What makes Advantage / Disadvantage work so well in 5e, is that it's used in place of more complex arithmetic, no circumstantial +2/+5, -2/-5 etc.
If I were to add advantage/disadvantage to Pathfinder, I'd still prefer it a uniform numeric bonus/penalty that stacks rather than a fortune/pugwampi effect. That would eliminate a lot of the issues with the mechanic while still providing the benefit of a simplistic way to track and calculate circumstantial bonuses/penalties.
For example, every advantage grants a +2 circumstance bonus whereas every disadvantage grants a -2 penalty. Since the number remains the same, you only need to count the number of advantages/disadvantages and multiply by 2.
It comes and goes. Some days he's great. Other days... yeah.
I'm wasn't sure why, but this guy or gal you're talking about really bugs me. It finally dawned on me while I was at the park with my daughter.
I'm the kinda of guy who will bend over backwards, so to speak, to help someone out if they'll meet me halfway and try to work something out that's beneficial to the group as a whole - this individual you're talking about doesn't sound like he's willing to compromise at all. I'm sure you, and the rest of your group (from what you've said), "don't like" to wait forever while he does basic math. Maybe it is due to the fact I have potential players coming out of my ears wanting into my main group, and others aren't so fortunate (I realize players can be hard to find in some areas), but I think I'd discuss it with the rest of the group and if the issue was as bad as I thought it was (i.e. they agreed it was a big problem), let him know in private and face to face that he had two choices: meet me halfway in coming up with a solution to speed things up or look for another game (albeit in a more diplomatic manner and less ultimatum sounding one). It may sound harsh, but his fun is not more important than the groups fun, in my opinion and a lack of willingness to compromise shows he thinks it is. I could be wrong, however, and it's not as serious as I'm reading into it.
What makes Advantage / Disadvantage work so well in 5e, is that it's used in place of more complex arithmetic, no circumstantial +2/+5, -2/-5 etc.Agreed with Ragnarok, advantage/disadvantage shines because it's faster to resolve than the arithmetic present in 3.5/PF.
I'm actually going to disagree with both of you, and not for the sake of disagreeing. There's nothing complex about basic math (adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying), barring some sort of disability/medication that interferes with the process. In both of these cases, there are really simple ways to help these people - getting group member to help, applications, and so on that don't involve adding extra rolls. For this guy, why are you telling him the AC, out of curiosity? Using your example, I'll give one of my own:
GM: "JoeRandom, your attack bonus is +5, roll a d20." He rolls the dice. You look. "Look, a 14. Your total is a 19, you hit. Roll your damage, which is two six sided dice." Rolls damage. "You got a 7. That's a total of 12 with your Strength modifier. Bork the orc falls over dead. BobRandom, you're next."
The only thing I can see slowing down combat, outside of the instances above, are lazy players. The player knows his base attack bonus is +15/+10/+5. He knows when a using a finessable weapon with the weapon finesse feat, he adds his +5 Dexterity modifier to it. He KNOWs he add his weapon's +3 enhancement bonus to it. Why then, is this not added to his sheet? His base attack bonus should be on his sheet. His modified attack sequence should be on his sheet in the weapon slot, where the company has kindly provided a space. Rapier +3 of Whatever (+23/+18/+13) Dmg: 1d6 + 3 (18-20/x3).
Adding modifiers from spells? All my players, for example, keep a scratch pad with them. Got a buff from X? Write it down - add it to the one-time between level up write up they've done between sessions.
All other circumstance modifiers are at the GM's discretion. You add them. You tell them if they hit. Players without problems such as this already know what to add or not - they're pretty easy to spot. You do the math for those unable to do so on their own.
I'm not trying to be a wank (though I may be unintentionally succeeding); I'm not trying to start a firefight over opinions; I simply do not see anything in the game as complex arithmetic or that adding even more dice rolls somehow makes it better.
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I'm not trying to be a wank (though I may be unintentionally succeeding); I'm not trying to start a firefight over opinions; I simply do not see anything in the game as complex arithmetic or that adding even more dice rolls somehow makes it better.
I see no wanking here. I actually agree with you when the player/character is making a single attack. They should have their attack bonus fairly well crystallized in their mind, be able to roll a dice and tell the GM the result of adding those two numbers together.
I'll expand on the example I gave above.
