D&D Q&A: Skills & Proficiencies

Earlier this week it was revealed that skills would be part of the default game (yay!), and we even got to see the current roster (yay…). This week’s Questions & Answers follwup sheds a bit more light on the skill list, how proficiencies work, and if/how you can pick more up.

The skill list is mostly fine, though a few like Perception and Search could stand to be combined (just swap out Wisdom and Intelligence depending on the circumstance), and I can easily see something like Drive being useful if a character wants to use a chariot, like in Eberron or Dark Sun.

This is not a big deal since according to the article they will provide advice on adding, removing, and/or changing them, as well as skills based on backgrounds or story elements. They are even considering an alternate rule that allows you to create a skill using a short phrase, which seems very much like FATE‘s aspects and 13th Age‘s backgrounds, so I both approve and prefer that model.

When I originally read this article I felt that the proficiency bonus was a promising idea, because if attacks and skills had the same range of bonuses that it would be really easy to make one set of DC’s for use in and outside of combat. Additionally an established range of bonuses would make it easier to determine what the range of DC’s in general should be (probably not up to 35).

However I have since read the latest packet where the proficiency bonus is implemented, and I am not impressed with it; the bonus is not only based on your overall character level, but it uniform across the board.

This means that two characters with the same proficiency will have the same bonus throughout the campaign, differentiated perhaps only by ability score (which will ultimately account for less than half of the overall bonus, anyway). Even worse is if you pick up a proficiency later, as it is immediately set to your level-bonus, so a fighter can go from having no knowledge about magical things, to having comprehensive knowledge of it in an instant.

I, as well as many others I am sure, would rather have characters make an actual choice between increasing a skill or choosing a new one instead of having one bonus. The range of the bonus is fine, but a player should choose which one(s) to increase over time so that you get to see your character improve through deliberate choice. Also add something like skill powers to the mix.

DDN Q&A: Skills

If you were wondering why skills were largely jettisoned in the most recent playtest packet, I guess it is to…streamline the game? If you were also wondering why lores were kept (and the bonus drastically inflated), it is because a lot of the players apparently missed being able to be an expert in a field of knowledge…?

Right.

I am serious: they kept asking what their characters would know, so the solution was to give them a non-scaling bonus to a couple of checks, which at
a whopping +10 is less of a bonus, and more of a guarantee, so I guess it
accomplishes their mission of streamlining the game since players will not even
need to ask.

You know what I miss? Being able to make meaningful decisions when building my character. 4th Edition gave us more control, especially since you could pick up training in any skill by using Skill Training or most multiclass feats. So if you wanted to, you could easily have a fighter that knew some stuff about magic, or was at least competent in social situations. Want your illusionist to be good at lying and sneaking? An easy two feats, at least one of which might give you something else like Sneak Attack.

As refreshing as this was, 5th Edition made it even better…for while anyway: you got to pick any four skills you wanted. No feats, no variant class features, anything goes. With this Josh was able to easily make a thug-type wizard that could intimidate people and sneak around pretty well. Given the lack of choices elsewhere in the bigger picture it was not much, but it was something. Now? Aside from spell selection he is virtually identical to every other evoker out there.

Personally I think that most groups want skills in some capacity. It is not like most of them are terribly complicated. Well, maybe when you are trying to jump; I can never remember the formula for that. Anyway, basic rules for skills should be the default. If you do not want them, then a sidebar or module can give you guidelines on how to adjust DCs. Same thing if you want more elaborate skills, or other ways to use them.

D&DN Q&A: Math Check

Earlier this week it was revealed that—for now anyway—attack bonuses sans ability score mods would cap at +6, while skills and saves can, in specialized cases anyway, hit +12. The reasons given for this are that attack rolls tend to be made much more frequently, the range for Armor Class is narrower, and the consequences for failing to hit something less severe.

