The buzz word is ‘Bounded Accuracy’. Plate mail has AC18. A adult dragon has skin as hard as Plate armour so it’s AC is also 18. You’re BAB (now called proficiency) still goes up, but way slower, capping at (from memory) +6 at level 20 (As opposed to +20 for a fighter) before you add any magic item/feat etc bonuses.
I really like it. No more, "Well, it’s CR15, an average fighter at this level is going to be rolling at +15 (or whatever) to hit, also it’s a large dragon, so that’s going to drop it’s AC, so we’re going to have to give it a completely arbitrary +20 Natural armour bonus to stop them hitting it on a 2+.
an AC of 22, 500HP, a breath weapon that averages 90 points of damage, Dragon Fear, and melee area attacks that will splatter a first-level pc.
An adult as I originally mentioned (stats are in the Phandelver intro set) is not quite as powerful, but will comfortably murder any first level party.
I ran through the Starter Set mission on Roll20 with some friends and we all agreed that we enjoy the new system. It is a breath of fresh air as well as a return to old school aspects. It can be played with a grid, but it doesn’t have to.
It also has the advantage of making lower level creatures viable as mooks against higher level PC’s.
An Orc under previous systems has almost no chance of damaging a significantly higher level PC unless he rolls a natural 20. Under the new system, they are still threats who can do damage.
As DeptfordX said, nothing. In fact, the system is designed to allow this. An army of 1st level archers can drive off that dragon. Specifically, they’ll be hitting at +5 (+1 Dex, +2 proficiency bonus, +2 Archery style) so hitting the dragon on a roll of 17+ or a 20% chance. If you’ve got a force of 500 archers then that dragon will take 100 dice of damage per round and will last two rounds.
Don’t forget the Dragonfear. 95% of those archers are going to fail a DC 21 Wisdom check and be disadvantaged on their rolls. Which i have heard mechanically (haven’t run the numbers myself) equates to a -5 on the roll.
That cuts their firepower massively, then it’s a few rounds of Fire breath and Wing stomps and the survivors of the 5% who made their Dragonfear check are running for the hills ,while the remaining 95%, being too scared to run (part of the Frightened condition) are being finished off.
That’s not as powerful as you think. Notice the limited duration and the post-effect immunity. After 1 minute max, victims are immune for the next 24 hours. Basically, the archers flee from fear, then reform a minute later now immune to the fear. Against an army, dragonfear primarily lets the dragon escape.
If the “disadvantage” mechanic works like Johnny LA describes (reroll and take the worst), then the amount of penalty it’s equivalent to depends on how likely the roll was to begin with. It’ll turn a 50% chance into a 25% chance, which is like a -5, but it’ll have a smaller effect at the ends of the distribution (assuming that there is an end of the distribution, that is): If you have a base 95% chance, then disadvantage will only turn that into approximately a 90% chance, equivalent to a -1. And if you ordinarily have a 1 in 4 chance, disadvantage will turn that into 1 in 16, which works out equivalent to a penalty somewhere in between -3 and -4 (whereas a -5 penalty would make it impossible).
So hitting on a 17 is 1 in 5. So that would make disadvantage 1in 25 right?
So they’re actually doing about 20 dice of damage a round, throw in those who made the save and criticals, let’s call it 25-30 dice a round, and dropping fast as the Dragon murders archers with area attacks.
Got the new PHB. I like it. I won’t be switching my current game to 5th Ed, and probably will run Pathfinder for a long while to come, but I could see myself running 5th Edition at some point.
Yeah. I’m involved in a HackMaster game that remains pretty exciting, and it’s been going for over a year now. Hard to get a game going for over a year anymore. But I’m excited about 5e. It does seem like a blend of OD&D and 3rd edition, with the rough burrs of the older game filed down. I’m actually working on a chargen for the new system, because as relatively rules-lite as the game is, making a chargen less of a big project in general, creating a character still involves a lot of having to hold a finger in multiple spots in the book while you look up your options.
