Sage Advice is just that: advice. It's not the Word of God being handed down from on high. Take it with a grain of salt or not.
If WotC is serious about a VTT, like they initially wanted back during 4E, then they need consistency. Especially with organized play, which is something they have to care about beyond your table. This doesn't do away with the rule of cool─far from it. The words on the page should say what they mean. I shouldn't be guessing as to the intent of the PH ranger's Beast Companion because I think an Oxford Comma is missing when it's just fallen out of vogue. And that's an ambiguity which should not be there.
A typographical error (which is what the absence of an Oxford comma always is) is what it is. A failure to case out every possible item a Thief could use with Cunning Action is not an error, it is an acknowledgment that players will always come up with scenarios the designers did not anticipate, and that the dungeon master should always be informed by but not bound by the text, when asked to make a call.
An attack with an item used as an improvised weapon is a common sense use of the Attack action, and not the Use an Object action. Any attempt to argue otherwise is made in bad faith, and can be dismissed accordingly without further justification. Replace 'acid vial' with 'bottle of ale.' You know why no one is asking this question about bottles of ale? Because throwing a bottle of ale isn't an optimal combat strategy worth cheating for.
D&D5 is non-exhaustive by design. The original books are crystal clear on this point, and empower the dungeon master and players to collaborate on resolutions they could not anticipate. This is not "Rule of Cool," it is "Rule Zero," and it is Rule Zero for good reason. If you want an exhaustive ruleset serving the same purpose, pick up either edition of Pathfinder for free, or D&D4 or 3.5 on DMsGuild.com, but be warned: a more exhaustive ruleset may have fewer gaps, but the gaps that remain are chasms.
D&D4 in particular had a terrible habit of leaning hard on Rule Zero to make up for the places where its powerfully complex design failed. I'm not saying D&D5 is perfect, but it does not suffer from the same problems on the same scale, because dungeon masters are better able to pick up the slack in a less hard-coded environment.
D&D and its derivatives are the only TTRPGs that are held to this ridiculous standard, and it is entirely a consequence of the wonderful, thriving, diverse online community, where there is an unfortunate tendency to find oneself at a table with no pre-existing relationships or trust. Dungeon World, as an example, has an order of magnitude fewer rules than D&D, and rules that are far less concrete besides, but it doesn't even address this problem. It is simply taken for granted that the dungeon master and players will not be working at cross purposes to each other. We need more of that in D&D, not more rules.
WotC would be well advised to recognize that a VTT that auto-adjudicates the rules of D&D without dungeon master input would be a niche curiosity at best, in the community. The most successful VTTs are the ones that allow for broad customizability, because every table is different. They'd be smart to leave the rules out of their implementation, and stick to making it the prettiest and most accessible option available.
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J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
There's a few things I find pretty bad and a few things that are decently good.
One of the main grips is Spells known equal to Spell slots. HORRIBLE. Just making spell casting way less versatile, especially at higher levels when you only have one lvl 6, 7, 8 and 9th spell slot. But even at earlier levels when you first get a 4th or 5th spell slot you're still screwed by this mechanic and have to choose only one spell but still have to pick 4 first level spells despite you'll likely only even use one or maybe two of them at mid to high levels.
New feats at level 1 are great, that and Bards (and I assume other casters) being able to prepare spells daily are the two stand out new features I like the most. But if they keep the spells known to spell slots its going to suck at higher levels.
A typographical error (which is what the absence of an Oxford comma always is) is what it is. A failure to case out every possible item a Thief could use with Cunning Action is not an error, it is an acknowledgment that players will always come up with scenarios the designers did not anticipate, and that the dungeon master should always be informed by but not bound by the text, when asked to make a call.
An attack with an item used as an improvised weapon is a common sense use of the Attack action, and not the Use an Object action. Any attempt to argue otherwise is made in bad faith, and can be dismissed accordingly without further justification. Replace 'acid vial' with 'bottle of ale.' You know why no one is asking this question about bottles of ale? Because throwing a bottle of ale isn't an optimal combat strategy worth cheating for.
The decision not to use the Oxford Comma on page 93 of the PH was a deliberate one. The problem with Fast Hands was the lack of clarification over what constituted the [Tooltip Not Found] and what constituted an improvised action. And the resulting ambiguities caused confusions for a number of players and tables. It was enough that they were repeatedly asked of the staff; including Crawford. And it's clear that you missed his reasoning, too. For the second time, here's the item description.
As an action, you can splash the contents of this vial onto a creature within 5 feet of you or throw the vial up to 20 feet, shattering it on impact. In either case, make a ranged attack against a creature or object, treating the acid as an improvised weapon. On a hit, the target takes 2d6 acid damage.
According to Crawford, that attack is the result of the [Tooltip Not Found] action. His reasoning is the first three words: "as an action." The Sage Advice Compendium is clear that the healer's kit can be used with Fast Hands, and it uses the same language as acid (vial) and alchemist's fire (flask). See, this is precisely the kind of confusion they want to avoid. A little clarification can go a long way without hindering anyone's fun. And if the DM wants to change it, that's their prerogative.
