I am very curious about the community's opinion on bounded accuracy in 5E. Do you (or your DM) think that items which increase stats break the game? Are you limiting this in your campaings? Not allowing Headbands of Intellect, or Belts of Giant Strength, etc...
My current DM does feel that these items break the game, and ruin things due to the design of the game. I, personally, do not think the game is unbalanced by these items, and see no issue.
The balancing factor is the requirement of an attunement slot. If a character wants to increase their stats by however much artificially via magic item that is totally fine. The impact is dependent on how much the increase is and how relevant it is to the character. If the barbarian wears gauntlets of ogres strength to make their strength go from 16 to 19 that's only marginally better. If the sorcerer wears a headband of intelligence to increase their intelligence from 13 to 19, that is a massive jump but how relevant will it be to the group and the character? In either case there could and are probably better options for that attunement slot.
Plus, the Dm has total control of what magic items the party finds and where. Even if the party wanted to make one of these items it would be up to the dm to determine if its even possible and if it how how much time, money, and other recourses need to go into it. That sounds like a really fun adventure idea to me. " In order to make gauntlets of ogre power you must slay a powerful Ogre, bathe the gauntlets in its blood then burry them in a place of great magical density."
I have only been playing (and DMing) 5e for about 6 months, so to be honest, my brain's jury is still out regarding bounded accuracy -- frankly, it's still out regarding a lot of mechanisms in 5e. I suspect the way I will find out if I want to limit things like Belts of Giant Strength in hindsight -- i.e., after it is too late. I will have a better idea after I have a campaign or two and a couple of years under my belt. Of course, by the time my brain's jury comes back with a verdict on the mechanisms of 5e, 6e will be out and I'll be starting from scratch again.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Well, OK, but I like crunching numbers and looking at statistical properties of the game.... and I look at the balance from that perspective. Numerically, my personal jury is still deliberating about the whole 5e system, not just bounded accuracy.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Well, OK, but I like crunching numbers and looking at statistical properties of the game.... and I look at the balance from that perspective. Numerically, my personal jury is still deliberating about the whole 5e system, not just bounded accuracy.
I usually just eyeball that math and end up close enough for D&D. I only actually run the statistics specifically when I have to prove it to someone or am trying to look smart.
I am very curious about the community's opinion on bounded accuracy in 5E. Do you (or your DM) think that items which increase stats break the game? Are you limiting this in your campaings? Not allowing Headbands of Intellect, or Belts of Giant Strength, etc...
My current DM does feel that these items break the game, and ruin things due to the design of the game. I, personally, do not think the game is unbalanced by these items, and see no issue.
So, what do YOU think?
Thanks for your opinions, ~Mad
Bounded accuracy makes it exceptionally difficult to award a lot of magic items that increase armor class, to hit or saves. In the past, there was a much wider range of Armor Class and To Hit for monsters. In the past, you would quickly progress to the point where a goblin would be no threat to you (5% change of hitting). Cut to 5E and and now those goblins on average have a (15% chance at hitting a level 20). Magic bonus capped at +3 for armor and most DM's are loathe to award that +3 save until level 18+. Why?
In older editions, there was a much higher to hit bonus. For example, a level 20 cleric in D&D 3.5 could have a +15 to hit and a fighter would have a +20 to hit not counting status bonuses. As you can imagine, the monsters also had much higher armor classes to compensate. Now, go to D&D 5E. The designers made the conscious decision to give the players and DM a 60% chance to hit on average. To do that they limited armor class growth for players and monsters and increased the hit points.
Any item that increases to hit, armor or saves is extremely strong. My players saw +1 weapons with some penalties at tier 1, they saw +1 weapons with no penalties at tier 2 and magic armors with no bonus and in tier 3 they will start seeing +2 magic weapons with some penalties and magic armor +1, once they get to tier 4, I'll open up the +3's. Cloaks of protection and rings of protection are very rare in my campaign and are priced accordingly if the players can find them in tier 3 and above.
You have to be creative and homebrew a lot of magic items that are useful to the PC's but not game breaking. You might want a +5 Holy Avenger (it doesn't exist in D&D 5E), but if a DM gave you that and the DM is good. I'd be very, very, very afraid, because almost every monster will be homebrewed with more stats or higher armor to handle it. A DM could give you +5's to hit and just increase every monsters armor by +2. Sure you think you are stronger, but you aren't and he kept the game balance intact. And yes if I had an open party in rebellion over not getting +5's, I'd give it to them, and increase all the armor by +2 to maintain balance at tier 4.
