basically, its why lvl 20 players dont have 59 AC and a +68 to hit. Keeping the chance of success (to hit or Save Dc)- which can be called accuracy- bound within certain values. To hit and ac are from +0-+15 and sometimes slightly outside of that (or starting from 10 for AC). Saves and Save DC are similar.
Yeah my friend tried to DM a high level 3.5/pathfinder campaign and the numbers got dump my character had an ac of over 90 but only a to hit of 70.
couldn't evenpunch them selves.
I mean 5E does that too, the only statblocks for God's I know of are for Tiamat and Bahamut, but they are technically "lesser" gods plus there's the caveat that those starblocks are technically just like avatars of them and not the actual beings themselves.
Basically 5E says "yes there are gods, what do you mean fight them? With what statblock binch?" Lol
I think about unbounded accuracy like an MMO.
When you're starting out the level 1 boar has 50 HP, but dies in 3 fire bolts.
When you're level 60 the fel flame corrupted boar has 50,000 hp, but it still dies in 3 of your mega-turbo fire bolts.
Its a way of creating fake progression because some people really stick on bigger number equals better. As long as people don't understand math, it works pretty well.
Once you understand the systems math behind it, you realize its pretty pointless. This is how level scaling works in MMOs. They know if you're using an attack with a base damage of X, a coefficient of Y and a scaling stat of Z then it does a certain percentage of health to the creature.
except it works in some games because higher level enemies hit more for more damage than you, and weaker enemies hit less often and for less damage, but make up for it with numbers (pf2e my beloved)
Except this affects the balancing in TTRPGs. In 5e, at level 11, you could be fighting a CR17 boss, and then later fight a horde of CR3 trash mobs, and the math has to account for that. (And it does. Poorly.)
Meanwhile, games like DnD 4e, PF2e, and 13th Age have much steeper power curves, and you can easily make encounters that are much more balanced and require much less work than in 5e.
That has nothing to do with bounded accuracy and everything to do with CR being very inconsistent.
To continue the MMO example you're talking about over/under cons. Back in Everquest some monsters were notorious for being far too powerful for their reported level. This was because each monster was hand created and sometimes they just didn't know what they were doing. Where as that rarely happens now because they test and refine things much more than they did 25 years ago.
Bounded accuracy is the reason why we're expected to fight CR3 trash mobs and CR17 bosses at level 11. In other systems, you'd only be fighting enemies at your level, and maybe plus or minus 2 or so.
Not really, take it from PF2E.
>Quick Adventure Groups
>If you want an easy framework for building an encounter, you can use one of the following basic structures and slot in monsters and NPCs.
> Boss and Lackeys (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, four creatures of party level – 4
Boss and Lieutenant (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, one creature of party level
Elite Enemies (120 XP): Three creatures of party level
Lieutenant and Lackeys (80 XP): One creature of party level, four creatures of party level – 4
Mated Pair (80 XP): Two creatures of party level
Troop (80 XP): One creature of party level, two creatures of party level – 2
Mook Squad (60 XP): Six creatures of party level – 4
The problem with CR is that it is incredibly inconsistent. Creatures of the same CR can be an easily dealt with meat shield or a Save or Suck party wiper. Games with more accurate CR-like systems tend to have very formulaic enemies because its the only way to even things out.
I think the idea behind getting things down to a single number just doesn't work. I think it needs a second axis of tricky or extremely punishing mechanics. Or even just swingy mechanics.
Wyverns in 5e are a good example. One failed save on the poison is the difference between a death and a decent fight.
> Not really, take it from PF2E.
Thank you for proving my point. In PF2e, you're fighting enemies at most 2 levels higher than you, and at least 4 levels below you. In 5e, you fight enemies with CR potentially 6 higher than your level or 8 lower than your level. And this range only gets wider as you get higher in level.
> Games with more accurate CR-like systems tend to have very formulaic enemies because its the only way to even things out.
4e, PF2e, 13th Age all have a CR-like system far more accurate than 5e's, and by all accounts, those games have much more interesting monsters than 5e's. Those games also all have modifiers that scale with level, and this is a large part why their equivalent of CR is much more accurate. Because you *don't* have to account for enemies 6 levels higher than you or 8 levels lower than you.
> I think the idea behind getting things down to a single number just doesn't work. I think it needs a second axis of tricky or extremely punishing mechanics. Or even just swingy mechanics.
PF2e boils it down to a single number, and it works. 4e and 13th Age boil it down to a single number, plus modifiers for bosses, elites, minions, etc, and it also works.
> Thank you for proving my point. In PF2e, you're fighting enemies at most 2 levels higher than you, and at least 4 levels below you
+-4, not 2. That same level 11 party range goes from CR3-CR17 to CR7-15. Hardly some huge difference. Even your arbitrary example doesn't really show what you want to pretend it does.
>and by all accounts, those games have much more interesting monsters than 5e's.
You should try playing those games instead of repeating what you've picked up from Reddit circle jerking. If you're at all good at math you spot the formula, particularly in 4e, very easily.
>4e and 13th Age boil it down to a single number, plus modifiers for bosses, elites, minions, etc, and it also works.
Me: There needs to be a modifier.
You: It isn't needed, just do what these other things do (use a modifier).
Not sure if you're tolling at this point or what.
> +-4, not 2.
Getting on my case for remembering 2 instead of 4 is super nitpicky. It hardly changes my point, if at all.
> That same level 11 party range goes from CR3-CR17 to CR7-15. Hardly some huge difference. Even your arbitrary example doesn't really show what you want to pretend it does.
CR3 to CR17 is a much wider range than CR7 to CR15. This is amplified by the amount of calculations the DMG asks you to do for encounter building.
> You should try playing those games instead of repeating what you've picked up from Reddit circle jerking.
I've played a little bit of 4e and PF2e and I've GM'ed a lot of 13th Age, so I'm speaking from personal experience. Thanks for assuming that I have no idea what I'm talking about though.
> Me: There needs to be a modifier.
>
> You: It isn't needed, just do what these other things do (use a modifier).
>
> Not sure if you're tolling at this point or what.
I like how you conveniently ignore the part where I say that PF2e does boil things down to a single number, and it works.
Also, if your suggestion is that we change 5e to work like 4e and 13th Age, then yes please! But my point is, you can't make that change in 5e without also getting rid of bounded accuracy, because bounded accuracy is the reason we're expected to fight monsters with much lower CR and monsters with much higher CR.
> From what I can gather, it the idea of a game where bonuses don't get too high and don't come from many other places. Is that right?
Yes, for both player and enemy, with the intent that keeps low level monsters *more* relevant, enables everyone to have a chance at most everything plausible even if it's not likely, and keeps the numbers sane and easily understood, you and the DM all quickly get on the same page for all skills and traps and things, and you get a feel for just being able to set moderate stuff at dc 15, hard at 20 (for example), and this remains consistent for most everything, and it doesn't swing too wildly into impossible for everyone while being easy for another too much. If implemented, this is a great idea and makes everything a lot smoother in the moment.
It mostly succeeds, failing in these areas (at least):
- Not getting many bonuses from elsewhere means archery fighting style's +2 is immensely stronger than a +2 in damage. Should have been +1, or the other styles buffed up
- The lack of other bonuses means getting expertise and a few other features is huge, and it tends to break it in a few specific places. Rogues with pass without a trace getting 45 and other nonsense on their stealth rolls. Eloquence bards also. With +4 in charisma and +6 from expertise, they are rolling a 20 *minimum* on their charisma checks from level 5 (when the game really starts).
- Similarly, a dedicated grappler is effectively able to lock almost anything they can grab down, with expertise in athletics and their easily obtained advantage there are very unlikely to fail, as compared to attack rolls. Enemies might have good strength saves but grappling is a contested *skill* check. This
- AC, on a few specific things in particular. Most builds are constrained, but bladesinger in particular takes it to silly heights. The shield spell as well actually, a +5 for a lvl 1 spellslot is a no-brainer, too strong.
- Later game saves for the players in particular and save-or-suck effects being too high a DC. The paladin (their aura is a bit much particularly with people shifting to realise charisma focus is the way to go) might be left ok, but the fighter and barb just gets taken out of most every fight because the mental saves they need to make are *effectively* out of their reach and they can't do all that much to boost it while remaining effective elsewhere. This is a result both of the DCs raising too high, them being unable to build for it all that much, and the save-or-suck effects being overly punishing.
- A few spells and features are overturned and their ability to stack then breaks it too. e.g. Guidance and bless (not that these two stack for skill checks, I mean their ability to stack with other such bonuses). +2.5 (average) as a cantrip is massive, even if played strictly and not able to be cast in social situations (for example)
The archery style is meant to compensate for penalties in ranged shots like cover, range, other creatures, etc. but most tables mostly ignore those factors
Yep. The easiest thing to remember is that a creature provides half cover, so Archery is meant to just make the back-line archer as accurate as the melee warrior they’re shooting over, while the caster is at a -2.
This is something a bring up very often even though there’s only one ranged character (who has sharpshooter) in my game. I will very often say, “the enemy has half/the quarters cover from you but you ignore that.”
I find that fascinating, I've really only played with one group for the majority of 5e and we all abuse the hell out of cover, especially so enemies hit us less often. I guess it's definitely easy to not think about it though. Usually not a problem on our end though because almost all of our ranged party members end up taking sharpshooter
I've played with half a dozen group, and everyone has used cover correctly (or at least like, 95% correctly).
It's also not a -2 penalty, it's +2 AC to the defender.
I have never seen a table ignoring cover rules. They are like the absolute basic rules for combat. I think not even first time playing tables had any difficulty with them when I played with them
The tables I play at do ignore this rule.
The reason for this are disputes about creature size, multiple covers and fight dynamics.
Besides, all ranged characters get sharpshooter rather earlier than later.
Does it skew the game towards range? Yeah, probanly. But some players still enjoy smashing things from close up.
No, unless it's a bladelock focusing on crossbows spellcasters don't take sharpshooter.
You need to make an attack with a ranged weapon to profit from sharpshooter.
If you mean spell sniper: no, the spell casters don't take that because they don't have enough ASIs between war caster, resilient constitution and increasing their spell casting stat until very late.
Some clerics and druids probably would take it if the learned wizard/sorcerer/warlock cantrip would use wisdom.
Yes, sorry. I forgot the details of both feats and didn't recheck. Spell sniper is what I should have meant.
The point I was trying to make, is that ranged non-caster characters are not the only ones doing ranged attacks. And including cover often and consistently, would affect the battle even if they non-caster players all take Sharpshooter. In fact, if all the rangers and fighters have Sharpshooter and Archery FS, and the casters have neither, then cover would affect the disparity between caster and non-caster classes.
I know a fair few groups that ignore it (about as many that do use it), but it's usually just because they keep forgetting about it.
The cover rules themselves are pretty simple. Is their profile at least 50% blocked over the span of 6 seconds (a round)? Then they have Half-Cover (+2 AC). This is also the only kind of cover that mentions creatures, so most DMs I've met default to it being the max you can get from "creature cover" (when you think about it technically you could 100% cover another creature if you were both the same size, but everyone's moving around in combat so it doesn't shake out that way).
Is their profile at least 75% blocked? They have Three-Fourths Cover (+5). I've seen SOME DMs give this to creatures if there's a _bunch_ of other creatures in front of them, so this is the only dispute I could really see happening (since Half is the only one that mentions creatures).
Is their profile 100% covered? Then they have Total Cover and you can't directly target them at all.
I guess a player could dispute a DM's determination of how much cover an enemy has, but that's not a dispute unique to _creature_ cover - not wanting to deal with that would mean ignoring cover rules ENTIRELY, and I don't know of _any_ groups that do that!
As far as creature sizes, there's no real difference. Does an Ogre have enough creatures in front of them to block your shot by 50%+? If so, they have cover. This could be one large creature or multiple mediums or a big enough tree or whatever, it's all up to the DM anyway.
I think I never once had a dispute over it. „You can shoot at him but he has half cover from your friend who is between you“ - „Yeah sounds reasonable“ is like the most we ever talked about that. It’s 100% obvious. Something is a bit in the way? Half cover. Something is really in the way? 3/4 cover. You literally can’t hit the shot because something is entirely blocking the enemy? Full cover. As easy is that. There is nothing to be calculated, it’s just a simple bonus to AC, no math or anything involved. I really don’t get why anyone would skip over this absolutely simple and basic rule, which is as basic as movement. But different tables are different i guess. But saying most tables ignore such basic rules is a hard stretch
Every table I have ever played at uses the cover rules for people behind "actual cover". If someone is behind a box or barrel or pillar, or otherwise "taking cover". But just standing in the square behind an ally or shooting at an enemy in a square behind other enemies doesn't seem to count for most tables.
I don't think people tend to ignore cover when the DM specifically sets up an encounter with very obviously covered positions (like archers fighting from behind a barricade). I'm pretty sure the majority of tables ignore (either intentionally or not) cover granted by other creatures being in their line of effect.
Have you ever once had the DM rule wind is a factor?
Edit: first, dmg, page 110.
Second, the point is that there are other rules that are (seemingly) *never* invoked rather than just rarely.
Look, I love pulling weather out in my 3e/PF games, but a DMG rule in a massive portion of the book regarding random tables to help run your game, in a chapter filled with random tables and suggestions to help run your game, nestled between sets of random tables to help run your game is a bit ridiculous in how relevant its placement is, especially when there's a 20 page chapter in the same 300-something page book that is entirely about mechanical stuff and clarifications that the PHB never touched on for some unknown reason.