The reason for leaving some things up to DM fiat is because there are an infinity of possible situations that can come up, and an RPG that tried to resolve them all would be both impossible to write and impossible to actually use, and a lot of the resulting rules wouldn't actually matter much. However, leaving a rules situation that is both common and important unresolved is problematic. Whether or not you can use a potion as a bonus action with fast hands is both obvious enough that most people playing the thief archetype will ask it, and pretty significant to the power of the ability, and that question, if answered in the affirmative, likely leads to more speculations about things like holy water, acid, and magic items.
The decision not to use the Oxford Comma on page 93 of the PH was a deliberate one.
Okay, having looked this up specifically, this particular example is just a wholesale failure of someone to write in English, not a simple question of missing punctuation.
Still, because it is relevant to the argument, the fact that no beast is proficient in any saving throw makes the proper reading of this perfectly clear after some critical thinking. The beast either gets proficiency in all saving throws, or none, and if it were none, they wouldn't have bothered to put saving throws in the list.
According to Crawford, that attack is the result of the Use an Object action.
He's wrong. Categorically. Just like he was wrong about being seen not negating all aspects of invisibility, an "intended reading of the rules" which has now been overturned explicitly in the playtest. Not that it needed to be, because a four-year-old knows that being seen means you are not invisible to the person seeing you.
His reasoning is the first three words: "as an action." The Sage Advice Compendium is clear that the healer's kit can be used with Fast Hands, and it uses the same language as acid (vial) and alchemist's fire (flask). See, this is precisely the kind of confusion they want to avoid. A little clarification can go a long way without hindering anyone's fun. And if the DM wants to change it, that's their prerogative.
Good lord, what hot garbage. The Attack action is ALSO an action, just like the Use an Object action. Why would "as an action" be a clarifying phrase?
The Healer's Kit does not use the same language -- it is the only one of those three items that does not specifically mention an attack roll. Plenty of objects require an ability check to use, but as Crawford is so fond of hammering home, "attack rolls are not ability checks." (insert vomiting emoji here)
Mark my words, we are similarly going to be reaping the whirlwind from this "d20 Test" nonsense for the next decade, if it makes it into oneD&D.
The problem with "if the DM wants to change it, that's their prerogative," is that once something is hard-coded in the rules, players make decisions for their characters based on it without consulting the dungeon master first, and contradicting a player who believes they have the rules behind them is NO FUN FOR ANYBODY. No dungeon master has (or should have) such an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules that they can inform their players of all of their disagreements with the text ahead of time. More exhaustive rules mean more bad design choices, and bad design choices set dungeon masters, particularly inexperienced dungeon masters, up for conflicts with their players.
Look, I'm not saying there isn't a place for rules-heavy systems. I'm saying that a rules-heavy system does not solve the problems you are describing. It just makes them more specific and harder to deal with. It might reduce them in number, but frankly I won't believe that until someone shows me data.
Fortunately 1DnD isn't shaping up to be very rules heavy. Outside of character creation material and spell lists, there are maybe 10 pages of actual rules max. And none of them are much more detailed than the previous versions. Some clarifications where questions came up again and again in 5e are welcome. In the cases where they went too far, or messed up again on the wording, we've been sorting them out pretty good in the surveys.
I see some good flavor in the UA so far but do have some qualms with certain rules. I'll address the elephant in the room - only players can score critical hits. I don't think this serves the spirit of the game, regardless of whether or not a DM allows it, since it completely removes a long-standing caveat of danger and battle. To me, this seems to dilute the essence of adventuring and facing things that are terrible and ominous. What do you think?
Honestly, our gaming group is made up of 7 players. 5 of them regularly DM for the group. 6 of us have been playing D&D for 30-40+ years each. We all love the idea of DM's not critting. We have never, ever....ever...had an encounter improved by a crit from a monster. The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game, and they are genuinely game-breaking. We have all had fights derailed by a mob getting a crit that we didn't want.
As a DM, you have an amazing amount of control over how difficult you want an encounter to be. Having dice luck turn that encounter into something far more dangerous never makes for a better story, or for something more fun for the players. And we have all had experiences where we rolled crits and ignored them because they were going to change the fight in an un-fun way.
We have continued to keep de-powered crits (although we want to tweak them up just a bit for characters) and have continued to not allow DM's and spells to crit, and our games have been better for it. This has honestly been one of the top three changes thrown out in the UA's so far, IMO. I'm also very fond of the background vs. species change in character creation and many of the changes to feats. Clarifying the rules has been a positive too, because they're establishing the baseline of how they expect the game to work...how it is balanced...and getting rid of some grey areas. (Anyone who has ever played with a combative DM can appreciate having baseline abilities clearly laid out.)
For now, the worst change, IMO is grappling. If they allowed the free check at the start of your turn it would be better. (I think I understand why they don't...they want the grappler to get something for succeeding at their check.) As it stands, a hardcore DM with a mob of goblins could wreck a whole lot of parties.
Where did you hear this? It sounds like a cool concept, but I don't see where it was presented.