Player is a paladin. Paladin is riding a mount. Someone has cast haste. Earlier before they reached the clearing, someone also cast heroism on the paladin.
In PF/3.5 the mount gets 4 attacks and the paladin (at level 8) gets 3 attacks.
The player knows his paladin is normally +13/+8 (8 BAB, 4 Strength, 1 magic weapon). When he was lower level (say 5th), he was attacking just once a round and quick and fast. He rolled, adds +10 and gave the result. Sometimes he used power attack, but it was the same modifier because he had Furious Focus. His brain settled in on quickly adding +10 to every attack roll. Life was good.
Then... something changed in how quickly he took turns. The example I gave also involved the perfect storm of attacking defensively, power attacking and furious focus. The mount is power attacking, the paladin is fighting defensively and power attacking.
In this case, the player is going to roll 7 dice on his round. Very few of those dice include the same attack modifier. In fact there are 5 different attack modifiers for the 7 dice being rolled.
Folks can resolve this faster if they roll dice together (i.e. the paladin rolls his 3 dice together, then his mount's 4 dice together). This involves assignment of colors to "which attack". Perhaps the blue dice is the mount's bite, and the green dice is one of the hooves and the purple dice is the other hoof, and the brown dice is the mount's hasted bite.
In the heat of the battle, this player will slow down as they try to remember which dice is which attack, and then to recall the modifiers on that specific attack. They'll then work to do the math. They'll almost always forget to add something in there... whether it was the penalty for power attack on the iterative, or the penalty for fighting defensively with 3 ranks in Acrobatics... or very commonly, it's the +1 from haste. Then after their round is over, and I'm about to give the next player their turn, the player says, "Wait, I forgot about haste!" and we pause for a second to either suggest it's too late, or try to factor that in.
It's not advantage/disadvantage alone that helps alleviate this in 5e. It's the whole system overhaul that eliminates a lot of the bonuses from even possibly clogging up a player's brain. There's no +1 from haste. There's no furious focus or power attack (yet). There's simply two creatures which have the same exact bonus for all of their rolls. In the odd case that there were 7 rolls needed in 5e, they'd all mostly likely have the exact same modifier. There's no need to waste brain power on assigning the brown dice to a bite and the blue dice to a hoof, and the... (so on...). The person can simply roll all the dice.
Now a GM could simply tell the player's the AC (at high level play, I have less issue with this since it can speed up how quickly onerous fights are run). In the case a monster has AC29 and a player knows every single of their dice nets a +13, they can simply count up the number dice showing 14 or higher... "one, two... I hit twice" and move on to damage.
So perhaps I was leading you down the wrong path and suggesting it was the "addition operations" that were the real problematic source of slowdown. It's more all the "mental operations" going on, assigning dice to certain attacks and then calculating each of the bonuses on those attacks individually. Some people are inherently disorganized, and they don't actually have a little scrap of paper that says "brown=bite, blue=hoof#1, green=hoof#2" and they then forget which dice goes to what attack. Or they decide that a certain dice is "cold" and then try to switch out the color code system the next round, and then the entire universe comes to a halt as they go into "wait, did I say the red was my first iterative or second?" and we need to figure out how to resolve that.
Your mileage may vary on how quickly a 5e round resolves at level 7-8 versus how quickly it resolves in 3.5/PF. I can only attest to how the switch from iterative attacks and the elimination of a lot of extraneous +1/+2/-1/-2 riders that are normally fairly common makes running this quicker for my games...
Lol wanking
One thing I've taken to doing is making my character sheets be spreadsheets. As long as I can put in the design work in advance (and sometimes during a session), I can simply check buffs on or off on my tablet, and the formulas are automatically calculated. That's a huge, huge help in Pathfinder... especially at high level when you may carrying a half-dozen or more magical buffs... that could go away in a moment if someone throws a dispel at you. I've seen high-level games grind to a halt on one good set of rolls on a dispel, because backing out all the changes takes so long.
The downside of this is that I'm no longer self-trained to keep track of buffs & debuffs that are not on the spreadsheet; it's very easy to forget about something I don't have incorporated yet.
Of course, the spreadsheet approach is not for people who don't have a laptop or tablet to run it on, and while most of the formulas are fairly basic, it's still quite time-consuming to set up. (There's a lot of side benefits I enjoy, like having a section to compute how many skill points I should have and compare against how many I've spent.) I'm getting better and better at it with every character I set up a sheet for, and I've started throwing together a template; I'll start throwing common buffs & debuffs onto it, I'm sure. And I wasn't willing to actually do it before I got a tablet, because a laptop just takes up too much table space... at least when multiple players are using them, they do.