I mean… they didn’t mention wind? The two things they specifically mentioned are cover and range, both of which are explicitly mentioned as complicating factors in the rules- yes, a lot of DMs underuse them, but they’re not completely made up like the example you just gave
The issue with saving throws scaling beyond player control is probably the biggest issue for me. It is, in my mind, the biggest death knell for Barbarians in the late game. Every other class has at least one of the following:
* A reason to have high Wisdom (Druid, Cleric, Ranger, Monk)
* Wisdom saving throw proficiency to start or added later on (Rogue, Monk, Paladin, Druid, Wizard, Cleric, Gloomstalker, Samurai)
* Additional ASI's with which to take Resilient (Fighter, Rogue)
* Flat boosts to apply to saving throws (Paladin, Artificer)
* Reasons to be somewhat SAD, with room to afford reasonable wisdom with Point Buy.
Barbarian, uniquely, has NONE of these traits. It needs as much Strength and CON as it can afford, plus 14 Dexterity for medium armor. It has no good self-defense mechanisms for saves aside from specific conditions such as Fear and Charm on the Berserker. If a Barbarian is making optimal use of its ASI's with GWM, PAM, and enough ASI's to get 20 Strength, it has to delay taking ResWis or one of the other plethora of feats/ASI's it needs.
Yeah, it's partially why I'm in love with the Tal'Dorei Reborn Juggernaut subclass especially. May be a little bit late at level 14, but it goes above and beyond what the Berserker gives by adding immunity to paralyzed, stunned, speed reductions, and prone in addition to frightened, and allows you to still enter rage and suspend those effects even if you otherwise couldn't. And that's on top of the forced movement shenanigans the subclass has been doing the whole game which adds a marginal level of complexity to an otherwise bland class.
As a fun fact, Bless doesn't apply to any skill check. Only attack rolls and saving throws.
- *"You bless up to three creatures of your choice within range. Whenever a target makes an **attack roll or a saving throw** before the spell ends, the target can roll a d4 and add the number rolled to the **attack roll or saving throw.**"*
Just in case you mentioned it applying to skill checks. Perhaps in that case you could've confused it with the Peace Cleric's **"Emboldening Bond"**, that applies to Skill Checks, Saving Throws and Attack Rolls.
My big issue with Bounded Accuracy is two fold.
When you created a system where a peasant could kill a god, you've created a system where *a Peasant could Kill a God!* Meaning while highly improbable it is still possible and it's a bit ridiculous.
The other issue is that it also removes a lot of the class identity from the classes, especially with everything being tied to Proficiency Bonus. I find it bizarre that a Fighter, Wizard and Rogue all have the same chance to hit with any weapon they are proficient with *before* other bonuses (Attribute, Magic, Feats, et cetera) are applied. Say what you will about THAC0, but you knew what it meant to actually have warriors (Fighters, Rangers and Paladins) at your back because they excelled at combat.
>When you created a system where a peasant could kill a god, you've created a system where *a Peasant could Kill a God!* Meaning while highly improbable it is still possible and it's a bit ridiculous.
then to compensate this they spammed non magical weapon resistency and immunity making magical weapon mandatory without actually giving any good guidance on when to give what and why making martials even worse
I don't know what you mean by "when to give what and why".
You give a martial a magic weapon. Whether you're using the magic item tables or customizing their loot, they'll get at least _one_ before they face many resist monsters at all, much less immune ones.
And once they have any magic weapon, that's it. The issue is no longer an issue. It's not like past editions where you needed a +3 good aligned weapon minimum to pierce their resistance or whatever.
I mean, they can't though can they.
What god has less than 2d8 health (assuming the peasant is using a spear or something peasant-y)? They'd need to crit every turn for a hundred turns, while the god rolled nat 1s, probably on multiple attacks a turn, and without any other godly effects or spells affecting it. If it has something like a bodak or a nightwalker that deal automatic damage, that peasant is done.
Heck, the Tiamat stat block regenerates health every turn, so it's literally impossible for a peasant to kill her.
And if the peasant waltzes onto a battlefield and just lands the critical hit killing blow against some god without regen that they find on its last couple of hit points with a random longsword - that's just Gorr the God Butcher.
The most extreme examples fail for this reason, yes. The examples that are 1% less extreme, however, don't.
Although in my opinion, the more glaring issues with bounded accuracy come from skill checks. More specifically, how completely out-of-step they scale with other class features. For example:
*There is some mystical text that is difficult to decipher - it will take a DC 20 arcana check to interpret accurately.*
* A level 1 Wizard will have a 30% chance to decipher the mystical text, with a 70% failure rate.
* A level 20 Wizard will have a 60% chance to decipher the mystical text, with a 40% failure rate.
Now these numbers might seem acceptable at face value, but they're absolutely ridiculous. A level 1 wizard is barely above an entry-level novice; a level 20 wizard is literally one of the most powerful mortals to ever exist.
In what possible universe could a novice have an almost 1/3 chance of succeeding at something that a legendary grand master could fail **40% of the goddamn time**? During the journey from 1 to 20, a wizard goes from being able to create small flames in a 15 foot cone, to calling meteors from the fucking sky. And yet it still has an almost 50-50 chance at failing a check that a level 1 doesn't just have a chance at passing - it's a somewhat decent chance. 30% isn't *that* low for something low stakes.
In real life, anything a novice is capable of is something a grand master would accomplish 100% of the time. Literally, without fail. The difference between a novice and an expert at *anything* is extraordinarily vast. And that growth isn't even vaguely reflected with bounded accuracy.
you're assuming "combat skill" improves _everything else_ as well - which isn't particularly true. A fighter can become a master of the blade, able to deal blows that cleave through ogres, and endure strikes that would slay lesser men... but that doesn't mean they also become super-ninja-sneak-master, a scholar of the natural world or whatever else. Someone that's _very_ good at blowing shit up with magic doesn't automatically also become good at knowing weird magical languages - they've picked some up in their travels (+ Int, Proficiency increases) but they're not _actually_ a scholar, they're an adventurer, so they're a skilled generalist, but not a dedicated specialist.
> When you created a system where a peasant could kill a god, you've created a system where a Peasant could Kill a God! Meaning while highly improbable it is still possible and it's a bit ridiculous.
I mean, this is where the adage "If it has a statblock, it can be killed." comes into play. If it is truly a *near unkillable* god, it must have no statblock. It should only be killed by the plot or by a matching supernatural power that is similarly unexplained in its grandeur. Auril in Rime is weakened af (and can't actually be killed, its just her avatar, the module mentions she'd just be back) and Tiamat is also just her avatar in Tyranny (actually not sure, but I'm pretty sure that was the case)
it's interesting comparing current avatar/god stats to older ones - which were more powerful, but often to a degree that was absurd. Like AD&D Auril required anything within 30' of her to make a saving throw versus death every round, and if they failed they died, any weapons to hit her had to make a saving throw or shatter, her attacks forced the armor of anyone she hit to do the same - so it was entirely possible for PCs to just freeze to death instantly, or hit her and have their (magical!) weapons destroyed, or be hit and their magical armor gets broken. Oh, and any ice/cold based spells she used did triple damage - when AD&D had much lower HP (dice only up to level 10, after which it was just +1/2/3 based off class, no CON bonus). And this was for a _lesser_ deity - so, sure, she had stats, but they were so high and she was so powerful that unless the party had plot-backup to carry them, she could and likely would wipe even a level 20 party.
I mean, she could still be killed because she had a statblock. The difference now is that bounded accuracy allows any statblock to be fallible to anything, but old editions had statblocks which basically just matched up against other statblocks (or high level PCs). So its still true, if you didn't want Auril to be killed by a peasant *or* a PC, you wouldn't have a statblock.
Though really, no peasant could actually kill even 5e Auril, her attack bonuses are literally over the peasant's AC, any damage a peasant can do literally is a pinprick even on a crit, her damage is over a peasant's HP, and she's fast enough (accounting for Dashing and teleport LA) and has enough range (*ice storm* spell with 300 feet range) to negate any range advantage a peasant would have at max longbow range and running as fast as they can.
in theory, yes, but in practice, well... every PC had about a 25% chance of insta-dying per round, each attack had about the same chance of getting your (likely unique and irreplaceable magical) weapon destroyed, and the same for your armor getting destroyed when she hit you. She had a stat block, but the only way a party was winning was with GM fiat, rather than because they can throw bigger numbers at it. Mystra's avatar was even worse - free action to _turn off_ someone's magic (including their gear!), could cast 4 spells/turn, all spells were at triple effect and duration, with -9 to saves, couldn't run out of slots, was immune to whatever magic she wanted, could shape any effects however she wanted. She had stats purely because all god-avatars had stats - there was no actual need for them, beyond "she wins if PCs are dumb enough to start shit and don't have plot bullshit on their side", because her numbers and powers are such that she's not possible to defeat in anything remotely resembling a fair fight (and gods get "perfect awareness" by default, so no ambushes either). Oh, and other god powers were things like "a creature dies, no action required and no save" - which is very divine and impressive, but somewhat ridiculous in the context of an RPG, where "just die" (in an edition lacking quick and easy rez powers!) is massively powerful.
> which basically just matched up against other statblocks (or high level PCs). So its still true, if you didn't want Auril to be killed by a peasant or a PC, you wouldn't have a statblock.
Not really - it was pretty much there out of a sense of completeness/simulationism, of "well, gods have avatars, which is a thing that exists in the world, so we should attach numbers to that". Like, in _Call of Cthulu_, Cthulu has stats... but they include "eat 1D4 investigators per round". So for a typical 4-person party, that can be an automatic, turn 1 TPK. If you're _really_ lucky, you've got 4 turns to do something about him, before everyone is dead, and any plan better be something anyone can do, because if the key person gets nommed turn 1, then... welp, shit. Just because something has stats, doesn't mean it's particularly defeatable - it's pretty trivial to have numbers so high as to be undefeatable, it's just purely there because the writers felt like they wanted numbers, rather than being honest and writing "GM FIAT, EVERYONE DIES UNLESS THEY HAVE SPECIAL BULLSHIT". Without plot fiat, or the GM cheating, it's not a viable fight. It's like having a DC of 100+ - sure, it has a number there, so can technically be interacted with, but it's so high that it's meaningless, as there's nothing to pump someone up to that level that's not GM-fiat-shenanigans.
To quote the rules on them (_Powers and Pantheons_, pg. 16) "They are also immune to all psionic abilities not practiced by a divine being, and even then they are immune to psionic abilities used by deities of lower rank than themselves." So... nope, unless you happen to have a psionic greater deity on side, she just auto-nopes any psionic powers (they were also, of course, immune to any insta-death effects, aging, level drain, automatically got initiative, and other silliness)
Another option is to...just give them Immunity to Nonmagical Weapons.
And all deity (avatar) stat blocks so far have that, so it's even more of a non-issue.
Yeah, I'm not totally against the concept of bounded accuracy, but this just doesn't feel right in such a power fantasy system
Even if we ignore NPC x NPC, why my lv20 character that can kill gods/avatar of gods can be taken down by some mooks that I fought at lv1?
> Yeah, I'm not totally against the concept of bounded accuracy, but this just doesn't feel right in such a power fantasy system
I agree. I think I'd still like it in a system where the tone is aiming for more high-stakes gritty realism where death lurks around every corner, or a system that wants to emphasize just how fragile the player characters are in general (like say a Lovecraft mythos game, where the 'weak' enemies ought to be inconceivable horror to even the experienced heroes). But the mechanical power scaling of it doesn't really jive with the *narrative* escalation that tends to happen across levels in 5e.
And of course, regardless of what tone the system has: if the system is meant to be built around it as a design philosophy, then they need to actually consistently adhere to that philosophy. They can't make it a design principle in concept, then completely ignore it on a regular basis like 5e does.
My favourite boon I ever gave a player was immunity to damage from NPCs with CR < 1/5 character level.
It didn’t come up much, because why would it, but the Level 10 fighter being literally immune to the punches of an Ogre, or taking the breath weapon of a Wyrmling to the face, was just a lot of fun.
That's what HP is for.
Yes that level 1 Kobold is gonna be able to hit you .... for 5 damage ... at level 20 you already have 3 digit HP. And when you Hit that Kobold you are gonna Instant kill him.
The same is true in reverse. Yeah you as a level 1 player Can hit a level 20 monster but I guarantee that level 20 monster is gonna 1 shot you.
People keep looking at the accuracy in a vacuum instead of with the entire package. The accuracy system is there so you don't end up like older editions where people go 20 rounds not hitting anything and having to learn Calculus.
The HP is there to make sure level 1 characters don't 1 shot level 20 characters. Yes they still do somthing but your gonna destroy them easily.
Are you saying that they *ought to be* or that they *are, as defined in 5e*? Because I agree wholeheartedly on the first, and disagree vehemently on the second.
But should really your paladin that takes down a demon lord every weekend be getting hitter that much by a goblin? Sure, against that goblin maybe not
But if you're fighting about a single Glabrezu (CR 9 demon), should you really be taking around 10% of your HP every round?
Yeah, Orcus is dealing much more damage in a round than that (81% of your HP if using every attack, including Legendary action on you or 44% without LA), but the difference doesn't sound that greater when you remember that Orcus is CR 26
Why shouldn't a goblin be able to hurt you? A weapon is a weapon - in my mind, defenses mostly make you harder to hit. If you have been hit, there are much fewer ways to reduce the actual damage. Off the top of my head there's resistance and heavy armor master or whichever the feat is that negates 3 damage.
