The Gaming Den

Voss wrote:Oh go fuck yourself with the biggest rusty pole you can find.

You are not going to seriously claim that setting fire to ability score increases to cast a single fucking first level spell utterly changes the capability of the rogue and then turn around and accuse me of strawmanning on top of that. Get right the fuck out.

You're snivelling about window dressing shit. While mechanically 5e retreats from 4e, philosophically, they're playing the same game: shit in combat matters, shit outside of combat is window dressing.

Which is why (outside first round) sneak and speech and all that crap you're snivelling about does not matter. It is essentially flavor text and has fuck all effect on the game. Because while you can dig really deep into the DMG and find a universal DC chart, it does not matter, because it never tells you what the effects of passing or failing those checks are. You can have a rogue that auto-passes DC 20 speech checks forever, and it doesn't fucking matter because the DM still has to adjucat what each and every one of those checks does on completely individual asspulls.

Even stacking on an additional real saving throw doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the class or what its capable of. Mathematically it's a tiny increase (literally 10-20%) for most of the entire game. By the exact same argument a 1e/2e saving throw item or 3e stat increaser is bigger change to what a rogue is capable of. You're full of shit on every level.

Voss, when someone tells you they are a 10th level rogue in 5th edition what can you absolutely tell me about that character?

A 10th level Rogue is a bit less clear because at that point you've gotten your Dex up to 20 and so you actually can set an ASI on fire for some stupid flavor feat.

All Rogues are gonna be somewhat decent at Stealth because it's a Dex skill. I would not call grabbing that shit-tastic BattlemasterLite feat a "feature" of a particular Rogue.

Voss is largely right that classes in 5e are relatively homogeneous (with regards to combat) but I'd probably note that Rogue is an especially samey class in that regard. Warlocks have at least 2 different combat builds, Fighters have at least 3, Casters are defined by their spell lists.

MGuy wrote:

Voss wrote:Oh go fuck yourself with the biggest rusty pole you can find.

You are not going to seriously claim that setting fire to ability score increases to cast a single fucking first level spell utterly changes the capability of the rogue and then turn around and accuse me of strawmanning on top of that. Get right the fuck out.

You're snivelling about window dressing shit. While mechanically 5e retreats from 4e, philosophically, they're playing the same game: shit in combat matters, shit outside of combat is window dressing.

Which is why (outside first round) sneak and speech and all that crap you're snivelling about does not matter. It is essentially flavor text and has fuck all effect on the game. Because while you can dig really deep into the DMG and find a universal DC chart, it does not matter, because it never tells you what the effects of passing or failing those checks are. You can have a rogue that auto-passes DC 20 speech checks forever, and it doesn't fucking matter because the DM still has to adjucat what each and every one of those checks does on completely individual asspulls.

Even stacking on an additional real saving throw doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the class or what its capable of. Mathematically it's a tiny increase (literally 10-20%) for most of the entire game. By the exact same argument a 1e/2e saving throw item or 3e stat increaser is bigger change to what a rogue is capable of. You're full of shit on every level.

Voss, when someone tells you they are a 10th level rogue in 5th edition what can you absolutely tell me about that character?

That they want to stab or shoot someone while the target is standing next to one of their friends so they can do combat relevant damage.

They roll attacks at +9 (plus whatever magic bonus the DM allows) and do (1d4 or 1d6)+5d6 damage. If they don't have a combat buddy, they're doing this on round one, and never again (unless the DM just overrides the actual stealth rules and decrees they can)

Their AC is 17 + whatever magic bonus they're allowed to have.
[Counter: they took a feat for medium armor: Oh noes, with half plate their AC is 15 + a max dex of 2 or... 17 + whatever magic bonus they're allowed to have. Normally I wouldn't feel I'd need to point that out, but someone stupid claimed that taking a feat to cast a single first level spell utterly changed the capabilities of the class, so I figured I'd address it]

Their dex saves are +9, the intelligence saves they make when the encounter mind flayers that one time are probably around +4-+6 and the rest of their saves are +0 to +3 (assuming point buy). Plus, again, whatever magic bullshit is granted.
[And a 2-3 point variation in 5e dice rolls is essentially buried in the RNG- don't care]

They can take half damage once per round, and take no damage on successful dex saves.

Bonus dash/hide/disengage

They're one level away from always getting 20 on any expertise skill they happen to have, but it doesn't matter since the results of skill checks are pure fiat.

The rest is pretty much all window dressing bullshit or specific surprise round bullshit for the assassin, but the above is ALWAYS true for EVERY rogue, unless they're built wrong or rolled. Those are the fundamental capabilities of any and every 5e rogue at 10th level.

They're also the only outputs you need to plan encounters and challenges. That one might cast misty step rather than auto-critting some fucker in a surprise round isn't a big deal unless the DM is trying to be a dick and smack down class abilities, or hard counter players for some inexplicable reason

Alright. So rogues in 5e are samey largely because they don't have any other sane options. That sounds pretty poor but it's a lot more informative to know exactly what the case for those if us who don't know 5e.

