Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

[Korwin]

I would use them as sensor drones.

[Ghremdal]

The point is that you don't have to fucking MTP. What if its not commoners, but its goblins with the same fucking modifier?

IF the DM says roll then, but the player disagrees because he could MTP past commoners what happens then? A 1 hour long argument at the table because the rules don't work.

Is that the point? Because the rules work fine and produce exactly the results we expect, as they have in every game ever: odds are good that someone in the party (namely the nonspecialists) will fail to sneak and a fight will ensue. If the sneaky guys go in for a favorable tactical position, they will more than likely succeed and get to surprise attack the goblins. And this 'surprisingly' (for a value of surprise that is exactly the opposite of its definition) gets more likely as level goes up.

No discussion of any kind need ensue, let alone an 'hour long one.' Cue combat music and get on with it.

That is not the scenario. The scenario is that the rogue wants to get past searching goblins undetected. For the commoners he got a MTP autopass from the DM, according to you. The argument will ensue if he does not get a autopass against the goblins, even if they have the exact same modifier as the commoners.

Wouln't it be better if the rules could support a focused character having auto success against certain NPC's/monsters. So the GM did not have to MTP your way around the issue.

[ScottS]

The thing that sucks about this whole discussion, is that you're not even arguing over an actual skill system, just a vestigial remnant of one...

By my reading, 5e skills serve almost no game function except in a few specific cases (Stealth vs Percep, and DC 15 locks I guess?). So you really only "care" about stuff like class skills, tool bonuses etc. if your DM happens to be a dick and makes you roll pointless numbers. The relative mod size of high vs low lvl chars, PCs vs mooks etc. is irrelevant, because the skill checks are only there as "plot randomizers" and bullshit rolls to keep the players' hands occupied with rolling dice.

Are skills somehow drastically expanded in importance in the PHB? If not, then why does anyone give a fuck? They're exactly as loosey-goosey and lame as they were in 4e, except now they've even removed any possible in-game stakes for having or not having them, because you don't even have to worry about losing out on xp from failing Skill Challenges. They've "solved" the skills problem by running away from it, except in the one case where they felt they couldn't get away with doing that (i.e. needing a "sneak up on monsters" check). They don't even tell you that Insight is supposed to be "Perception for social skills", because they don't care and they want skills to go away.

[MfA]

It's still too complex for what it is, if you just want to roll against bullshit DC's and have the DM arbitrary decide outcomes without rolling you can make it far simpler.

[Username17]

The thing that sucks about this whole discussion, is that you're not even arguing over an actual skill system, just a vestigial remnant of one...

By my reading, 5e skills serve almost no game function except in a few specific cases (Stealth vs Percep, and DC 15 locks I guess?). So you really only "care" about stuff like class skills, tool bonuses etc. if your DM happens to be a dick and makes you roll pointless numbers. The relative mod size of high vs low lvl chars, PCs vs mooks etc. is irrelevant, because the skill checks are only there as "plot randomizers" and bullshit rolls to keep the players' hands occupied with rolling dice.

Are skills somehow drastically expanded in importance in the PHB? If not, then why does anyone give a fuck? They're exactly as loosey-goosey and lame as they were in 4e, except now they've even removed any possible in-game stakes for having or not having them, because you don't even have to worry about losing out on xp from failing Skill Challenges. They've "solved" the skills problem by running away from it, except in the one case where they felt they couldn't get away with doing that (i.e. needing a "sneak up on monsters" check). They don't even tell you that Insight is supposed to be "Perception for social skills", because they don't care and they want skills to go away.

Well, yes. The game doesn't have a real skill system. The DCs don't exist, and won't until the DMG comes out, unless they forget to include them in which case it will be longer still. The point of this discussion is that there are no numbers you could write that would fix this subsystem.

It is in essence the same as the Skill Challenges problem, which is unsurprising because it's the same writers. Their current claim is that there exists some set of DCs that they could write that would make the system "work," and that they will deliver those DCs "soon." However, the reality is that just like Skill Challenges no DCs they could possibly write will fix the system. The problems are conceptual, not numerical, and it is a failed design.

The thing is that even if you created a set of DCs that meshed with the skill bonuses the game provides, it still wouldn't be possible to represent the difference in skill between an olympic gymnast, a sought-after blacksmith, a wise sage, or a master chef and a random bystander. It's not that there aren't any rules for determining how hard it should be to navigate a narrow channel or paint a beautiful picture - although of course there aren't. It's that the game cannot give you numbers that make you recognizable as an expert navigator or a great painter in the first place.