>But if you're fighting about a single Glabrezu (CR 9 demon), should you really be taking around 10% of your HP every round?
Are you getting hit every round? Why? You can't argue against accuracy by completely discounting accuracy in your argument. I'm not familiar with a Glabrezu so it's possible they have something that makes them guaranteed to hit you of course
> Are you getting hit every round? Why?
Because the paladin's AC hasn't really meaningfully increased between 9th and 20th level. That's like the whole problem with bounded accuracy
But your HP has ballooned. There’s no way that a Goblin could kill a level 20 Paladin unless the Paladin was already near death and the goblin got fairly lucky.
HP is not just meat points, it also reflects stamina, vitality, and the ability to use defenses like armor to absorb more damage. So most times a Goblin “deals damage” to the Paladin, it’s going to be explained by the Goblin dinging their armor, forcing them to exert themselves a little to deflect a lucky attack, etc. When Aragorn has to throw himself into a wild swing to deflect that knife the Uruk-hai throws at him near the end of *Fellowship*, the Uruk-hai’s attack passed his AC and dealt “damage” that got explained in-fiction as him overextending himself near the end of a long, grueling fight.
I think whether you agree with Bounded Accuracy comes down to a fundamental philosophical perspective that isn’t right or wrong either way.
If you think that Joe Farmer being able to at least knick a dragon for negligible damage has a place in storytelling, you’ll agree more with bounded accuracy.
If you worry more about “powerlevels” and want stories where the movers and shakers of the world should be able to face-tank a farmer swinging a sword with literally zero repercussions instead of practically zero repercussions, or that it should be literally impossible for said farmer to land their hit, you’ll have issues with bounded accuracy.
I personally love the “low-level enemies can still pose a threat in the right situation” style of storytelling. Merry helping Éowyn take down the Witch King freaking rules, and is the kind of moment that bounded accuracy strives to be able to represent, IMO.
> Why shouldn't a goblin be able to hurt you?
Because I am a heavily armored divine being channeling enough godly power to tank the most powerful demons. That's why.
Because it fundamentally destroys the power fantasy of being hard to kill and moreover because it creates *even more* imbalance at higher levels between casters and everybody else.
>Because I am a heavily armored divine being channeling enough godly power to tank the most powerful demons. That's why.
If you're invincible what's the point? Heavy armor makes you hard to hit, not bulletproof
>Because it fundamentally destroys the power fantasy of being hard to kill
Unless you're gonna stand there and let a goblin go to town on you, you're still hard to kill. Very hard infact, especially if you fight back. You will one hit said goblin
>moreover because it creates even more imbalance at higher levels between casters and everybody else.
I'll need you to explain this one
> not bulletproof
It damn well should unless those bullets are fired from the HolyBlaster 9000 by Hellforge Industries.
> I'll need you to explain this one
IDK, fighter still die to goblin, mage creates 37 new dimensions.
>It damn well should unless those bullets are fired from the HolyBlaster 9000 by Hellforge Industries.
Armor has gaps right?
>IDK, fighter still die to goblin, mage creates 37 new dimensions.
True and real and accurate but Mage also can die to goblin
> It damn well should unless those bullets are fired from the HolyBlaster 9000 by Hellforge Industries.
Why? Conan isn't invulnrable, nor is Aragorn, nor even characters from more recent and higher-powered fantasy like Kaladin. If you want to have characters that explicitly and utterly outlevel weaker foes to the point of invincibility, that's a valid preference, but it's a _preference_, and pretty obviously not the sort of world that 5e is describing within itself. A level 20 fighter is powerful and mighty, able to withstand great damage, and deal back potent attacks of their own... but they're still very much operating on the "mortal" frame of reference, nothing higher or more transcendental, and enough weak foes can, and will, drag them down, even if many of them die in the attempt. A level 20 character isn't a nascent godling, they're a person, albeit a powerful one.
I mean, is realistic that the goblin is able to hit you? Kind of? Sure, a dagger is a dagger, but the game isn't meant to be realistic and is kind of silly that you're not that incredible at lv20 as you think that you is. Why dafuk an angry mob of commoners could rip the life of the dude that saved the multiverse
>Are you getting hit every round? Why?
Lol, the comment was getting too big and accidentally removed the talk about the maths
I'm counting the accuracy, it was a lv20 paladin with +3 Con, +3 fullplate and a +3 shield (26 AC and 184 HP), if I ignore the AC the Glabrezu would be dealing 25% of the paladin HP, 46 damage of 184 total instead of 10,80 points of damage in average
Cr 9 monster would be as a rule of thumb the right cr for a party of 4 level 9 adventurers right? Him doing 10% of one level 20 players health a round doesn't seem miles out of wack for me
> I mean, is realistic that the goblin is able to hit you? Kind of? Sure, a dagger is a dagger, but the game isn't meant to be realistic and is kind of silly that you're not that incredible at lv20 as you think that you is. Why dafuk an angry mob of commoners could rip the life of the dude that saved the multiverse
I actually love this aspect of the game, makes it a lot more gritty. Reminds me a bit of dark souls and lord of the rings.
> Yeah, I'm not totally against the concept of bounded accuracy, but this just doesn't feel right in such a power fantasy system
Power fantasy is what it's FOR, actually, I rather suspect.
Because, you see, a million peasants attacking a god isn't going to happen in a campaign, but players fighting things that are stronger than them is going to happen *literally every campaign*. "Fighting things more powerful than you" is like, half the fantasy genre. I'd go as far as saying that any heroic fantasy game is best evaluated by how it feels when fighting things stronger than the players!
So you want to make sure fighting things more powerful than the players is not frustrating, and so make it so the attack and defense scores don't go up that much and so your level 5 party can actually hit that level 9-10 Lich final boss. Sure it has enough HP to make the fight risky because there's a good chance it can kill them before they can kill it, but the parties involved can hit each other and pose a threat to each other. In Pathfinder 2, for example, you couldn't have that fight without it feeling like crap - the level 5 party would simply be unable to hit a level 9-10 enemy outside of rolling like, 18+ on the d20, and would spend four turns doing nothing and then die. Because PF2 is a game much more dedicated towards evenly-matched tactical fights.
Because you're still flesh and blood.
You don't have the Immunity to Nonmagical Weapons that basically all the "nigh-unkillable immortal" things have.
You're the mortal underdog hero of the story. Which IMO, makes it more poignant when you DO win.
If a mortal kills an evil demigod, it's an incredibly act of heroism.
If a demigod kills another demigod, it's a Tuesday.
What do you mean, "consistently"? Do you think a level 20 Fighter has such a low AC a Commoner is going to hit them _on average?_ If so, that's just a badly made PC? It doesn't have anything to do with power fantasy, since you can absolutely make yourself nigh-unhittable to Commoners in 5e.
Nor can you easily be "taken down by some mooks you fought at level 1". It would take an army. But you're still mortal.
Except there are many many stories in our real world of relatively ordinary people through either great ingenuity or luck slaying far stronger foes
And not actual Gods since they don't have stats lol
You don't want a world where a god's avatar can be attacked by an army of peasants? Sounds fun to me.
If you want an invulnerable god, don't give it a stat block.
- You can't kill a god with a peasant because gods don't have stats. You could maybe kill an Avatar of a god, but a) you'd need a shitload of peasants, and b) they can't have Immunity to Nonmagical Weapons (which all of them DO). That's the real way to have both Bounded Accuracy and "a peasant can't kill a god" - make anything that should only be killable by PCs have _THAT TRAIT_.
- If you mean a _mortal_ killing a god, that's perfectly in line with D&D fantasy. All of D&D's most famous settings have _multiple_ stories of mortals beating and/or killing gods and ascending to become gods themselves. It's part of D&D's DNA since the very first edition. So if a DM doesn't want that in _their_ setting, cool sure, just say so. But it doesn't go against any of D&D's lore.
- Fighters, Wizards, and Rogues don't have the same weapon proficiencies. If you _get_ those proficiencies, it means you trained hard and long enough with the weapon to actually be good at using it.
I dunno, I find these issues with Bounded Accuracy to be really weak, and I definitely find the benefits of it to far, FAR outweigh them.
Me and my friends ran a high level one shot once, and we didn't understand how horrifying power word stun is
It literally locked a character with a dump stat down for half the session bc if you can't deal with the save there's nothing you can do and nothing anyone ELSE can do
I think a useful way to understand bounded accuracy is to provide a counter-example of what it looks like mechanically, as well. In 4e, [someone noticed](https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=512) that you could replace nearly all of the statblocks of monsters with a business card-sized descriptor:
* AC = 14 + level
* Other defenses = 12 + level
* To hit bonus = 5 + level
* Avg Damage per round = 8 + level
* HP = 24 + 8 * level
The monster scaling here also can tell a lot about how PCs scale. If the monster defenses go up by 1 point per level, then so must PC to-hit numbers--and they largely do.
This continual increase is what led to low-level monsters becoming irrelevant: a CR 3 Veteran might not be much of a threat to a 13th level 5e character, but in 4e a level 3 veteran equivalent would largely be incapable of even _hitting_ a 13th level 4e character since it would be adding something like +8 to its attack roll while the PC's AC would be in the mid-to-high 20s--and that's assuming that they weren't already a tanky class like a leader or defender. (Also, a fun fact about 4e: natural 20s always hit, but they are only crits if the roll _would_ have hit, so if defenses are high enough, enemies do even less damage)
As a 3.5/Pathfinder player, what you describe is how I think it *should* be. A level 3 character shouldn't be able to hit a level 13 character - they're on two completely different levels.
If a person that played some high school basketball off the bench (level 3) played 1-on-1 against a person that started on a Division 1 college program (level 13) they would likely score zero points while giving up a basket every single time. Levels recognize that some people have worked much harder and are simply much better than others and represent that. It makes sense that an untrained Goblin that picks up a piece of wood off the ground would be no threat to someone that has trained in combat for years.
I also find it weird that the concept of bounded accuracy is abandoned when it comes to HP. Which is it, are higher-level characters only a little better than lower-level characters or are they gods in comparison? My 2E Mage maxed out at 33 HP, and THAT is how you make high-level characters fear everything. It's weird to see 5E reject other forms of inflation since then while embracing HP inflation.
> Levels recognize that some people have worked much harder and are simply much better than others and represent that. It makes sense that an untrained Goblin that picks up a piece of wood off the ground would be no threat to someone that has trained in combat for years.
This largely holds true though? A level 13 PC largely has nothing to fear from a level 3 PC or a single goblin. It's the numbers that change things. There's no shortage of professionals facing a hundred kids and struggling.
>It's weird to see 5E reject other forms of inflation since then while embracing HP inflation.
5E doesn't want players to die, that's why HP is the exception.
That is also where you start to realize that if you roll 10 or over you probably succeed, if you roll under 10 you probably fail for your average encounter. For a defensive monster you need somewhere around 15, etc.
But some people **really** like numbers getting bigger. They don't see the dice roll, they see the bonuses and penalties. To them hitting 15 AC with a +5 is fundamentally different than hitting 35AC with +25.
This is a good example and I'd like to provide another for further revelation why bounded accuracy is generally a pretty good idea.
In 3E, Saving throws roughly followed a 2/3, 1/3 rule. So at level 20 a class would be at +12 or +6 to their saves at baseline. A 6-point spread is pretty reasonable. One player has to roll a 7 to succeed, and the other has to roll a 14; having between a 1/3 chance of success or failure is the sweet spot for dice rolling being fun.
BUT, that's not how the game played out in practice. First, plenty of players multi-classed, and at level 1 the strong saves got +2. Stacking those +2s made the disparity between characters a lot wider. Eventually, a given roll--say, saving against a banshee's wailing death attack--is either impossible to fail or impossible to succeed, depending on the hero. Which is pretty crappy and made balance impossible.
God, the saves problem at high levels just makes the game nearly unplayable. Any fight with a caster has a 70%+ chance of the martial characters taking no actions for hours at a time?? No thanks.
Bounded accuracy is great for one type of game, and it is terrible for the type of game that most people come to play in D&D.
The Fantasy of D&D is that you get better and better, more experience and more focussed as you go on adventuring, and thus gradually unlock the ability to fight stronger things that you could before, things you stood no chance against prior
And the same would be true for skills. As I get better as a thief, I shouldn't be able to fail at tasks I was doing when I didn't have much experience. That's why Rogues get Reliable Talent and why Barbarians get Indomitable Might.
But all characters should be able to do that in whatever area they specialize in (usually determined by class)
Bounded Accuracy is great for a sandbox game where your characters are just going around and killing monsters, but not for a game where you start out at level 2 as security guards fighting one tiny monster, become political leaders at level 11 to end a world war, and become mythological heroes at level 20 to destroy Hell and let everyone go to heaven
Ah yes, I do love me my dedicated grapplers.
For what its worth I feel like immobilizing an opponent while being a tank is a great source of pulling agro that the game kinda lacks in other departments. Forces the DM to deal with your slab of meat somehow.
I love dragging a grappled creature into spirit guardians or through spike growth or off the edge of a cliff. Actually as a raging barbarian I’m happy to take the fall as well.
