384
When it all comes down to a single roll.
(comicpress.socksandpuppets.com)
This comic is part of an ongoing story that might make more sense with full context.
First comic in this story
Previous comic in this story
Next comic in this story
Please be advised that if you use the connect app, it doesn't always correctly parse links to lemmy posts. If they're not working for you, you can follow the whole plotline on my site. (These comics are in reverse chronological order, so start at the end and work backwards.)
I guess if you throw an egregious amount of magical power at a problem it DOES solve it!
I understand WOTC's idea to simplify by making Advantage the primary way to modify rolls, but it runs into a wall pretty quickly: only one effect can help at a time. Therefore you've still got things like Guidance and Bardic Inspiration providing numerical bonuses and the issue WOTC was trying to solve is only mitigated. And occasionally you get things like the above with an easier 30.
On the other hand, our level 12 Bard has +13 to most of his CHA-based skills (+5CHA, 4 Prof, expertise) so rolling 20-25 with just a flat D20 is more common than not. Which means unless the people he's persuading are heroically resistant to charm, he's probably getting his way within reason. Not having level-based scaling really amplifies players into super-human.
I feel what it's really "missing" is the bonus "typing" from previous editions - where you couldn't "stack" bonuses of the same type - so you might have access to a lot of buff spells that give you a flat bonus, but you can't stack them if they're the same general kind of thing...
The reason they moved away from typing all the bonuses (and keywording everything) was "simplicity" - and that does make some sense, but "bounded accuracy" has a built in assumption that you can't stack lots of bonuses...
There's some ways you can house-rule to try and adjust this... but they're pretty significant system changes, so... is it worth doing, or is it better to focus on scenario design to avoid this mattering so much...
I feel it's WotC's intention not to keep stacking bonusses. All the plusses and minusses in earlier editions could really turn a fantasy game into a mathematical slug-fest, and without the stacking bonus that doesn't happen all that much.
But it does fall flat rather quickly for me, as well.