Thursday, October 9, 2014

D&D 5: Rolling Over & Feels Good

There always was an interesting shift between d20 and d100 for skill and task resolution. With d20 it has always been roll-over, and rolling high was a satisfying thing. With d100 it has almost always been roll-under, and rolling low was the goal.

Roll-over proponents point to the fact that rolling high is inherently satisfying, and they have a point. There is a disconnect on the target numbers that tends to blow out the dice's natural range with roll over, or a disassociation with the target numbers where the number you are trying to beat goes down.

Let's say you are doing open-ended roll-over, where you add some number to your roll, and you have to beat an ever-increasing target number. This is the system in D&D 3, where AC or DC was the target, and some monsters had AC values in the 40's and above. Think about that, you need a +20 to-hit to be able to have a chance at hitting these monsters, and all of a sudden, your original promise of a system based on 1-20 target numbers fell by the wayside.

In these systems, AC is always 10+some number, since they are basing the entire system on a 50% chance to hit. D&D 5 continues the roll over system, but it constrains the numbers tightly so nothing can really leave the +10 to hit range, instead of D&D 3 and Pathfinder's +30 and beyond.

The second roll-over system puts an ever-decreasing target number in place and tries to constrain positive numbers. You saw this in AD&D and AD&D 2, where the best to-hit in the world you could get was a 2+ on a 1d20 roll, and again, the plus to-hit was strictly limited to magic item bonuses and  ability scores.

D&D 3 introduced the concept of "level bonus" to to-hit to the d20 landscape, and this has really been with us for the last 15 years as an accepted norm of the system. D&D 4 enshrined this concept, with levels going up to 30 and to-hit bonuses going up to +12 or higher, with positive modifiers being up to +42 or higher.

With such high to-hit modifiers, the original 1-20 range of the die means nothing. There is little random chance, it's just if the designer or DM wants to make the encounter a challenge or not that is the question.

With higher levels, random chance is slowly taken out of the game.

D&D 5 tries to put the genie back in the bottle by limiting math, but this creates a system that has tenuous balance - later feats, combat moves, and items in expansion material could throw the system out of balance quickly - especially a book of high-level magic items with +3 or higher modifiers to-hit. Pretty soon, these will be highly sought-after, and soon enough, required for high-level builds because the designers are now balancing for +3 items.

There is an important game-design point hiding in here. In early editions of D&D, better to-hits were a way to increase a class' damage potential. You did not have any way to do more damage except a better to-hit. In later editions, this was also true, but class' also had built-in ways to do more damage through level-bonuses and special powers, so it meant less and it stacked upon that built-in power curve. In D&D 4, "basic attacks" sucked and were actually looked down upon as "what you did if you couldn't use a power." Yes, D&D 4 was a strange superhero game.

It is all an interesting experiment, and blowing out the d20 dice range is something D&D has been wrestling with ever since level-based increasing to-hit was introduced back in D&D 3. You can design a game where the to-hits are static and do not change, but level just brings increasing power to the table. Adding a "higher-level is a better to-hit" mechanic stacks upon that system, and once you put in a second variable like this, things become very difficult to balance.

You do need to ask yourself the serious question, what do better to-hits do in my game? Are they just for damage capability? Do they stack with other powers to increase their effect even more? Good balance comes from careful consideration.

A lot of game design is pure math, but we have been experiencing another area of "feels good" design in recent years that add powers and abilities on top of that math, which often leads to breakage of the system. "Feel good" designs come primarily from MMOs, where better and better abilities need to be given to players to keep them playing, and eventually nerfed naturally and 'expected' as players level past them, only to have another gee-whiz ability added later to keep the play-addiction cycle going.

There is actually a lot involved, which explains why MMOs constantly wrestle with balance and numbers, and D&D has been so tumultuous over the last three (four if you count D&D 3.5, and five if you count Pathfinder) editions when it came to the subject of balance, math, and keeping random chance meaningful in the game. It's not just the +to-hit, it's multi-attacks, spells, feats, powers, class abilities, and special level-added powers adding to the equation.

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