Levels, Structure, and Creativity

So some time back I was having a chat with my much younger cousin who had gotten into D&D in the 5E generation, and I was trying to explain to him why I preferred the relative simplicity of 13th Age's character design during level up.

Now, in 13th Age, each class has a list of a half dozen or so Talents, which are classic genre beats for that type of character (some also have Talents baked in - every Barbarian can Rage, for example, that's just part of being a Barbarian). You also have 8 points to divide as bonuses to player defined Backgrounds, which include within them flags and world building and generally have huge penumbras in play. You have 1 feat, or two if you're playing a human. Depending on the class you may have some additional bits such as spells accessible or fighter maneuvers. And you pick your 3 icon relationships. 

All skill checks and attacks add Level to them. Your basic attack damage is your level in weapon dice. So when you level up everything automatically gets better, no need to fiddle around with decisions for points spends, and your basic attack damage scales with level so it removes the linear fighter/logarithmic wizard problem. You get another feat, maybe a new options in your additional bits (more spells, a new maneuver, etc.), and you're done. 

He said he found this uncomfortably formulaic and a bad design, because he doesn't get all those decisions and design bits and levers to pull as he levels up. He was sure every 6th level fighter would therefore look like every other 6th level fighter while 5E lets everyone be different. 

This was flabbergasting to me, because it's the exact opposite of what I see happening. 

In 13th Age and other freeform games I get to make a unique character at the jump. No one else has my backgrounds because I defined them. The powers are genre classics that I get to mix and match from so there are some 30 possible talent builds per baseline class. The icon relationships are equally in the players hands. The rules are explicitly loose in a variety of places to make sure you're getting the character you want to play very quickly. The feat selection is so much an afterthought of "oh that might be neat" rather than "I need x to get to y" because the character. The characters also start at about the 3rd level of power in 5E terms. (Mind you, I'm not 100% on board with how much the rules assume you're maximizing attributes to class given the strength of the underlying math, but that's been a bugaboo of mine across a lot of non-random roll systems where attributes provide a lot of the bonus)

What I've seen in 5E is MUCH more structured, with 1st level PCs looking very close to one another and the differentiation not starting until 3rd level, and after that it's navigating a tree of decision points to make every character fit within a tree of branching, evenly powered options, so you can carry your character from game table to game table and know that you're balanced. He wanted that list of switches and options, the system mastery and the regular decision points. 

In short, when he looked at 13th Age he didn't see the structure to build the character over play. When I looked at 5E I saw all the characters the structure wouldn't let me play without someone official coming up with a design tree to "allow" it. I'm not saying I'm right and he's wrong, but it's amazing to me that we can be looking at the same two systems and see completely different outcomes on it. Especially as I do work again now on B/X and 3E, which are at other places on that spectrum.

Final Thoughts on 5E

Crossposted from my Facebook feed

I like to think I gave it a fair shot. We ran 4 sessions and took the characters from 1st to 3rd, and I used the intro module with just minor modifications. It just didn't fly. Here were my problems:

1) Character stats give minimal differentiation and not enough skill: There was a big push for simplicity in reducing the number of skills, giving a saving throw to each stat, and having all skills and attacks use the same proficiency modifier. This in and of itself is not a problem, though the decision to reduce all of the bonuses made it hard to have a character stand out in a skill since the 1-20 range of the die swapped the 0-6 range of stat bonus + proficiency. That made it hard to use stats and proficiencies to enforce niche protection.

2) Character powers are too fiddly: Every class has lots of little powers and distinctions and branch points that everyone has to remember. Our fighter forgot his action surge. We all forgot the halfling’s luck ability, or the chaos sorcerers’ probability shifts. Everyone had to keep looking up class powers. Every arcane damage cantrip had a follow up condition. These million fiddly buts ran directly counter to the simplicity implicitly promised in the other half of the character rules

3) The combat and adventuring rules were too simplistic: there was a whole bunch of stuff that we kept stopping to look for in the rules (like charging) that were just gone. But not all of them – lots of things were now DM discretion for advantage and disadvantage, but a lot of other things still had specific rules. Pick one or the other guys.