Why don't stats just all baseline at 0, and be a modifier of +0, and a strength of 1 is a +1 modifier, cuts out all the fiddly conversions of '-10 divide by 2' and is a one less chart for new players to look up.

I'd also probably cut levels in half, so there's only 10 levels in the game, each level would be significant and powerful, but it removes dead levels.

Because you want different kinds of checks to have different levels of granularity. Giving out bonuses to carrying capacity at every individual strength milestone is fine, but giving a bonus to attack at every individual milestone produces disappointing results like 5e's "everyone takes max starting SAD" meta.

So, you think people should care about the difference between a 20 lb carrying capacity and a 25 pound one?

Foxwarrior wrote:So, you think people should care about the difference between a 20 lb carrying capacity and a 25 pound one?

I can imagine caring about the difference between a 400 pound carrying capacity and a 460 pound carrying capacity, and I do not want to have to give people a +1 on the d20 for melee attacks to represent that difference.

-Username17

merxa wrote:I'd also probably cut levels in half, so there's only 10 levels in the game, each level would be significant and powerful, but it removes dead levels.

I'm okay with this iff there is the possibility for horizontal advancement within a level.

Carrying Capacity is an extremely important stat in logistics and dragons, since every pound of gear you can carry into the dungeon, and every pound of loot you can carry out, counts.

Convoluting the entire stats system over carrying capacity is probably the wrong design decision.

Besides carrying capacity could still be modeled with granularity in other ways. For example, it should probably a function of size and strength with optional racial modifiers (ie dwarves get a +20% bonus). You could also add in a class modifier, fighters get to add +50 to their carrying capacity, then for those who really care there could be magic items and feats that further modify it.

And if you still care so much that you need what amounts to a +.5 so you can model 400 lbs, 450lbs, and 500lbs, then still make stats start at baseline 0, and give a +1 modifier for every difference of 2, so having a strength of +2 is a +1 modifier, strength of 4 is a +2 modifier, so now you have your 3 strength and 5 strength and so on difference -- I still think you're losing out on the simplicity and playability versus granularity and simulationalist perspective but it still better then the current baseline of stats at 10.

The other advantage of having stat = modifier is how straight forward certain things could be. What 'Int' do you need to cast level 3 spells? You need a +3.

From my perspective you want to streamline all the math so people aren't wasting time cross referencing charts they can't be bothered to memorize so more time can be spent actually playing the game they want to play.

hyzmarca wrote:Carrying Capacity is an extremely important stat in logistics and dragons, since every pound of gear you can carry into the dungeon, and every pound of loot you can carry out, counts.

No it doesn't. Logistics doesn't care much about how many pounds you, Steve the adventurer, can carry, it wants to know how much an average hill giant can carry, and for how long, and what percentage of it needs to be hill giant food. Your job as adventurer is to get the monsters out and the workers in.

As the DM, why do you want the level and class combination to tell you something reliable about the character? If you're playing a campaign with the same boys and girls over multiple consecutive sessions, you have more information than level and class can tell you, and the labels aren't helping you get that information.

The only reason I can think of for wanting labels to translate to concrete info is if you're playing a pickup game, a convention game, or other some one-shot where you cannot invest the time to learn each character as an individual. I admit, there's value in that even though I don't play those games. But do you really want to play a D&D that has classes or levels in such strict straitjackets that you can gain that information with nothing but labels? Do you want there to be no meaningful choices to make in character advancement?

I think that the goal of having level and class tell you something reliable about a character's capabilities is something that should be thrown out completely. I'd prefer to see classes treated as nothing more than a starting point, allowing you to build the character however you like as experience leads to advancement.

Bihlbo wrote:As the DM, why do you want the level and class combination to tell you something reliable about the character?

Because then you can make an informed call on the challenges to put forth to that character instead of winging it. Getting to know your players is nice and all, but what if a PC gets dropped, a cohort gets added, or a new player joins? If there's no guideline as to what class and level means, then a) how do you create ad-hoc challenges and b) why do you have class and level in the first place?

Labels, hard labels, aren't a bad thing. Information like that in a game is important and does not stifle creativity: in a fantasy heartbreaker it provides the jumping off point to be creative. When you know type, you can play to, against or subvert type. When there's no type and you're free from the quote unquote straitjacket of nomenclature, then you're a Steve and have to explain to everyone what you do and what that means. That takes time and effort which takes from the other players being able to run and describe their shit, which is ultimately selfish.

Call me crazy but I thought the current META for challenge planning was to just make all your classes capable of handling regular challenges at a given level regardless of the exact combo of abilities. So when a player drops or a new one is added it should follow whatever the standard guidelines for encounters adjusted for the new number of players.

That still relies on the class and level determining which tier of challenges the character needs to be able to hit (level) and provides a certain subset of abilities that hit those core competencies while creating differentiation between characters (class).

It's useful to have the information chunking of "This is a [foo]; it does X, Y, Z"; these things will be designed one way or the other. For the sake of tuning, it's nice to have that known and presented by the mechanics. You can tweak when the players get their hands on it, update it if the initial ideas don't work, but having a starting point is better than nothing.