If you want someone to be actually skilled at anything by the normal every day definition of the term, you can't use the skill system. Someone who can consistently make masterwork swords or win all the bake-offs or even just be faster than anyone else in the village requires a unique ability that specifically does that and bypasses the skill system entirely. The skill system cannot represent skilled people. At all. It's not just a non-system missing the entirely crunchy math part where you line up bonuses and DCs and generate expected success percentages - it's an unworkable system that cannot be fixed. It can't do the thing a skill system is actually for. Not with a dozen Mearlsian revisions to the DCs, not with perfect revisions to the DCs. The design is a simple failure. This system cannot be made to work, and is a waste of ink and page space.

-Username17

[virgil]

What exactly are these theoretical orcs going to do in a theoretical adventure to make theoretical PCs feel sad?

Has anyone looked at how many basic orcs it would take to kill that level 17 red dragon?

[Schleiermacher]

Frank:

Isn't the 5e skill system virtually identical to the 3E skill system, except implemented worse?

And if so, doesn't that mean that at root, the same criticism applies to the 3e system, albeit less so?

And isn't the root problem here that the d20 provides too much variance for skill and ability checks (arguably for any sort of checks) to be functional in the first place without mind caulk?

I love M&M 2e which has this problem in spades all over the system, so I'm intimately familiar with the required form of mind caulk and it doesn't really bother me. But it should be said.

[Voss]

@dsmstticus-'you are quite correct, we are talking about different things - that isn't how the system actually works. At no point does perception get rolled. Each character rolls stealth against passive perception.
So the adventurer rolls a +10 vs DC 10 and wins. The commoner rolls +0 against the dragons 23 and never wins, and the dragon rolls +6 vs the commoners 10 and usually wins.

There are plenty of things to rant about in 5e, but it does help if you rant about the actual rules rather than the fantasies that exist solely in your head.


Ghermdal - No. Read my other posts. Winning against goblins with stealth can and does happen. Just like with commoners. My point with the mtp was simply that fucking around in taverns to see if you have a bigger dick with peasants serves no purpose. If you're rolling checks for the sake of rolling checks, especially with +13 to bake a pie against + 0 to bake a pie, you are wasting time. Say you're having a bake off, and a pie is either easy (DC 10) or even very easy ( DC 5). It is obvious who wins- the guy with +13 can never fail and the guy with+0 can. A bunch of rolls to determine that serves no purpose. Simply call +13 guy the winner and move on

[Ghremdal]

What exactly are these theoretical orcs going to do in a theoretical adventure to make theoretical PCs feel sad?

Has anyone looked at how many basic orcs it would take to kill that level 17 red dragon?

Its depressingly low.

I don't know about orcs, but shortbow armed skeletons have a +4 to hit and do 1d6+2 damage. If a lvl 17 necromancer made them, they have +4 to hit and do 1d6+8 damage, or 11.5.

The CR 16 blue dragon has 225 hp and AC 19. The same skeletons have a 3.625 DPR against AC 19. 62 skeletons are enough to drop him in one round!

[Kaelik]

Isn't the 5e skill system virtually identical to the 3E skill system, except implemented worse?

And if so, doesn't that mean that at root, the same criticism applies to the 3e system, albeit less so?

No. The criticism "The bonus of a level 17 specialist is not off the RNG as compared to a level 1 mook" does not apply to a system in which the bonus of a level 9 specialist is off the RNG of a level 1 Mook and a level 5 Specialist can be off the RNG of a level 1 Mook.

[Voss]

Do people expect Commoners to go on adventures and steal treasure from them? If not, I don't see why this matters to the gameplay of 5e DnD at all.

Mercenaries exist. If you can throw some of your useless gold to get a small pile of basic Orcs, they'd better not collectively overshadow all the other player characters. But in 5e, they do.

I don't think 5e even has stats for commoners. At least, if it does I haven't seen them. But it does have rules for disposable mooks, and they can appear on either side and make your character feel small in the pants.

-Username17

Then you just aren't looking. Because they're right there in the free download for DMs with the other npcs

[Username17]

Frank:

Isn't the 5e skill system virtually identical to the 3E skill system, except implemented worse?

No.

It's basically the 4th edition skill system, except implemented worse. The defining this of the skill system of 3rd edition is the skill rank. That had a lot of problems, but 5th edition doesn't have those things. The defining thing of 4th edition skills was binary have-it-or-not skill bonuses for being "trained" and then automatic level scaling. 5th edition is exactly that.

5th edition is just 4th edition's skill system with the following modifications:

• The bonuses are smaller (generally about half as big for the skill training, level bonus, and attribute cap).
• You only get your level bonus in trained skills.
• That's it.