And all that... is why my mental jury is still in the jury room deliberating about 5e. I'm just not sure yet how much I like the +3 max/bounded accuracy business. In principle it looks OK on paper but I will need to see how it actually plays before the jury can render a verdict.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Bounded accuracy makes it much easier to run a game as the mechanics are sped up much more than previous editions. It does make decisions around magic items, assigning ability scores, and handing out advantage/disadvantage much more impactful.
Its one reason, in my opinion, rolling for stats is not a good option for this edition. Especially for new groups.
A DM who understands the math behind the system and knows a bit about balancing it can effectively make challenges to overcome it. However, I believe a lot of DMs over evaluate their ability to create balance and end up mucking up the numbers too much.
RAW the books have options that can really push the boundaries of the system but overall its pretty balanced if you adhere to the suggestions of the DMG.
Most people just want to hand out big items because they are fun but honestly they do not think of the impact of these decisions as the players progress. I have seen too many games broken by handing out rare or higher items much too soon. Mid tier play is actually pretty balanced if you adhere to the suggested encounter guide. Adding items can easily tip this.
High tier play is already pretty hard to balance as is but if you give out very rare or artifact level items it makes it that much harder.
The designers of 5E have said that magic items, multi class and ASI's are not factored into CR calculations. They might have took that into later edition monster guides, but for sure its not in the monster manual. So if you allow your players to use the "optional", which is actually part of the game and everyone considers standard. It makes CR calculations a joke with those extras added in. You have to really run the players ragged dropping continuous encounters to keep the players challenged, even at lower levels.
Solution: Make every encounter deadly and or have multiple high risk encounters in between each long rest.
That’s what I do. Well, not every day. I might do a couple days in a row of just exploration or just social encounters, and then blammo! It’s meat grinder day!
Solution: Make every encounter deadly and or have multiple high risk encounters in between each long rest.
That’s what I do. Well, not every day. I might do a couple days in a row of just exploration or just social encounters, and then blammo! It’s meat grinder day!
Your campaign sounds like fun. I'm a big fan of tough battles.
I am very curious about the community's opinion on bounded accuracy in 5E. Do you (or your DM) think that items which increase stats break the game? Are you limiting this in your campaings? Not allowing Headbands of Intellect, or Belts of Giant Strength, etc...
My current DM does feel that these items break the game, and ruin things due to the design of the game. I, personally, do not think the game is unbalanced by these items, and see no issue.
So, what do YOU think?
Thanks for your opinions, ~Mad
Bounded accuracy makes it exceptionally difficult to award a lot of magic items that increase armor class, to hit or saves. In the past, there was a much wider range of Armor Class and To Hit for monsters. In the past, you would quickly progress to the point where a goblin would be no threat to you (5% change of hitting). Cut to 5E and and now those goblins on average have a (15% chance at hitting a level 20). Magic bonus capped at +3 for armor and most DM's are loathe to award that +3 save until level 18+. Why?
In older editions, there was a much higher to hit bonus. For example, a level 20 cleric in D&D 3.5 could have a +15 to hit and a fighter would have a +20 to hit not counting status bonuses. As you can imagine, the monsters also had much higher armor classes to compensate. Now, go to D&D 5E. The designers made the conscious decision to give the players and DM a 60% chance to hit on average. To do that they limited armor class growth for players and monsters and increased the hit points.
Any item that increases to hit, armor or saves is extremely strong. My players saw +1 weapons with some penalties at tier 1, they saw +1 weapons with no penalties at tier 2 and magic armors with no bonus and in tier 3 they will start seeing +2 magic weapons with some penalties and magic armor +1, once they get to tier 4, I'll open up the +3's. Cloaks of protection and rings of protection are very rare in my campaign and are priced accordingly if the players can find them in tier 3 and above.
You have to be creative and homebrew a lot of magic items that are useful to the PC's but not game breaking. You might want a +5 Holy Avenger (it doesn't exist in D&D 5E), but if a DM gave you that and the DM is good. I'd be very, very, very afraid, because almost every monster will be homebrewed with more stats or higher armor to handle it. A DM could give you +5's to hit and just increase every monsters armor by +2. Sure you think you are stronger, but you aren't and he kept the game balance intact. And yes if I had an open party in rebellion over not getting +5's, I'd give it to them, and increase all the armor by +2 to maintain balance at tier 4.