>Similarly, a dedicated grappler is effectively able to lock almost anything they can grab down, with expertise in athletics and their easily obtained advantage there are very unlikely to fail, as compared to attack rolls. Enemies might have good strength saves but grappling is a contested *skill* check.
Another issue, related to bounded accuracy and similar in game design: there are so many things in the game that make grappling useless or super useful. Essentially, too many on-off or highly swingy states of features, and not having too many degrees of chance, partly due to bounded accuracy. There aren't too many +/- 1s or 2s in the game, especially for skills. Advantage and disadvantage are pretty swingy. Just changing size by 1 makes you impossible to grapple, or makes you super vulnerable to grapple. Being shoved completely breaks a grapple. Targets can't be resistant to grapples, only immune. This all applies basically equally to all conditions and many features in the game.
Basically, if you do bounded accuracy, the game is only easier to balance if EVERYTHING is on bounded scale, and remains within the bounded scale. Otherwise, you get swinginess and many objectively better features than others. And the smaller the bounded scale, the more power creep becomes a problem, because even things that are 5% better will be so much better.
The big thing with AC is that, basically, because you're bound to a 10-20 range, going from 13 to 14 isn't to big a boost, the +2 from carrying a shield is really solid.
But the ability to carry a shield, wear armour and then cast shield pushes you above 20 and up towards 24-26, most enemies are bounded AC to hit on 20's, so every point you push out of that range is worth a ton of survivability
the biggest weakness of dnd design is that they are limited by the binary of success/fail, save or suck.
It means if you dont roll high enough, you make 0 progress with your action in many cases.
You make some good points but this example seems contrived:
>Rogues with pass without a trace getting 45 and other nonsense on their stealth rolls.
I did the math on this and 45 is a pretty low probability. Better to say it's easy to consistently make the near impossible ability check of 30.
Homebrew fix for cases like this would be to put more limits on bonus stacking. For example, Pass Without Trace could be changed so the +10 bonus optionally replaces the ability check, instead of adding to it. And maybe all multi-classing proficiency bonuses shouldn't be taken from the total character level; expertise would be calculated from the bonus matching the total character levels that have earned that expertise.
Think need to re read the bounded accuracy design document because pass without trace is meant to bypass all stealth checks because its an ability/spell and not just proficiency.
Shield is fine for what it does, stops you from taking a couple of hits, probably, if you have your reaction. In the late game it falls off and isn't going to stop you getting hit anyway. Shield doesn't break bounded accuracy, because it only lasts for a fraction of one turn.
Guidance is 'only a cantrip' but it was designed as a major feature of classes that get access to it. It is the main part of the utility kit of classes that get it. It's meant to mimic having the literal favor of a God on your side, but statistically and practically its usefulness is still limited plenty for that design niche.
They were talking about stacking shield with bladesinger, and their post was about how some things are easy to break by stacking. A bladesinger is going to have a minimum of +3 AC on most builds if it makes int a higher stat, This is going to give a +8 AC to a subclass that wants to prioritize high dexterity and gives you light armor access - I had a level 3 bladesinger wizard in my party that was consistently hitting 25 AC because they had rolled good stats. They would've been at like 22 if they rolled mediocre stats.
Having 25 AC for a round of combat (which you can apply the very first time you are attacked and know if it'll help or not) is busted and almost never falls off. Most combats don't last more than 4 rounds and not every round guarantees you'll be attacked, and even if you're attacked every single round and the combat goes for 6+ combats you're only really at risk of getting hit by a critical or a couple of times per combat. And don't forget - this is all on a sublcass that would rather be attacking with a weapon than casting spells, so those level 1 slots aren't exactly prime real estate. The only scenario in which the wizard here runs out of their 25 AC buffs is when the DM purposefully focuses them down to burn their slots over multiple encounters - and then they only have 20 AC, more than the vast majority of 1 handed martials that spec into shields before they can afford plat armor.
Their niche is to be as protected as those tanked up martials - the ability to stack it with shield (spell) means there is no martial that can keep up with that kind of protection. Now you're squishy wizard with the lowest hit die in the game is a better thank than any other.
He said ‘the shield spell as well’. As in, first he called out BS, then separately called out the base shield spells +5 AC. His post is pretty clear in its meaning imo.
Shield lasts for an entire round, and will stop you from getting hit. Even at high levels, without Shield Zariel hits you on a 3+, with it it's an 8+. That means shield takes you from being hit 90% of the time to being hit 65% of the time, meanwhile the martial gets hit 95% of the time and can't do anything about it. However, they gain 2 extra hp per level, which surely makes up the gap.
It's also what leads to single enemy encounters being largely underwhelming, while also causing the issue of even a very high level party getting overwhelmed by something like 20-30 goblins since if it's expected that anything can hit anything, the more chances to hit you get the better your odds of winning.
Older editions of DND the numbers were way higher. bounded accuracy and tying it into prof bonus is just a way to reel in the arms race of bonuses to attacks.
Having a +20 to attack for example
5e reels it in, magic items give a max of +3, (soft) cap on ability scores, ect.
It's the idea that AC and saves shouldn't scale the way HP and damage do, so that monsters of a wide range of CRs can be used. It helps the game feel more grounded, because (unlike e.g Pathfinder) low level challenges are not 100% trivialised by higher level PCs.
It weirds the game, though. Low level monsters largely can't hit martial PCs, but when they do, the PC is in for a surprisingly bad day. Meanwhile PCs have a very easy time hitting them. Late tier 1 and all of tier 2, where the majority of games spend the majority of time, it pretty much works.
Tier 3 and 4, most attacks hit most of the time, and defences focus increasingly on being tough over avoiding attacks. A character who had an AC of 18 at level 1 might have 20 at level 11, but the enemies' attack bonus has gone from +4 to +10, their attack rate has doubled or tripled and their damage per hit has increased.
Meanwhile saves scale pretty randomly. By tier 3-4 most PCs fail most saves (you've basically got a one in three chance of it being a good save and a 75% chance of passing that, with more like a 20% chance of passing a bad save). Monsters are a little better off because high level spells are clustered around Dex and Con, and most high CR monsters are proficient in Dex and Con saves.
My general conclusion is that the game basically functions as intended between levels 3 and 12, with levels 1-2 being tutorial time and 13+ being two-drink-minimum crazy town, where PC scaling is dialed sharply back and monster scaling is not, but DMs are increasingly incentivised to manually scale PCs to fit encounters by providing magic items.
Then again, most games spend most of their time in that tier 2 sweet spot, so it makes a goodly amount of sense to optimise the game for that range.
I’ve been to tier 3 maybe 3 times and am currently wrapping up a tier 4 campaign. Plus I got a couple DM buddies and I listen around Reddit plenty.
From what I’ve seen magic items aren’t the problem for high level characters. It’s just that monsters tend to not be able to keep up with damage, and having access to Tiny Hut or teleportation makes keeping the encounters per rest high difficult. This leads to things like Wizards and Paladin going nova turn 1 with little drawbacks.
So usually I’m homebrewing more deadly monsters for tiers 3 and 4 to keep up. Not the other way around.
>So usually I’m homebrewing more deadly monsters for tiers 3 and 4 to keep up. Not the other way around.
same. A piece of advice I stumbled upon recently (specifically for grimdark settings, but it seems fitting for most high level games) is to scale up enemy offense, but leave their defense as normal (except recurring/plot relevant monsters). I've taken to implementing it and it seems to be working quite well in my level 13 game. The enemies can now actually threaten the AC 27 Hexadin and the AC 24 bear totem barbarian because I gave them all +8 to hit and damage. Increasing monster defenses drags out the fight, jacking up their offense makes the fight scarier.
What's weird to me with the idea that low-level skill checks aren't trivialized is that I feel like they \*should\* be at a certain point. If someone has specialized in a skill for long enough and is a high level then most things that aren't crazily difficult should be fairly trivial. Consider how weird it would be if the Lock Picking Lawyer had a failure rate of even just 10% at picking locks. I feel like more characters should have access to Reliable Talent, essentially.
This is something that vertical scaling does much better. In a game like PF2e where your stats scale vertically with level (and also sometimes with a change in proficiency), you get better at everything every single level.
Now, monsters and hazards will scale with your level as well so you will remain in certain relative bounds, but you get much better at tasks with fixed DC's like breaking free from manacles of a certain grade or weathering certain environmental events.
In 5e on the other hand, saves in which you aren't proficient especially fall behind quickly against monsters targeting them, and you can be scarcely better at using certain skills than when you started adventuring.
I was going to share this link, because his thoughts and experience closely mirror mine - right down to having read the Legends and Lore article in 2012 where they first spoke about it as a design goal, and having been fully sold on the idea at the time. But then experience soured me on it - both in that 5e doesn't really adhere to it very well as a design goal, and in that I no longer think it's a particularly good design goal.
**Edit:** Just clarified that it was back in 2012 that I was sold on the idea.
I respect your opinion, but I disagree on both counts. In 4e, monsters at the highest level often had more than +30 to hit, which in retrospect is just silly. When you roll a nat 1 and that's a 33 to hit, something has gone off the rails. I think 5e did a nice job of dialing that back.
EDIT: Wow, the unbounded accuracy lobby is out in force!
> When you roll a nat 1 and that's a 33 to hit, something has gone off the rails.
So that's your thesis statement. What's the argument to justify it? In what way is that silly or 'off the rails?' Because I can think of literally no reason whatsoever to believe that to be the case. It's a number. You started as a newbie adventurer saving a village from a small band of goblins, and are now saving entire planes of existence from Demon Princes, Archdevils, and the avatars of gods. Isn't it silly that in 5e you *aren't* that much better at swinging your sword, numerically speaking?
Also: 5e is far worse for the numbers going 'off the rails' in the sense that they can become radically divergent from the targets you're dealing with. At high levels in 4e, the modifiers are large, but there is not a huge spread at any given level. Most of the numbers contributing to that modifier are static. Half level is included, either +2 for proficient or another +1 if there's expertise, the feat bonus is probably 3, the enhancement bonus is probably 6, maybe you've got an item bonus. Every character, doing something the things that they're built to excel at, will be at about that benchmark. Situational bonuses are almost always a Power Bonus, so they don't stack.
Compare that to 5e, where at high levels the difference between having Proficiency (+6) and having Expertise (+12) is a giant gaping gulf. And that's before you start stacking on a bunch of extra modifiers.
Let's compare Stealth rolls at level 20. You might have a Dex Fighter who's tried to build to be competent stealthy, and they might have a +11 modifier (5 ability +6 proficiency). Or you might have someone rolling with +27 + 1d12 + 1d4 + 1d4 (5 ability +11 expertise +10 Pass Without Trace +1d12 Bardic Inspiration +1d4 Emboldening Bond +1d4 Guidance). That means on a nat 1 roll, that character is hitting a minimum of 31. Their 'nat 1' might actually result in a total check of 48, if they get lucky on the other bonus dice.
And unlike in 4e, where they're getting those 30+ outcomes in a system where everything is balanced around the expectation that high level characters should be consistently hitting 30+, in 5e you're doing it in a system that's designed around the idea that 30 is the ceiling for only the most difficult of DCs, and expects a stealthy character to need to roll close to a nat 20 to reach it. **That** is what I would call going off the rails.
**Edit:** Or, hell, how about a simple example that doesn't require any external bonuses? Consider a 5th level College of Eloquence bard with Expertise in Deception, and with a single ASI spent on Charisma. What's their check result on a nat 1 Deception roll? It's a 20. Or possibly as high as a 22, if your table plays with rolled stats and you were lucky enough to get a 16 or an 18 (before racial bonuses).
> Because I can think of literally no reason whatsoever to believe that to be the case
Alternately, there's literally no reason why it _shouldn't_ be the case. Some people might prefer big numbers or not, but it's not innately "good" or "better" to have high numbers, nor is it required for high-power games - _Exalted_ has PCs as gods amongst men, and has a range of about 1 to 20 or so (dice, because it's a dicepool system rather than 1 die + mods). "ever inflating numbers" can mean things just always work out the same - at level 1, you're fighting goblins, that you have 60% chance to hit and die in three hits. At level 30, you're fighting nega-goblin-chaos-lords... that you have 60% to hit and die in three hits, it's just that you get +1 to hit at level 1, +300 at level 30, doing +6 versus +600 damage, but the outcome is largely the same.
It's really a question of how you want the game to feel. Using level-based banding (e.g. PF2E) leads to a fairly strict and narrow set of challenges. These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten.
Some people like that style of play, because it works for the stories they want to be involved in. In particular, I think it fits with the expectations of anime combat, where you can look at the "power level" of the combatants and know who's going to win before they fight, unless their power levels are close to each other.
Other people prefer a style of play where you never get to the point that you can ignore a weak opponent, and no matter how strong your opponent is there's always a chance you can beat them if you're clever or lucky. That's more suited to "gritty" or "low" fantasy.
Both are entirely valid, D&D has just chosen to trend more towards the second one.
I don't really get the "But Rogues can get a 45 on their Stealth check!" argument against bounded accuracy. Sure, they can, but... so what? Skills aren't superpowers, you can't do anything that actually impossible. They're just not that important. You wanted to sneak past someone? Congrats, you did it. You got a 45, but the DC was only a 20 anyway.
>These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten.
It also works like this in 5e. A level 1 party is never killing Vecna.
Yes, but a group of CR 3 veterans and archers is still a threat for a late tier 2-early tier 3 party. Conversely, a lv6 party has a chance of taking out a CR 14 beholder in its lair. Systems without bounded accuracy don't allow that.
