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

[Deathfork]

Because that story, makes it sound like the 3e encounter system worked perfectly.
Your DM only pitted your group versus 'easy encounters'. Which the DMG describes as:"The group should be able to handle an almost limitless number of these encounters."

Though the DMG advises you to use more difficult encounters most of the time(90% of the encounters should be more difficult in fact), so it is a shame your DM didn't know or follow the encounter building rules.

I was illustrating, by way of anecdote, the non-straight forward manner of the encounter building, leading to people just not bothering with it. Yeah, he wasn't a big fan of really cracking open the rules, for the most part. He and I were on two extremes. I wanted to build really interesting encounters that would really dig into the player's tool boxes.

The final encounter I put together for a gestalt campaign involved a red dragon that had taken all 10 levels of that weird starmetal PrC from complete arcane (I think?), and had become a construct, gaining a host of immunities. He had with him, a host of drow sorcerers, and a pair of Rakshasa Monk/Sorcerer specialized in Thunderlance, getting AoOs every time something moved inside 20 feet of them.
This was a dragon hunting campaign so the players had a bunch of the PrCs that hunted dragons from draconomicon and whatnot, and many of their abilities didn't work on this construct dragon.
The bard/paladin remembers he's a bard and pulls out that bard spell that empowers sonic damage and proceeded to yell its ass to death, which he hadn't really done over the course of the game.
It was a fun encounter, but statting out the rakshasas, dragon and drow sorcs had taken roughly 3 hours.

Contrasted with my buddy, who would run the biggest "timmy" monster of our CR or CR+2 or 3, mostly ignorant of our capabilities. Here's a big Dracolich, final boss of the adventure. I, playing the cleric, hit it with an empowered, twinned bolt of glory and drop it before it gets to go.

So, it's working perfectly if you want to spend 3 hours designing one encounter, have an intimate relationship with each facet of the system from the perspective of both a player and GM, and are so aware of the players abilities that you could play each of their characters yourself.
However, if you need to put together a dungeon delve in 30 minutes, it's dogshit.

[NineInchNall]

So, it's working perfectly if you want to spend 3 hours designing one encounter, have an intimate relationship with each facet of the system from the perspective of both a player and GM, and are so aware of the players abilities that you could play each of their characters yourself.
However, if you need to put together a dungeon delve in 30 minutes, it's dogshit.

Um, don't be retarded. You had a party of eight fucking PCs, and that changes things quite a lot.

[Voss]

8 PCs or gestalts vs a boss monster and an excessive number of companions completely layered in special snowflake bullshit. Ok then.

I suspect the problem had nothing to do with the system and everything to do with trying to pretend Mac Trucks and stock Honda Civics make perfect dune buggies.

Alternately, it's another log on the Ancedotes are Useless fire.

[Pixels]

Hmm? It works fine for quick n' dirty dungeon delving, especially if you DM doesn't mind reskinning monsters to fit the theme or tweaking numbers on the spot. It's only when you try to involve chargen (as you did) or want to provide a difficult puzzle that you should take more than a minute or two to put an encounter together, tops. Even spellcasters you can whip together pretty quickly if you already know the important spells you want them to have and don't mind glossing over details.

I've rarely had problems throwing together encounters in seconds, but I have a fair amount of experience DM'ing adlib.

[Deathfork]

8 PCs or gestalts vs a boss monster and an excessive number of companions completely layered in special snowflake bullshit. Ok then.

I suspect the problem had nothing to do with the system and everything to do with trying to pretend Mac Trucks and stock Honda Civics make perfect dune buggies.

Alternately, it's another log on the Ancedotes are Useless fire.

Yeah, I admit, a gestalt campaign is an extreme example, but I wasn't attempting to illustrate the system breaking down there. I was giving an example of the difference in GM styles.

The illustration of system break down happens in the second example when the system tells the GM "this is a challenging monster for this level of PC" when that is really not the case.