But if you don't have something like that, even with a scratch pad of buffs & debuffs, most people are likely going to be taking their normal attack sequence, and adding a couple of modifiers. Sure, you could compute that sum and add only one number... but then, especially if any are commonly coming in and out, you have to recompute that regularly, which is also annoying.
I'm totally fine rolling one attack at a time; I've found that if I roll more than 2 at a time, though, I lose track of which die was which much too easily. (Also I don't actually have enough color variety to roll more than 3 at once unless I'm very careful about positioning the dice.) And I've seen some insane situations; recently I was attacking a wizard, and had to roll 4d100 plus my d20, because closing my eyes and relying on blind-fight was a better proposition than dealing with both displacement and mirror image, and even after that, there were two custom spells which also provided percentile miss chances. That was insanely time-consuming compared to a normal round, even though we were online, so I could roll 4d100 in a single command.
I see no wanking here. [...]
So perhaps I was leading you down the wrong path and suggesting it was the "addition operations" that were the real problematic source of slowdown. It's more all the "mental operations" going on, assigning dice to certain attacks and then calculating each of the bonuses on those attacks individually. Some people are inherently disorganized, and they don't actually have a little scrap of paper that says "brown=bite, blue=hoof#1, green=hoof#2" and they then forget which dice goes to what attack. Or they decide that a certain dice is "cold" and then try to switch out the color code system the next round, and then the entire universe comes to a halt as they go into "wait, did I say the red was my first iterative or second?" and we need to figure out how to resolve that.
I see exactly what you're saying now; thank you for the clarification. Your example illustrates quite well the issue you're addressing, though it could have been my poor interpretation of it just as easily as any other explanation.
I'm totally fine rolling one attack at a time; I've found that if I roll more than 2 at a time, though, I lose track of which die was which much too easily. (Also I don't...
We tend to handle one at a time, as well, and we added a special rule: we do not go back and correct mistakes (i.e. skipped attacks, forgotten modifiers, etc.) after the action has been resolved, save in the instance that it caused PC death. This rule applies equally to me as GM as it does the players, except I don't care if my NPCs die, so I don't go back and "save them".
I'm actually going to disagree with both of you, and not for the sake of disagreeing. There's nothing complex about basic math (adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying), barring some sort of disability/medication that interferes with the process. In both of these cases, there are really simple ways to help these people - getting group member to help, applications, and so on that don't involve adding extra rolls.What makes Advantage / Disadvantage work so well in 5e, is that it's used in place of more complex arithmetic, no circumstantial +2/+5, -2/-5 etc.Agreed with Ragnarok, advantage/disadvantage shines because it's faster to resolve than the arithmetic present in 3.5/PF.
You're right. I meant tedious when I wrote complex. And yeah, wake down exemplifies the point quite well.
I kinda like the mechanical take on the dragonborn, their scaling breath weapon in particular. As it stands, there's not really an easy way I've found to do that in the Race Generator.
Maybe take the 8 RP lizardfolk and use the usual breath weapon template, then give them an extra d6 on the damage roll every two character levels, then a save equal to level + Con modifier (as though they were spellcasters, according to my limited understanding)? Dunno if giving them full "draconic immunity" is a good idea. That's a lot of immunities.
I found the "scalable spellcasting" in general not unanalogous to the "Words of Power" system, just with a little less complete customization. I suppose that something similar could be made to work in Pathfinder, though it'd take a lot of DM fiat and grunt work to scale everything up and down.
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You're right. I meant tedious when I wrote complex. And yeah, wake down exemplifies the point quite well.
I probably wasn't being fair in my interpretation of what you guys were saying.
When my wife points out that I'm being an ass about something, I often respond, "Well, I wasn't trying to be an ass." She responds, predictibly, "As with many things in our life, dear, you excel without effort."
She's often right - this may have been one of those instances.
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I kinda like the mechanical take on the dragonborn, their scaling breath weapon in particular. As it stands, there's not really an easy way I've found to do that in the Race Generator.
When the Advanced Race Guide was in beta, there were several individuals who extrapolated that if you gave a PC race approximately 1 RP per level (around 1-3, if I recall correctly) as they leveled, you could scale abilities to go along with it without affecting their CR.