If you want to claim that 5th edition's skill system is even potentially salvageable you implicitly have to be arguing that 4th edition's skill system was basically on the right track.

And isn't the root problem here that the d20 provides too much variance for skill and ability checks (arguably for any sort of checks) to be functional in the first place without mind caulk?

The game design challenge for skill systems is to provide for things for specialists to do while still allowing non-specialists to complete adventures. There are lots of ways you can do that, but the fundamental truth to understand is that there are some things that need to be on the RNG between specialists and non-specialists, and some things that need to not be.

The moment you decide that the numbers on a willpower save and a masterful weaving check need to be basically the same, you've already lost the game.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Your vitriolic and long-running obsessions with very specific player behaviors strongly suggests you are dealing with a single group, or at best a single community. Your assumptions about player behavior in the past have been so implausible as to be nearing Poe territory (most notably, that there exists any demographic that would rather play Doug Funnie than Flynn Rider outside of tautologies), which suggests that even your read of the players you have encountered is not reliable. I have, within the past three years alone, played in groups from about a half-dozen different websites in addition to locally, and the number of specific players I have played at least three sessions with clocks in somewhere near one hundred. You demonstrate a fixation with a single gaming subculture, whereas I am noticing a consistent pattern amongst what are otherwise an extremely diverse panoply of groups with divergent playstyles, cultural backgrounds, and attitudes towards gaming.

Let's just say that when it comes to Internet cold reading, you're no Derren Brown. Or even a John Edward for that matter. It's... it's hard for me to unpack the amount of bullshit in this and your last post, but I'm going to give it a try.

1.) This is a straight-up Courtier's Reply. You should be embarrassed for making your argument revolve around a fallacious argument style.

2.) The Courtier's Reply is stupid enough as a response to claims that could theoretically be analyzed deductively or empirically. But as you admitted we're just comparing anecdotes. Have you ever heard the phrase 'the plural of anecdote is not data'?

3.) You made your idiotic reply without even asking me about my experience with TTRPG gaming. Just for the record: I have probably played with more people than you. I have played PbP, I have played IRC/Skype, I played in a D&D club with three years at the university, and while I was serving on-board an aircraft carrier I played with people on-board there, too. I mostly played 4E D&D in the D&D club and mostly 3E D&D on the ship. If it's really that important my experiences might be colored by the fact that I have only had a few long-running campaigns where I wasn't the DM and I generally play in pick-up games that run 1-5 sessions before they end or fall apart.

4.) How dense do you have to be to use the 'unlike me, you don't know what D&D is really like, MAN!' accusation? In case you haven't fucking noticed from previous forum invasions, that's the last resort of dumbass 4Erry and grognards who can't empirically or logically justify their claims with shit like 2E D&D CoDzillas, permadeath, magic item acquisition systems, and of course skill challenges. Even hinting at that argument on TGD is the ethical (in the Aristotelian sense) equivalent of using your fundamentalist pastor as a source for neurobiology.

5.) 'most notably, that there exists any demographic that would rather play Doug Funnie than Flynn Rider outside of tautologies' - dude, WTF are you talking about? You know what, I'm not even going to get into this on this post. If you're still feeling sore about that claim, bump that thread. Or just keep pushing me on this point, see what you get.

6.) But finally, let's get to the meat of our argument. I claimed that the skill system of 4E D&D, in which people passively became Batman over time, offended many people. You said it wasn't a big deal and when pushed rather fallaciously and presumptuously did a bunch of cheapo Internet armchair psychology. But you fucking know what? Even if the entirety of your rant was true and sound, it's still fucking readily discreditable. People did complain about these things and quite readily. Just a small sampling of Internet links:

http://www.neuroglyphgames.com/skill-ch ... le-to-fail
http://eljared.livejournal.com/77318.html <-- pulled from the 1d4chan wiki. I wrote some of the entries, but not the one on skills.
http://dmdavid.com/tag/proficiency-and- ... n-dd-next/
http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-464053.html
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/215-penc ... 278?page=2

Like I said, yes, it's fucking cherry-picked and won't stand up to a survey or a large-scale focus group. But it's more than enough to refute your claim that my stance was borne of parochialism and thus inapplicable to the world of TTRPG gaming at large. You thinking so is, like most of the times you've tried to ice-burn me, your hysterical and hypocritical psychological projection.

[Deathfork]

No. The criticism "The bonus of a level 17 specialist is not off the RNG as compared to a level 1 mook" does not apply to a system in which the bonus of a level 9 specialist is off the RNG of a level 1 Mook and a level 5 Specialist can be off the RNG of a level 1 Mook.

