The Dice that Bind: Bounded Accuracy in D&D Next

Welcome to your doom!

Wizards of the Coast has an article up about a game mechanic/rubric/system that they are evaluating for inclusion in D&D Next. The system, called “bounded accuracy” seeks to curtail some of the negative side-effects of player advancement.

In past editions of D&D, as characters leveled up, they automatically gained numerous skills and abilities. Though this makes sense from a “practice makes perfect / what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” sort of thought line, the way it was implemented became a bit broken as characters reached higher levels.

In earlier editions of D&D, low level characters would be reasonably challenged by a hostile encounter with the city watch, or an attempt to scale a cliff. However, as they leveled, these challenges would remain challenging for some while becoming dice-negatingly easy for others, depending on where the players chose to put their points as they leveled. To keep things challenging, GMs had to scale the difficulty of such challenges along with the player’s growing power. City watch officers were laid off in droves and replaced with elite squads of psi-ninjas, and freak hurricanes would appear out of the blue sky any time the characters ventured near a mountainside or city wall... all to maintain a sense of excitement. This mutual power-escalation also often caused a fracturing of player engagement as different characters began specializing in different skills. This resulted in encounters in which the player with the skillz would be the only participant while the others adopted an “Its not even worth trying” stance, choosing instead to just sit things out and comment on their companion’s performance.

Based on my reading of the article, bounded accuracy seeks to mitigate this spreading power creep without removing the rewards gained by leveling. It doesn’t eliminate the power gains, but rather condenses them, so that small bonuses are more meaningful and so that those without bonuses can still participate with some hope of success. According to WOTC, the bounded accuracy system will allow low level characters/monsters to remain a potential threat even against much higher level opponents.

In past editions of D&D, a low level creature couldn’t even make contact in a fight with high level opponents, because the gap between attack rolls and AC made such attacks mechanically impossible. A 10th level player could reasonably decimate an entire continent of kobolds, even if they all banded together to fight back. Zombie hordes were just not that scary past the levels where just a few zombies would suffice. Bounded accuracy seeks to correct that by replacing the gains in attack and defense rolls with gains in hit points, thus allowing the little guys to get in their punches while keeping the big guy resilient. Under this system, if you got enough kobolds in on the action, it could mean death by a thousand tiny fists, even for a badass level character.

The folks over at Obsidian Portal voiced their opinion on the matter in this week’s Haste podcast. The OP guys really hone in on the bounded accuracy’s implications in combat. They raise an excellent point that such strength in numbers threats pose other problems under the D&D rules, specifically that resolving tons of little attacks takes tons of time and drags a game to a halt.

I agree that running a great orcish pigpile might not work very well. However, I think the new system presents a tantalizing opportunity for long, running-battle encounters. The heroes might not have to face a whole horde of low-level baddies at once for it to be a challenge. If the GM sends in the bad guys in waves, he/she can keep the encounter’s scope manageable while  creating a slowly building challenge for their heroes.

W is for Warfare

Every epic adventure needs to have at least one equally epic battle. Often coming at or near an adventure story’s climax, such a battle often serves to highlight the full realization of a hero’s badassery. Battles serve as an occasion for great speeches, massed charges and desperate last stands.

Working epic battles into a game like D&D is surprisingly tricky. The mass combat associated with such events is an ill fit a tabletop RPG, which is designed for playing out the activities of small groups of adventurers. Incorporating a cast of thousands can quickly bog down the game if you treat that cast as though it is made up of characters.

The trick to effectively incorporating battle scenes into your game is to treat the battle not as a conflict of supporting characters, but as a sort of dynamic dungeon. The battle is setting, not cast. The 3.5 Edition supplement, Heroes of Battle sums up the best way to do this as “think big, play small” Focus on the specific missions given to the PCs while the battle rages around them in the background. Their success or failure may change the dynamic of that battle-turned dungeon, but the focus is squarely on the heroes.