One of the explanation youtube videos WotC did talking about the philosophy behind the new rules ideas. It was one of the earlier ones. I'm looking forward to when we get to monster updates to see some of those ideas come to fruition. It sounds reminiscent of the recharge encounter powers that monsters had during the 4th Ed era, which I enjoyed.
I think this might be a misunderstanding. When I watched the video, I took it that he meant that monsters that had powerful recharge abilities *already* had the effect of big, game-changing criticals in those powers and more wasn't needed. (Breath weapon is a big deal already.)
Honestly, our gaming group is made up of 7 players. 5 of them regularly DM for the group. 6 of us have been playing D&D for 30-40+ years each. We all love the idea of DM's not critting. We have never, ever....ever...had an encounter improved by a crit from a monster. The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game, and they are genuinely game-breaking. We have all had fights derailed by a mob getting a crit that we didn't want.
Why do you say, "The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game?" I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily, I'm just curious about your reasoning.
The fellow AD&D veterans in my circle and I are generally quite reluctant to kill PCs compared to some of our contemporaries, but we had the same reaction to this change that the original poster did: critical hits and the chance of a domino-effect encounter are just part of D&D.
Speaking personally, I really don't want more control over when my monsters do burst damage; I'll likely never remember or feel confident enough to use it.
At a bare minimum, allowing PCs to continue to crit while monsters cannot feels like it has to have far-reaching unintended effects on encounter balance. It's breaking an assumption the game has had in place for 40 years or more.
(Anyone who has ever played with a combative DM can appreciate having baseline abilities clearly laid out.)
Anyone who has ever played with a combative dungeon master, or combative players, needs to find a new table. If the interests of the players and the dungeon master are not aligned, that is a bad table. What it is not is a reason to turn the game into a ten-volume encyclopedia so combative individuals can always find a line on a page in a book to point to and say, "I told you so."
Honestly, our gaming group is made up of 7 players. 5 of them regularly DM for the group. 6 of us have been playing D&D for 30-40+ years each. We all love the idea of DM's not critting. We have never, ever....ever...had an encounter improved by a crit from a monster. The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game, and they are genuinely game-breaking. We have all had fights derailed by a mob getting a crit that we didn't want.
As a DM, you have an amazing amount of control over how difficult you want an encounter to be. Having dice luck turn that encounter into something far more dangerous never makes for a better story, or for something more fun for the players. And we have all had experiences where we rolled crits and ignored them because they were going to change the fight in an un-fun way.
Monster critical hits in 5e aren't an aberration (they've existed in every edition since 3e), they aren't even terribly powerful. In 3rd edition an orc could realistically instantly kill a fifth level PC from full hit points; in 5th edition it's really not a realistic risk past level 1.
For the rest of your points, I generally find games are improved by unexpected things happening, but that's a style issue.
Honestly, our gaming group is made up of 7 players. 5 of them regularly DM for the group. 6 of us have been playing D&D for 30-40+ years each. We all love the idea of DM's not critting. We have never, ever....ever...had an encounter improved by a crit from a monster. The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game, and they are genuinely game-breaking. We have all had fights derailed by a mob getting a crit that we didn't want.
Why do you say, "The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game?" I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily, I'm just curious about your reasoning.
The fellow AD&D veterans in my circle and I are generally quite reluctant to kill PCs compared to some of our contemporaries, but we had the same reaction to this change that the original poster did: critical hits and the chance of a domino-effect encounter are just part of D&D.
Speaking personally, I really don't want more control over when my monsters do burst damage; I'll likely never remember or feel confident enough to use it.
At a bare minimum, allowing PCs to continue to crit while monsters cannot feels like it has to have far-reaching unintended effects on encounter balance. It's breaking an assumption the game has had in place for 40 years or more.
(Anyone who has ever played with a combative DM can appreciate having baseline abilities clearly laid out.)
Anyone who has ever played with a combative dungeon master, or combative players, needs to find a new table. If the interests of the players and the dungeon master are not aligned, that is a bad table. What it is not is a reason to turn the game into a ten-volume encyclopedia so combative individuals can always find a line on a page in a book to point to and say, "I told you so."
Crits have not been part of the game for 40 years that I recall. I began playing regularly around 1981 or so, though I had played a bit around 1978. Crits first became official in 3 as far as I remember. (I don't remember crits being an official part of 2e, but almost everyone played with some sort of critical hit system, so that's a bit muddy for me. There were whole systems of crit charts available as almost a side business. Most of the time, we found the crits working against the players far more than against the monsters. The monster doesn't care if it loses a leg, because it isn't continuing to adventure.)
I can't speak about D&D 4, but as far as I know, 5e is the first one to double ALL dice in an attack. In 3 & 3.5 for the majority of weapons you got an additional damage die plus bonuses. There were rare weapons that were significantly better than that, but they were usually smaller dice to start with. Plus, the second check, even with the expanded crit range, likely kept the likelihood lower, at least on the tankiest characters and monsters. 5e being a flat 5% chance of a crit is new. Cantrips could crit in 3/3.5 but they did such laughable damage that it didn't matter. Cantrips are solid attack forms now. I'll play casters and go entire combats never throwing a damage spell other than a cantrip.
