not pretend that starting with six stats really adds anything to the design of the monster you end up with.

Sure. I see no reason to default generate stats in detail for every mook and minion, but for important NPCs it can be worth having.

(And also that having a grab-bag of skills and powers the GM has to remember to use makes it harder for the GM to run the monsters, and makes the challenge much more variable depending on the GM's whim...)

That latter is not a bug, though, it's a feature.

Or rather, to my mind it's not so much "whim" as "what works to generate excitement and adventure and really wild things". I've always favoured the DM doing dice-rolling behind a screen, and not giving the players precise counts of the monsters' hit points, frex, rather than vague descriptions of whether they appear to be mildly or moderately or seriously or critically wounded. And it's certainly a plus to protecting your campaign against the dice happening to go really badly; if the first goblin a new player's first character ever fights happens to roll three criticals in a row and kill them during their first session, and the player is someone who would find that particular experience no fun at all, I think it's entirely in the interest of the game for the DM to be able to fudge that. I'm not opposed to killing PCs every now and again, I just think they need to earn it, either by egregious poor decisions which they get fair chances to rethink, or if the player wants to move on and wants their character to go out in a blaze of glory (or, in an ideal world, has bought into the story enough to see going out in a blaze of glory as worth it to stop the main antagonist.)

[seekingferret]

Or rather, to my mind it's not so much "whim" as "what works to generate excitement and adventure and really wild things".

Maybe, but some degree of reliability is important to build the continuity of the world, and to some extent the stability of the gameplay. If the players fight a bunch of orcs and the orcs have certain abilities they use in combat, after a certain amount of time the players SHOULD develop tactics to fight the orcs. And if suddenly they meet a new orc and it pulls out an ability they hadn't seen orcs have before, there's a couple of reasons that could be behind it. It could be that they just haven't been in a situation before where the orc would have used that ability, and suddenly they learn a new thing orcs can do, and that's cool. But if there were reasonable situations when the orcs they previously fought should have used that ability and they didn't, then it's unfair and jarring and fiction-breaking for the orc to suddenly develop new abilities.

[rysmiel]

Maybe, but some degree of reliability is important to build the continuity of the world, and to some extent the stability of the gameplay.

I very much agree with that as a principle. It's an exercise of mutual trust, and I have the kind of meta-level position that if rules are being legalistically nitpicked the desired level of trust is already not being granted.

If the players fight a bunch of orcs and the orcs have certain abilities they use in combat, after a certain amount of time the players SHOULD develop tactics to fight the orcs. And if suddenly they meet a new orc and it pulls out an ability they hadn't seen orcs have before, there's a couple of reasons that could be behind it. It could be that they just haven't been in a situation before where the orc would have used that ability, and suddenly they learn a new thing orcs can do, and that's cool. But if there were reasonable situations when the orcs they previously fought should have used that ability and they didn't, then it's unfair and jarring and fiction-breaking for the orc to suddenly develop new abilities.

It depends on how much separate characterisation you want to give each individual band of orcs, though. I think my reaction above comes from a default playstyle assumption along the lines of "by the fifth or sixth bunch of orcs, there is going to be enough plot going on that that's going to have a major determining effect on how the orcs behave." They they will be directed by an evil wizard who's watched and learned from the party's previous battles with his minions, or infiltrated by a doppelganger with smarts, or carrying the Black Death or something to make them more interesting.

Though I suppose it would be quintessentially Tolkien to play one's small bands of otherwise undirected orcs as having the tactical aptitude of a fencepost. One can get a certain element of variety just from them being too stupid/petty/focused on individual motives to have any consistent small-group tactics,

[jack]

"That latter is not a bug, though, it's a feature."

Sorry, maybe "whim" is the wrong word. It sounds like we have very similar play-styles, how much for the GM to adjust the difficulty of a monster when it comes up.

But what I mean is, ideally the GM make a positive choice to do that, and in which direction, not just because the GM has to remember a dozen little details and bits of arithmetic to make the monster work, and the difficulty yoyos up and down according to which bits they remember.

Like, we talked about how the mandatory feat trees for fighters is unfortunate, and it seems even MORE random for monsters -- ideally the monster would have an "attack" saying how it usually attacks, folding in all its usual tactics (ie. use the mandatory feats all the time), not bury that in a stats block and require the GM to figure it out in the fly. And tactics can be even worse, they're often not listed at all, or passed over briefly, but "monster snipes from cover" compared to "monster charges and attacks" can make more of difference to the difficulty than anything else, so should ideally have prominent positioning in the notes and in the GM's mind, not just assumed "make something up and it will be equally good".

[rysmiel]

I am definitely all for DMs doing adequate prep and having good notes on which tactics monsters can use; I think this loops back to what we were talking about earlier, though, because presuming a monster intelligent enough to have tactics at all, if the same tactics are optimal in every circumstance, that suggests that something's out of whack with the balance somewhere.