Using just the skill system in 3rd, the specialist (assuming skill focus) wouldn't be off the RNG until level 14. The bulk of skill in 3rd came from stat boosting items and the wide variety of stackable skill bonus items. We've seen the stat boosting items, but any skill bonus items have yet to show up. And while it's fair to assume they probably won't add more than rogue/bard expertise, we just don't know yet.
Also, we have no idea what the expected magic item distribution is.

But even assuming magic and whatnot, it won't save the 5e skill system from being a barely usable clusterfuck.

[Kaelik]

Using just the skill system in 3rd, the specialist (assuming skill focus) wouldn't be off the RNG until level 14. The bulk of skill in 3rd came from stat boosting items and the wide variety of stackable skill bonus items.

Attribute bonuses are part of the skill system. Racial bonuses are part of the skill system. Various miscellaneous bonuses from items, including non magic items granting a +2 bonus are part of the skill system. Size modifiers to hide are part of the skill system. All the things that modify the skill DCs and bonuses are part of the skill system. A level 5 Whisper Gnome Rogue can have a +23 to hide without any magic items at all. That is, you will note, off the RNG to the +0 a Commoner and/or many CR 1/4th to CR 1 enemies have.

A level 9 Wizard can have, standing naked in a field in an AMF, a +21 bonus to Spellcraft. This is oftentimes off the RNG of people at level 1 with Int 10-11. And by that I mean like always. Now, both of those characters will have items, and the Wizard will definitely have an Int booster, and the Rogue might have Dex booster, but the point is that Specialists in 3e are pushed off the RNG very much so.

Your claim that 5e will secretly add a bunch of bonuses to make it actually scale, even though the level and attribute and training bonuses are super fucking tiny is both wrong, and also irrelevant to whether or not the criticism can be levied against 3e. Because it cannot be. Because 3e does have people off the RNG for specializing. Way Way Way Way the fuck before level 14.

[OgreBattle]

If you want to claim that 5th edition's skill system is even potentially salvageable you implicitly have to be arguing that 4th edition's skill system was basically on the right track.

You salvaged the 4e skill system before in a thread about making the math actually "just work"

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51 ... sc&start=0

But let's say for the moment that we're going with an AD&Desque model, where attributes exist, but the bonuses they provide are in fact quite small. Maybe +1 or +2 to various tests, like the old days and disregarding great strength. Maybe this is done with attribute tags (where you would either have "strong" or you would not, but you wouldn't have an actual strength score). But you could also do it seriously old school, where having a Dexterity of 15+ gave you a +1 modifier. These days I'm honestly leaning towards the tag system because it better incorporates access to Herculean and Hulk strength levels - for fuck's sake a genuine strong man has a strength of like thirty something according to the lift rules in Essentials.

Anyway, it's not super important. Because one way or the other you're basically either getting a +1 or +2 bonus or you aren't for being strong or fast of some shit. Thereafter, you have proficiencies that negate a -4 penalty, and you have focuses, that provide a +3 bonus. Other than that, it's all your level bonus. And yes, that means that the difference between someone who is untrained and someone who is fully tweaked out in training will be nine points. And that's most of the RNG. But more importantly, it since Proficiencies are very easy to get and people will usually consider something they lack proficiency in to be something they "can't do" the real difference between someone who invested heavily in doing something and someone who is doing something because their main schticks are inoperable for whatever reason is going to be "only" 5 points. And yeah, that's still a lot. And it's going to get even worse because players are going to get their grubby hands on +2 equipment bonuses eventually, but hopefully by that time characters should have enough focused abilities to be usually doing something that their character "does" and the numbers are going to narrow to +4 for a character with super strength and a magic sword vs. a character with neither.

So anyway, mostly to show that we can, we're going to split level progressions into three categories:

• Highly level dependent stuff rises at +2/level. Athletics and Macguyvering advance like this.
• Moderately level dependent stuff rises at +1/level. Attacks and Perception advance like this.
• Minimally level dependent stuff rises at +1/ 2 levels. Diplomancy and Craft advance like this.

This is because there is some stuff that you really want to be able to say "I'm too high level for this shit, I win" and other stuff that you want to be to some degree able to interact with lower level types as if they were the same species as you.

So we're starting with default assumptions of Defenses in the 10 range, modified for level and possibly with those stat bonuses. Meaning that at first level you swing a sword and your bonus is going to be between +1 and +6, and your target has a defense DC between 11 and 13. At 10th level, you'll likely have magic weapons and protection, and your attack bonus will be between +15 and +17, while your defense DC will be between 22 and 24. So you can't quite tell 1st level enemies to completely fuck off until the double digits of level.