Crits are easier to get, especially on higher AC's. They do more damage than ever. And there's the Smite mechanic which lets paladins go supernova and not worry about wasting the slot. It's a weird system. Some of that works against monsters. But a lot of it works against PC's. If we played crits, then last session we would have taken 6-7 crits in one fight that was meant as a throwaway and it would have ended the party. Zero people at our table would have enjoyed that.
For monsters, one of the crit problems is just how many monsters have multi-die attacks, and some of them are fairly low CR.
You already have control of when your monsters do burst damage. It's built into the game on the significant monsters with their recharge abilities. And the randomness of the recharge adds enough chaos. Get a string of 5's and have a dragon breathe 3 rounds in a row and it's pretty brutal.
IMO, outside looking in, 5e did one of the worst jobs of encounter balance I have seen in a game. Frankly, it's pretty awful. It didn't seem to account for PC burst damage at all. There's no defense against it. So lots of really potentially cool fights get short circuited. (For example, our 1st level party had the "boss" fight with a bugbear in one of the beginner adventures. I went first and my cleric critted the bugbear with Guiding Bolt. Fight over. It was funny. We laughed. But we all missed out on a good, solid fight at that level.) So I don't think it's changing the balance badly to keep weak PC crits and not have them apply to the DM. Thus far, in every playtest we've had -- which has admittedly stayed to lower levels -- it has been working amazingly well.
Honestly, our gaming group is made up of 7 players. 5 of them regularly DM for the group. 6 of us have been playing D&D for 30-40+ years each. We all love the idea of DM's not critting. We have never, ever....ever...had an encounter improved by a crit from a monster. The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game, and they are genuinely game-breaking. We have all had fights derailed by a mob getting a crit that we didn't want.
As a DM, you have an amazing amount of control over how difficult you want an encounter to be. Having dice luck turn that encounter into something far more dangerous never makes for a better story, or for something more fun for the players. And we have all had experiences where we rolled crits and ignored them because they were going to change the fight in an un-fun way.
Monster critical hits in 5e aren't an aberration (they've existed in every edition since 3e), they aren't even terribly powerful. In 3rd edition an orc could realistically instantly kill a fifth level PC from full hit points; in 5th edition it's really not a realistic risk past level 1.
For the rest of your points, I generally find games are improved by unexpected things happening, but that's a style issue.
So...an example. Trash fight meant to be an early light challenge as the party starts into a dungeon. I've got 7 level 3 PC's. 2 Bugbears. Should lay out as an easy fight, and I was really just looking to introduce them to the space and hint at what they might be seeing more of. Ambush position and the Bugbears have surprise...because why use Bugbears if they're not going to set an ambush? First one steps to the tank, crits him and rolls 4d8 + 4d6 + 2 so the tank is out. Fight goes much worse and they spend more resources to beat them than they should have to. Plus they need to press on, so they have to use potions and spells to get the tank back up.
The downside is that one player had the kind of combat encounter he's supposed to be built for end before he got a roll. It took a while to resolve the combat. And because they spent so much recovering from that fight, an hour into the dungeon they're pulling back for a long rest after the second fight and they hadn't even gotten close to the parts that were developing the story and mystery of what was going on. It didn't make for a better session.
I think there is plenty of randomness in general hit rolls and damage dice. I can figure those out and have a rough idea of what is going to be a balanced encounter because I can estimate how much the party should take and then they can do better or worse and we have variability. But short-circuiting an entire adventure because of one fluke roll is bad.
Just getting hit was only a 30% chance for him...so being hit like that is a big, damaging whack and frankly...the threat of that was part of the attraction of the encounter. But if he'd taken a hard shot and then got to try to pay it back, how is that not a better story and more fun for everyone?
(I really hate things that take the players out of the game when they don't really have any opportunity to change it. And DM crits are really the only thing that typically does that right now. So I am content to see them go away. Anything that lets the players try to roll their way out of the problem is more interesting to me than having someone watching everyone else play. And yeah...that is a stylistic choice for sure. But it's one I've developed over 40+ years of playing.)
(I really hate things that take the players out of the game when they don't really have any opportunity to change it. And DM crits are really the only thing that typically does that right now. So I am content to see them go away. Anything that lets the players try to roll their way out of the problem is more interesting to me than having someone watching everyone else play. And yeah...that is a stylistic choice for sure. But it's one I've developed over 40+ years of playing.)
Healing Word exists; being reduced to 0 hp is barely an inconvenience in 5e.
(I really hate things that take the players out of the game when they don't really have any opportunity to change it. And DM crits are really the only thing that typically does that right now. So I am content to see them go away. Anything that lets the players try to roll their way out of the problem is more interesting to me than having someone watching everyone else play. And yeah...that is a stylistic choice for sure. But it's one I've developed over 40+ years of playing.)
Healing Word exists; being reduced to 0 hp is barely an inconvenience in 5e.