I use this method for all my homebrew races, granting 1 RP per level and a select list of abilities I deem fitting; I give the players the illusion of getting to customize their race by getting to spend points on things in this list, which further attaches them to their character and make their characters quite unique. I use standard "PCs should have this ability as X level, this one at Y level" and so on (no uninhibited flight prior to level 5, and such, for example).
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On a more positive note, I think the lair actions for their legendary creatures are pretty cool. Basically, at initiative 20, the lair gets to act (steam venting, acid bubbles up, madness intrudes, or whatever).
It helps solve the action economy issue for solo monsters and, hopefully, makes the terrain a little more dynamic at the same time. Very "boss fight," which I'm a fan of.
Cheers!
Landon
That's pretty cool actually.
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@Malachi, let it lie. Landon's reported his experience using advantage. If your experience is otherwise by all means say so (though your posts look more like theory than from experience using the mechanic regularly in high level play), but it's not very helpful to tell Landon that he must be doing something wrong. Worth keeping in mind that what works for one group doesn't always work for another. YMMV and all that.
Your belief it *shouldn't* slow anything down doesn't invalidate his reported experience, and it sounds like you don't have experience of your own to report to the contrary. If you do, say so, and it can be left at that.
:-)
As someone said (in Latin, no less!), personal taste isn't a rules issue.
Re-reading my posts, it comes across as more stroppy than I intended; for that, I apologise. Ah, well. Nil illigitimati desperandum, as they say. : )
The way we throw the dice doesn't tell us if a rule is good or not. Maybe if the rule was asking us to roll 37d20 and keep the middle 13, maybe that would be a bad rule simply because of the unreasonable and pointless effort, but I can't believe that two dice is so excessive it makes a bad rule. Thus, the difficulty some may have with rolling 2d20 doesn't tell us if this is a good or bad rule.
As for theory versus practical experience, I've not only read the starter set and players handbook, I've had two sessions of organised play. On Wednesday our rogue crept up on a bad guy, and attacked with advantage (because the enemy hadn't seen him due to a good stealth roll), and the rogue rolled 6 on both dice. When you have advantage and roll low with both, it's not just an ordinary miss to you, it feels like a disaster! It nearly was for the rogue BTW, who was attacked by several baddies and went to zero.
In my experience, we try harder to get advantage than we ever did to get +2, and feel brilliant when we get it and feel terrible when we fail anyway!
And we despair if we have disadvantage and cheer madly when we succeed anyway! It's a roller coaster of emotion, good and bad, and it makes the game more enjoyable.
I haven't played above 1st level, but I doubt even a 20th level fighter will get more than five attacks, where PF could get double that. I'm not sure it'll be that common to get advantage on all of your attacks.
Players want to be the heroes, want their actions to be significant, and the advantage/disadvantage mechanic makes these actions feel significant.
Number 1: A simple interaction with the environment can be incorporated into a move action at no cost (or maybe 5 feet of movement cost, allowing a full-attacker to spend their 5-foot-step on it).
Example: kicking over a chair (for cover), swatting at a candelabra to knock it over (and start a fire on the next round), pulling a lever (to do whatever), etc.Number 2: Scaling cantrips.
Ex: 1d6 damage at 3rd level, 2d6 at 5th, 3d6 at 11th, 4d6 at 17th.Number 3: Multiclass spellcasting not being gimped to all hell.
Ex: Even levels (2nd, 4th, etc) of base classes (not prestige classes) other than your favored class act as if they had "+1 level of existing spellcasting class," but only for advancing your favored class casting.
Ex: Arcane spell failure doesn't apply to armor you are proficient in (but does apply to shields unless you have some special ability).
Before you scream, note that the caster has to either spend feat slots, or take a level in another class and be forever behind by 1 caster level. Note that they must also spend gold on the armor, which doesn't stack with mage armor, while bracers of armor continue to exist and protect against incorporeal touch attacks.Number 4: Reining in AoOs to make combat more fluid.
Ex: Only entering or leaving a creature's threatened area provokes. If you move from one square to another without entering or leaving the creature's threatened area, you don't provoke.Number 5: Un-gimping sneak attack.
Ex: Sneak attacks (including ranged sneak attacks) can be made as long as at least one other creature is threatening the target, instead of requiring you flank the target.Number 6: Reining in the paladin's plot-destroying...