So here are some Athletics DCs:

Challenge	DC	Is Easy For Level	Is Hard For Level
Climb Tree	8	1	-
Climb Stone Wall	18	6	1
Climb Smooth Stone	20	7	2
Climb Doom Tree	30	12	7
Climb Blood Fountain	35	14	9
Climb Rain	40	16	11

Meanwhile, Diplomancy is almost completely situation dependent at all levels. Being a silver tongued character with a Dipomancy Focus has you walk in with a +5, and by level 10 you have a +10. DCs basically don't really need to move, you just encounter things with the -5 to talking "Hellspawn" trait now and then at 10th level and call it a day.

Now the part where things go apeshit is damage and hit points...

[DSMatticus]

@dsmstticus-'you are quite correct, we are talking about different things - that isn't how the system actually works. At no point does perception get rolled. Each character rolls stealth against passive perception.
So the adventurer rolls a +10 vs DC 10 and wins. The commoner rolls +0 against the dragons 23 and never wins, and the dragon rolls +6 vs the commoners 10 and usually wins.

Stop being fucking stupid. The fact that 5e uses 4e stealth and therefore meeting stealth DC's isn't an example of the thing being discussed at all is not a call for you to repeat your irrelevant bullshit as though it were magically going to be more relevant the second time you said the exact same god damn thing.

Or maybe I'll let the DSMatticus guy take over and he can explain it to you:

If 5e stealth runs off 4e style passive perception (not really a problem in and of itself), then talking about hitting the needed DC's isn't actually a response at all. Sure, an olympic gymnast can do things I can't do. But they will also perform a better gymnastic routine than me 100% of the time (or at least, more frequently than the granularity of your RNG should bother attempting to represent), which they will not do if my bonus is +0 and their's is +17 - because then there are DC's I can manage to hit that they can fail to hit and when that happens I win. Random peasant bystanders with no training and level 17 specialists are still on eachother's RNG, and that by definition means that sometimes the peasant bystander will beat the level 17 specialist.

Is any of this registering? Am I penetrating that thick layer of dumb?

If the level 1 nobody has a +0, and the level 17 specialist has a +17, then the nobody will accomplish tasks that the specialist failed to some non-trivial number of times. I will out-gymnast the world's best gymnast. I will out-sneak a grandmaster ninja. I will out-lecture-on-magic-theory an archmage. And I can do all these things because I am on the same RNG as those people, and that means they can roll low and I can roll high and I fucking win. It is impossible over 17 levels of play to attain a level of skill such that you no longer risk being shown up by a fucking peasant bystander. And the fact that there are DC's a level 17 specialist can hit and the level 1 nobody can't does not change that in any fucking way. Because dice. You moron.

Ghermdal - No. Read my other posts. Winning against goblins with stealth can and does happen. Just like with commoners. My point with the mtp was simply that fucking around in taverns to see if you have a bigger dick with peasants serves no purpose. If you're rolling checks for the sake of rolling checks, especially with +13 to bake a pie against + 0 to bake a pie, you are wasting time. Say you're having a bake off, and a pie is either easy (DC 10) or even very easy ( DC 5). It is obvious who wins- the guy with +13 can never fail and the guy with+0 can. A bunch of rolls to determine that serves no purpose. Simply call +13 guy the winner and move on

People do not win opposed skill checks because they have a higher modifier, they win opposed skill checks because they have a higher check result.

Here: your friend has a +10 sleight of hand check, and you have a +9 sleight of hand check. You are playing a game of hot hands for bragging rights. The DM declares that because +10 is higher than +9, you lose. Congratulations: your stupid mother-may-I-auto-win-with-my-larger-bonus patch is stupid. You have failed miserably at understanding fundamental things like how checks and dice even work.

If you want one character to have zero chance of beating another, the magical difference you are looking for is +19 (assuming ties go to the higher modifier). Because 1+19 >= 20+0. If the difference is anything less than that, then some percentage of the time the character with the smaller bonus can win and accomplish something that the character with the larger bonus failed to do. Your "fix" for the problem that bystanders can beat specialists many levels above them because that magical +19 is never reached is that people bypass the skill system entirely with mother-may-I because the skill system obviously doesn't work. Thank you for admitting that you are a stupid person who's been arguing stupid things. Can you please now shut the fuck up about them?