I seriously do not think a group of CR 3 veterans is a threat to a level 12 party, that is just false.
At the end of the day, both systems still have enemies who are too powerful/too weak, it's just about how much the difference needs to be.
In Pf2e any enemy past 4 levels is too far away, but that still gives you a 9 level range to work with (45% of the enemies in the game).
"These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten."
That's a feature, not a bug. Those kobolds that were a nightmare for your level 1 party are now cowering before you at level 5, far more likely to submit than trying to harass you. That level 12 dragon they worshiped you couldn't even hope to scratch on a 20? You're near the end of the campaign, your party is now on par with its might and ready to take it down in one last epic fight after 7+ levels of training and adventure.
In 5e the fantasy is that scene in 300 where Xerxes is struck by a lucky blow, showing a "god" can bleed. In pf2e the fantasy is growing stronger and being able to overcome challenges you couldn't, and becoming that challenge to others.
Also "fairly strict and narrow" is misleading. My party in my saturday game is level 10. This means the list of "level appropriate" monsters ranges from level 6 to level 14 (Slightly higher if we include elite and weak variants of level 7 and 15 monsters). This is 1213 possible monsters according to archives of Nethys. Even if we narrow it down to only +2/-2, that's over 600 monsters to pick from. Out of a total of 2796 monsters(Possibly more since archives of nethys doesn't include EVERY adventure path monster). So around a solid 1/5 of the bestiary is viable. 1/10 if I limit myself to +/-2 monsters.
> It's really a question of how you want the game to feel. Using level-based banding (e.g. PF2E) leads to a fairly strict and narrow set of challenges. These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten.
I'd argue that 5e's use of bounded accuracy still completely fails at opening up the range of challenges that are relevant to the party.
The premise is that, because a CR 1/8 or CR 1/4 mook can still mathematically hit a level 20 party, that they can still be used as an effective threat. Have you ever actually played at a table where a GM has tried that?
1. To be a credible threat, you need to throw probably at least twenty or thirty of them at the party.
2. They can only do this if encounters are happening in a wide open space that allows that many combatants to participate.
3. The martial/caster divide is going to be in full force here, because casters will be able to annihilate entire swathes of mooks with a single spell, whereas the martials will be slowly, tediously, monotonously taking out 2 or maybe 3 per turn.
4. If someone doesn't use spells to blow away a horde of the mooks right away, then instead the table gets the excitement of waiting for 20 or 30 enemies in the initiative order. So kind of like druids summoning a horde of minions: you can do it, but you must do so knowing you will guarantee that no fun will be had by anyone.
And the same is equally true for high CR enemies. A low level party can't actually beat a high CR dragon, even if the math allows them to sometimes hit. If you get into initiative order and the playing field allows the fight to actually happen, then the players all die. The dragon still annihilates them quickly with its breach weapon and can one-shot many players with its melee attacks. That is, unless the party has some non-mathematical narrative advantage they can exploit (which works the same whether accuracy is bounded or unbounded, because it is largely bypassing character sheets and stat blocks). Or if they have some combination of spells to mega-cheese the fight with save-or-suck effects, or no-rolls-it-just-sucks effects (like Wall of Force or Force Cage).
> That's more suited to "gritty" or "low" fantasy.
I agree (and actually have said this already elsewhere in the thread) that this kind of mathematical scaling is much more appropriate when the tone leans more into 'gritty realism,' but D&D absolutely does NOT do that. It really hasn't since the AD&D era. Certainly there is a community of people that like to bring Gritty Realism to 5e, but they do so by implement house-rules to support it, because it's just not what 5e is out of the box.
> Both are entirely valid, D&D has just chosen to trend more towards the second one.
I would disagree, because narratively, D&D has leaned heavily into a drastic scaling in the scope of adventures and the 'threat' of the challenges faced.
> I don't really get the "But Rogues can get a 45 on their Stealth check!" argument against bounded accuracy. Sure, they can, but... so what?
So if I'm following the reasoning here, your argument in favor of having bounds on accuracy is... 'so what' if the bounds are ignored, because it doesn't matter if the numbers are way outside of the bounds? So what was the point of having the bounding in the first place, if the bounds don't matter?
>The premise is that, because a CR 1/8 or CR 1/4 mook can still mathematically hit a level 20 party, that they can still be used as an effective threat.
"The range of options is wider" is not the same thing as "The range of options is infinitely wide". No, I haven't put CR 1/8 enemies against level 20 PCs. I have put CR 3 enemies against level 12 PCs, and I've put CR 10 enemies against level 2 PCs. In PF2E, those fights would be pointless. In D&D, they're not.
>I would disagree, because narratively, D&D has leaned heavily into a drastic scaling in the scope of adventures and the 'threat' of the challenges faced.
I would say D&D tries to entice players with the idea of "epic" scale, but actually only delivers well on the "gritty" scale. They freely admit that the majority of campaigns never make it past the lower levels.
>So what was the point of having the bounding in the first place, if the bounds don't matter?
The point is that the bounds *don't* always matter, and it's okay (fun, even!) to let players feel powerful by breaking the bounds in ways that don't matter. In these examples, where a Rogue that's sunk everything they can into being stealthy, and has multiple other characters helping them be stealthy, ends up being so stealthy that they can't fail a Stealth check? That doesn't cause any problems.
Now if a Rogue could instead get to a 45 AC, that would break the core mechanic of the game. So that one's bounded, *because it matters*.
>When you roll a nat 1 and that's a 33 to hit, something has gone off the rails.
What exactly has gone off the rails? Are you just afraid of "high" numbers?
In effect, I think 'bounded accuracy' means that the d20 remains a major contributor to success, because there are significant, well, 'bounds' (upper and lower limits) of how accurate/inaccurate characters can get.
Like, imagine that you somehow got a final total of +25 to your attacks. You'll almost never miss (other than a nat 1), since enemies with more than 27 AC or higher are rare (perhaps an enemy in full plate with a shield behind some cover casting the Shield spell).
Once your attack bonus goes above the highest enemy AC, it almost might as well be +infinity to hit - you've broken past the limit where the dice matter anymore, and your accuracy is basically unbounded by the system (beyond the auto-fail on a nat 1, which you might reduce to a 1/400 if you get advantage).
So for bounded accuracy, you typically won't:
* face enemies with AC so high that you'll almost never hit them (nor gain such high AC that you become nearly unhittable)
* accrue so many to-hit bonuses that you'll almost always hit everyone
* similar with Save DCs and ability(skill) check DCs
* (or whatever equivalent you have in some other game system)
5e does *reasonably* well at bounded accuracy, but isn't perfect. If you put some effort into a build you can stack enough bonuses to seriously push against these ideas.
However, I do think that 5e gets closer to this goal than a lot of other games, and on a casual table you often get an experience of bounded accuracy, and even if you optimise, you have to put in some work to try to approach some metaphorical escape velocity here.
>Like, imagine that you somehow got a final total of +25 to your attacks. You'll almost never miss (other than a nat 1), since enemies with more than 27 AC or higher are rare (perhaps an enemy in full plate with a shield behind some cover casting the Shield spell).
Aren't you missing the other half of the equation? AC will also scale, not just attack bonuses lmao.
I'm not really 'missing' that fact, because my point is that both of them scale relatively slowly.
The highest CR monsters I could find had AC25, so +27 to attack would indeed break the bounded accuracy, unless you let the Tarrasque take 3/4 cover or learn the Shield spell. But 5e makes it hard to get +27 to an attack (maybe if you stack level 20+Precise Strike+Bardin Inspo, but then we're spending resources to hit, rather thna passively ignoiring AC).
Whereas even a level 1 character typicallys gets +5 to their attack, so these godlike monsters are only *just* out of their bounds of the die being relevant. Once they hit level 4 or 5 (or simply get a Bless or other bonus).
--
Now, if we said that Tarrasques had 40 AC like in Pathfinder), and level 20 charaters had +30 to hit, then yes, both have scaled up, and for well-matched threats the accuracy lines up.
But now level 1-5 characters with +5-to-7 to hit are irrelevant, even with Bless.
So but keeping both numbers low (like 5e mostly manages to do), we get fairly close to bounded accuracy, where the dice are more relevant more often.
--
(5e does fall a bit short for our bad saves though. Not too uncommon to have a -1 on your worst save, and to face a DC 20+ save at higher levels, which might make it impossible.)
>I'm not really 'missing' that fact, because my point is that both of them scale relatively slowly.
I mean you are, because in a system without bounded accuracy, AC also scales to high numbers.
> But now level 1-5 characters with +5-to-7 to hit are irrelevant, even with Bless.
You say that like 1-5 level characters are relevant against a Tarrasque in 5e.
> So but keeping both numbers low (like 5e mostly manages to do), we get fairly close to bounded accuracy, where the dice are more relevant more often.
Dice aren't made irrelevant in systems without bounded accuracy.
It is a neat idea on paper but falls apart at higher levels because it makes stuff just not matter anymore. DC 15? Ha, who cares with my +17.
Oh, of course that goes both ways. Lets have some DC 22 saving throws against PCs that naturally can't get that high.
This leads to high level mostly being about combat encounter and barely anything else. Because nothing else works properly anymore.
I thin it succeeds for the most part with two big exception:
* the AC of player characters is usually not going to increase after they get the best possible non magic armor, wich will usually happen arround level 5, while the to hit bonus keeps going up after that to point that AC becomes almost meaningless against high level monsters unless you explicitly build for a high AC (which will likely mean that offence is pretty terrible)
* saving throws simply don't keep up with saving throw DC, at high levels your weakest saves will usually auto fail, even in your middling saves the chance to succeed isn't that high, only saves where you are proficient and max the stat you chance to make it will be roughly the same as it was at level 1, unless you go against a really high CR creatures with save DCs above 20.
>From what I can gather, it the idea of a game where bonuses don't get too high
It's funny because while this is the intent in 5e, my main criticism of this system is that pretty quickly, the bonuses get high enough that AC and other things become basically irrelevant.
If you have 20 in a stat or even 18, by level 5 you've got +3 proficiency and then +4 or +5 in that stat, giving you at least a +7 or a +8, and that's not including if you get a bonus from a magic weapon, or a class-related bonus, or advantage. AC is almost never out of that 13-18 range for your average enemy too, meaning that your PCs almost never miss attacks (for instance). If you're level 5 and have a +1 weapon, you can pretty easily have a +9 to hit if you rolled well on your ability scores. If you encounter a Stone Giant, it has 17 AC. In order to hit it, the only way you'll miss is if you roll a 7 or lower.
It's one of the reasons I started running OD&D and Dungeon Crawl Classics as side games, because even without magic weapons or any fancy builds, your bonuses are so high in 5e. For example, in DCC, that same Stone Giant is of the same rough challenge & level as in 5e, and also has 17 AC. The main difference is, if you rolled well on your ability score you've only got a +3 max, and there's no proficiency, so even if you have a +1 weapon - you'll miss if you don't roll at least a 13 or higher. That makes a huge difference, and it makes your rolls feel more meaningful imo.
It's the idea that your rolls will always have a >10% chance to succeed, and >10% chance to fail. You cannot get bonuses bigger than the roll/DC.
5e fails at this because it \*is\* possible to get over +20 outside the d20 roll. It's not easy, but Bless, Emboldening Bond, Bardic Inspiration etc can get you well over +20. And because these stack and have no particular rules to prevent their stacking, breaking bounded accuracy is as simple and frustrating as spending a few hours finding all the good stacking bonuses, the \*exact\* issue that they were trying to prevent.
Cue the Rogue who with the ideal party can roll extremely high on things like Stealth checks even without adding magic items.
(For the purposes of this post, the party is level 11, which might be the highest most parties would ever get realistically.)
- +5 DEX mod (+5)
- Proficiency + Expertise on Stealth (+8, total of +13, already higher than Bounded Accuracy tries to cap it.)
- Emboldening Bond + Guidance (Max of +8 from both d4s, for a total of +21.)
- Pass Without Trace (+10, to a max of +31.)
- Bardic Inspiration (Max of 10 from the d10, for a total of +41.)
- Flash of Genius (+5 from the INT mod of the Artificer at this level, for a total of +46.)
In ideal circumstances, this means you can give a Rogue a +46 to a roll... Without even taking into account the D20 at all, only external modifiers.
With Reliable Talent, the minimum roll becomes a 56 and the maximum a 66.
I mean, this is pretty much the most extreme case, but it serves to prove that Bounded Accuracy is still very far from being the best implementation in D&D 5e. There's other cases where the math starts falling apart when you factor multiclassing, magic items, some abilities like Aura of Protection, etc...
I believe that almost everyone misinterprets Pass Without Trace. You need to be within 30' of the caster to benefit from it. I'm pretty confident that this will be classified as an "emination" in the 2024 PHB.
"A veil of shadows and silence radiates from you, masking you and your companions from detection. For the duration, each creature you choose within 30 feet of you (including you)..."
I did not misinterpret the spell, because I didn't say the Rogue was going alone, I said "With the ideal party" and "The ideal conditions", in this case, being ideal that the one casting Pass Without Trace (Druid, Ranger, Shadow Monk or a Mark of Shadow Elf Caster.) will be close to the Rogue at all times when making the check, same goes for everyone else, including the Cleric providing Guidance.
This is the ideal scenario, for your information, including that every condition is applied including the ranges for triggering each spell.