4) Spellcasting felt wrong: The design read as being innovative in several ways but it grated. My personal sense of fantasy meant that the unlimited use combat cantrips felt wrong - I know there’s an argument for giving spellcasters attacks that are as reliable and damaging as hitting someone with a staff, but it doesn’t sit well with me and felt too super-hero. The Cleric’s player kept getting confused as to whether she should be further selecting from her spell list. The concentration rules hindered a lot of clever ideas. The saving throw changes made it much more likely that magic would fail. There were so many minor tweaks of existing spells that all of our existing system memory was actually counterproductive. I love the ritual rules, and the new rules for daily charges on devices, but all told the bad outweighed the good.

5) The healing rules are whacked. Not only do PCs get lots of healing quickly, not only is there no good dramatic possibility for wounds, but there is so much healing potential in the party (fighter’s healing surges, ranged healing spells for the cleric, the paladin laying on hands having a ton of effect with no negative HP) fights went on way too long at the end. Add in the swinginess I mentioned earlier and we ended play with a way to long fight where PCs getting hit took them for 4 to 0 points, and they then got healed to 4 points and went right back to fighting, but the swinginess of the dice means that for 6 rounds no one hit anything and we just went round the circle over and over. The clear tactical advantage of some actions meant that circle covered the same territory time and again.

All told we had some nice bits in the mini campaign, but any future D&D will be done in 3.0 (for me) or Pathfinder (for Jay) or a modified Basic Set if I want something without the crunch. 5E, in trying to satisfy everyone, ended up neither fish nor foul. I passed my PHB onto Jason’s family and the basic Set box onto Kris and Nick. It’s not something I’ll come back to.

YMMV.

Pontificating in the absence of evidence

Every 6 months I run a game for my old High School gaming group - so far one shots exploring different play styles and power levels of d20 Fantasy. This January I don't know if I'm going to stick with building a power level focused version of D&D like I have in the past or use it as a springboard for 5th Edition. If I were to do the latter I'd still want to build characters using my card stack system.

To explain, I have several stacks of cards that fall into certain types - levels in the 4 core classes, character race, character gifts, major equipment - and each player starts with one stack. They pick their favorite from the stack and pass the rest to the right. Eventually everyone gets a card from each stack which, taken in total, gives them their stats, class levels, race, special abilities and core equipment. It's a midpoint between pre-made characters and designing the characters at the table.

However it is very much keyed off of 3rd edition multi-classing. 5th edition doesn't mutli-class as cleanly, instead calling for a lot of specific decision points for a design in play character. 5E really wants you to start at 1st level and work your way through to give your character an organic feel, and the classes have internal option trees rather than promoting multi-classing and prestige classes. It keeps things uniform, but it also makes things messy for how I've done this in the past.

This speaks to some of my issues with 5E, not that I've played enough of the game to really form opinions on them. As I said before I think character creation is still too complex: you don't just select a race but a subrace, and rather than a +2/-2 on stats and some bonuses to skills/saves there are differing stat levels and special racial powers that aren't mimicked anywhere else. Classes are easy at first but have internal trees that force decisions at later levels that radically change the character. Feats are optional, but feel optional in the way that 2E non-weapon proficiencies were optional in that all future supplements will assume their use. At least backgrounds are consistent with their 'two skills and a social advantage' structure, which is nice, and you don't have points to distribute between skills the way you did in 3E, which could be a time saver.

It all makes me hesitate to use 5E for the January game. Maybe everyone will think it's brilliant and will start running games for their kids with it (it's probably good for that). But it doesn't feel innovative enough for me to one to showcase rules with it the way I have with, say, fanmail chips, noun+verb magic systems and decentralized power options in previous games - things that weren't in any of the games this group played with before that really show off new gaming tech.

There are a lot of good ideas in 5E, but aside from the Advantage/Disadvantage rules I don't see enough breaking new ground to justify some of the character crunchy bits complexity.

D&D 5E Initial Play Thoughts

Now that I have a session of 5E under my belt I have a few comments on its design and functionality.

Advantage and Disadvantage are useful enough. They don't really solve the whole problem of needing to track and add bonuses to things as any number of spells still add or subtract digits from die rolls but they do solve most of it. I suppose that's enough.

