Advantage
I make fun, but D&D 5e’s Advantage/Disadvantage rule was a genius idea (scroll down a bit over here if you’re not familiar). All you’ve got to do is look at your positive conditions vs. your negative conditions. If you’ve got only good stuff it’s advantage, while bad stuff means disadvantage. If you’ve got both you’ve got neither. Simple. This system solved the problem of older editions piling bonuses on top of bonuses, resulting in encounters with that most terrifying of all monsters: math.
Everything is hunky-dory with one or two conditions. Your buddy is flanking the monster and you’ve got a masterwork sharp thing, so in 3.X D&D you get a +3 to hit. Easy enough. But when you’re in a situation like Cleric’s, you’ve got to cross reference a half dozen different sections of the rule book. Here’s the Pathfinder version of Cleric’s encounter for comparison:
- Mount larger than opponent (+1)
- Poisoned, assuming Cleric took 2 Strength damage ( -1)
- Magic weapon subbing in for guiding bolt (+1)
- Blinded (50% miss chance)
- Entangled (-2)
____________________________________________________________
-1 to hit and the attack has a 50% miss chance
Now I play a lot of Pathfinder, and I love how the conditions feel so flavorful. Getting blinded doesn’t make you physically weaker, but it does mean you’re swinging wildly as you attack the darkness. In game terms, that equates to a miss chance. Getting poisoned on the other hand does sap your strength. In game terms, your stats get adjusted downwards. The 5e versions of both conditions are simply “you have disadvantage.” That level of abstraction is great for ease of play, but it can hinder the depth of the game’s simulated reality.
After years of jotting down my modifiers on the wet erase mat in front of me, I find the 5e version a refreshing change of pace. Of course, I can see value in both methods. How about you guys though? Do you like your situational modifiers simple and user friendly, or do you appreciate a little more depth? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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The system you describe sounds nice, but 5e went a bit more simple than that even.
If you have one or more sources of advantage and no disadvantage, you roll with advantage.
If you have one or more sources of disadvantage and no source of advantage, you roll at disadvantage.
All other cases, you roll as normal. (Cleric can stop counting effects after mount and poison)
Ach! How embarrassing. I went back and applied the edit. Thanks for the catch, PC!
I’ve only ever done a short, six-session 5e campaign. My group is planning to start Curse of Strahd in the next couple of weeks, so with any luck my rules-fu will suck less by the new year.
Just started a new group a couple months ago. I was going to GM for the first time, and I’d only ever played AD&D and 3.5, so were going to use 3.5. I read into 5e and the advantage/disadvantage system is the thing that convinced me to flip. Sooo much easier.
Our 3.5 group is level 8 and I think we spend 10 minutes out of a 30 minute battle remembering and adding up bonuses. The 5e version is much cleaner, though less nuanced. It’s a lot easier for me as the GM, anyways.
One of the big criticisms I hear of Savage Worlds (one of my other favorite systems) is that it begins to feel samey after you play for a while. It’s interesting that you’re positive on 5e while you’re new to it, but I wonder if that “samey” factor might catch up with you over time?
Definitely a possibility, we’ll see how it goes. I think if it gets boring it falls GM to somehow mix it up a bit and keep it interesting, whatever that would entail.
I have really only ever played Pathfinder, and I like the depth of the system itself. Even if it gets a bit difficult to keep track of every buff…
One thing that can help is auto-calculating character sheets.
I will mention that we have forbidden the Sacred Geometry general feat and the like. Seriously that’s some crazy stuff…
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/sacred-geometry
In case you ever un-ban it: http://d20toolkit.com/tools/sg/sacredgeo.php
My Pathfinder GM described the Sacred Geometry and Arithmancy feats thusly:
“If you use these feats, everyone else at the table gets to punch you in the face. Even if you’re playing online, because no matter where you live, they’ll have time to get to your house before your turn’s over.”
That was meant to be a reply to the above comments, sorry.
No worries, WD. You’re next in line, so it makes sense.