True, but depends on your DM. I've seen it twice in our group where we're fighting a creature with 3 attacks, and if the first attack knocks you unconscious, you better believe the next two attacks are coming at you, and since its a critical, it outright kills the PC with no chance of anyone bringing them back up (apart from Revivify, Raise Dead, etc). But if you have a nicer DM I suppose you'll have more chances to use Healing Word haha
True, but depends on your DM. I've seen it twice in our group where we're fighting a creature with 3 attacks, and if the first attack knocks you unconscious, you better believe the next two attacks are coming at you, and since its a critical, it outright kills the PC with no chance of anyone bringing them back up (apart from Revivify, Raise Dead, etc). But if you have a nicer DM I suppose you'll have more chances to use Healing Word haha
Creatures with 3 attack combos don't generally do enough damage per attack to drop a PC with one hit, even a crit.
(I really hate things that take the players out of the game when they don't really have any opportunity to change it. And DM crits are really the only thing that typically does that right now. So I am content to see them go away. Anything that lets the players try to roll their way out of the problem is more interesting to me than having someone watching everyone else play. And yeah...that is a stylistic choice for sure. But it's one I've developed over 40+ years of playing.)
Healing Word exists; being reduced to 0 hp is barely an inconvenience in 5e.
That assumes that someone has taken that. Not everyone takes it every time. Party of 7 had 1 cleric, so he tended to make sure his heals were as big as possible rather than ranged. Bard took Cure Wounds as well.
The crit could have just as easily gone on the cleric.
5.5 is offering some assistance at low levels for healing, but none of it works at range.
Crits have not been part of the game for 40 years that I recall. I began playing regularly around 1981 or so, though I had played a bit around 1978. Crits first became official in 3 as far as I remember.
Goodness, you are absolutely correct! I don't think my players or I ever once questioned it, back in the 20th. So much of the game was habit and hand-me-down back then. Halcyon days!
From the AD&D1 DMG:
Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents. (Such rules as double damage and critical hits must cut both ways — in which case the life expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably — or the monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the system. I am certain you can think of many other such rules.)
I'll have to make a note of this; I enjoy collecting old rules that were removed from the game because nobody liked them, instead of for reasons of design, and this certainly looks like one.
I do have to agree with Pantagruel, though, that I have just not seen this player lethality in D&D5. I find that it is very easy to knock PCs out in D&D5 combat, but them getting back up again mid-combat is routine, and having one die is always a bit of an unpleasant surprise. But my experience does not negate yours -- there are numerous variables in play, and every table is different.
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J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
Crits have not been part of the game for 40 years that I recall. I began playing regularly around 1981 or so, though I had played a bit around 1978. Crits first became official in 3 as far as I remember.
Goodness, you are absolutely correct! I don't think my players or I ever once questioned it, back in the 20th. So much of the game was habit and hand-me-down back then. Halcyon days!
From the AD&D1 DMG:
Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents. (Such rules as double damage and critical hits must cut both ways — in which case the life expectancy of player characters will be shortened considerably — or the monsters are being grossly misrepresented and unfairly treated by the system. I am certain you can think of many other such rules.)
I'll have to make a note of this; I enjoy collecting old rules that were removed from the game because nobody liked them, instead of for reasons of design, and this certainly looks like one.
I do have to agree with Pantagruel, though, that I have just not seen this player lethality in D&D5. I find that it is very easy to knock PCs out in D&D5 combat, but them getting back up again mid-combat is routine, and having one die is always a bit of an unpleasant surprise. But my experience does not negate yours -- there are numerous variables in play, and every table is different.
Don't get me wrong...it's *hard* to kill players. Crazy hard. Keeping them down once they are out (with a well-tuned party) is really, really hard. But knocking them out with a crit is really easy and if you're not playing the "knock down pop up" meta, that's a problem. (And the supernova characters at higher levels can just end big encounters without much fanfare. We don't like that part either.)
Part of the charm of 5e is that the standard party isn't required. As people who have played for ages, we love playing groups that are not the standard. ("Hey...cool! No one has to play the healer this time!") For instance, our current group is running 2 rogues, 2 warlocks, a ranger and a fighter in what is basically a big caper/heist mission. And it's crazy amounts of fun. But we have to play carefully.
As far as the old 1st edition text though, we all started from that idea. But the fact of the matter was that crits fell heavily on player characters more than the monsters. First, PC's usually were on the receiving end of more attacks, so they received more crits. Second, as I mentioned before, most of the crit systems tended to introduce lingering injuries. Those things actually affected the PC's, but the fights always started with fresh monsters. So while it comes from a logical place, it's functionally not accurate. Besides, is anyone playing the game to play the story of the monsters?
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A typographical error (which is what the absence of an Oxford comma always is) is what it is. A failure to case out every possible item a Thief could use with Cunning Action is not an error, it is an acknowledgment that players will always come up with scenarios the designers did not anticipate, and that the dungeon master should always be informed by but not bound by the text, when asked to make a call.