The counter to that is that under 3.5 rules, bonuses to attack increased much more rapidly than bonuses to AC, especially if you had a GM that wasn't awarding you with an armor upgrade every level (and I never had a GM that kept the party up to the level-appropriate wealth level recommended in the DMG- it was far more common for a character to be using the same gear at 7th level as they'd been at 4th). Often, your Armor Class didn't determine whether or not an enemy was going to hit you so much as how many points they were going to dump into Power Attack before they hit you.
Then 4th Edition made things even worse, as enemies got +1 to their attack and defense scores for every +1 boost to their CR, while player characters only got +1 per every 2 levels. This meant that at best, if you dumped everything into maxing out your attack modifier, you'd still be stuck with having a lower chance to hit a CR 30 monster at level 30 than you'd have had at hitting a CR 1 monster at level 1.
And then there were saving throws (at least in 3.5). It was really common to have a character who would be easily able to make one type of save in 3.5, but need a natural 20 to succeed at either of the other two by the time your level got into the teens (or lower if you multiclassed a few times). Bounded accuracy also binds the DCs on saving throws and keeps them at a level where you're generally not going to risk facing impossible saves on a regular basis.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the power level flattening in 5e, I'm kind of fond of my giant monsters being unstoppable monsters that can lay waste to armies and need elite heroes to take down, and that requires a fair amount of power escalation. Also, well, if a 17th level wizard can use Meteor Swarm to do 140 damage per target to 100 targets, a 17th level fighter should be able to do 140 damage per target to five targets per round, or something similar.
Then 4th Edition made things even worse, as enemies got +1 to their attack and defense scores for every +1 boost to their CR, while player characters only got +1 per every 2 levels. This meant that at best, if you dumped everything into maxing out your attack modifier, you'd still be stuck with having a lower chance to hit a CR 30 monster at level 30 than you'd have had at hitting a CR 1 monster at level 1.
Which is interesting as one of the biggest complaints against 4e that I have seen (outside of changing so much of the lore) was how easy it was to become a literal god and wreck everything by mid-tier. This was mainly do to the insane amount of feat trees their were that could lead to crazy combinations on top of magic items.
I do miss all the cool powers and magic items from 4e though but yeah, it got stupid crazy fast if you had even a decent understanding of how the mechanics worked.
Then 4th Edition made things even worse, as enemies got +1 to their attack and defense scores for every +1 boost to their CR, while player characters only got +1 per every 2 levels. This meant that at best, if you dumped everything into maxing out your attack modifier, you'd still be stuck with having a lower chance to hit a CR 30 monster at level 30 than you'd have had at hitting a CR 1 monster at level 1.
Typically, at level 30, those 29 extra levels got you +15 to hit, and you also got something like +4 for ability score improvement, and +6 for a magic weapon, and a point or two from feats, and then there were various powers that granted bonuses, so you'd actually come pretty close, you just had to jump through a few more hoops to do it. However, my experience from running a 4e game from level 1-17 is that fights really started bogging down in paragon tier (possibly contributed to by the need to run at around 300% of the xp budget to actually produce legitimate challenges).
It seems that the holy grail of RPG design, at least in level-based games, is providing a system robust enough to take you from 1 to max level without going out of control.
In every RPG with levels that I can remember playing, the low levels are tough because of the low margin for error but are very well balanced, then as you gain the lower mid-levels you become more powerful but things scale pretty well and then when you get into the upper levels, the PC power level usually skyrockets out of control and you end up with a mess. City of Heroes had this problem too... the max level there was 50 and the 30+ game (at launch) became way too easy. This was largely because they did not test the upper level game as robustly as they tested the lower level game (leveling took a long time and like 90% of the beta testers never got out of the 20s).
I wonder if this is generally the case -- that playtesting tends to be heavily biased into the lower levels, and that what seems like it will scale on paper, doesn't in practice, but nobody figures it out in the design phase because they do all their testing with PCs in the lower levels and just assume additive items will scale properly.
Another problem COH had -- they realized people would not naturally level into the 30s during beta so they just up-leveled people into the mid-30s to try the game play. This meant that you had a bunch of inexperienced noobs running around with a bunch of powers and abilities they didn't have the first clue how to use, and they were far less effective at playing their characters than someone who had naturally leveled to 35 or 39 and had hundreds of hours of practice with all those mid and upper level powers. I know during late beta (because I was there) the wiser play-testers begged the devs to give the players longer to test the upper level game because of this, but the company needed money so they launched. And the consequence was that the level 30+ game was so easy they had to include a difficulty slider to let us buff it -- even after nerfing power enhancements by about 50%.