I agree with the first part. In my experience attack rolls eat up the majority share of dice rolling compared to skill checks, especially if you just count the meaningful ones. I also agree with the narrower Armor Class range, as they want to avoid the issues of the past two editions where numbers scale so that
you can throw bigger numbers at other, bigger numbers.

What I do not agree with are the stakes of the attack roll compared to the ability check. Mind you I am not disagreeing that the disparity exists: a bad Stealth check can bring an encounter down on your head, while a failed Athletics check and bring your head down onto the ground, but in both cases chances are you will survive. Saving throws on the other hand are a different beast. In older editions a single botched roll could prove fatal, or at least snowball you towards a total party kill. What makes these worse is that if a monster has got ’em, they can often use them whenever they please.

Reduce the DCs and boost the saving throw bonuses all you want, but you will still end up with anticlimactic character deaths because for some reason monsters just gotta have their arbitrary instant-death attacks, and little else from their mythological roots.

One of these gorgons does not belong, but that is okay I guess.

While I do not like magic in Dungeons & Dragons, I felt that 4th Edition at least eased up on it a bit by making the attack roll based on your level, Intelligence modifier, and bonuses from feats and implements (which could be easily ignored if you used inherent bonuses or your DM dropped monster defenses by a point here and there). This allowed you to easily multiclass into wizard and, assuming your magic implement is up to par for your level, have pretty good odds of it all working out.

The plan is to roll how magic saving throws are determined back two editions, making them depend on the spell’s level. At the start of the game it does not affect things much, but over time it will end up equating for half or more of the save DC. I guess the idea is to encourage wizards to use high-level slots for offensive magic, burning lower-level slots on utility stuff. I think that encouraging casters to use certain slots for certain spells is indicative of an issue, but what about multiclassed spellcasters that are fighting high-level monsters without high-level magic? What about the 5 to 15-minute work day?

D&DN Q&A: Feats, Feats, And More Feats

I mentioned earlier this week that I am getting to the point where I think that feats should just be dropped from the game, and this week’s Questions & Answers column does nothing to dissuade me from this stance. Part of it is that classes will get a variable number of opportunities to boost their already easily “cappable” ability scores, but most of it is the feat philosophy of “you need to only take one feat to be good at a certain thing”.

This is similar to an issue I had in 3rd Edition regarding multiclassing, where you could pick up a level in wizard and spontaneously learn every cantrip and a bunch of 1st-level spells, or nab a level in fighter and know how to wear every
form of armor and wield most weapons. What makes it even more bizarre is that
you do not need to know anything about either of these things beforehand.

I get that the pair of example feats have not been “developed or edited”, but why does Great Weapon Master require no prior knowledge of how to use any weapons at all? Why does Heavy Armor Master only require that you know how to wear medium armor. According to the article you will need to wait until 4th-level to pick a feat, but does it make any sense at all that a wizard of all classes can become a “master” of big weapons, or a dwarven wizard can be a “master” of heavy armor?

If a player wants to become a master with two-handed weapons and/or armor, then should that not require access to a class that is iconically good with weapons and/or armor? Like, if a wizard wants to get better at weapons she should pick up some fighter levels, which would ideally allow her to pick from a suite of weapon features to more gradually emphasize her training. Same goes for the reverse, where a rogue could dabble in illusions and the like by snagging a few wizard levels.

Of course this approach would require an overhaul of the classes, giving them more options at more levels (or some, as is the case with most of them so far). It would also require spellcasting that remains viable even if you take only a few levels, unlike how it worked in 3rd Edition where in almost every case you had to have full spellcasting. These would both be welcome changes, as I think it would allow for more organic, interesting concepts that editions before 4th made it difficult if not impossible to realize.

D&DN Q&A: Cosmology & Monsters

I have mentioned several times now that the best approach for handling the default cosmology is to not give as a default one; give us a toolbox that can effectively construct the cosmologies from official campaign settings, but make it very easy for us to build our own. I guess the other solution is to somehow design a cosmology that can be used in any setting without any changes.