Number 1-Yeah, everyone already does that.
Number 2-Just add +1 per level to damage, healing or whatever to cantrips. Either limit it to 3 or remove all maxs by spell level.Number 3-The Savage mage takes penalties only from metal armor and shields. Similarly, a sorc. with earth elemental blood might take no penalty only from metal armor and shields. Similarly Madges who take the elemental earth school. So a dwarf Madge might wear full plate.
Number 4-So, attack of opportunity when someone passes through a threat area without stopping, yes or no?
Number 5-How is one other creature threatening the target not always a flank? Does this mean trying to shoot the target from 60 feet away gives your chums a flank?
Only movement causes AoOs? So there are no concentration checks in 5e?
Only movement out of a creatures reach in most cases. There are concentration checks in 5e but only for getting hit while concentrating on a spell. Casting a ranged spell in while within 5 feet of a creature causes disadvantage on the attack.
Even if concentration was just boiled down to one roll instead of like 10 that you have in the Pathfinder CRB would be nice...
Only movement causes AoOs? So there are no concentration checks in 5e?Only movement out of a creatures reach in most cases. There are concentration checks in 5e but only for getting hit while concentrating on a spell. Casting a ranged spell in while within 5 feet of a creature causes disadvantage on the attack.Removing concentration checks in general would be very nice. It's something I find very limiting and even frustrating. If I plan on playing a character who is going to be close to badguys a lot (magus, bard, inquisitor, some cleric/oracle setups), I end up having to take both a trait and a feat to get a +6 toward concentration checks so I don't flub the rolls. It's a very un-fun feat tax just so I can access basic features of my class.
Even with the trait/feat, I end up looking at situations where I "only need to roll a 3" to pass the check, but of course I always roll a 2 when it counts. Nothing more frustrating and disappointing than: "The other six people went, so it's finally your turn. What are you going to do?" "Lose a spell slot, apparently." Of course it's still possible for a melee class to roll a 1 on an attack roll, but unlike a fighter I have a limited number of spells. And a lot of them require attack rolls or saves as well. Concentration just adds an extra layer I don't agree with.
I'll be starting a new campaign soon, and one of the players is doing a magus. They already have the +6 combination from traits and feats, and would probably be very happy to hear that they don't need that just to cast spells. So, I may pick this up.
This does open up some questions though. What happens with the Disruptive feat tree, for instance.
Oh goodness, Concentration. My magus has, I think, never failed it (before he became a gifted blade soulknife instead, and then he hasn't had to roll it yet). But I remember my wizard and a pack of trolls. I had the perfect shot to finish all of them with an acid-admixed burning hands. Sure, I had to stand next to one of them, but he was prone, and I'd make the Concentration check on something like a 3, this will be fine, right? Yeah, I rolled just below. Now my item queue is topped by the bracers that provide a bonus and allow some re-rolls. Just in case.
I deleted my last post; it could be seen as being antagonistic and that's not what I was shooting for (i.e. it sounded funnier in my head).
I'm not sure removing concentration checks would be wise. It is one of the few mechanics that hasn't been removed which helps, albeit slightly, in keeping spellcasters in some sort of check.
Concentration checks make some sense, but only if any complex task requires them. As it is now, if mundane dust puffs out at anyone trying to pick a lock, you have to roll a will save for the rogue or apply minuses to the attempt. I play because "I want to toss fireballs", "I want to kill monsters", or "I want to create a freakin world". If the game doesn't feel believable, all the game balance in the world won't save it.
Concentration checks make some sense, but only if any complex task requires them. As it is now, if mundane dust puffs out at anyone trying to pick a lock, you have to roll a will save for the rogue or apply minuses to the attempt. I play because "I want to toss fireballs", "I want to kill monsters", or "I want to create a freakin world". If the game doesn't feel believable, all the game balance in the world won't save it.
I agree. Complex tasks like spellcasting, for example. We've never had anyone, aside from spellcasters, use concentration checks before, just their roll with x or y penalty or bonus. I may be misunderstanding your meaning, though.
I tend to keep realism and game play separate. My opinion, of course, buy if you can suspend disbelief that dragons exist, you can suspend disbelief that spells exist and require concentration - perhaps even that mundanes can have powers as they progress, as well.
You get it. My telekinetic mutation has them attempt a will save if someone tries to disrupt their concentration. Monsters with that trait should have to make concentration saves too.