Again I wonder if the same thing happens in D&D. If they just hand their testers level 15 characters to try things with -- this would skew the results, since someone just handed a level 15 warlock or monk is not going to be anywhere near as good at playing it, as someone who started a warlock or monk at level 1, and played it for 50 or 75 sessions to get to level 15, and has learned all the most effective ways to use every feat and class trait on their character sheet.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the power level flattening in 5e, I'm kind of fond of my giant monsters being unstoppable monsters that can lay waste to armies and need elite heroes to take down, and that requires a fair amount of power escalation. Also, well, if a 17th level wizard can use Meteor Swarm to do 140 damage per target to 100 targets, a 17th level fighter should be able to do 140 damage per target to five targets per round, or something similar.
A 17th level wizard can cast Meteor Swarm once per long rest. A 17th level Champion can make three attacks/round with a greatsword, critting on an 18-20. They can use Action Surge twice per short rest. Any round that they use a action surge, they have a very good chance of scoring at least one crit. With GWM, that allows them to make another attack as a bonus action. Assuming that they use the damage bonus from GWM and have a +3 Greatsword, a 20 Strength, and no other magic items that improve their damage, that gives them the potential to inflict up to 210 damage to a single creature in one round.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the power level flattening in 5e, I'm kind of fond of my giant monsters being unstoppable monsters that can lay waste to armies and need elite heroes to take down, and that requires a fair amount of power escalation. Also, well, if a 17th level wizard can use Meteor Swarm to do 140 damage per target to 100 targets, a 17th level fighter should be able to do 140 damage per target to five targets per round, or something similar.
A 17th level wizard can cast Meteor Swarm once per long rest.
And can annihilate an army of giants doing so. Yes, I don't expect a fighter to do meteor swarm level damage every round, but over the course of a day they should be capable of similarly epic total activity.
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Hello all,
I am very curious about the community's opinion on bounded accuracy in 5E. Do you (or your DM) think that items which increase stats break the game? Are you limiting this in your campaings? Not allowing Headbands of Intellect, or Belts of Giant Strength, etc...
My current DM does feel that these items break the game, and ruin things due to the design of the game. I, personally, do not think the game is unbalanced by these items, and see no issue.
So, what do YOU think?
Thanks for your opinions,
~Mad
The balancing factor is the requirement of an attunement slot. If a character wants to increase their stats by however much artificially via magic item that is totally fine. The impact is dependent on how much the increase is and how relevant it is to the character. If the barbarian wears gauntlets of ogres strength to make their strength go from 16 to 19 that's only marginally better. If the sorcerer wears a headband of intelligence to increase their intelligence from 13 to 19, that is a massive jump but how relevant will it be to the group and the character? In either case there could and are probably better options for that attunement slot.
Plus, the Dm has total control of what magic items the party finds and where. Even if the party wanted to make one of these items it would be up to the dm to determine if its even possible and if it how how much time, money, and other recourses need to go into it. That sounds like a really fun adventure idea to me. " In order to make gauntlets of ogre power you must slay a powerful Ogre, bathe the gauntlets in its blood then burry them in a place of great magical density."
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"Play the game however you want to play the game. After all, your fun doesn't threaten my fun."
I have only been playing (and DMing) 5e for about 6 months, so to be honest, my brain's jury is still out regarding bounded accuracy -- frankly, it's still out regarding a lot of mechanisms in 5e. I suspect the way I will find out if I want to limit things like Belts of Giant Strength in hindsight -- i.e., after it is too late. I will have a better idea after I have a campaign or two and a couple of years under my belt. Of course, by the time my brain's jury comes back with a verdict on the mechanisms of 5e, 6e will be out and I'll be starting from scratch again.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Nothing is unbalanced if the DM makes the fights hard enough.
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Well, OK, but I like crunching numbers and looking at statistical properties of the game.... and I look at the balance from that perspective. Numerically, my personal jury is still deliberating about the whole 5e system, not just bounded accuracy.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I usually just eyeball that math and end up close enough for D&D. I only actually run the statistics specifically when I have to prove it to someone or am trying to look smart.