But yeah, Sacred Geometry and Arithmancy are the poster children for too much crunch. I will say however that, as a third party designer, I appreciate those feats. It’s nice to be able to point at Paizo-official stuff and say, “It’s always up the GM what’s allowed at the table. In the same way that third party doesn’t mean auto-crap, official doesn’t necessarily mean bug-free!”
I need the rules. I need the strategy. I need the minutiae. I need the blanketing the entire area in fog cloud because the fighter has blind fight and the monk has larger number of attacks each round than his opponent so killing everyone’s visibility is net gain for the team. Don’t get me wrong I could play simple, but I would not play DnD 5e. If I’m gonna play a simple system then it should be one that does away with hit points and damage dice all together like Mutants and Masterminds or Fate. Hell, I would even prefer Mutants and Masterminds, but so long as the rules are really strict then there needs to be a lot of them. Its what gives a player options.
Do you ever find that the minutia slows down the game? A lot of rules don’t scare me, but the potential for an in-game slowdown sure does.
Its definitely slows down the game. The the inevitable arguing over rules slows it down even more, but all that is just part of fun for our group. Pus, from time to time our gm tries to give his character in the party some ridiculous power-up or the guy who sits next to me pulls some brilliantly munchkiny BS so enforcing the rules as strictly as possible is usually best way to avoid problems.
I agree with your statement that it was a genius idea. Like several rules that showed up in 4E or 5E, it seemed like a rule that roleplaying systems were groping around for for a few years prior but just hadn’t quite managed to find in the dark possibility spaces.
I personally think the conditions in 5E are flavorful enough. I don’t think any of them JUST apply advantage or disadvantage, so it still matters what exact condition you have. It just means there’s one less thing to do complicated math problems and munchkining about for. Both are improvements in my book.
“The Dark Possibility Spaces” will be my next dungeon.
You also make a fair point about the 5e conditions. After another quick skim…
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Conditions#content
…It looks like only Poisoned amounts to “has disadvantage on Attack rolls and Ability Checks.” Everything else has at least some additional effect, and even Poisoned usually goes hand in hand with some kind of hp damage (if memory serves). I guess it’s more accurate to say that the “main effect” of the condition is usually expressed in terms of advantage/disadvantage rather than some other part of the system.
I got to play a beta version of 5e, and I was a premade gnome rogue. I gained advantage (and sneak attack damage) on a cluster kobolds over 4 rounds by popping around the same door differently each round, sneak attacking each time, and they had no way to give me disadvantage, so I got to force a truce and got what we were there for in exchange for letting them eat our already dead wizard. I remember laughing at it, but it wasn’t super satisfying.
I dunno, the more technical it is to get your brutal damage, the more blood pumping it is when it applies, in my opinion. Jumping down a wall and shivving someone’s clavicle, and then running off so you can try to hide again…is a lot more work than playing peekaboo, but it’s so much more visceral.
I gather it’s a sort of “I worked hard for this rules knowledge and I’m going to use it” feeling. That’s fair.
The DM ran the monsters incorrectly. Just because a Rogue has successfully hidden doesn’t mean that enemies don’t know where the Rogue was last seen. I’d have had a duo of goblins break off to come find you while the others occupy the fighter types. If you are just standing on the other side of the door when they get there, they don’t even have to roll checks to find you, because you aren’t hard to see or hear. Goblins would absolutely know to do this since they employ similar strategies themselves, as evidenced by their Bonus Action Hide.
Yeah, it was kind of a gooby call, but the thing was a one-shot beta test and I didn’t feel like asking the DM to ramp the difficulty up to ‘Sensible’ from ‘Clown Car’ just for that test run was the way to go.
Nowadays, I have other reasons I like Pathfinder better than 5th ed (Concentration spells, primarily. Wizards need to be able to wombo combo the crowd control.)
Your call of course, but I find that to be a strength of 5e. You don’t need to rely on your casters to be way OP in order to fight. A heavy grappler is a very reasonable alternative/supplement to control spells.