Lol wanking
You're not supposed to laugh when you're doing that. If you are, something has gone horribly wrong.
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Lol wankingYou're not supposed to laugh when you're doing that. If you are, something has gone horribly wrong.
Or horribly awesome :D
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Another good thing about 5E: although it seems you are skill starved, there are fewer skills, you can try any skill check, and fighters aren't shafted with hardly two skills to rub together.
The minimum number of skills any character can have is four, two from a list from your class, and two from your background. But you choose your background without restriction, and can swap these skills if you want.
Out of the twelve classes, rogues have four from a list, rangers have three from a list, bards can choose any three they like, and all the other nine classes have two from their list. It doesn't feel like you've got the short end of the skill stick like you do in PF. You don't have to worry about whether your build has high or low Int, because there are no adjustments to the number of skills you have based on Int.
So it doesn't feel like your dumb fighter is pointless outside combat, because his skills are as good as nearly everyone else's.
What makes Advantage / Disadvantage work so well in 5e, is that it's used in place of more complex arithmetic, no circumstantial +2/+5, -2/-5 etc.If I were to add advantage/disadvantage to Pathfinder, I'd still prefer it a uniform numeric bonus/penalty that stacks rather than a fortune/pugwampi effect. That would eliminate a lot of the issues with the mechanic while still providing the benefit of a simplistic way to track and calculate circumstantial bonuses/penalties.
For example, every advantage grants a +2 circumstance bonus whereas every disadvantage grants a -2 penalty. Since the number remains the same, you only need to count the number of advantages/disadvantages and multiply by 2.
4e advantage was always a flat +2 circumstance bonus I believe. It applied to flanking, attacking a prone opponent, attacking an opponent that can't see you, etc. Similar to 5e I believe it did not stack with itself for multiple advantages from different circumstances. I believe rogues sneak attacked on any advantage situation.
Easily stealable for pathfinder.
After having a couple more sessions gone through, the initial suspension of disapproval is gone. I feel like I can come back to this thread with a clear head and more insight.
The Good
- Bounded Accuracy; This is highly opinionated, but the ability for low level enemies to remain a threat is awesome. It's also pretty awesome when as a group with good tactics and some luck you can take down an enemy that would be beyond your challenge rating. However where this really shines is in a certain simplification that comes with it.
- BAB replaced by Proficiency; it looks bad, but it's actually good. With proficiency being the main divider, a person can generally hit with a weapon that they've trained in regardless of their class. However a wizard won't be normally proficient in the weapons that a fighter thus won't hit as well and a fighter won't normally be proficient in hitting with a wand. The main attraction to this is that one doesn't have to constantly boost a skill to remain competent in it; although I feel that this is because of a synergy with bounded accuracy.
- Action Economy; I love the way they handle it. "Full-Attack" is a thing of the past. A character can move between attacks with having to pick up a feat. You can push things out of the way or close a door as part of your movement (instead of such things being relegated a standard action) which means you can still attack or do some other action. Standing up uses half of your move, which means you can still move and perform an action in the same round (Which can prevent the infinite trip, although I suppose you could make a feat to do such as a bonus action/swift action). Overall it feels very dynamic and combat looks cooler. Also fighters get boosted as the ones who can attack most, and other classes get bonus actions (swift actions) that class specific which I think is cool.
- Feats and lack of Feats; Many of the things that are considered feat tax are inherent to an adventurer. No need for Weapon Finesse because finesse is a weapon property. No need for Spring Attack because you can move before, after, and between attacks (although leaving a threatened square still provokes). Also one can wield two weapons just fine. However what feats there are, are awesome. They do multiple things and make you feel like you really got something.
- Character Generation: Races, Classes, and Background. I like how they did the races, making them actually feel different and have more life in them. For the most part, they remain true to their origins but it still feels more open and inclusive to other concepts than the previous races. This is reflected in the mechanics as well as the fluff, with no penalizing ability scores and different sub-races available. Classes feel more alive and have better protected niches and the best part is archetypes built right in, I love the option for them to take from a list of appropriate items. And then there's background, a skill and some items that tie your character into the world. 5E Backgrounds are quite superior to Pathfinder's traits which seem too small, unimportant, yet gimicky to try and get power gamers to roleplay. Although I'm not too fond of the inspiration which is anothe Advantage / Disadvantage mechanic.