From what I gather, one of the problems with 3/3.5/pathfinder is that you basically had to optimize and power game to be relevant. Certain feats were necessary, stuff to do with prestige classes, I don’t fully understand. But the risk was that if you deviated from optimal, you’d end up being pretty useless at everything.
Seems like the new system with subclasses and limited feats allows customizing your class with real choice and not needing to follow a particular optimal path.
Is the spell memorization all new? I’m only familiar with 2e, which I hated because you had to spell out exactly which spells you memorized entirely. The new system seems to be, for wizards and clerics at least, you memorize your level + your spellcasting stat mod worth of spells, and you can use whatever spell slots you’re granted from that level to cast any of those prepared spells so long as the spell slot meets the minimum level. Lots of spells can be cast as different level spells, where a level 1 attack spell may be 1d6 damage, and casting it as a level 2 is 2d6.
I like the newer system a lot because you can memorize some lesser used spells and it’s not a total waste if it ends up not being useful, because you can always just use the spell slots on magic missile or something else that’s almost always useful. In the old system, you’d rarely go with any sort of niche or situational spell because it was a waste if that situation didn’t end up coming up.
With the caveat that my own power-gaming-fu is relatively weak, optimization seems less high-stakes. Since the advancement and challenge curves are flatter in general, an optimized character’s advantage over a less optimized character will tend to be more marginal.
On the other hand, if DCs and ACs are capped at 30, it seems to me that this makes each +1 all that much more important. But does it if the bonuses and target numbers never get so high that the d20 roll becomes meaningless, as it often was under 3rd edition?
And of course there’s a serious criticism to be made of the system if your roll makes a bigger difference in the outcome than your actual skills.
Yes, the fact that everybody seems to be on what 3rd Edition called a spontaneous casting system now is a great improvement. Actually, I had essentially allowed this in 2nd Edition myself – treat your spell slots as mana that comes not in discrete fungible points but in quantum-like energy levels. But in 5e some classes do have to declare some number of spells prepared (level + casting stat bonus), and from those they can blow quanta of magical energy.
At this point, it seems like it should be relatively easy to pick up using the Starter Set or the online Basic Rules. With the free rules, you can give it a try. What the hell?
My copy is coming in today. I’ve heard it described as AD&D III - a game that might have been if Wizards hadn’t bought out TSR and 3.0 had never happened. This appeals to me. I intend to run a game as soon as my group can settle on a day.
Why do people say everyone is a spontaneous caster in 5e? I don’t have a 3.5 rulebook or a 2e rulebook, but in 5e, Wizards (at least) have a lot more spells in their spellbook than can be prepared in any given day, and they have to select which spells to prepare. I thought that was the opposite of spontaneous casting. Isn’t it how Wizards were in both 2e and 3.5e? (Even 4e kind of tried to simulate this within the AEDU framework IIRC.)
A couple. Play-by-post games are very difficult to maintain, and there have been a lot more aborted attempts than successful ones. Appleciders is running one right now that I think is going pretty well when schedules aren’t conflicting.
If there’s interest, I might be willing to run a game after I’ve had a chance to read through the rules.
Strictly speaking, it’s not the same as what was specifically called Spontaneous Casting in 3e, where you can decide at casting time which of all the spells you know you’re going to cast. But it’s also not the old-fashioned system in which you have to assign a spell to each slot in the morning. When you prepare spells now, you make a sublist of your known spells, the length of which is according to your level and casting stat, and from that smaller list you can essentially do the same thing as spontaneously casting.
If I’m not mistaken, the new system is the same as the one used by the Spirit Shaman, one of the great many spellcasting classes from 3rd edition.
And optimization is certainly less relevant in 5th edition, but then, that’s true whenever a new edition comes out. More optimization will become possible as more books come out, and as people learn the subtle nuances of the existing books. Whether optimization remains less relevant remains to be seen.