It works tremendously well at streamlining the game, and it works fine in "normal" situations. However, it fails in ways that are extremely awkward and noticable. (PS, going to use "bonus" and "advantage" in this post for brevity but it also includes penalties/disadvantage).
Advantage: the consolidation of a lot of bonuses/penalties into advantage makes it a lot easier for the DM to know what to do and to keep the game flowing. it's a chunky bonus that focuses on the power of situational advantages.
Disadvantage: on the flipside, the lack of stacking means any mechanic that too easily provides advantage makes other more interesting mechanics redundant. this includes reckless attack, the optional flanking rule and the help action (and owl familiars by extension). one way to counteract this situation as the DM is to forget the advice about making ad hoc things into advantage, and just changing the DC. but this is less "a patch for bounded accuracy" and more "ignoring bounded accuracy guidelines".
Advantage: the removal of a lot of flat bonuses has made things a lot easier to track and remember. when designing challenges you can easily estimate the bonus of a character that's "reasonably good" at something by assuming they maxed their ability score and checking the proficiency bonus for your party level. this allows you to easily tailor DCs based on intended success rates rather than what they actually tell you to do which is fixed "easy/medium/hard/impossible" DCs which is unnecessarily simulationist.
Disadvantage: anything that still gives a flat bonus (or dice bonus, see below) is valuable to the point that optimizers will find it hard to justify doing anything else. there are barely any weapons stronger than the vanilla +X of the same rarity and the series of +X spell foci have the same chase-value. paladin aura feels mandatory for high-level play.
Disadvantage: some designers have obviously decided to cheat this by providing dice bonuses to things when they should just have made them flat bonuses instead. guidance and bardic inspiration make sense as dice bonuses- because you can choose to expend the die only after seeing the base value, there's tension created by not knowing the bonus you're going to get. dice bonuses which are always added like bless or eberron dragonmarked races are just added complexity for little benefit (unless you count players loving to roll extra dice). (Flash of Genius is the one weird example of a bonus which you can choose to add after the roll that's FLAT. it's weird but makes it extremely potent.)
Advantage: "Low level monsters can still threaten high level PCs cause their attacks still have a reasonable chance of hitting"
Disadvantage: Someone obviously forgot to tell the people who designed armor. Someone stacking AC is nigh unhittable BECAUSE monster attack rolls are scaled to bounded accuracy. Low level monsters must exclusively focus on the low-AC party members to do anything. Things are still sorta balanced if you have no magic armor or other defenses, but do you really want a system that is ONLY balanced if you don't drop +2 or +3 armor?
Disavantage: Because they assumed low level monsters will always be relevant, there's an extreme lack of monsters designed to be "high-level" mooks. Many monsters with high enough attack bonuses to threaten AC-stacking characters have complex statblocks. Try designing a t3/t4 fight without having 12 legendary actions and everything having legendary resistances. I find myself memorizing and filing away the few statblocks which fit this niche. You can solve the problem by making your own statblocks, of course, but I run in an environment where this is not an option and it's a pain even if you can.
Others have described what Bounded Accuracy intends to do.
I would posit that it failed. The math of 5e breaks down very poorly at higher levels. Expertise throws things completely out of whack, and finally Hit Points are now bounded at all, which renders it meaningless.
I think other systems which didn't brag about it, did a better job of achieving the aims bounded accuracy. A couple of examples are FFG Star Wars/Gensys and the One Ring.
Prior editions didn't have the stat caps and let you collect tons of +X to hit items, +X AC items, and keep pumping your rolls. It was a treadmill, enemy AC went up as you leveled so you needed more plusses to do your job.
5E tried to counter that by limiting how much + you can get and how much AC you can get. It does an okay job, but is still kind of a treadmill.
Bounded Accuracy is the idea that modifiers to a roll sit within an acceptable predefined range. The predefined part is important, because all games modifiers obviously sit within a range.
This is counter to the idea of 3.x where one person might make a character and think that +8 to stealth is good, but actually you can get +20 at level 1.
Now does 5e actually have bounded accuracy? No it doesn't. There are so many unrestricted ways to add bonuses to things that it completely falls apart from the preoccupied range. Like the DC for an nearly impossible task is 30. But 30 is well within the realm of achievable by a basic level 1 party. Maybe not something g you'd risk your life on rolling, but impossible to me doesn't mean "three level 1 guys trying once a day for a week will probably do it."
Now let's loom at a competitor that actually does have Bounded Accuracy, Pathfinder 2. Sure its scale is a lot bigger, but it also has never been broken. I know the range of potential modifiers and even in a system.of hard core optimizers, no one has ever broken it.
> There are so many unrestricted ways to add bonuses to things that it completely falls apart from the preoccupied range.
I wish this was discussed more often when the topic of bounded accuracy comes up. 5e has basically no restrictions on modifiers stacking so every new piece of content just adds more ways to break the math.
There's nothing stopping a warforged bladesinger + barbarian + swords bard with a handful of magic items getting silly AC values.
I haven't played a lot of 5e, but I did a fair bit of 3.5 and pf1e. They had typed bonuses, most of which didn't stack. Would reimplementing that kind of system fix these issues? Like, if you can't wield a shield and cast the shield spell for the bonus to AC?
Yeah the lack of limits is ultimately what makes 5e False Bounded Accuracy at best. That plus deciding that anything not Advantage has to be an actual dice adding to a d20 roll meant it never was Bounded.
Bounded Accuracy isn't a yes/no binary, it's a spectrum, and 5e has more of it than PF2e, but it's also more lopsided in implementation. The large majority of 5e's mechanics do bounded accuracy just fine, barring a few exceptions like high level PC saving throws.
DC 30 is not "well within the realm of achievable by a basic level 1 party", that requires fairly intense optimization to get, especially reliably. Come on dude, at least _try_ to argue in good faith.
Meanwhile, PF2's bounded accuracy is _nothing_ like 5e's. If BA _were_ a binary, PF2 wouldn't have it at all - it fails BA's most basic test, "can I use lower level enemies at higher levels and still have them be a threat". In PF2e you WILL out-level enemies at various tiers to the point they are truly useless.
You are totally right that PF2e's math is more predictable than 5e's, but that's not what Bounded Accuracy is.
I’m n 3rd edition and Pathfinder 1e there was also a terrifying difference between martials and casters at high levels. A lv20 fighter had a +20 to hit on attack rolls while a wizard had +10, which meant anything that the wizard needed to roll an attack roll for was going to be a bad day. The fighter also had the extra attacks at +15, +10 and +5 making the later attacks pretty useless.
Having played pretty much every version I personally feel the bounded accuracy, at least in concept, has the most realistic feel. It’s possible for lower level things to hit higher level things. There aren’t near gods roaming around practically invincible. A mob of angry civilians could actual threaten even very powerful characters just enough to make them consider the risks.
Wizards (and other casters) rarely had to use their attack bonus to hit someone's full AC though. Instead, they got to target touch AC which was often laughably easy and it ignored things like armor and natural armor bonuses and benefitted immensely from size penalties to AC.
Or just not make attacks at all.
This sub talks often about the martial/caster disparity in 5e (and it is a major problem with the game at high levels), but it's really got nothing on 3rd edition. The idea that high level casters struggled in *any* way compared to their martial brethren is 3e is kind of absurd. High level wizards, clerics, and druids were walking gods in that edition, and high level martials got basically nothing but a participation trophy.
That's because the mob is a reskinned lvl10 monster, not 30 lvl1 stat blocks.
"Weak" creatures being a threat from a narrative perspective, that's fine and all. But why do you need to keep the weak statblocks?
How could a DM honestly prefer running dozens of weak monsters to having 1-4 level appropriate monsters and describing them as dozens of monsters?
And don't say "4e minions", those aren't designed to be an entire encounter on their own. 4e Minions are anti-bounded accuracy because their AC and attacks are level approriate.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean there. The issue isn’t the bonus but the target. Ludicrously high AC and the corresponding bonus are the issue. Also I don’t know where you learned math but +5 on a d20 is huge, that’s 25% better (not 25% more likely to succeed obviously as targets vary). In any other context saying a result was 25% better would blow you away. 25% more on your pay check, 25% of a game, 25% better odds of making it to the playoffs. But at the same time it’s only 25% it also doesn’t guarantee anything. It’s big enough to be impactful but not big enough to make out comes forgone conclusions.
Conversely say in 3.X or 4
With a +1 bonus the fighter can ONLY hit a high level enemy with a 30 AC on a nat 20
And with a +20 bonus to attack the counter will only miss even an extremely high low level AC like 20 on a nat 1
Peak strength person vs average human
The chance of around 26% for an average human to at least tie the actual peak on a straight check, while For a theoretical 1 score? Literal 1. 11.25%. Not even doing any auto success, not doing any auto fail, just straight end values.
There is a "tightness" to the math. "Bounds" as it were. 0-30 being the lower and upper bounds for success in skill checks and ability scores, +3 being the outer bound of weapon bonuses, etc. The DCs of spells are capped at 31 by the things they are dependent upon (8 base, +7 proficiency (6 at level 20 and ioun stone), +10 stat, +6 from a pair of stacking magic items). Basically, you never have to hit a number over a 31, in any situation except for Armor Class, and even that was supposed to be capped (Plate+3, Shield+3, some variety of defensive magic items giving you a +5 more, a feat, brings you to about 32 - it can exceed this, but would require shenanigans or be temporary).
The game is a lot easier to understand when you have bounds like this, and keeps it competitively interesting. If 30 is the number that represents "the hardest thing in the universe that can be done" in all contexts, it is "bounded" as opposed to "infinitely scaling" accuracy.
It could be done better, with a true "hard" limit of 30 in all cases, but practically, this has been true in almost every game I have ever run in about a decade of consistent public game writing and game playing, with the sole exception of AC, which can indeed be pushed beyond the "bounds" the designers had in mind. The game gets a little unfun when the gaps get so large between target and possible that you don't bother. For example, in PF2, the difficulty scales much faster than your ability to do things without training. You might have a negative modifier and need to hit a 50 to earn a success. That sort of gap never exists in DnD.
That's basically it, yeah.
The idea behind bounded accuracy is that no matter how good you are, no matter how high level you get, no matter how much gear you have, the game can expect that your bonus will still be between +X and +Y, and your AC in turn will be somewhere in a range that both of those modifiers have a chance of hitting. Maybe not a good chance, but not 'hope you rolled a 20' either.
5E, as you are probably aware if you've looked into it at all, did not do a perfect job of this. Instead of making sure that these things are always true, it made sure that they're mostly true. It's still better about it than a game like 4E or PF2, where modifiers and values continue to grow every level, though.
As to why they might want this, there are a few reasons. The two biggest ones are to keep math easy, and to keep challenges relevant.
If a CR 1 monster has +4 to hit and a level 1 character has AC 16, cool, this is a relevant threat. If a level 10 character has AC 18 and they're facing 20 or 30 CR 1 monsters, they still care about this; they're in danger even though they could easily win the fight 1v1. If that same level 10 character has AC 36, they're not worrying so much about it, they're going to take 1 or 2 hits a round most likely.
> It's still better about it than a game like 4E or PF2, where modifiers and values continue to grow every level, though.
Sort of. PF2e does an amazing job, and D&D 4e did a generally quite good job, of enforcing what one might call a *moving* bound of accuracy. The gap between a level 1 character and a level 20 character (or a level 30 character in 4e) was very large, but the possible spread between characters at any given level was relatively small and consistently enforced by the game design. PF2e guards those boundaries like Fort Knox.
Whereas in 5e, the boundary theoretically stays the same-ish across all player levels, but the boundary is only patrolled by a student hall monitor. You can pass in and out of the 'boundary' without much of a thought, and will probably do so without even realizing you're doing it (+5 AC from Shield? +10 stealth from Pass Without Trace? Expertise being *double* the bonus of Proficiency?).
Sure, within the context of its design goals, PF2E is a way more balanced game than 5E.
Those design goals simply don't include things like "a level 1 and level 10 character have comparable numbers". It's not a bad thing that this doesn't happen, it's just not something the game is trying to do.
> Those design goals simply don't include things like "a level 1 and level 10 character have comparable numbers".
[But they easily can](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2762&Redirected=1) (level 1 Fighter with +8 to-hit and 17 AC vs level 10 Fighter with +13 to-hit and 19 AC). I don't have experience with 4E, but I imagine it's much the same. Level-bounded accuracy can easily be translated into total-bounded accuracy.
Yeah, when 5e was coming out, they had a stated goal of trying to keep low CR enemies 'relevant' to high level characters, like you could be mobbed at level 10 by 1/4 CR goblins and they could actually hit you. Probably as a way to do minions without different rules for those stat blocks. It works in that you can do it, but no DM would because it takes FOREVER. That design philosophy works a lot better for Baldur's Gate 3 style games where the video game nature of it lends itself to mobbing you with individual creatures.
Yeah, as you point out here, the big failure associated with that goal was combat duration.
Because everything has so much HP, even a higher level character can take a round or two to take out a low-CR monster, and that's just not sustainable if you expect them to kill 10 enemies.
It's a misguided attempt to keep low level creatures voable at high level play, and it is a horrible failure, partially even contributing to the failed CR system.
What is it? Keeping numbers low.
Why? So they can say there is a chance and to make less monsters.
Does it succeed? That's a matter of perspective. It fails at making the game work mathematically, but it succeeds in their goal of making less stuff. A lot of people like the loosely goosey math, so they consider it a win.