The swinginess of the system isn't as noticeable at low level, where we expect play to be very swingy and dice dependent.

The spellcasting systems are too complicated. I need to redesign part of the character sheet to make it clear to the people with Cantrips that those are powers with infinite uses. Right now the fact that there are casting rules for one set of spells and other rules for a different set is messing with the players. Things are going to get worse when the Sorcerer levels up and there's a third set of rules for her spells distinct to the sorcerer class. This might not be a problem to people coming in fresh, but its enough not like 3E and Pathfinder that it grates and slows play.

The Kits, er Backgrounds, need to be clearer in how experienced the PC is. As it stands its possible for your first level PC to be a local hero, a respected officer or an established member of a spy network - all of which imply a certain level of life experience - or an untested acolyte or street urchin - which implies a very different one. It's a minor nit, but since the experience tables treat levels 1-4 as the Design In Play, your kids from the backwater village become legitimate heroes levels, it became a noticeable one. The actual abilities conveyed by the backgrounds don't have to change, just the text for them.

I'm not sure we need the subraces; they add another level of complexity to what could be rapid character creation (Race + Class + Background; select 2 skills from list, done) and I'm not sure how much they add other than more need to memorize crunchy bits.

Likewise I don't think I'll be adding Feats to my game. I found them critical in 3E, but now I feel like they're in the way. Has my gaming style changed in the last 14 years? Sure. Now I feel like the people who saw Non-Weapon Proficiencies as being optional in 2E and treated them as optional, as opposed to what I did back in 89 which was treat them as critical.

I get the real sense that 5E is trying to reduce the advantages of system mastery, but didn't want to go all the way on that, so Feats are still there but 'optional' and classes have lots of little options. I want to see system mastery go the way of the dodo in this edition, however. Hence some of my decisions.

I also told the players that they had to go with either the standard spread or roll at the table and take what they got. I then had to wrestle one of the adult players to the ground because he immediately insisted his character concept required a point build so he could spread things around and not have the '8' that comes with the stat spread.

I do have to admit that when Nick rolled up his elf paladin and the dice hosed him (he has more penalties due to stats than plusses) he took it with impressive grace. Jason admitted later he'd probably have groused more than Nick did. Nick then took our advice and borrowed things from the Dragon Magazine article I wrote years ago about how you can use bad stats to make your character impressive by having his background - being the sole survivor of a red dragon attack that killed his village - be writ in scars across his body to explain clearly why he has a below average Dex and Con. Yes, he has below average stats, but since he should be DEAD, and you would be DEAD if you'd been there, his stats are pretty damn awesome. It makes for a visually and socially impressive character, and fortunately 5E is not stingy with increases to stats over play.

I'm looking forward to next session.

The Caves of Erratic Decision Making

Continuing from last time, our heroes had survived a goblin ambush and found both the trail to the goblin's lair and evidence of survivors being dragged away from the last ambush. I can't go into too much detail on this because at this point he players have intersected with the material I'm re-purposing unchanged from the module that came with the D&D Starter Kit.

Suffice it to say that they engaged quietly, overextended, recovered, moved forward, engaged quietly, overextended, recovered, moved forward, rinse, alter repeat until they fled somewhat ignominiously back to their base camp.

Ya'know - First Level.

Their base camp was making use of the depression that held the cache, covering it with the canvas, covering the canvas with a layer of sand. That preparation proved prescient as the quintet spent the night lying silently in the sand as the goblins and their wolf scoured the island for them. Luck or divine assistance saw them through the night (I ruled the searchers needed an outcome of 15 or more to find them and their rolls were 4 and 14).

The next morning our heroes take stock - they don't have any good way off the island, they know the Goblins are likely prepared for them, and they don't know what the pirates (or whoever left the cache) were doing on the island. After some debate they decided to follow the pirates trail tos ee if they could find another boat. Moving past the original ambush point they cross the island to find another cove that does indeed contain a boat. And another. And another - more than two dozen shipwrecks dating back at least 400 years jumbled up against one another like a mad jigsaw puzzle, held in place by the orange-grey coral that has grown up between and around them.

"That's not possible" Roberto whispers.

