This dynamic where combat and magic level up to absurd/incredible heights, but characters are otherwise unable to substantially improve their knowledge of the world? Where the wizard can stop time itself and the knight can slay gods, but the rogue is only marginally better at picking the lock on the backdoor of the local tavern?Yeah, the game is a blast. Lock in what you enjoy and play it for all its worth. Not only do I enjoy taking characters into truly epic spheres of play, but I find the 5E dynamic - where you can trivially dispatch celestial titans and fight your way to the throne of Asmodeus, but knocking down a wooden door? Man, that's still a tough ask! - to be kind of ridiculous.Į6? Sure. Between the two this is almost certainly preferable.īut, frankly, I hate it. Lock the target numbers in with bounded accuracy and unlock Smaug-tier monsters by increasing the # of hit points monsters have and the amount of damage characters can do. In 4th Edition, that took the form of leveling the whole world up with the PCs: All the numbers got bigger, but the game world didn't actually shift.ĥth Edition decided to go the other direction: Just don't let the numbers increase.
Starting with 4th Edition, the designers have tried to square expectations and mechanics. The one exception is combat: They still want to play Aragorn and Conan, but they want to be able to solo Smaug. And when the mechanics of the game have tried to push them into a truly epic tier of play they have mostly just kept playing Aragorn and Conan while getting cranky that the high-level mechanics are returning "nonsensical" results. But the significant majority of the fanbase has mostly been interested in playing Aragorn and Conan (i.e., fairly gritty fantasy heroes rooted pretty firmly in reality). So for most of its history, D&D has held out this idea of characters advancing into truly epic tiers of play. Same thing in 3rd Edition, where E6 resonated with a goodly portion of the fanbase (and probably would have resonated with even more if they'd known about it). But those earliest players also talk about how Greg Svenson was really smart because he never allowed his character to level up high enough to get retired. If you look all the way back to Arneson's Blackmoor, the game had a designed structure of zero-to-hero-to-king, with characters eventually fighting vast wars for the fate of the empire before being retired as the next best thing to legendary demigods. To expand on my previous thought: Deep in its DNA, D&D has this kind of fundamental mismatch between expectation and design that goes back to its very earliest days. It dramatically flattened the curve of the game. One thing that this brings up that instead of adding +1s and +2s onto rolls, they did Advantage (roll 2 dice, take the highest) and Disadvantage (roll 2 dice, take the lowest) and how they interact (any number of advantages cancel out any number of disadvantages, and they don't stack with themselves).
Furthermore, gaining levels grants the characters new capabilities, which go much farther toward making your character feel different than simple numerical increases." Characters can fight tougher monsters not because they can finally hit them, but because their damage is sufficient to take a significant chunk out of the monster's hit points likewise, the character can now stand up to a few hits from that monster without being killed easily, thanks to the character's increased hit points. Instead, we represent the difference in characters of various levels primarily through their hit points, the amount of damage they deal, and the various new abilities they have gained. "The basic premise behind the bounded accuracy system is simple: we make no assumptions on the DM's side of the game that the player's attack and spell accuracy, or their defenses, increase as a result of gaining levels.
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