The D-Day scene from the movie, Saving Private Ryan provides an example of this sort of framing. Though on one level, the scene is about the allied landings in Normandy, it is essentially about the action of John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his small unit of men attempting to complete their small part of that mission. Their objectives are to get off the beach, scale the cliffs and clear the enemy positions on top. All of these things, which can be accomplished by a small group contribute to the success of the whole. The artillery barrages, machine gun sweeps of the beach and the carnage all around become the setting against which their actions take place.

Another thing to consider when working a battle into a game like D&D is the way a high fantasy setting changes the nature of warfare. Though D&D is probably most similar to a medieval setting, it adds things like magic and monsters to the mix. A massed unit of sorcerers hurling fireballs, or a flight of griffin riders could very-well make mincemeat of units relying on mass formations and other tactics used in actual medieval and renaissance combat. Tactics closer to those used by contemporary armies might actually be more appropriate. Fireballings could take the place of artillery barrages and wingriders could launch strafing runs of the field.

The mortality rate of such a fantasy battle is likely to be an even stranger beast. The presence of clerics with the ability to magically heal the wounded would certainly have a major effect. Ranks of troops might rotate off the front line as they get injured to be healed before working their way back up through the queue. Clerics, protected by powerful abjuration spells might pick their way unscathed through the ranks of the dead and dying in an attempt to save as many as possible, perhaps even to the point of raising fallen generals from the dead, or in the case of evil clerics, raising the dead soldiers of their enemy to turn against their own.
I’ve been thinking a lot about large-scale warfare a lot as my campaign seems headed towards its own set-piece battle. Have any of my fellow GMs run this sort of thing before? If so, what worked well for you? What traps would you recommend avoiding?

The Rule of Fives!

First off, L.G. Smith over at Bards and Prophets tipped me off to a new blogfest that looks to be right up my alley.

However, since this blog makes my favorite game pretty apparent, I think that I will instead post about some awesome game night alternatives. Keep an eye out for Monday’s post.

So, last night was game night and my group was properly lured into a sense of complacency, having just killed a big ol’ dragon, so what did I do? I threw a rampaging horde of orc barbarians at them! YAY!

Anyway, I had really been wanting to try my hand at running a defensive encounter, similar to this one. In the typical D&D format, players are usually the invaders, breaking in to the homes of unsuspecting monsters who are just trying to mind their own business and eat a few villagers. Well, I decided to turn the table on my players, giving them two days warning of an approaching horde of orcs. They had to prep their defenses and hold them as long as they can.

Now, as implied by the word “horde”, this encounter included a LOT of combatants, which has the potential to severely bog down the play rotation as the GM has to resolve every roll made by every creature not controlled by a player.

To make my job easier and keep the pace snappy, I devised a mass-combat system, which I have dubbed the “Rule of Fives!” Now, five seems to be a magic number for DMs. There are a variety of planning techniques based around fives, from the five-room dungeon to the myriad of applications of the five-by-five technique. My Rule of Fives, however, is different.

In summary, this rule takes the base hit points of every NPC and monster, and makes it a multiple of five. More importantly, whenever damage is dealt to that NPC or monster, it happens in multiples of 5, with each 5 being recorded as a check-mark on my combat tracker (i.e. 1-5 hp = ✓, 6-10 hp = ✓✓ and so on.) When the tally marks reach the total hit points of the creature divided by five (e.g. ✓✓✓✓✓ for a 25 hp monster), it dies.

The Rule of Fives simplifies the mental math every GM must churn out down to the quick and easy task of counting by fives. However, it still accounts for variation in the amount of damage dealt by different attacks (i.e. a fireball can kill in one hit, while an arrow is unlikely to do so.) When implementing the rule last night, I combined it with a couple other shortcuts to speed things along. The first was my random attack roll sheet I mentioned back in April. The second is a simple mechanic, whereby NPC minions only deal a single ✓ of damage to each other when making basic attacks. Big spell effects are different, but this rule works well for arrow shots and sword hits. This also helps emphasize the importance of the players. They are the heroes. They deal the most damage, and they can dramatically swing the tide of battle.

Anyway, the system worked beautifully last night, and we got through an entire combat session at the players’ first defensive line, and the group killed almost 20 baddies in an hour. If I had hand rolled everything, I doubt we would have made it through a single round.

You know what? three can suck it, five is the new magic number!