Between them and the mass of wrecks seagulls and crabs are congregating, hiding something in the sand. Shooing them away with magic and yells they find a group of eight bodies, all as decomposed as the ones the goblins were using for the ambush. Brock surveys the area with a soldiers eye and discerns that these people were fighting one another - 3 on 5 from the looks of it - and accounted for most of the damage before they were struck by a third party with bows. The arrows were taken, and the bodies stripped just as the ones at the ambush site.

Roberto examines the bodies and finds markings of both Talos and Malar worship amongst the fallen - both chaos gods, and erstwhile allies.

There's also evidence that whatever these people salvaged from the shipwreck mass was stolen by the Goblins and brought back to their camp.

"What," Olam asks, 'In the Nine Hells is going on here?"

We'll find out more next month!

In the Footsteps of Evil

The second part of my first session of 5E playtest write up, we pick up with our heroes washing up on shore having just escaped a slaver ship,

After a quick confirmation that all five of the escapees made it to shore the make a survey of what they have and it's not much - the storm-tossing cost them their weapons and then passing into this cove at low tide ripped out the bottom of their rowboat. Tebryn and Olam make improvised weapons from the oars while Roberto hands out the contents of his pack, collected under the god-touched daze that has just now lifted (though it is clear to the others that Roberto is now much more than the man they knew in chains on the ship). That pack contains things of nostalgic import for eachof them: Tebryn's scrolls of notes and revelations from his time in the wastes, Olam's playing cards, which unbeknownst to the others are a call sign to other members of his spy circle, The goblin tooth necklace that Brock constantly wore prior to his enslavement, Deldiira's woodcarving supplies that have been passed through her family for generations and Roberto's holy symbol, the red cord wrapped around the wrists and hands as a symbolic recreation of Ilmater's bondage.

Everyone scours the horizon and the coasts, ascertaining that they are in no immediate danger before Brock leads Olam to the treeline to scout there. They discover an unnatural rise at the edge of the sand which, when excavated, reveals a canvas wrapped cache containing no shortage of weapons, armor and equipment, as well as vestments to the faith of Talos, the storm lord and one of the gods of chaos. Tossing those aside they raid the cache to outfit themselves and feast on iron rations and deeply watered down wine. It's remarkably convivial and all offer prayers to Torm, Tyr and Ilmater for this providential bounty.

Climbing a tree and scanning about Brock is able to find evidence of elevated land and running water inland, and a likely trail heading in some hundred yards from their current spot. At their approach the trail reveals to Roberto and Tebryn's eyes that it is not just a game trail but has been expanded by man. Brock and Olam go one further, sure from the machete marks and regrowth that it was cut to its expanded form less than a week earlier. Someone, a worshiper of an evil god, was here, cached supplied and led a modest-sized party into the jungle. Seeing no other course the group cautiously follow.

Some distance later they spy two bodies lying across the trail, obviously days dead from the smell fo the rot. Olam and Roberto approach, and Roberto's medical training gives him enough time to note that these corpses were felled by arrows that were since removed but not enough time to mount a warning before arrows streak from the underbrush. Roberto falls, Olam is wounded and Tebryn rushes forward to shield the fallen cleric. Having identified where the archers were firing from Brock disappears into the underbrush on one side while Deldirra's fey enchantments send those on the other side into a magical slumber.

Tebryn lays hands on Roberto so Tyr's  blessing can restore him to consciousness and the cleric scrambles for cover as the archers to their left fire again. Olam charges their position, blocking an arrow with his shield before dispatching one goblin with his sword. The remaining one prepares to fire on him when Brock appears from the undergrowth and clubs him down with a crowbar. Tebryn runs to the other archers, dealing with one goblin before tying the other up for questioning.

The group takes a short rest for Roberto to recover and examine the bodies (both slain with arrows, both looted; this disturbs the players equilibrium, wondering what foul creatures would loot the bodies like that. They then armed themselves with the fallen goblins shortbows....). Brock, the only one with a common language with the Goblins, questions the survivor but his visceral hatred of the race causes him to permanently end the questioning before he learns too much - there are goblins here, they did attack the 'boat people' who he thinks are pirates, they were planning to ambush more of them when they came back through from the coast, they left the bodies there to bait the ambush and whoever they expected it wasn't our heroes.