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Bounded accuracy makes it exceptionally difficult to award a lot of magic items that increase armor class, to hit or saves. In the past, there was a much wider range of Armor Class and To Hit for monsters. In the past, you would quickly progress to the point where a goblin would be no threat to you (5% change of hitting). Cut to 5E and and now those goblins on average have a (15% chance at hitting a level 20). Magic bonus capped at +3 for armor and most DM's are loathe to award that +3 save until level 18+. Why?
In older editions, there was a much higher to hit bonus. For example, a level 20 cleric in D&D 3.5 could have a +15 to hit and a fighter would have a +20 to hit not counting status bonuses. As you can imagine, the monsters also had much higher armor classes to compensate. Now, go to D&D 5E. The designers made the conscious decision to give the players and DM a 60% chance to hit on average. To do that they limited armor class growth for players and monsters and increased the hit points.
Any item that increases to hit, armor or saves is extremely strong. My players saw +1 weapons with some penalties at tier 1, they saw +1 weapons with no penalties at tier 2 and magic armors with no bonus and in tier 3 they will start seeing +2 magic weapons with some penalties and magic armor +1, once they get to tier 4, I'll open up the +3's. Cloaks of protection and rings of protection are very rare in my campaign and are priced accordingly if the players can find them in tier 3 and above.
You have to be creative and homebrew a lot of magic items that are useful to the PC's but not game breaking. You might want a +5 Holy Avenger (it doesn't exist in D&D 5E), but if a DM gave you that and the DM is good. I'd be very, very, very afraid, because almost every monster will be homebrewed with more stats or higher armor to handle it. A DM could give you +5's to hit and just increase every monsters armor by +2. Sure you think you are stronger, but you aren't and he kept the game balance intact. And yes if I had an open party in rebellion over not getting +5's, I'd give it to them, and increase all the armor by +2 to maintain balance at tier 4.
And all that... is why my mental jury is still in the jury room deliberating about 5e. I'm just not sure yet how much I like the +3 max/bounded accuracy business. In principle it looks OK on paper but I will need to see how it actually plays before the jury can render a verdict.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Bounded accuracy makes it much easier to run a game as the mechanics are sped up much more than previous editions. It does make decisions around magic items, assigning ability scores, and handing out advantage/disadvantage much more impactful.
Its one reason, in my opinion, rolling for stats is not a good option for this edition. Especially for new groups.
A DM who understands the math behind the system and knows a bit about balancing it can effectively make challenges to overcome it. However, I believe a lot of DMs over evaluate their ability to create balance and end up mucking up the numbers too much.
RAW the books have options that can really push the boundaries of the system but overall its pretty balanced if you adhere to the suggestions of the DMG.
Most people just want to hand out big items because they are fun but honestly they do not think of the impact of these decisions as the players progress. I have seen too many games broken by handing out rare or higher items much too soon. Mid tier play is actually pretty balanced if you adhere to the suggested encounter guide. Adding items can easily tip this.
High tier play is already pretty hard to balance as is but if you give out very rare or artifact level items it makes it that much harder.
The designers of 5E have said that magic items, multi class and ASI's are not factored into CR calculations. They might have took that into later edition monster guides, but for sure its not in the monster manual. So if you allow your players to use the "optional", which is actually part of the game and everyone considers standard. It makes CR calculations a joke with those extras added in. You have to really run the players ragged dropping continuous encounters to keep the players challenged, even at lower levels.
Solution: Make every encounter deadly and or have multiple high risk encounters in between each long rest.
Edit: This is what I do and my players love it
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"Play the game however you want to play the game. After all, your fun doesn't threaten my fun."
That’s what I do. Well, not every day. I might do a couple days in a row of just exploration or just social encounters, and then blammo! It’s meat grinder day!
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
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Your campaign sounds like fun. I'm a big fan of tough battles.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The counter to that is that under 3.5 rules, bonuses to attack increased much more rapidly than bonuses to AC, especially if you had a GM that wasn't awarding you with an armor upgrade every level (and I never had a GM that kept the party up to the level-appropriate wealth level recommended in the DMG- it was far more common for a character to be using the same gear at 7th level as they'd been at 4th). Often, your Armor Class didn't determine whether or not an enemy was going to hit you so much as how many points they were going to dump into Power Attack before they hit you.