I am not sure how this would work given how different the Great Wheel is from the World Axis, which are both very different from Eberron‘s orbiting planes, all of which have more variety than Dark Sun’s 3-4 planes. I have heard a couple people mention simply having to remove existing options, which sounds
like you are still making changes, but also does not account for orbiting planes.

The second and third questions I am pretty much fine with. Having a canned description is handy for both the first encounter and potential inspiration for describing how it does things. Bonus points if the description matches the art. As for stat blocks, yeah, I get that humanoids tend to have more varied roles, but there have been some variant monsters with some interesting twists. The umber hulk had three entries in Monster Vault: the basic model with two claws and a confusing gaze, one that focused more on its gaze attacks, and one that could grab you and tunnel away.

Of course this could be solved by giving Dungeon Masters alternate powers, and ideas for how to do other things in line with the various pillars. For example I could see an umber hulk snatching an ally and trying to escape as part of a botched skill check during the Exploration phase, or even have one bust out of a wall and try to kidnap someone as part of an added trouble during combat (which sounds a bit Dungeon World-y).

D&DN Q&A: Legendary Difficulty

Earlier this week we got our first glimpse at 5th Edition’s kind-of answer to 4th Edition’s solo monster. Understandably this raised a lot of questions, some of which are covered by this week’s Questions & Answers column.

One of the traits about legendary creatures is that they can have lairs that not only are capable of independently taking their own actions, but can expand on the out-of-turn actions that the legendary monster can perform. In the example black dragon, the pools of water in its lair could automatically surge forth at a specific initiative count, potentially dragging characters underwater. The dragon also gained the option to spend legendary actions while underwater to heal itself.

This lead to questions about a monster’s XP value, specifically as to why it only had one when such a dragon encountered outside of its lair would be at a greater disadvantage than one inside. The column states that they will “probably” present two XP values for encounter-building, but it sounds like it would be pretty a simple matter to just attach an XP value to the lair.

That being said these “lair” rules could be great for handling environments for any kind of creature, and it would be a wasted opportunity to just attach them to legendary creatures: guards armed with crossbows could take shots at you on a catwalk, a planar gate could randomly unleash destructive energies (or vomit forth monsters), and rocks might fall from a ceiling while fighting an earth elemental underground.

There was an article awhile back that talked about making some monsters like the medusa into unique creatures by default. My reaction was one of confusion as Dungeons & Dragons is not particularly known for sticking close to an established mythology, mentioning that gorgons are metallic bulls, basilisks have like, six legs, hydras come in a variety of forms, and depending on your campaign setting minotaurs might be a true-breeding race, blessed cultists, or something else entirely. Really the only unique monster that I am aware of that is not a god is the tarrasque.

As I also said before I think that WotC should focus on interesting, useful monsters and let DMs decide when/if they want to make a monster unique because it is way easier to power up a single monster than to strip away a lot of stuff if you, say, want a nation of monsters. Of course, I also think that they need to bring back elite and solo monsters, because I do not believe that a monster that does not exceed an arbitrary size category need be “legendary” in order to hold its own against a handful of people.

Finally, artifacts. It was briefly mentioned that artifacts could make a creature legendary. While I am fine with this, as there are plenty of instances where a magic item makes someone incredibly powerful, there are also examples of people being capable of seemingly magical feats of awesomeness, and it is disappointing that after 4th Edition made it possible for “mundane” classes to remain viable at any level that to be legendary you either must be made of magic, capable of using magic, and/or have a magic item.

D&D Next Q&A: Weapon Dice, Sorcerer, Warlock, & Feats

NOTE: Phaezen and Sky Roy cleared up a huge misconception on my part. I had assumed that two-weapon fighting reduced the damage dice on both weapons and removed any ability score bonuses, to boot. It turns out that while both attacks take an attack penalty, only the light weapon loses out on the damage bonus, so it is not as bad as I had originally thought. In that case my only criticism is that I think that the attack penalty could be reduced a bit (maybe -1/-1), or at least removed for the primary attack. Seems like a good stress-test opportunity.