Roberto shakes his head sadly at the waste, but Brock did find a path leading from the ambush site back into the woods, clearly to the goblin camp, and there is evidence that the Goblins pulled some bodies, likely survivors, away from the ambush, Roberto is unequivocal that those taken must be rescued, no matter who they are. Brock, seeing a chance to kill more Goblins in this, agrees wholeheartedly, and the group heads deeper into the island.

Escape into the Sea of Fallen Stars!

We had the first session of my 5E playtest game on Saturday and I have several things to say, but first the play report.

We opened with a diceless sequence of 'meeting the heroes' as they escaped confinement on a pirate/slaver ship on the Inner Sea. I opened with describing their current dire circumstances of the five of them being chained to the wall of a small cell in the hold of a large ship and asked everyone to give me two cool things they did to get the five of them off the ship during a sudden tempest.

(Being players they immediately started asking if they could free all 80 other prisoners, take over the ship from the 30 pirates and otherwise push things well past the boundaries of the scenario. You're first level, people! This is you're very quick origin story that sets up the villains, not the big boss battle! I don't know if this is the downshift from playing kick ass Feng Shui PCs last time we met or something about players no longer remembering that they should run away from some stuff.)

Deldiira, the Halfling Guild Artisan, was the most recent addition to the cell, and once there are no guards present reveals her hidden Sorceress skills (and in shaking her head reveals the small horns on her hear that are evidence of her wild fey heritage) and sets herself to casting ray of frost on her chains repeatedly, gritting her teeth at the conveyed ice burn on her wrists until the chains snap from the pressure.

She yanks and they shatter, sending chunks of metal around the room. Brock Grimsbreaker, a Dwarvish soldier, nags a flying bit of metal and, after conveying it to his teeth, uses the shard to pick the lock on his chains. He quickly frees the other occupants of the cell, uttering curt orders tokeep quiet and stay calm while they assess the situation.

Once he frees the long haired, wild eyed Elf Hermit Tebryn that figure grabs another shard and worms it into the wood holding what once were his chains. By the time Brock frees the other two Tebryn worked the length of chain free and is spinning it expertly, watching the door and ready to deal with anyone coming through.

Brock frees the slender Human Acolyte Roberto - who has a bit of a glazed expression - and then the broad shouldered Human Warrior Olan Gethbriar. A whispered word in Olan hear from Brock and Olan nods, charging the door just as a guard passes it, knocking the door down, and the guard. Olan grabs the slavers sword from its scabbard as he falls and snags the top of a water barrel as an ad hoc shield.

Tebryn charges past him up the stairs to the deck, apparently planning to deal with both pirates clinging to the doorway with his chain. Instead both collapse at the sigh of his approach - he thinks they have fainted in terror of him but actually felled by Dildiira's enchantment. Olan is directly behind him, snagging a second sword from a fallen pirate and tossing it to Tebryn, who snags it effortlessly in the dark and driving rain and commences to wield both it and the chain to clear a space from the others.

Roberto, still somewhat glazed, emerges carrying a small pack that he gathered on instinct from the guard's room, and waves a hand towards the pirate trying to keep control of the ship. Divine radiance falls from the sky at the gesture, throwing the pirate from the wheel. Deldiira grabs the humans hand and yanks him into one of the ship's rowboats.

Brock yanks open the chest holding carpenter's supplies for ships repair and snags a hatchet, which he uses to cut the rowboat free. He leaps in while Tebryn and Olan give them cover. Olan interposes his shield on an attack on Tebryn and pushes the elf into the now descending rowboat. He then takes a viscous sword hit from one of the pirates and falls, more alive then dead, into the pitching rowboat.

Seconds after he lands Roberto lays his hands on the dying human and, with a prayer and the full force of Ilmater's might flowing through him for the first time, restores Olan to life and health.

We'll continue next time....