An attack with an item used as an improvised weapon is a common sense use of the Attack action, and not the Use an Object action. Any attempt to argue otherwise is made in bad faith, and can be dismissed accordingly without further justification. Replace 'acid vial' with 'bottle of ale.' You know why no one is asking this question about bottles of ale? Because throwing a bottle of ale isn't an optimal combat strategy worth cheating for.
D&D5 is non-exhaustive by design. The original books are crystal clear on this point, and empower the dungeon master and players to collaborate on resolutions they could not anticipate. This is not "Rule of Cool," it is "Rule Zero," and it is Rule Zero for good reason. If you want an exhaustive ruleset serving the same purpose, pick up either edition of Pathfinder for free, or D&D4 or 3.5 on DMsGuild.com, but be warned: a more exhaustive ruleset may have fewer gaps, but the gaps that remain are chasms.
D&D4 in particular had a terrible habit of leaning hard on Rule Zero to make up for the places where its powerfully complex design failed. I'm not saying D&D5 is perfect, but it does not suffer from the same problems on the same scale, because dungeon masters are better able to pick up the slack in a less hard-coded environment.
D&D and its derivatives are the only TTRPGs that are held to this ridiculous standard, and it is entirely a consequence of the wonderful, thriving, diverse online community, where there is an unfortunate tendency to find oneself at a table with no pre-existing relationships or trust. Dungeon World, as an example, has an order of magnitude fewer rules than D&D, and rules that are far less concrete besides, but it doesn't even address this problem. It is simply taken for granted that the dungeon master and players will not be working at cross purposes to each other. We need more of that in D&D, not more rules.
WotC would be well advised to recognize that a VTT that auto-adjudicates the rules of D&D without dungeon master input would be a niche curiosity at best, in the community. The most successful VTTs are the ones that allow for broad customizability, because every table is different. They'd be smart to leave the rules out of their implementation, and stick to making it the prettiest and most accessible option available.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
There's a few things I find pretty bad and a few things that are decently good.
One of the main grips is Spells known equal to Spell slots. HORRIBLE. Just making spell casting way less versatile, especially at higher levels when you only have one lvl 6, 7, 8 and 9th spell slot. But even at earlier levels when you first get a 4th or 5th spell slot you're still screwed by this mechanic and have to choose only one spell but still have to pick 4 first level spells despite you'll likely only even use one or maybe two of them at mid to high levels.
New feats at level 1 are great, that and Bards (and I assume other casters) being able to prepare spells daily are the two stand out new features I like the most. But if they keep the spells known to spell slots its going to suck at higher levels.
The decision not to use the Oxford Comma on page 93 of the PH was a deliberate one. The problem with Fast Hands was the lack of clarification over what constituted the [Tooltip Not Found] and what constituted an improvised action. And the resulting ambiguities caused confusions for a number of players and tables. It was enough that they were repeatedly asked of the staff; including Crawford. And it's clear that you missed his reasoning, too. For the second time, here's the item description.
According to Crawford, that attack is the result of the [Tooltip Not Found] action. His reasoning is the first three words: "as an action." The Sage Advice Compendium is clear that the healer's kit can be used with Fast Hands, and it uses the same language as acid (vial) and alchemist's fire (flask). See, this is precisely the kind of confusion they want to avoid. A little clarification can go a long way without hindering anyone's fun. And if the DM wants to change it, that's their prerogative.
The reason for leaving some things up to DM fiat is because there are an infinity of possible situations that can come up, and an RPG that tried to resolve them all would be both impossible to write and impossible to actually use, and a lot of the resulting rules wouldn't actually matter much. However, leaving a rules situation that is both common and important unresolved is problematic. Whether or not you can use a potion as a bonus action with fast hands is both obvious enough that most people playing the thief archetype will ask it, and pretty significant to the power of the ability, and that question, if answered in the affirmative, likely leads to more speculations about things like holy water, acid, and magic items.
The best - Feat at level 1.
The worst - The changes to the Mage Slayer feat.
Okay, having looked this up specifically, this particular example is just a wholesale failure of someone to write in English, not a simple question of missing punctuation.
Still, because it is relevant to the argument, the fact that no beast is proficient in any saving throw makes the proper reading of this perfectly clear after some critical thinking. The beast either gets proficiency in all saving throws, or none, and if it were none, they wouldn't have bothered to put saving throws in the list.
He's wrong. Categorically. Just like he was wrong about being seen not negating all aspects of invisibility, an "intended reading of the rules" which has now been overturned explicitly in the playtest. Not that it needed to be, because a four-year-old knows that being seen means you are not invisible to the person seeing you.
Good lord, what hot garbage. The Attack action is ALSO an action, just like the Use an Object action. Why would "as an action" be a clarifying phrase?
The Healer's Kit does not use the same language -- it is the only one of those three items that does not specifically mention an attack roll. Plenty of objects require an ability check to use, but as Crawford is so fond of hammering home, "attack rolls are not ability checks." (insert vomiting emoji here)
Mark my words, we are similarly going to be reaping the whirlwind from this "d20 Test" nonsense for the next decade, if it makes it into oneD&D.