The breakdown occurs because the GM can't trust the system to be correct. Which is the whole reason people pay money for a monster manual. They're trusting that the system is going to do the heavy lifting on the math so they don't have to. And when the system doesn't you run into problems.

It's an RPG. Anecdotes are all we have besides the numbers. There's no lab setting for this.

[Voss]

Yeah, I admit, a gestalt campaign is an extreme example, but I wasn't attempting to illustrate the system breaking down there. I was giving an example of the difference in GM styles.

The illustration of system break down happens in the second example when the system tells the GM "this is a challenging monster for this level of PC" when that is really not the case.

The breakdown occurs because the GM can't trust the system to be correct.

No, the breakdown occurs because the GM is an ignorant fuckwit. Or in your kinder words, 'mostly ignorant.' No system fixes that.

It's an RPG. Anecdotes are all we have besides the numbers. There's no lab setting for this.

And, wrong. You can easily test encounters in 'lab conditions.' One thing WotC has never been able to figure out is you don't playtest with campaigns. You build shitloads of sample characters and put together shitloads of encounters and you run them through on averages. Then you change things (including the numbers) and run them through again. And again. Repetition reveals weaknesses in the assumptions, and points out when the problems are numbers, class abilities, monster stats or whatever. Do it enough and you know what to replace and what to plug in, and what the expected results will be. But you have to do the work- you certainly can't throw out a public playtest and then ask people about their feelings. That produces shit. Mikey might as well wipe his ass with the napkins he scribbles his design notes on for how shitty their process is.

[Deathfork]

It's an RPG. Anecdotes are all we have besides the numbers. There's no lab setting for this.

And, wrong. You can easily test encounters in 'lab conditions.' One thing WotC has never been able to figure out is you don't playtest with campaigns. You build shitloads of sample characters and put together shitloads of encounters and you run them through on averages. Then you change things (including the numbers) and run them through again. And again. Repetition reveals weaknesses in the assumptions, and points out when the problems are numbers, class abilities, monster stats or whatever. Do it enough and you know what to replace and what to plug in, and what the expected results will be.

If this wondrous scenario exists anywhere, please clue me in. Because the only time this seems to happen is 2-4 years after a game has come out and everyone jumps on message boards with tons of anecdotal evidence (with numerical support) as to why certain things need fixing.

But you have to do the work- you certainly can't throw out a public playtest and then ask people about their feelings. That produces shit. Mikey might as well wipe his ass with the napkins he scribbles his design notes on for how shitty their process is.

No argument here.

[name_here]

An empowered, twinned bolt of glory is a fucking twelfth level spell. I actually forget the rules for casting spells like that, but it's firmly in epic, which is not generally considered to be well balanced.

[Wiseman]

He probably used some of the methods of reducing metamagic costs.

[Voss]

It's an RPG. Anecdotes are all we have besides the numbers. There's no lab setting for this.

And, wrong. You can easily test encounters in 'lab conditions.' One thing WotC has never been able to figure out is you don't playtest with campaigns. You build shitloads of sample characters and put together shitloads of encounters and you run them through on averages. Then you change things (including the numbers) and run them through again. And again. Repetition reveals weaknesses in the assumptions, and points out when the problems are numbers, class abilities, monster stats or whatever. Do it enough and you know what to replace and what to plug in, and what the expected results will be.

If this wondrous scenario exists anywhere, please clue me in. Because the only time this seems to happen is 2-4 years after a game has come out and everyone jumps on message boards with tons of anecdotal evidence (with numerical support) as to why certain things need fixing.

It happened repeatedly. Sadly less by the designers, but it certainly happened during the play tests/early sneak peaks of pathfinder, 4e *and* 5e. And the designers stepped back and let the rabid people with 'feelings' shout down anyone who presented logical criticism based on experimental testing.