Another Angle on the Forgotten Realms

After complaining last week about the size and scope of the Realms, and their hodgepodge, jigsaw puzzle world design it dawned on me that Conan's Hyboria had a very similar world design and it didn't matter there at all. Look back over the Conan stories and they'd open with him in pseudo-Egypt, or running from native tribsemen, or dealing with no-quite-vikings or what have you. The lack of highly realistic integration in Hyboria didn't matter. So why does it feel like it matters in the Realms?

I suspect there are a few reasons:

First, the more narrative the players are the more they want to detail every part of their PCs lives. You need permission in advance to just say "OK, in the last 6 months your adventuring company has made it from Waterdeep to Arm, and have taken command of a merchant ship heading south...." even thought that makes them appear more broadly competent and powerful in that these things can be glossed over.

Second, mechanically the game now favors rapid PC improvement. In earlier editions your PCs took a long time to move through the key levels of 5-9, and therefore could have several different stories at the same relative power level. That's certainly not the case in 5E, especially since levels 1-4 are your 'origin story'. I tried to run a Conan style game with Captain Fasaad where the crew of the Daud would arrive somewhere, have a adventure and move on, but each adventure had at least 13 encounters of her CR, so every adventure Fasaad would level up and, by the nature of D&D, become better at fighting. That perpetual escalation lends itself to a sort of narrative, where as Conan started damn tough and got a little tougher but a lot more broadly skilled. (At least with my players Fasaad also got more broadly skilled since the players never tight focused their skill points).

Third, the breadth of the Realms in any one area sell themselves to small location until you're on sweeping quests and then return home sort of play. It has a lot of politics and trade baked into it.

Fourth, Conan often starts adventures broke, and D&D places a lot of PC power in their gear, Players would freak if you kept taking it all away. This, at least, is something 5E should work against.

I think I'd be much more comfortable with the Realms in a Conan style, where I move from adventure spot to adventure spot with little bridging stories. I'll have to give it some thought.

Musings: Into the Forgotten Realms for 5E

So I have the upcoming D&D 5E Game and the players requested that I run it in the Realms. Now, I know the two adult players have read realms related stuff but none of them have ever played in it, and while I own the AD&D boxed set, some 2E guidebooks, the Ruins of Undermountain, the 3E hardcover and Larry Elmore’s Forgotten Realms book I’ve never actually run anything explicitly in the Realms, nor had much desire to do so. (I do at least have the advantage of having played in a couple of Realms based games run by the illustrious Chris Mansfield back in the 80’s and 90’s, so that’s something.)

Part of my concern is that the Realms are just so damn big – it’s like saying “I’m running my game set in Eurasia and Northern Africa”. The landscape is huge. It’s also filled with not just history but fast moving recent history – from that AD&D boxed set to the current 5E discussions of the Realms we have had 25+ years of continuous play full of huge upheavals around every new edition, so I don’t know what’s canon now and what’s not, and I’m not sure I should care. In my normal way of doing things I’d just define my own campaign setting (probably something more science fantasy/pulpy than the Realms high fantasy adventure based on my Old School Renaissance readings of late) and then I know I’d be comfortable with everything in it.

Our campaign frame is that the PCs are escaped cargo from a slaver ship operating in the Sea of Fallen Stars, which gives the PCs an excuse to be from nearly anywhere while giving them a reason to trust one another and work together. Especially since in the first session everyone is going to define one or two awesome things their characters did to facilitate their escape and then they’ll be washing up on an abandoned shore and having to survive. Here we immediately run into some problems because both Zhentiel Keep and Thay, the two big slavery powers in the area, are on downward trajectories due to heroic action in the Living Forgotten Realms setting. I’ll be ignoring that, or at least setting it before that. I don’t know if it will matter, if the campaign will last anywhere near long enough for the PCs to interact on that scale, but it’s that sort of thing that worries me.

I’ll have more commentary later on the design decisions surrounding the initial adventure (which I am changing up quite a bit) at a later date.