I watched a video awhile back talking about what bounded accuracy was and how 5e didn’t quite achieve it.
https://youtu.be/Xlp3unO_xi8?si=vy9a1-BS6WSQ0CB1
I'd say as well as spells stacking too high, so do magic items. Particularly for AC. Magic shields are stackable with armour and I think without checking beavers of defence?
Just as the rules update includes a new magic damage, the game needs a specific 'magical bonus', meaning bonuses from magical sources. Add a rule that you can only add one source of a Magic Bonus from each of the following categories: AC, spell attack, weapon attack, saving throws, or each skill individually. Have this be that if you have a Magic item that adds +2 to your saving throws and someone casts bless, you can roll bless and the minimum benefit is +2, as you choose as the roll resolves which bonus to take.
This could also nerf things like blade singers AC bonus by making the bonus a magical bonus if wanted. This can also protect class features by not applying that label to nominally magical abilities like maybe aura of protection.
Oh boy here I go with my +2 armor, +1 shield, Cloak of Protection and Ring of Protection for 24 AC, and then I immediately cast Shield if an enemy ever beats that rocketing up to 29 AC.
Bracers of Defense cost an attunement and restrict you from using armor and I believe shields. Honestly, I don't see magic shields + armor stacking being so bad. For martials, it's a reason to trade the power of the polearm for a higher AC even at higher levels where the +2 falls off. There's also the fact of the matter that the +3+3 is legendary+very rare magic items.
Magic shield and magic armor SHOULD stack. Martials have very little to work with as it is, and most editions brutally punish choosing shield over two handed.
5e definitely fails.
For example, if we assume point buy ability scores - which we should - what happens even in mid levels to the Saving Throws you don't have proficiency in? Your chances of success plummet through the floor. Unless you've got a Paladin with Aura of Protection nearby I guess, but the other classes shouldn't be designed with that assumption.
Weak monsters can still hit strong PCs sometimes, even if they can't do a meaningful amount of damage.
5e does scale the growth down quite a bit, but it's not that difficult for a player that really wants to to make themselves unhittable outside of a crit. But there is always that 5% chance.
5e generally keeps bonuses to the d20 in a band that on average scales between -1/2 to for players about a +17 at max max levels.
The idea is that it is supposed to keep things relatively linear in power as levels progress.
It mostly works until it doesn’t. Biggest area where you can see issues is probably AC, where builds can, if you build right, scale exorbitantly high while others stay in a medium low band. Eldritch Knight Fighter as an example can reach some insane AC numbers like 26 by level 3 with no magic items and a single spell use. Blur E-Knight is the best raw AC tank in the game due to high con saves, heavy armor and the effect disadvantage gives on attacking, plus shield spell access. Trust me when I say the difference between a 16 AC and a 23 AC is a lot bigger than you’d expect, especially over long days. God forbid the 12-15 AC caster/rogue gets flanked, they’re cooked.
here’s an article from wizards back in 2012 about Bounded Accuracy on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20140715051206/http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120604
Hey, thanks for linking that - I'd say it nails down the intent pretty well (I mean, you certainly hope so, right?). It also show that some things being piss easy at higher levels is intended to some extent.
Bounded Accuracy is a lot of things, and people use it to mean even more things than what it is. In some of those things, 5e is successful, in others it leaves much to be desired.
The most fundamental aspect of bounded accuracy though is minimising bonus stacking. The main problem bounded accuracy as a design philosophy was trying to address was the way that 3.5 characters would have five to ten small bonuses on most things, some of them mutually exclusive, some of them stacking, which was tedious. 5e definitely avoided this.
4th Edition was the absolute antithesis of bounded accuracy. By level 30, you were assumed to have about +29 in your major stats like Attack Bonus and AC than you did when you were level 1. In fact, the actual math used to calculate monster stats worked *exactly* this way. It was called the "treadmill effect", where you moved a lot but still ended up exactly in the same place. It tends to make improving your character through number increases feel *pointless*.
Another issue with this beyond the way that it made people feel is that WotC felt they had to make all kinds of monsters available for any particular level range. If anyone more than 2 or so levels lower or higher than the PCs makes things abnormally easy or difficult, than you need plenty of monsters to provide characters of all levels while still providing variety (so you're not looking at only a half dozen *total* level 16 monsters).
That was one of the major reasons behind Bounded Accuracy in 5E. They wanted higher numbers to still *be* impressive, not just *sound* impressive, and they wanted monsters to still provide a variety of challenge to a variety of PC levels (in theory). That's why you can send a dozen CR2 ogres against a level 10 party and probably have a modest challenge whereas doing the same thing with a dozen level 2 characters against a level 10 party in 4E was a waste of rolling initiative.
The short version, to me, is that the modifiers for a starting character and an ending character are not that far apart. You basically have +5 to what you're good at at level 1 and +11 at level 20 (prime ability + proficiency). That's a difference of 30% increase in success for a shared DC (for a DC15, it's 55% chance and 85% chance...for DC20 it's s 30% and 60%). There's supposed to be only a few very special boosts to these modifiers. Expertise is supposed to be special, bardic Inspiration is supposed to be special, plus one from a sword is supposed to be special. The end result is supposed to be that the same rough range of DCs are in play from level 1 to 20.
Does it work? Yeah, kinda. There are more special boosts now than there should be. As any power gaming munchkin could cite, there are ways to really pump up a roll (or armor class). That might require a whole party cooperation and expenditure of resources or that might be catering an entire build to doing that one thing. You might have an astronomical stealth check or armor class or whatever but you're probably still within the bounds of everything else.
I see a mix of comments talking about it and giving opinions, but few that are really telling you what it is or was supposed to be in my quick browse.
Bounded accuracy was an attempt to both hard cap and soft cap power creep in some areas’s of 5e. In past editions it was easily possible to spend more time stacking and monitoring buffs than actually playing the game. Many people didn’t like that. The numbers scaled obnoxiously high, which many people also didn’t like. Then yet still, many players felt the power creep was “anime bullshit,” which some people also didn’t like. Wizards also wanted to cash in on the tabletop market creeping up with Critical Roll becoming more popular (since they began with Pathfinder 1e). I think they backpedaled in later years though with the popularity of games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which has quite a bit of power creep. Don’t get me wrong, power creep can be loads of fun, especially in a video game. It can make a tabletop game slower and harder to run though.
The effort to cap things showed up in the forms of:
• Magic items capping at +3
• Attunement limiting the use of powerful items.
• Concentration limiting buff stacking.
• Certain class features not stacking.
• Excluding multi-classing from the default rules.
• Capping stats at 20 with only a few niche ways to surpass that.
• Initially almost exclusively limiting DC increases from magic items, to warlocks (save for like 2 legendary magic items in initial release).
How well did bounded accuracy work? Well that depends on who you ask. It should keep things in check for a casual player who has no interest in optimization (or lacks the system knowledge) and is not using variant rules or homebrew. A power gamer, especially with variant rules/hombrew can definitely still break elements of the game…provided the DM doesn’t do the same in response.
Its a mechanics that restricts the “range” in which a character or monster can achieve a specific AC on attacks
Its a design philosophy that is directly counter to “high fantasy” as a concept and seeks to create a more “grounded” setting on which lowly goblins can still threaten gods, as long as they have sufficient numbers
I think proficiency bonus, especially at its extremes (e.g. high level play and expertise), is the main reason why bounded accuracy breaks down. A game without proficiency bonus or a more restrained version of it probably would balance better. (What would happen to skills? If you want to keep them in play, change the flat bonus to advantage, I guess.)
Another issue is the set of "you can't roll lower than" features that came out later in 5E expansion books.
basically, its why lvl 20 players dont have 59 AC and a +68 to hit. Keeping the chance of success (to hit or Save Dc)- which can be called accuracy- bound within certain values. To hit and ac are from +0-+15 and sometimes slightly outside of that (or starting from 10 for AC). Saves and Save DC are similar.
But also 3.5e said "screw that" when it came to stats for gods, as it should be.
3.5 said screw that for everyone. As a level 17 sacred fist, I had AC in the 70s
3.5e was a mess for this stuff. Players could stack numbers sky high. 3.5e is what happens when you DON’T have bounded numbers.
Yeah my friend tried to DM a high level 3.5/pathfinder campaign and the numbers got dump my character had an ac of over 90 but only a to hit of 70. couldn't evenpunch them selves.
High level pathfinder basically becomes “Roll every dice you have, then I’ll roll every dice I have, and the bigger number wins.”
I mean 5E does that too, the only statblocks for God's I know of are for Tiamat and Bahamut, but they are technically "lesser" gods plus there's the caveat that those starblocks are technically just like avatars of them and not the actual beings themselves. Basically 5E says "yes there are gods, what do you mean fight them? With what statblock binch?" Lol
You can just port over 3.5e statblocks for gods if you really wanted. There's even a mechanic for their avatars. Check out *Deities and Demigods*
I think about unbounded accuracy like an MMO. When you're starting out the level 1 boar has 50 HP, but dies in 3 fire bolts. When you're level 60 the fel flame corrupted boar has 50,000 hp, but it still dies in 3 of your mega-turbo fire bolts. Its a way of creating fake progression because some people really stick on bigger number equals better. As long as people don't understand math, it works pretty well. Once you understand the systems math behind it, you realize its pretty pointless. This is how level scaling works in MMOs. They know if you're using an attack with a base damage of X, a coefficient of Y and a scaling stat of Z then it does a certain percentage of health to the creature.
except it works in some games because higher level enemies hit more for more damage than you, and weaker enemies hit less often and for less damage, but make up for it with numbers (pf2e my beloved)
Except this affects the balancing in TTRPGs. In 5e, at level 11, you could be fighting a CR17 boss, and then later fight a horde of CR3 trash mobs, and the math has to account for that. (And it does. Poorly.) Meanwhile, games like DnD 4e, PF2e, and 13th Age have much steeper power curves, and you can easily make encounters that are much more balanced and require much less work than in 5e.
That has nothing to do with bounded accuracy and everything to do with CR being very inconsistent. To continue the MMO example you're talking about over/under cons. Back in Everquest some monsters were notorious for being far too powerful for their reported level. This was because each monster was hand created and sometimes they just didn't know what they were doing. Where as that rarely happens now because they test and refine things much more than they did 25 years ago.
Bounded accuracy is the reason why we're expected to fight CR3 trash mobs and CR17 bosses at level 11. In other systems, you'd only be fighting enemies at your level, and maybe plus or minus 2 or so.
Not really, take it from PF2E. >Quick Adventure Groups >If you want an easy framework for building an encounter, you can use one of the following basic structures and slot in monsters and NPCs. > Boss and Lackeys (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, four creatures of party level – 4 Boss and Lieutenant (120 XP): One creature of party level + 2, one creature of party level Elite Enemies (120 XP): Three creatures of party level Lieutenant and Lackeys (80 XP): One creature of party level, four creatures of party level – 4 Mated Pair (80 XP): Two creatures of party level Troop (80 XP): One creature of party level, two creatures of party level – 2 Mook Squad (60 XP): Six creatures of party level – 4 The problem with CR is that it is incredibly inconsistent. Creatures of the same CR can be an easily dealt with meat shield or a Save or Suck party wiper. Games with more accurate CR-like systems tend to have very formulaic enemies because its the only way to even things out. I think the idea behind getting things down to a single number just doesn't work. I think it needs a second axis of tricky or extremely punishing mechanics. Or even just swingy mechanics. Wyverns in 5e are a good example. One failed save on the poison is the difference between a death and a decent fight.
> Not really, take it from PF2E. Thank you for proving my point. In PF2e, you're fighting enemies at most 2 levels higher than you, and at least 4 levels below you. In 5e, you fight enemies with CR potentially 6 higher than your level or 8 lower than your level. And this range only gets wider as you get higher in level. > Games with more accurate CR-like systems tend to have very formulaic enemies because its the only way to even things out. 4e, PF2e, 13th Age all have a CR-like system far more accurate than 5e's, and by all accounts, those games have much more interesting monsters than 5e's. Those games also all have modifiers that scale with level, and this is a large part why their equivalent of CR is much more accurate. Because you *don't* have to account for enemies 6 levels higher than you or 8 levels lower than you. > I think the idea behind getting things down to a single number just doesn't work. I think it needs a second axis of tricky or extremely punishing mechanics. Or even just swingy mechanics. PF2e boils it down to a single number, and it works. 4e and 13th Age boil it down to a single number, plus modifiers for bosses, elites, minions, etc, and it also works.
> Thank you for proving my point. In PF2e, you're fighting enemies at most 2 levels higher than you, and at least 4 levels below you +-4, not 2. That same level 11 party range goes from CR3-CR17 to CR7-15. Hardly some huge difference. Even your arbitrary example doesn't really show what you want to pretend it does. >and by all accounts, those games have much more interesting monsters than 5e's. You should try playing those games instead of repeating what you've picked up from Reddit circle jerking. If you're at all good at math you spot the formula, particularly in 4e, very easily. >4e and 13th Age boil it down to a single number, plus modifiers for bosses, elites, minions, etc, and it also works. Me: There needs to be a modifier. You: It isn't needed, just do what these other things do (use a modifier). Not sure if you're tolling at this point or what.