The problem with "if the DM wants to change it, that's their prerogative," is that once something is hard-coded in the rules, players make decisions for their characters based on it without consulting the dungeon master first, and contradicting a player who believes they have the rules behind them is NO FUN FOR ANYBODY. No dungeon master has (or should have) such an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules that they can inform their players of all of their disagreements with the text ahead of time. More exhaustive rules mean more bad design choices, and bad design choices set dungeon masters, particularly inexperienced dungeon masters, up for conflicts with their players.
Look, I'm not saying there isn't a place for rules-heavy systems. I'm saying that a rules-heavy system does not solve the problems you are describing. It just makes them more specific and harder to deal with. It might reduce them in number, but frankly I won't believe that until someone shows me data.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
You're entitled to your opinion. If you're trying to argue, this isn't one you can win.
Fortunately 1DnD isn't shaping up to be very rules heavy. Outside of character creation material and spell lists, there are maybe 10 pages of actual rules max. And none of them are much more detailed than the previous versions. Some clarifications where questions came up again and again in 5e are welcome. In the cases where they went too far, or messed up again on the wording, we've been sorting them out pretty good in the surveys.
Honestly, our gaming group is made up of 7 players. 5 of them regularly DM for the group. 6 of us have been playing D&D for 30-40+ years each. We all love the idea of DM's not critting. We have never, ever....ever...had an encounter improved by a crit from a monster. The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game, and they are genuinely game-breaking. We have all had fights derailed by a mob getting a crit that we didn't want.
As a DM, you have an amazing amount of control over how difficult you want an encounter to be. Having dice luck turn that encounter into something far more dangerous never makes for a better story, or for something more fun for the players. And we have all had experiences where we rolled crits and ignored them because they were going to change the fight in an un-fun way.
We have continued to keep de-powered crits (although we want to tweak them up just a bit for characters) and have continued to not allow DM's and spells to crit, and our games have been better for it. This has honestly been one of the top three changes thrown out in the UA's so far, IMO. I'm also very fond of the background vs. species change in character creation and many of the changes to feats. Clarifying the rules has been a positive too, because they're establishing the baseline of how they expect the game to work...how it is balanced...and getting rid of some grey areas. (Anyone who has ever played with a combative DM can appreciate having baseline abilities clearly laid out.)
For now, the worst change, IMO is grappling. If they allowed the free check at the start of your turn it would be better. (I think I understand why they don't...they want the grappler to get something for succeeding at their check.) As it stands, a hardcore DM with a mob of goblins could wreck a whole lot of parties.
I think this might be a misunderstanding. When I watched the video, I took it that he meant that monsters that had powerful recharge abilities *already* had the effect of big, game-changing criticals in those powers and more wasn't needed. (Breath weapon is a big deal already.)
Why do you say, "The crits in 5e are an aberration in the history of the game?" I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily, I'm just curious about your reasoning.
The fellow AD&D veterans in my circle and I are generally quite reluctant to kill PCs compared to some of our contemporaries, but we had the same reaction to this change that the original poster did: critical hits and the chance of a domino-effect encounter are just part of D&D.
Speaking personally, I really don't want more control over when my monsters do burst damage; I'll likely never remember or feel confident enough to use it.
At a bare minimum, allowing PCs to continue to crit while monsters cannot feels like it has to have far-reaching unintended effects on encounter balance. It's breaking an assumption the game has had in place for 40 years or more.
Anyone who has ever played with a combative dungeon master, or combative players, needs to find a new table. If the interests of the players and the dungeon master are not aligned, that is a bad table. What it is not is a reason to turn the game into a ten-volume encyclopedia so combative individuals can always find a line on a page in a book to point to and say, "I told you so."
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
Monster critical hits in 5e aren't an aberration (they've existed in every edition since 3e), they aren't even terribly powerful. In 3rd edition an orc could realistically instantly kill a fifth level PC from full hit points; in 5th edition it's really not a realistic risk past level 1.
For the rest of your points, I generally find games are improved by unexpected things happening, but that's a style issue.
Crits have not been part of the game for 40 years that I recall. I began playing regularly around 1981 or so, though I had played a bit around 1978. Crits first became official in 3 as far as I remember. (I don't remember crits being an official part of 2e, but almost everyone played with some sort of critical hit system, so that's a bit muddy for me. There were whole systems of crit charts available as almost a side business. Most of the time, we found the crits working against the players far more than against the monsters. The monster doesn't care if it loses a leg, because it isn't continuing to adventure.)
I can't speak about D&D 4, but as far as I know, 5e is the first one to double ALL dice in an attack. In 3 & 3.5 for the majority of weapons you got an additional damage die plus bonuses. There were rare weapons that were significantly better than that, but they were usually smaller dice to start with. Plus, the second check, even with the expanded crit range, likely kept the likelihood lower, at least on the tankiest characters and monsters. 5e being a flat 5% chance of a crit is new. Cantrips could crit in 3/3.5 but they did such laughable damage that it didn't matter. Cantrips are solid attack forms now. I'll play casters and go entire combats never throwing a damage spell other than a cantrip.