Musings: Advantage, Disadvantage and Bounded Accuracy in 5E (Thur, Oct 2)

I’m planning a 5E campaign for one of my two game groups and that means reading through not just the new PHB and starter kits but also a lot of the online design discussions so I understand why the game is the way it is. A lot of the discussion revolves around a pair of 5E innovations – Advantage/Disadvantage and Bounded Accuracy

Advantage/Disadvantage is the mechanism for removing all of the +1 tracking that occurred in earlier systems. Rather than getting a +2 for having the high ground and another +2 for flanking and a +1 for racial advantage and a +2 for the Bard’s singing you simply roll 2d20 with an attack or skill test and take the higher roll. Likewise if you have a mass of penalties you roll 2d10 and take the lower roll. There’s a general claim that the bonus and penalty tracking got really bad in 3E onward but I never saw it as a problem (and will admit that when I was playing 2E I’d engineer insane contrivances like the black mesh bag designed to make my continual light stone instead produce twilight conditions to boost the efficacy of my Fairy Fire spell, layered with a Prayer and a Chant simultaneously – I referred to myself as a +1 Slut in my drive to be a force multiplier for the party fighters). Still, this is an elegant enough mechanic that won’t cause too much problem.

Bounded Accuracy is the designer’s term for doing away with the really high bonuses that higher level PCs could accrue in 3E onward. If your thief maxes out their Climb skill (just to pick an example) by high level their bonus is so high that things that challenge them will be impossible for their partners. This is something I have a lot less sympathy for, just because I have been running some version of 3E on and off for 14 years and I have never seen it. Now enough other people have brought this up that it must be happening, but it still floors me.

I’ve run/played several campaigns up to 9^th level and others where I started the PCs at 14^th or so and one of two things always happen – the players opt for PCs with very broad skill sets that max out around +10 in any one skill (so that a take 10 will give a 20 result) or the PCs focus on one skill that they bring up to superhuman levels with skill and magic and therefore I treat them as… superhuman. Now, I run a lot of supers games with Ninja heroes or people who can turn invisible or intangible while staying part of a team so the idea of having managing challenges for someone with +25 with Hide, Sneak and Climb just doesn’t worry me.

For combat fighter types would have high to hit rolls that people though would require really high Armor Classes on opponents, high enough to make other PCs unable to hit. But 3E solved that problem by giving additional attacks ever increasing penalties, so you could aim the AC at their 2^nd or 3^rd attack bonus and it would just mean fighters would hit reliably on their 1^st attack.

I just don’t see either as a game breaker, but apparently a lot of people who played a lot of D&D did. There was some inexplicable urge to say “the sample characters are built to look like X, but the rules allow me to build my PC to have up to X+8, so I have to do that! Wow, PCs at X+8 are stomping over some parts of the adventure and wrecking party cohesion, we need to try to bed the rules to make X+8 the standard. Now everyone has X+8 and look at all these unfixable problems the system has. These rules suck for letting me ignore the suggested designs and build my character to X+8!” So now we need to fix that.

5E solves these ‘problems’ (and I’m sorry if I sound derisive here, but I’ve been listening to some variant of “doctor it hurts when I do this” for more than a decade) by radically curtailing the bonuses PCs get. A 7^th level fighter used to get a +7 to hit on his first attack for skill, probably up to +12 when you add in magic and stats, letting him reliably hit most targets with his first attack and increasingly less reliably with his second attack. Now that fighter has a +3 for to hit, likely increased to +8 with magic and stats. Notice how his stats and any magic are now more important than his skill? That’s a design decision – it’s probably not until 17^th level that a characters training with their key abilities outstrips the bonus they get from their stats, and at no point is the combination going to exceed +11. (OK, I lie – Rogues can get up to a +17, which means there’s a good chance that stealth, climbing and similar skill checks will still have to be statted outside the easy range of anyone else.)

The goal on this is to keep the bonus in line with the AC ranges and make lower difficulty scores the standard. The outcome is that PCs don’t have heroic bonuses for a very long time and the swinginess of the d20 means an awful lot more than before. Worse, with no way to stack a meaningful skill bonus onto a stat bonus the strongest, smartest or most graceful people in the world end up with a 25% advantage over the average man. The game designer’s solution for this is to let the DM skip those checks for high attribute characters in favor of auto successes, which is a fine piece of handwaving.

I may be wrong – this may all work swimmingly. I admire the designers for identifying a problem and trying to fix it. It’s just not a problem I ever had, and I don’t know about the solution. I’ll find out soon enough.