The Bad
- Advantage / Disadvantage - This simplification seems like a cool idea at first, and can save a lot of time. There is a huge cost however. They've embraced the idea so much they've given up entirely any other modifiers, and that means everything is advantage and disadvantage. EVERYTHING. They don't stack, but they cancel out, regardless of how overwhelming something is. Also everyone is trying to find advantage or disadvantage. Even with that there's still the chance to fail on advantage or for someone to get high rolls with a disadvantage. Sometimes quick static bonuses and penalties are just better, and this editions uncompromising war against them creates a frustrating system that bases too much around luck.
Also critical hits auto-confirm and with an advantage there are twice as many critical hits (or more).
- Unshackled Magic - Along with unshackling martials from full attack potholes, they also unshackled casters. Yes, they made a vast number of spells into concentration which prevents a single caster from stacking spells on himself, or anyone else. People forget that non-casters rely on magic as often as the caster does. In fact, playing in a game with casters and no magic items does not weaken the caster... it makes them a god! So how is magic unshackled? Casters no longer worry about spell interruption from casting right in front of sword wielder's face. Cantrips are now quite a bit stronger (hello d8 and d10) and raise in power as the wizard levels up. These are just the infinite spells, but let's not forget that wizards get their spells back from a short rest as well. Which really just means they buffed up the first level, yet higher level spells are still... Well anyway.
- Dicey Death - Screw Advantage/Disadvantage. Maybe this is just a HotDQ thing, but even low CR encounters almost killed the party quite often. I've got six kobolds, but they get advantage on the players almost all the time, because of swarm. Advantage means twice the chance of a critical hit. Also these auto-confirm, which means that AC doesn't reduce the chance of a critical hit at all. So on every roll there's a about a 10% chance that these kobolds will crit and do 2d4+2 damage, with six attacks in one turn that's a lot of damage. You're a douche in 5E if you throw an ambush against 1st level characters they'd never survive. More so if you tossed a rogue in (that 2d8+2d6+3 damage would be a character ender).
- The actual proficiency bonus - It starts at a +2 and ends at +6. What this means is that you'll forever be a slave to your dice. With a d20 roll, that +2 only feels like a circumstance bonus. More so when you realize how little it does for you. That's the difference between a guy who knows how to use a sword and one who doesn't in this game. In 3.5, a fighter using a sword (BAB +1, If WF +1) vs a commoner (NWP -4) is a 5 or 6 depending on weapon focus. This may have been better if they just made it a static +6 throughout the game. If you're going for BOUNDED ACCURACY, that would be it. Fighters get more attacks, etc. You could even have made it to where fighters can specialize in a weapon and bump that to +9 or something.
What to Canabalize:
* Action Economy: An easy fix, it just means allowing movements between attacks and having certain actions (such as getting up from prone) instead just use up movement.
* Combining Attack Bonus, Saves, and Skills into Proficiencies: This means no BAB, but warriors should get a second attack at level 5. Instead of their lousy +2 to +6 bonus based on level, I will use a static +3 for trained, +6 for proficient, and +9 for expertise. Characters have a number of things they can be trained in and proficient in, however 1st level characters probably shouldn't be +9.
* Backgrounds, definitely adds flavor, won't use the inspiration pool though.
I love what they've done for the Rogue. I'm playing one at lvl5 right now, and was planning to take an opening shot with my bow, then close with the rapier. But I've been able to use Cunning Action to shoot, move, and hide all in the same turn, so long as the terrain allows it.
I like a lot of stuff, Advantage/Disadvantage, Concentration to prevent people from getting too crazy prepared for a fight with buffs, and so on. But I feel most of it works for 5e and would be very difficult to put into PF.
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No need for Spring Attack because you can move before, after, and between attacks (although leaving a threatened square still provokes)
No, in 5th ed it isn't leaving a threatened square that provokes, it's leaving a creatures reach that provokes.
No need for a 5-foot step, more dynamic battlefield because you can move around opponents as long as you don't leave their reach, and the equivalent of flanking doesn't require the flankers to be in exactly opposite squares.
So if a Rogue goes into hiding while still within reach, sort of, they can initiate Continuing Threat without creating an attack of opportunity?
Continuing threat is a feat I invented where a Rogue can go into hiding and as long as he or she stays hidden the flank continues. It reflects how another attack could come from anywhere.