[momothefiddler]

@dsmstticus-'you are quite correct, we are talking about different things - that isn't how the system actually works. At no point does perception get rolled. Each character rolls stealth against passive perception.
So the adventurer rolls a +10 vs DC 10 and wins. The commoner rolls +0 against the dragons 23 and never wins, and the dragon rolls +6 vs the commoners 10 and usually wins.

There are plenty of things to rant about in 5e, but it does help if you rant about the actual rules rather than the fantasies that exist solely in your head.

Interestingly, there's a big jump in the listed creatures - nothing has a passive perception between 17 and 21, which makes this instance of the problem a little less glaring. Interesting.

That said, the commoner never sneaks past the dragon, but it can sneak past the vampire 15% of the time - and the specialist adventurer can sneak past the vampire 80% of the time. Given a level 10 guy specialized in sneaking dragging around a random peasant, nearly one in thirty vampires will notice the sneak and not notice the peasant. And that's for the specialist. What can levels even be said to mean at that point if ten of them aren't enough to reflect someone who can consistently outperform untrained people off the street?

[Ferret]

Condition Paralyzed: attack rolls vs affected

So I take it the Coup De Grace/Finishing Attack action was removed from game.

Confirmed, d&d went back to the Bad Old Days.

Eh, attacking restrained/helpless enemies grants advantage and auto-crits, which doubles all dice etc. It's not _exactly_ instakill after low level, but it's not too far off.

[Voss]

People do not win opposed skill checks because they have a higher modifier, they win opposed skill checks because they have a higher check result.

Huzzah. Now count the number of times opposed checks even come up in the 5e rules: not often. The examples given aren't even skill checks, but just flat ability checks. Your game of 'hot hands' doesn't matter, because you generally won't be making that test against each other's check result, but against a static (but admittedly ass-pulled) DC. All your gibbering is completely irrelevant to what is actually being discussed, and in fact, the game as presented.

If you want a commoner never to have a flash of inspiration or a moment of grace or whatever, that is all on you. I give no shits. Frank made a claim that the system is entirely static and looks exactly the same always, apparently in complete ignorance since he doesn't know what the DCs are or even that commoners are statted out. It was wrong.

If the level 1 nobody has a +0, and the level 17 specialist has a +17, then the nobody will accomplish tasks that the specialist failed to some non-trivial number of times. I will out-gymnast the world's best gymnast. I will out-sneak a grandmaster ninja. I will out-lecture-on-magic-theory an archmage. And I can do all these things because I am on the same RNG as those people, and that means they can roll low and I can roll high and I fucking win.

No, you don't. None of those are opposed contests- at no point do you try to stop someone from doing his gymnastics routine while you do yours. If you do easy pull ups or lecture on a basic concept, the commoner can sometimes do that too. But if the specialist ups his game and tries for something increasingly difficult, he eventually reaches a level that the commoner can't achieve at all. At that point the specialist wins.

Any idiot can sneak a little bit and get past the drunken orc guard, and the system reflects that. But only a master of stealth has a chance of sneaking past the Unblinking Eye of Sauron, and the system also reflects that. That the system does not give a shit about your dick-measuring contest with the peasant while sneaking is not a problem.


Now if you want to go into a rant about how the opposed check rules are stupid because they produce dumb results feel free. That a tie results in the situation remaining the same is fucking weird, since their ring snatching contest results in the ring staying on the floor (failure for both), but the door pushing contest results in the door remaining shut (which is a win for the 'defender')

[DSMatticus]

Huzzah. Now count the number of times opposed checks even come up in the 5e rules: not often.

No, you don't. None of those are opposed contests- at no point do you try to stop someone from doing his gymnastics routine while you do yours. If you do easy pull ups or lecture on a basic concept, the commoner can sometimes do that too. But if the specialist ups his game and tries for something increasingly difficult, he eventually reaches a level that the commoner can't achieve at all. At that point the specialist wins.

How many times are you going to strike out? Should I just declare mercy rule and stop letting you embarrass yourself?! This is goddamn ridiculous. You are not this stupid. No one is this stupid. So whatever you are doing that is making you say things this fucking stupid, stop doing it.

This is entirely too simple for you to be making it this difficult. I get that you are painfully wrong and do not want to eat your crow, but I seriously don't give a fuck. You can just shut the hell up and wander off and no one will give a shit ever again. But because you insist on having this explained you half a dozen times like you are truly goddamn retarded, I will indulge you one more time.

