What makes 5(.5)e's CRs and encounter budgets so inaccurate and unhelpful, whereas other systems (D&D 4e, Path/Starfinder 2e, Draw Steel, 13th Age 2e, etc.) are able to manage it?I have been interacting with various 5e communities. One consistent thread I notice is that it is simply "common knowledge" that the DM has to significantly exceed the highest listed encounter budgets for the party, and also field at least X amount of encounters per workday, where X is usually 5 or 6. I can see why this is true, given my recent experiences running 5.5e: >>96683686And yet, other systems are able to manage it. D&D 4e, Path/Starfinder 2e, Draw Steel, 13th Age 2e, Tom Abbadon's ICON, and indie games like level2janitor's Tactiquest might not have 100% perfect enemy strength ratings and encounter budgets, but they roughly work: and with significantly more accuracy than 5(.5e). Nor do they have any expectation whatsoever that the party needs to churn through an absurd 5+ or 6+ encounters per workday. 4e's Living Forgotten Realms adventures were usually only two or three fights per workday, and I have been DMing two-encounter workdays without issue. Pathfinder 2e assumes three fights per workday: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43vmk&page=2?Michael-Sayre-on-Casters-Balance-and-Wizards#79It seems so ironic that 5(.5)e, a game with little rigor paid to combat mechanics, is the one system among these that demands drastically overshooting the encounter budget and fielding an absolute marathon of fights in order to generate challenge.What makes 5(.5)e the odd one out here? Is it the lack of standardization of statistics?
I also think that a large part of it is that 5(.5)e's CRs do not take into account magic and glaring enemy weaknesses at all. In the other aforementioned games, it takes effort or a whole lot of luck to completely disable an enemy with a single magical action, whereas it can happen with frightening reliability in 5(.5)e just by tossing the right save-or-lose spell at the right enemy, such as Banishment, Wall of Force, or a non-reasonable 5.5e Suggestion or Mass Suggestion.
>>967040935e's rules are just poorly designed. Monsters get virtually no special abilities and players get endless special abilities. As a result, the players punch way above their theoretical weight class. It's clear that it wasn't playtested.
>>96704093Any game determined by a dice so large as a d20 will struggle unless you automate damage and remove the need for rolling. 5.5 is fine if you understand bad rolls can kill you and good ones make things too easy. That’s kind of the fun for hardcore players. If you’re experienced enough that you respect the smallest enemy, you’re probably having more fun than the spergs that cry when they take damage.
>>96704147D&D 4e, Path/Starfinder 2e, and 13th Age 2e all use d20s, and they have significantly more accurate and helpful enemy strength ratings and encounter budgets.
>>96704172If I’m remembering right, those systems all take chance away in favor of guaranteed effects and damage. While they might not be all random, they point less towards small chances of extreme imbalance, which some dms might prefer.
>>96704356I would not be so sure about that. D&D 4e and 13th Age 2e do have miss damage and miss effects, but nowhere to the extent of, say, Draw Steel. And Path/Starfinder 2e is a very luck-reliant and swingy game due to its critical successes and critical failures.
>>96704377I suppose my contention is that with a game that goes from 0-40 on every roll considering bonuses, you’ll find level 12 parties getting their shit rocked by a troglodyte on a bad day. I guess I just use the MM as a guide and tweak all my enemies based on my party, but if I were to use the CR guides, I doubt I’d ever find balance like the other games.Still, I don’t have a problem with that because I truly don’t fear character death and when I’m nice to my players with easy combats, they’re actually so relieved. Keeps tension in the game.
I am currently looking at a series of highly intricate articles that set out to prove that D&D 5e does, in fact, have exquisitely well-balanced encounters.https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/variability-encounter-difficulty/I do not know about these articles. All these elaborate formulae seem to completely crumble in the face of a spellcaster tossing a Banishment, a Wall of Force, a non-reasonable 5.5e Suggestion or Mass Suggestion at the right enemy to disable them.
>>96704093Not all parties are optimal. Very few encounters are intended to kill a PC. 5e is balanced so that weak parties wont be killed
>>96704524They're retarded bullshit from people who don't know what balanced encounters look like.
>>96704093Monster math only really adds up if you take something extremely basic, like a handful of Sword+Board Fighters or Warlocks spamming Eldritch Blast, and assume that they spend a fraction of the resources they have. That's the context where 3 CR 2 Ogres actually might pose some difficulty for a level 5 party, where you're stuck plinking away with standard attacks, but falls apart as soon as you assume those Warlocks have Repelling Blast to push the Ogres away, or that one of them drops a Hypnotic Pattern so that the party can deal with the encounter piecemeal. And the discrepancy gets worse at higher levels because the PCs have more resources and more spells, on top of having Magic Items which tip the scales in their favor further. For instance, a level 7 Party of 4 can consist of 4 spellcasters, each with Polymorph, who can take turns changing one member of the party into a CR 7 Giant Ape. And if you're fighting 6+ encounters that are roughly on par with a Giant Ape for difficulty, then you've basically solved 4 of those without even relying on enemies failing any saves. And you still have all the 3rd-level room-clearers on top of that. That's a silly example, but it cleanly illustrates how that many CR 7 encounters can be insufficient for a CR 7 party in a blatantly obvious way.Odds are that minimal playtesting was done at higher levels, because the designers identified that fewer people play at higher levels. And then they probably just ensured that the math was designed so that bad characters played poorly still have a chance to win. Thus the majority of players won't have their characters die, and will instead continue to play the game and buy merch and splatbooks.
>>96704756The rules even say that the CRs are estimated ignoring magic items. Players with potent magic break the calculations at their core. And yeah, low enemies can still be a tpk if you’re not careful.
>>96704124I actually feel that monsters get more special abilities than PCs. I would much rather play a monster stat block than any of the boring ass PC classes. But I also think that casters are ghey and exclude them from all comparisons. So maybe that's my problem.
>>96704524Legendary pseud retardation in that image.
>>96709880Full casters or anyone with spells?
>>96708296>Players with potent magic break the calculations at their coreWhy would they do this? Potent magic is basically a corner stone of Dungeons and Dragons. How did they not balance their CR around a core assumption of the fucking system?
Edna make a 13th age general I want to rant about class design
>>96717907NTE but you can do it here.Is it Fighter? 13th Age fighter is a travesty.
>>96717591better than the first run of 5e where they printed the monster manual assuming players won't have feats :^)
>>96717940Which version of the fighter, the old fighter or the new fighter? I think the new fighter is an enormous buff that took the class from being mid to being mega
>>96704124Playtesting is a waste of time! Move fast and break stuff!
>>96718060Is it still as boring to play?
>>96718124you have maneuvers, flexible attacks,momentum and power attack nowusing the windlord subclass from 13g on the new 2e fighter chassis would be a pretty crazy character. You would have more fighting techniques than most casters have spells.
>>96704093You tell me