Two-weapon fighting in Dungeons & Dragons has almost always been a bad idea. I do not think it was even possible in Basic (barring houserules), but according to 2nd Edition’s Combat & Tactics you could try attack with two weapons, you just took a -2 to the first attack and a -4 to the second. 3rd Edition kind of kept this model, starting you out at a whopping -6 and -10 to attack, which could be reduced to -2 and -2 through the use of lighter weapons and feats.

4th Edition made it more universally applicable through the use of feats and its power system. The Two-Weapon Fighting feat gave you a +1 bonus to damage when you made attacks while wielding two weapons, I guess assuming that you worked the other one in there at some point. Simple, to the point, and stacked with Weapon Focus, though understandably too simple for some, which is why it was nice that several classes–namely barbarians, fighters, and rangers–had access to at-will multi-attack powers (though many higher level attack powers let you hit multiple things, too).

The current take on it in Next is that you have to be wielding a light weapon, you take a -2 penalty to both attack rolls, and you have to use the light weapon’s damage die for both attacks. Oh, you also do not get to add any bonuses. So, as an example, let us say that a fighter with a Strength of 16 wants to hit an orc with a longsword and short sword: she makes both attacks at a net +2, and if she hits both times will deal an average of 7 damage.

What if the fighter just ditches the short sword for a shield? She makes her one attack at a +4, deals an average of 7.5 damage, and has a slightly improved Armor Class. Even if she goes with the short sword her damage is only reduced by a half-point, but she is still way more accurate. If she decides to on a full-offensive and pulls out a greatsword? Her attack bonus still stays at +4, but damage improves to 9.5.

Of course none of this assumes feats, of which three out of the Two-Weapon Fighter specialty are directly applicable:

• Dual Wielding lets you use any one-handed weapon when making your double-attack, which can improve the average damage from 7 to 9 (assuming two longswords, here). You still have the penalty though, so you are spending a feat to make less accurate, slightly less damaging attacks.
• Two-Weapon Defense gives you a slight Armor Class boost, which means that with Dual Wielding you are now doing better-than-longsword damage, with the same Armor Class, but are still less accurate.
• Eventually you can get Two-Weapon Strike, which lets you make one attack with advantage. This is a pretty good payoff because you are also making the attack at your full bonus, and you get to add damage bonuses. The drawback is that you have to spend a feat on Dual Wielding and wait until 9th-level.

I was not a fan of having to plan towards a concept in 3rd Edition, and it is because of this that in my last playtest packet feedback that I voiced by dissatisfaction that a player wanting to wield two weapons is worse off in every way–accuracy, damage, and defense–unless she spends feats. Eventually being able to make a very accurate attack is nice, but that is at least eight levels down the road; in the mean time you will be much better off using a sword and shield, or a two-handed weapon.

My proposal was to allow a character with two weapons that attacks the same target to roll both damage dice, keep the highest result, and add her damage bonus. This makes it so that you get more reliable damage, without exceeding what a character with one weapon can do (or doing more than a character with a two-hander). You could do this as part of a single attack roll, or require that both attacks hit in order to gain the benefit (which has the advantage that the dual-wielder gets another chance at landing an attack, though she will not always get to roll extra dice).

The problem is that this only works against a single target. What about hitting multiple targets? In this case I was thinking of a mechanic where the character can divvy up damage to two or more targets, which would again prevent the dual-wielder from out-damaging the two-hander. This could also require the use of Martial Damage Dice, like the monk’s Flurry of Blows, as the benefit is that the fighter gets to make extra attacks to stack damage, instead of rolling multiple dice and taking the best result.

As for the sorcerer and warlock, I still see no reason why the dragon-sorcerer cannot be a heavy-hitting melee-ish spellcaster type. I really dug the sorcerer mechanic, and hope that future iterations retain the “manifest traits as you cast more spells” shtick. Frankly if they are going to make a warrior mage, why not make a warmage tradition?