It does not fucking matter whether there is an opposed roll mechanic! Rolls will still be opposed. Rolls will always be opposed. It is impossible to not have opposed rolls unless your resolution mechanic is unmodified goddamn coinflips. If you are comparing numbers to another number, the extent to which your numbers compare more favorably than someone else's numbers translates into a change in outcomes. It does not matter whether you are comparing the rolls to eachother or to a collection of static DC's; the fact that +10 is bigger than +5 represents a change in the distribution of outcomes. That's what the numbers fundamentally mean. It's what they are for. It is their raison d'etre. They exist solely to represent the extent to which one character is more likely to complete the set of tasks accomplished using that number than another character. Full stop.

If you are a level 17 stealth specialist rolling +17 on your sneak about checks, there is nothing you are guaranteed to accomplish that a level 1 commoner cannot also accomplish. You cannot be guaranteed to beat a level 1 commoner in an opposed roll sneak contest. You cannot set any DC that you will be guaranteed to meet that the commoner won't be able to meet. Because those two statements are functionally identical you leadsucker. You are not off the RNG from one another.

An archmage rolling +17 can hit a DC 30 check. Good for him. He can also fail a DC 20 check. You want to know who can make a DC 20 check? A fucking gardener rolling +0. And that means that a level 17 archmage can be giving a lecture at the college of magic and the dude shovelling shit onto plants outside the window can interrupt and correct him. Note how that is specifically an example of hitting a static DC, because you are a special kind of stupid who does not realize that rolling against a static DC with another character is just a special kind of opposed roll.

That the system does not give a shit about your dick-measuring contest with the peasant while sneaking is not a problem.

Do you understand that people chose peasants because they are the worst case scenario? As in, they are basically the least competent thing in the game and should be among the first things to fall off the RNG, and the fact that they do not means a bunch of other stuff (like level 1 challenges that actually have positive modifiers) also do not fall off the RNG? If the math doesn't work for commoners, it also does not work for any of the other shit. You keep trying to land with that anti-powertrip barb, but it just makes it painfully obvious that you wouldn't even begin to know how to grok out the math of a skill system and are basically useless here. That's... accurate, but I doubt it's the image you're trying to convey.

[Deathfork]

Attribute bonuses are part of the skill system. Racial bonuses are part of the skill system. Various miscellaneous bonuses from items, including non magic items granting a +2 bonus are part of the skill system. Size modifiers to hide are part of the skill system. All the things that modify the skill DCs and bonuses are part of the skill system. A level 5 Whisper Gnome Rogue can have a +23 to hide without any magic items at all. That is, you will note, off the RNG to the +0 a Commoner and/or many CR 1/4th to CR 1 enemies have.

Yeah, that's why I said "The bulk of skill in 3rd came from stat boosting items and the wide variety of stackable skill bonus items." Let's throw racial and whatever else on that pile too.
I guess I didn't make it clear that I was making the assumption: all else being equal. If we're going to compare X race that gets +20 to hide at first level to race Y that has -10 to hide, there's no point in discussing the system that advances skill at all since it won't be the thing grants the RNG busting bonus.
I've been assuming equal stat/same race/no magic items even though all those would be considerations of building a specialist character to keep the field as uncluttered as possible. It highlights the fact that a specialist in 5e simply can't, at any level, overtake a mook with no training.

Your claim that 5e will secretly add a bunch of bonuses to make it actually scale, even though the level and attribute and training bonuses are super fucking tiny is both wrong, and also irrelevant to whether or not the criticism can be levied against 3e. Because it cannot be. Because 3e does have people off the RNG for specializing. Way Way Way Way the fuck before level 14.

Actually I claimed

But even assuming magic and whatnot, it won't save the 5e skill system from being a barely usable clusterfuck.

I was simply stating we still don't have a complete picture of the system.

I wasn't disagreeing with you, because I don't think the criticism applies either, I was trying to make the point that even all things else being equal, it still doesn't apply.

[Dogbert]

62 skeletons are enough to drop him in one round!

So an all-necro party using their Level 9 slots in Animate Dead?

[Chamomile]

1.) This is a straight-up Courtier's Reply.

No, it isn't. I'm not asking you to read more. I'm telling you that the thing you said doesn't happen does in fact happen, because I have seen it happen, and seen it happen very, very regularly. The thing that you said is an edge case is in fact something that crops up almost anytime anybody discusses HP. Seriously, start a discussion about what HP means or how it should work, and if it gets off the ground at all someone is nearly guaranteed to mention that Wizards should not be able to tank a longsword to the face. And they will probably try to explain this away with some mental gymnastics about how HP really represents "rolling with the punches" or whatever, and if it happens to be a conversation about a game that I am actually in, this is the point where I will declare a preference for Order of the Stick style wounds where high-level characters can seriously get shot by three arrows and shrug it off even if they're a d4-hit die Wizard.