The designers, universally, were unwilling to do the real work, and even with people volunteering to do the hard part, categorically rejected the efforts of people who did put in the effort to make their games better. You can see the shades of it in post #1 of 'Pathfinder is Still Bad,' and if you dig into older posts about Pathfinder, you can find Jason Bulmahn telling people to fuck off with their numbers and shit, and nothing outside of campaign anecdotes that supported his personal play style counted as 'testing'.

[Username17]

The Same Game Test is an actual thing, and people use it to judge the balance of existing content and even create balance points for homebrew content. There was even a brief period during the "public playtest" of Pathfinder where fans began running them for preview classes in order to assess the efficacy of the proposed "balance fixes."

That didn't last long, as Jason handed out temporary forum bans to everyone who dared to organize those and wrote an angry tirade about how Paizo wasn't interested in objective data, but it's not like the process was unknown. In 3rd edition and its derivatives, CR has an actual meaning, and you can actually get reasonably objective answers about how strong or weak classes are.

For the moment, I genuinely have no idea how tough a 3rd level character is "supposed" to be compared to a CR3 monster in 5th edition. So fans can't organize meaningful SGTs at the moment. Once the DMG comes out and the designers are forced to commit to a fixed position, then people will be able to say with more confidence how badly 5th edition fails to achieve its desired balance point. I'm pretty sure the answer is going to be "very badly," but obviously I can't be completely certain until I find out what the balance point is supposed to be.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

I can't help but feel like the Voss description of "You build shitloads of sample characters and put together shitloads of encounters and you run them through on averages. Then you change things (including the numbers) and run them through again. And again." is vastly more rigorous and tedious than how the SGT is normally used.

[Voss]

Well, yes and no. There are other things you need to do (particularly with stuff that doesn't involve numbers, you have to have uninvolved people read it and tell you all the ways they'd abuse the shit out of it).

But yes, it is rigorous and tedious. Which is exactly why you get 1000s of obsessive volunteers to do that for you and report back. But you don't ban people for doing that, or ask them for feedback that centers around whether it 'feels' like D&D or not.

Its also notable that most of the play tests versions for 5e bear no relationship to the final form of the game. Rather than test and change, they went with test and start over because feelings. And this obviously led to a less tested final version. If you look at the monsters that have been published in the DM doc and adventure supplement, so many of them are variations on exactly the same thing- which stands out at the cyclops and frost giant, as apart from frost immunity and a couple digits scattered around, they are _exactly_ the same monster. One just gets an ice skin.


If you want to see this done relatively well, check out privateer press' testing for Warmachine Mk2 a few years back. They wanted real results with data points and everything, and specifically told people to stop sending them comments about how their favorite model should win more, because it felt better when their side won. They also mentioned that any reports that included that kind of nonsense would be deleted rather than considered.

[Maxus]

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

So they're releasing the rules for free.

Huzzah.

[fectin]

He probably used some of the methods of reducing metamagic costs.

It also caps at 15d6 damage (x2 for twinned). That's 105 average, which is a lot, but shouldn't one shot most dragons at a level where 12th level spells are achievable.

[Emerald]

The illustration of system break down happens in the second example when the system tells the GM "this is a challenging monster for this level of PC" when that is really not the case.

No, the system is telling the GM that the monster is an Easy challenge, as ishy already pointed out. CRs are set assuming a 4-person party. Doubling the number of creatures increases ECL by 2, so an 8-person party of level X counts as a 4-person party of level X+2, meaning an encounter of CR = party level is actually an Easy encounter, not a Challenging one.

The problem here is not the CR system or the complexity of encounter-building, it's your GM not reading the ECL rules and building encounters that are weaker than they should be to challenge you.

[Voss]

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

So they're releasing the rules for free.

Welcome to a month ago. And also... only some. As in 4 of 9 races (and -1 sub race), 4 of 12 classes, a selection of backgrounds, a third of the spells and no feats at all. And skills won't be complete in the real text until november with the DMG. So, yeah, have fun with that.

It's enough to find the holes in the basic systems, but not enough to really do anything with the game as a game.