Crits are easier to get, especially on higher AC's. They do more damage than ever. And there's the Smite mechanic which lets paladins go supernova and not worry about wasting the slot. It's a weird system. Some of that works against monsters. But a lot of it works against PC's. If we played crits, then last session we would have taken 6-7 crits in one fight that was meant as a throwaway and it would have ended the party. Zero people at our table would have enjoyed that.
For monsters, one of the crit problems is just how many monsters have multi-die attacks, and some of them are fairly low CR.
You already have control of when your monsters do burst damage. It's built into the game on the significant monsters with their recharge abilities. And the randomness of the recharge adds enough chaos. Get a string of 5's and have a dragon breathe 3 rounds in a row and it's pretty brutal.
IMO, outside looking in, 5e did one of the worst jobs of encounter balance I have seen in a game. Frankly, it's pretty awful. It didn't seem to account for PC burst damage at all. There's no defense against it. So lots of really potentially cool fights get short circuited. (For example, our 1st level party had the "boss" fight with a bugbear in one of the beginner adventures. I went first and my cleric critted the bugbear with Guiding Bolt. Fight over. It was funny. We laughed. But we all missed out on a good, solid fight at that level.) So I don't think it's changing the balance badly to keep weak PC crits and not have them apply to the DM. Thus far, in every playtest we've had -- which has admittedly stayed to lower levels -- it has been working amazingly well.
So...an example. Trash fight meant to be an early light challenge as the party starts into a dungeon. I've got 7 level 3 PC's. 2 Bugbears. Should lay out as an easy fight, and I was really just looking to introduce them to the space and hint at what they might be seeing more of. Ambush position and the Bugbears have surprise...because why use Bugbears if they're not going to set an ambush? First one steps to the tank, crits him and rolls 4d8 + 4d6 + 2 so the tank is out. Fight goes much worse and they spend more resources to beat them than they should have to. Plus they need to press on, so they have to use potions and spells to get the tank back up.
The downside is that one player had the kind of combat encounter he's supposed to be built for end before he got a roll. It took a while to resolve the combat. And because they spent so much recovering from that fight, an hour into the dungeon they're pulling back for a long rest after the second fight and they hadn't even gotten close to the parts that were developing the story and mystery of what was going on. It didn't make for a better session.
I think there is plenty of randomness in general hit rolls and damage dice. I can figure those out and have a rough idea of what is going to be a balanced encounter because I can estimate how much the party should take and then they can do better or worse and we have variability. But short-circuiting an entire adventure because of one fluke roll is bad.
Just getting hit was only a 30% chance for him...so being hit like that is a big, damaging whack and frankly...the threat of that was part of the attraction of the encounter. But if he'd taken a hard shot and then got to try to pay it back, how is that not a better story and more fun for everyone?
(I really hate things that take the players out of the game when they don't really have any opportunity to change it. And DM crits are really the only thing that typically does that right now. So I am content to see them go away. Anything that lets the players try to roll their way out of the problem is more interesting to me than having someone watching everyone else play. And yeah...that is a stylistic choice for sure. But it's one I've developed over 40+ years of playing.)
Healing Word exists; being reduced to 0 hp is barely an inconvenience in 5e.
True, but depends on your DM. I've seen it twice in our group where we're fighting a creature with 3 attacks, and if the first attack knocks you unconscious, you better believe the next two attacks are coming at you, and since its a critical, it outright kills the PC with no chance of anyone bringing them back up (apart from Revivify, Raise Dead, etc). But if you have a nicer DM I suppose you'll have more chances to use Healing Word haha
Creatures with 3 attack combos don't generally do enough damage per attack to drop a PC with one hit, even a crit.
That assumes that someone has taken that. Not everyone takes it every time. Party of 7 had 1 cleric, so he tended to make sure his heals were as big as possible rather than ranged. Bard took Cure Wounds as well.
The crit could have just as easily gone on the cleric.
5.5 is offering some assistance at low levels for healing, but none of it works at range.
From the AD&D1 DMG:
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
Don't get me wrong...it's *hard* to kill players. Crazy hard. Keeping them down once they are out (with a well-tuned party) is really, really hard. But knocking them out with a crit is really easy and if you're not playing the "knock down pop up" meta, that's a problem. (And the supernova characters at higher levels can just end big encounters without much fanfare. We don't like that part either.)
Part of the charm of 5e is that the standard party isn't required. As people who have played for ages, we love playing groups that are not the standard. ("Hey...cool! No one has to play the healer this time!") For instance, our current group is running 2 rogues, 2 warlocks, a ranger and a fighter in what is basically a big caper/heist mission. And it's crazy amounts of fun. But we have to play carefully.
As far as the old 1st edition text though, we all started from that idea. But the fact of the matter was that crits fell heavily on player characters more than the monsters. First, PC's usually were on the receiving end of more attacks, so they received more crits. Second, as I mentioned before, most of the crit systems tended to introduce lingering injuries. Those things actually affected the PC's, but the fights always started with fresh monsters. So while it comes from a logical place, it's functionally not accurate. Besides, is anyone playing the game to play the story of the monsters?