The only reason we started discussing anecdotes at all is because you brought it up and your behavior happens to suggests lacking breadth of experience compared to mine, and since you completely missed the point of what I was saying you haven't really confirmed or denied this although everything you've mentioned so far most definitely falls into the category of being a small number of groups constrained by geography, so even if you played D&D with 800 different groups comprised all three thousand complement and crew of a Nimitz-class you wouldn't have any idea what about that player behavior was unique to Nimitz-class crewmen, who, in a shocking turn of events, do not make up a very large proportion of the audience for a TTRPG. You seem to have missed that the experience I am citing is for the last three years only (cut-off point chosen primarily because that's the point when I started gaming primarily with major sites like GitP, /tg/, roll20, etc. etc. rather than trying to assemble groups out of whatever community I happened to already be a part of) and also that the main point was not the raw number of players played with and especially not the medium it was played on but the number of different communities I've pulled from. The point isn't volume it's breadth. And also all of that is besides the original point, but whatever, you wanted to talk about anecdote-fu so here we go.

Have you ever heard the phrase 'the plural of anecdote is not data'?

And while we're throwing fallacies around, this is basically the Nirvana fallacy. No amount of anecdotes is going to be data even if my experience extended to the 1,000+ people necessary to get actual statistically significant results, because the information isn't gathered in a properly controlled manner. That doesn't mean that when two people compare anecdotes, one of them cannot have broader experience and therefore is more likely to be seeing common trends in the greater community because he is at least interacting with that greater community at all.

How dense do you have to be to use the 'unlike me, you don't know what D&D is really like, MAN!' accusation?

I'm really, actually going to have to explain to you the difference between using experience with players as justification for system results and using experience with players as justification for knowing how players behave, aren't I? You are actually saying something so stupid that I have to break out the elementary school flashcards and explain basic principles to you? Okay, fine, here we go.

If something mathematically does not result in the things people say it results in, then you can be certain that some amount of mind caulk was involved. When people say something stupid like "well clearly there's more to the game than just the math you robots are so obsessed with because I ran skill challenges and they worked out just fine," it is stupid because they are failing to recognize that the math is all there is to the skill challenges. They are a mathematical formula and that formula does not produce the results it should and in fact it cannot produce the results it should no matter what variables you use because what you actually have to do is seriously restructure the actual elements of the formula, and when people use skill challenges and it works out it is because of mind caulk.

And that is why despite having had this kind of experience to work from for like two years now I have never brought it up before now. Because it is not relevant to the kind of mechanical discussions the Gaming Den usually concerns itself with. But what you're doing here is saying "players don't notice it when HP scales up such that high-level fragile characters are more durable than low-level tough characters, but they do notice when it's skills!" And then I can look back at all the campaigns I've run and played in and tell you that players from roll20, /tg/, and Giant in the Playground have all noticed exactly that, and also rpg.net has brought it up in discussions of the subject (I will admit that despite extensive lurking I have never actually recruited a group from rpg.net because why would I ever do that). I have played with multiple groups each from multiple websites which are (for good or ill) major bastions of gaming subculture and all of them have brought this up sooner or later.

Now, you also talk a lot about how people don't like how skills work in 4e. And that is true, they don't. However, you are #1 citing links that do not actually say that which is hilarious and more importantly #2 completely missing the point of my argument which is that HP has exactly the same problem. I'm not saying that people don't complain about the skills, what I've said since my first post on the subject is that that ship has already sailed. The contortions people bend themselves into trying to explain how HP represents "luck" or "rolling with the punches" is well documented, to the point where people can cite the reasons those explanations don't work (fireball in a corridor, for example) off the top of their heads. Because people don't like it when frail characters become superhumanly strong and they do notice.

Also, seriously, double-check those links you posted. One of them doesn't mention the thing you said it did at all and one of them sort of implies a dissatisfaction with it but is ambiguous.

And as a final note: Considering I can think of two threads where several other people responded to your read on other human beings with "wtf?" you can go ahead and shut up about my projecting or whatever. I might be the only one who's particularly irritated by your consistent incapability to understand other human beings, but I'm far from the only one who's noticed.

[erik]

You seem to have missed that the experience I am citing is for the last three years only

There were too many words so I fixate on this.
I made my save to resist on the previous post, yielding right of first shot to Lago. 100 people is like 20-25 tables. Wooo. If you wanted to try to contest Lago you don't have to write the Illiad and posture as though your anecdotes are significant. If someone states their experience is "X" you can just say "My experience differs" and it's back on them.