[infected slut princess]

It is stupid how you can just take a short rest and basically erase all injuries you have sustained. So a dragon eats your face and you take 50 damage, but you rest for an hour and all those injuries are gone if you use your healing surges. Fuck this game. Healing surges are retarded.

[Deathfork]

It is stupid how you can just take a short rest and basically erase all injuries you have sustained. So a dragon eats your face and you take 50 damage, but you rest for an hour and all those injuries are gone if you use your healing surges. Fuck this game. Healing surges are retarded.

Depends on what you think Hit Points mean. Since nothing besides hitting zero has any effect on you, it's reasonable to claim there's no actual injury until that happens. Just fatigue or combat weariness or whatever.
So either both Hit Points and Healing Surges are retarded, or they're just a game concept we accept when not playing Riddle of Steel or any other game where injury is a death spiral.

[Deathfork]

An empowered, twinned bolt of glory is a fucking twelfth level spell. I actually forget the rules for casting spells like that, but it's firmly in epic, which is not generally considered to be well balanced.

Never heard of rods of metamagic, I take it. If I remember correctly, I used a rod of twin spell and some class feature that 1/day empowered a spell from the glory domain.

[Wiseman]

That didn't last long, as Jason handed out temporary forum bans to everyone who dared to organize those and wrote an angry tirade about how Paizo wasn't interested in objective data, but it's not like the process was unknown. In 3rd edition and its derivatives, CR has an actual meaning, and you can actually get reasonably objective answers about how strong or weak classes are.

Could you possibly link me to this? It might be entertaining and informative to read this and get an understanding of Paizo's philosophy.

[infected slut princess]

Depends on what you think Hit Points mean. Since nothing besides hitting zero has any effect on you, it's reasonable to claim there's no actual injury until that happens. Just fatigue or combat weariness or whatever.
So either both Hit Points and Healing Surges are retarded, or they're just a game concept we accept when not playing Riddle of Steel or any other game where injury is a death spiral.

No. Don't even fucking START that shit with me. It is never, EVER reasonable to claim that "no actual injury occurs" if you are taking hit point damage.

Fuck you and your healing surge fapfest.

[Deathfork]

You can see the shades of it in post #1 of 'Pathfinder is Still Bad,' and if you dig into older posts about Pathfinder, you can find Jason Bulmahn telling people to fuck off with their numbers and shit, and nothing outside of campaign anecdotes that supported his personal play style counted as 'testing'.

The Same Game Test is an actual thing, and people use it to judge the balance of existing content and even create balance points for homebrew content. There was even a brief period during the "public playtest" of Pathfinder where fans began running them for preview classes in order to assess the efficacy of the proposed "balance fixes."

That didn't last long, as Jason handed out temporary forum bans to everyone who dared to organize those and wrote an angry tirade about how Paizo wasn't interested in objective data, but it's not like the process was unknown. In 3rd edition and its derivatives, CR has an actual meaning, and you can actually get reasonably objective answers about how strong or weak classes are.

I had heard of the debacle, but since I don't really care about PF either way, I had no idea how deep it went. Thanks for the info.
That is truly sad on the level of passing a law enforcing the teaching of intelligent design in science class.

[Deathfork]

No. Don't even fucking START that shit with me. It is never, EVER reasonable to claim that "no actual injury occurs" if you are taking hit point damage.

Fuck you and your healing surge fapfest.

I'm not telling you anything the game isn't telling you. Either you accept no injury occurs, or that any injury that occurs is so insignificant that it has no negative effect on the injured, or that PCs simply don't feel pain.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Since nothing besides hitting zero has any effect on you, it's reasonable to claim there's no actual injury until that happens. Just fatigue or combat weariness or whatever.

No it is not.

• If hit point loss isn't wounds, why are the spells that restore them explicitly curing wounds?
• If hit point loss isn't wounds, how do they deliver poison, disease, and other rider effects?