Then 4th Edition made things even worse, as enemies got +1 to their attack and defense scores for every +1 boost to their CR, while player characters only got +1 per every 2 levels. This meant that at best, if you dumped everything into maxing out your attack modifier, you'd still be stuck with having a lower chance to hit a CR 30 monster at level 30 than you'd have had at hitting a CR 1 monster at level 1.
And then there were saving throws (at least in 3.5). It was really common to have a character who would be easily able to make one type of save in 3.5, but need a natural 20 to succeed at either of the other two by the time your level got into the teens (or lower if you multiclassed a few times). Bounded accuracy also binds the DCs on saving throws and keeps them at a level where you're generally not going to risk facing impossible saves on a regular basis.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the power level flattening in 5e, I'm kind of fond of my giant monsters being unstoppable monsters that can lay waste to armies and need elite heroes to take down, and that requires a fair amount of power escalation. Also, well, if a 17th level wizard can use Meteor Swarm to do 140 damage per target to 100 targets, a 17th level fighter should be able to do 140 damage per target to five targets per round, or something similar.
Which is interesting as one of the biggest complaints against 4e that I have seen (outside of changing so much of the lore) was how easy it was to become a literal god and wreck everything by mid-tier. This was mainly do to the insane amount of feat trees their were that could lead to crazy combinations on top of magic items.
I do miss all the cool powers and magic items from 4e though but yeah, it got stupid crazy fast if you had even a decent understanding of how the mechanics worked.
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
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Typically, at level 30, those 29 extra levels got you +15 to hit, and you also got something like +4 for ability score improvement, and +6 for a magic weapon, and a point or two from feats, and then there were various powers that granted bonuses, so you'd actually come pretty close, you just had to jump through a few more hoops to do it. However, my experience from running a 4e game from level 1-17 is that fights really started bogging down in paragon tier (possibly contributed to by the need to run at around 300% of the xp budget to actually produce legitimate challenges).
It seems that the holy grail of RPG design, at least in level-based games, is providing a system robust enough to take you from 1 to max level without going out of control.
In every RPG with levels that I can remember playing, the low levels are tough because of the low margin for error but are very well balanced, then as you gain the lower mid-levels you become more powerful but things scale pretty well and then when you get into the upper levels, the PC power level usually skyrockets out of control and you end up with a mess. City of Heroes had this problem too... the max level there was 50 and the 30+ game (at launch) became way too easy. This was largely because they did not test the upper level game as robustly as they tested the lower level game (leveling took a long time and like 90% of the beta testers never got out of the 20s).
I wonder if this is generally the case -- that playtesting tends to be heavily biased into the lower levels, and that what seems like it will scale on paper, doesn't in practice, but nobody figures it out in the design phase because they do all their testing with PCs in the lower levels and just assume additive items will scale properly.
Another problem COH had -- they realized people would not naturally level into the 30s during beta so they just up-leveled people into the mid-30s to try the game play. This meant that you had a bunch of inexperienced noobs running around with a bunch of powers and abilities they didn't have the first clue how to use, and they were far less effective at playing their characters than someone who had naturally leveled to 35 or 39 and had hundreds of hours of practice with all those mid and upper level powers. I know during late beta (because I was there) the wiser play-testers begged the devs to give the players longer to test the upper level game because of this, but the company needed money so they launched. And the consequence was that the level 30+ game was so easy they had to include a difficulty slider to let us buff it -- even after nerfing power enhancements by about 50%.
Again I wonder if the same thing happens in D&D. If they just hand their testers level 15 characters to try things with -- this would skew the results, since someone just handed a level 15 warlock or monk is not going to be anywhere near as good at playing it, as someone who started a warlock or monk at level 1, and played it for 50 or 75 sessions to get to level 15, and has learned all the most effective ways to use every feat and class trait on their character sheet.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A 17th level wizard can cast Meteor Swarm once per long rest. A 17th level Champion can make three attacks/round with a greatsword, critting on an 18-20. They can use Action Surge twice per short rest. Any round that they use a action surge, they have a very good chance of scoring at least one crit. With GWM, that allows them to make another attack as a bonus action. Assuming that they use the damage bonus from GWM and have a +3 Greatsword, a 20 Strength, and no other magic items that improve their damage, that gives them the potential to inflict up to 210 damage to a single creature in one round.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
And can annihilate an army of giants doing so. Yes, I don't expect a fighter to do meteor swarm level damage every round, but over the course of a day they should be capable of similarly epic total activity.