Honestly, the rapid-fire math is one of the reasons why “Martial” characters have less appeal to me in Pathfinder. I have a Vigilante who’s combat unarmed melee routine is as follows:
-2 for Two Weapon Fighting
-3 for Power Attack
Replace first attack with a Feint
Roll Bluff vs Sense Motive
If successful, enemy is denied Dex modifier to AC
Second Attack from Two Weapon Fighting, using modifiers above
If this (or any) attack hits, roll free Intimidate check from the Enforcer feat
First Iterative attack, -5 from full Base Attack Bonus, using modifiers above
If enemy is already demoralized, Cruel enchantment makes them Sickened for one round
Secondary Iterative from Improved Two Weapon Fighting, same as First Iterative
At any time during routine, can use Swift action to apply Vishkanya Poison. Works best when Demoralized/Sickened for net -4 to Fortitude save
…meanwhile, my Necromancer casts a spell as a standard action, the enemy makes a save or runs away for a few rounds. And that’s when he’s not just using a Wand of Magic Missile for an automatic 1d4+1 damage.
I hear you. However, my own clash with “too much Pathfinder crunch” actually came with a wizard. Of course, this was using the mythic rules, so it was a matter of shouting “enormous rapidity” to set off a contingency mythic haste, taking a move action to draw a wand, using a mythic action to trigger greater invisibility from that wand, tossing off a quickened buff, laying down a dazing ball lighting changed to ball acid via some other bullshit ability as my standard action, then moving to a new hiding spot via my second move action before taking another couple of actions on behalf of my cohort.
That game was complicated.
Laurel was the “simple build” in that campaign. Her two-handed fighter came with separate piece of scratch paper containing a veritable spreadsheet of pre-calculated bonuses.
Lucky for them they’re not in a Star Wars rpg. I think the modifiers might work out different. It’d be over, the spider has the high ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmXFhklB7C4
To be fair, if you’re going to fight a Star Wars style spider, you’re probably going to lose regardless of terrain:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Knobby_white_spider
A few sessions ago, we knew we were heading into a giant battle so we spend some time buffing up. I actually took notes on what was cast so I could make sure the macros would work correctly. Everyone got Haste, Bless, and Prayer from the Cleric. I cast Barkskin on myself, my boar, and anyone who wanted it. I also cast Strong Jaw on the Boar, the Gold Dragon, and the Not a dragon. (I can’t remember what exactly it is, it’s just not a true dragon.) I also cast Bloody Claws on the boar and Lead Blades on myself. It was a tough session, facing down 3 Adult White dragons, one of which was Ancient I think, and a dozen half-dragons. But we made it through.
You should have seen the back of Laurel’s character sheet the one time we tried Mythic. It looked like a hand-drawn Excel sheet what with all the conditional modifiers on her fighter’s full attack routine.
Sounds like a lot of math for the both of us. Did I mention I have Bane, Holy, Thundering, and Sneak Attack?
Yeah, I may have started in the weird old days of 3E (and dabbled then in 2nd as well) but when I came back to it under 5th edition I really found myself favouring the elegance of the new system. It’s fine to me if poison (condition) and blinding do the same thing: it’s for the player – or otherwise me as the dm – to give the flavourful description of what the result is. I don’t need complicated rules systems to differentiate.
e.g. “Evidently I feel nauseous as the spider’s venom works into my blood; I can’t hold my sword steady enough to land a hit.” or “unable to see your opponent, your first attack is aimed too high and goes over his head. By luck as much as skill though, you manage to catch him on the backswing”
When you get all the way down to PbtA systems, your ki blast is mechancally indistinguishable from Gambit’s playing cards, a fire hose, or “gun.” In 5e that stuff can be distinguished by damage types, magical vs. non-magical damage, or vulnerabilities. Dispensing with all of the above is part of the same continuum, dispensing with mechanics for maximum ease of play.
Where you draw that line depends on the kind of experience you’re looking to impart.
I like Pathfinder’s more detailed mechanics in principle. In practice, it varies.
I wish there was a way to combine the je ne se quois of an in-person TRPG with the “a computer handles the dice and math automatically” of a video game.