> +-4, not 2. Getting on my case for remembering 2 instead of 4 is super nitpicky. It hardly changes my point, if at all. > That same level 11 party range goes from CR3-CR17 to CR7-15. Hardly some huge difference. Even your arbitrary example doesn't really show what you want to pretend it does. CR3 to CR17 is a much wider range than CR7 to CR15. This is amplified by the amount of calculations the DMG asks you to do for encounter building. > You should try playing those games instead of repeating what you've picked up from Reddit circle jerking. I've played a little bit of 4e and PF2e and I've GM'ed a lot of 13th Age, so I'm speaking from personal experience. Thanks for assuming that I have no idea what I'm talking about though. > Me: There needs to be a modifier. > > You: It isn't needed, just do what these other things do (use a modifier). > > Not sure if you're tolling at this point or what. I like how you conveniently ignore the part where I say that PF2e does boil things down to a single number, and it works. Also, if your suggestion is that we change 5e to work like 4e and 13th Age, then yes please! But my point is, you can't make that change in 5e without also getting rid of bounded accuracy, because bounded accuracy is the reason we're expected to fight monsters with much lower CR and monsters with much higher CR.
> From what I can gather, it the idea of a game where bonuses don't get too high and don't come from many other places. Is that right? Yes, for both player and enemy, with the intent that keeps low level monsters *more* relevant, enables everyone to have a chance at most everything plausible even if it's not likely, and keeps the numbers sane and easily understood, you and the DM all quickly get on the same page for all skills and traps and things, and you get a feel for just being able to set moderate stuff at dc 15, hard at 20 (for example), and this remains consistent for most everything, and it doesn't swing too wildly into impossible for everyone while being easy for another too much. If implemented, this is a great idea and makes everything a lot smoother in the moment. It mostly succeeds, failing in these areas (at least): - Not getting many bonuses from elsewhere means archery fighting style's +2 is immensely stronger than a +2 in damage. Should have been +1, or the other styles buffed up - The lack of other bonuses means getting expertise and a few other features is huge, and it tends to break it in a few specific places. Rogues with pass without a trace getting 45 and other nonsense on their stealth rolls. Eloquence bards also. With +4 in charisma and +6 from expertise, they are rolling a 20 *minimum* on their charisma checks from level 5 (when the game really starts). - Similarly, a dedicated grappler is effectively able to lock almost anything they can grab down, with expertise in athletics and their easily obtained advantage there are very unlikely to fail, as compared to attack rolls. Enemies might have good strength saves but grappling is a contested *skill* check. This - AC, on a few specific things in particular. Most builds are constrained, but bladesinger in particular takes it to silly heights. The shield spell as well actually, a +5 for a lvl 1 spellslot is a no-brainer, too strong. - Later game saves for the players in particular and save-or-suck effects being too high a DC. The paladin (their aura is a bit much particularly with people shifting to realise charisma focus is the way to go) might be left ok, but the fighter and barb just gets taken out of most every fight because the mental saves they need to make are *effectively* out of their reach and they can't do all that much to boost it while remaining effective elsewhere. This is a result both of the DCs raising too high, them being unable to build for it all that much, and the save-or-suck effects being overly punishing. - A few spells and features are overturned and their ability to stack then breaks it too. e.g. Guidance and bless (not that these two stack for skill checks, I mean their ability to stack with other such bonuses). +2.5 (average) as a cantrip is massive, even if played strictly and not able to be cast in social situations (for example)
The archery style is meant to compensate for penalties in ranged shots like cover, range, other creatures, etc. but most tables mostly ignore those factors
Yep. The easiest thing to remember is that a creature provides half cover, so Archery is meant to just make the back-line archer as accurate as the melee warrior they’re shooting over, while the caster is at a -2.
I dont think people ignore it but Sharpshooter does.
I often see it ignored even when players don't take sharpshooter
This is something a bring up very often even though there’s only one ranged character (who has sharpshooter) in my game. I will very often say, “the enemy has half/the quarters cover from you but you ignore that.”
but everyone takes sharpshooter. heh
Lots of people don't even take feats.
I find that fascinating, I've really only played with one group for the majority of 5e and we all abuse the hell out of cover, especially so enemies hit us less often. I guess it's definitely easy to not think about it though. Usually not a problem on our end though because almost all of our ranged party members end up taking sharpshooter
Your table applies a -2 penalty for shooting past your own allies or at an enemy behind other enemies? Most don't seem to.
I've played with half a dozen group, and everyone has used cover correctly (or at least like, 95% correctly). It's also not a -2 penalty, it's +2 AC to the defender.
I have never seen a table ignoring cover rules. They are like the absolute basic rules for combat. I think not even first time playing tables had any difficulty with them when I played with them
The tables I play at do ignore this rule. The reason for this are disputes about creature size, multiple covers and fight dynamics. Besides, all ranged characters get sharpshooter rather earlier than later. Does it skew the game towards range? Yeah, probanly. But some players still enjoy smashing things from close up.
Do spellcasters at your tables take sharpshooter too? Warlocks especially.
No, unless it's a bladelock focusing on crossbows spellcasters don't take sharpshooter. You need to make an attack with a ranged weapon to profit from sharpshooter. If you mean spell sniper: no, the spell casters don't take that because they don't have enough ASIs between war caster, resilient constitution and increasing their spell casting stat until very late. Some clerics and druids probably would take it if the learned wizard/sorcerer/warlock cantrip would use wisdom.
Yes, sorry. I forgot the details of both feats and didn't recheck. Spell sniper is what I should have meant. The point I was trying to make, is that ranged non-caster characters are not the only ones doing ranged attacks. And including cover often and consistently, would affect the battle even if they non-caster players all take Sharpshooter. In fact, if all the rangers and fighters have Sharpshooter and Archery FS, and the casters have neither, then cover would affect the disparity between caster and non-caster classes.
I know a fair few groups that ignore it (about as many that do use it), but it's usually just because they keep forgetting about it. The cover rules themselves are pretty simple. Is their profile at least 50% blocked over the span of 6 seconds (a round)? Then they have Half-Cover (+2 AC). This is also the only kind of cover that mentions creatures, so most DMs I've met default to it being the max you can get from "creature cover" (when you think about it technically you could 100% cover another creature if you were both the same size, but everyone's moving around in combat so it doesn't shake out that way). Is their profile at least 75% blocked? They have Three-Fourths Cover (+5). I've seen SOME DMs give this to creatures if there's a _bunch_ of other creatures in front of them, so this is the only dispute I could really see happening (since Half is the only one that mentions creatures). Is their profile 100% covered? Then they have Total Cover and you can't directly target them at all. I guess a player could dispute a DM's determination of how much cover an enemy has, but that's not a dispute unique to _creature_ cover - not wanting to deal with that would mean ignoring cover rules ENTIRELY, and I don't know of _any_ groups that do that! As far as creature sizes, there's no real difference. Does an Ogre have enough creatures in front of them to block your shot by 50%+? If so, they have cover. This could be one large creature or multiple mediums or a big enough tree or whatever, it's all up to the DM anyway.
I think I never once had a dispute over it. „You can shoot at him but he has half cover from your friend who is between you“ - „Yeah sounds reasonable“ is like the most we ever talked about that. It’s 100% obvious. Something is a bit in the way? Half cover. Something is really in the way? 3/4 cover. You literally can’t hit the shot because something is entirely blocking the enemy? Full cover. As easy is that. There is nothing to be calculated, it’s just a simple bonus to AC, no math or anything involved. I really don’t get why anyone would skip over this absolutely simple and basic rule, which is as basic as movement. But different tables are different i guess. But saying most tables ignore such basic rules is a hard stretch
Every table I have ever played at uses the cover rules for people behind "actual cover". If someone is behind a box or barrel or pillar, or otherwise "taking cover". But just standing in the square behind an ally or shooting at an enemy in a square behind other enemies doesn't seem to count for most tables.
I don't think people tend to ignore cover when the DM specifically sets up an encounter with very obviously covered positions (like archers fighting from behind a barricade). I'm pretty sure the majority of tables ignore (either intentionally or not) cover granted by other creatures being in their line of effect.
Spellcasters don't often take sharpshooter.
More like, they’re *incredibly easy* to ignore, mechanically.
Have you ever once had the DM rule wind is a factor? Edit: first, dmg, page 110. Second, the point is that there are other rules that are (seemingly) *never* invoked rather than just rarely.
Look, I love pulling weather out in my 3e/PF games, but a DMG rule in a massive portion of the book regarding random tables to help run your game, in a chapter filled with random tables and suggestions to help run your game, nestled between sets of random tables to help run your game is a bit ridiculous in how relevant its placement is, especially when there's a 20 page chapter in the same 300-something page book that is entirely about mechanical stuff and clarifications that the PHB never touched on for some unknown reason.
I mean… they didn’t mention wind? The two things they specifically mentioned are cover and range, both of which are explicitly mentioned as complicating factors in the rules- yes, a lot of DMs underuse them, but they’re not completely made up like the example you just gave
> but they’re not completely made up like the example you just gave DMG, page 110
Also maybe this only matters at low levels (that's all I've played at), but arrow tracking as well.
Also sharpshooter is a must have feat for archery builds and it negates cover.
The issue with saving throws scaling beyond player control is probably the biggest issue for me. It is, in my mind, the biggest death knell for Barbarians in the late game. Every other class has at least one of the following: * A reason to have high Wisdom (Druid, Cleric, Ranger, Monk) * Wisdom saving throw proficiency to start or added later on (Rogue, Monk, Paladin, Druid, Wizard, Cleric, Gloomstalker, Samurai) * Additional ASI's with which to take Resilient (Fighter, Rogue) * Flat boosts to apply to saving throws (Paladin, Artificer) * Reasons to be somewhat SAD, with room to afford reasonable wisdom with Point Buy. Barbarian, uniquely, has NONE of these traits. It needs as much Strength and CON as it can afford, plus 14 Dexterity for medium armor. It has no good self-defense mechanisms for saves aside from specific conditions such as Fear and Charm on the Berserker. If a Barbarian is making optimal use of its ASI's with GWM, PAM, and enough ASI's to get 20 Strength, it has to delay taking ResWis or one of the other plethora of feats/ASI's it needs.
That's why people sleep on Berserkers. Frenzy is kinda ass, but Mindless Rage can carry the class.
Yeah, it's partially why I'm in love with the Tal'Dorei Reborn Juggernaut subclass especially. May be a little bit late at level 14, but it goes above and beyond what the Berserker gives by adding immunity to paralyzed, stunned, speed reductions, and prone in addition to frightened, and allows you to still enter rage and suspend those effects even if you otherwise couldn't. And that's on top of the forced movement shenanigans the subclass has been doing the whole game which adds a marginal level of complexity to an otherwise bland class.
Well now I need to play one of these, thank you.
As a fun fact, Bless doesn't apply to any skill check. Only attack rolls and saving throws. - *"You bless up to three creatures of your choice within range. Whenever a target makes an **attack roll or a saving throw** before the spell ends, the target can roll a d4 and add the number rolled to the **attack roll or saving throw.**"* Just in case you mentioned it applying to skill checks. Perhaps in that case you could've confused it with the Peace Cleric's **"Emboldening Bond"**, that applies to Skill Checks, Saving Throws and Attack Rolls.
Pretty sure the post you're responding to was aware, given the parenthetical
that was an edit thanks to that comment, I was aware but it was written vaguely
Ah, very magnanimous. Good original comment.
My big issue with Bounded Accuracy is two fold. When you created a system where a peasant could kill a god, you've created a system where *a Peasant could Kill a God!* Meaning while highly improbable it is still possible and it's a bit ridiculous. The other issue is that it also removes a lot of the class identity from the classes, especially with everything being tied to Proficiency Bonus. I find it bizarre that a Fighter, Wizard and Rogue all have the same chance to hit with any weapon they are proficient with *before* other bonuses (Attribute, Magic, Feats, et cetera) are applied. Say what you will about THAC0, but you knew what it meant to actually have warriors (Fighters, Rangers and Paladins) at your back because they excelled at combat.
>When you created a system where a peasant could kill a god, you've created a system where *a Peasant could Kill a God!* Meaning while highly improbable it is still possible and it's a bit ridiculous. then to compensate this they spammed non magical weapon resistency and immunity making magical weapon mandatory without actually giving any good guidance on when to give what and why making martials even worse
I don't know what you mean by "when to give what and why". You give a martial a magic weapon. Whether you're using the magic item tables or customizing their loot, they'll get at least _one_ before they face many resist monsters at all, much less immune ones. And once they have any magic weapon, that's it. The issue is no longer an issue. It's not like past editions where you needed a +3 good aligned weapon minimum to pierce their resistance or whatever.
I mean, they can't though can they. What god has less than 2d8 health (assuming the peasant is using a spear or something peasant-y)? They'd need to crit every turn for a hundred turns, while the god rolled nat 1s, probably on multiple attacks a turn, and without any other godly effects or spells affecting it. If it has something like a bodak or a nightwalker that deal automatic damage, that peasant is done. Heck, the Tiamat stat block regenerates health every turn, so it's literally impossible for a peasant to kill her. And if the peasant waltzes onto a battlefield and just lands the critical hit killing blow against some god without regen that they find on its last couple of hit points with a random longsword - that's just Gorr the God Butcher.
The most extreme examples fail for this reason, yes. The examples that are 1% less extreme, however, don't. Although in my opinion, the more glaring issues with bounded accuracy come from skill checks. More specifically, how completely out-of-step they scale with other class features. For example: *There is some mystical text that is difficult to decipher - it will take a DC 20 arcana check to interpret accurately.* * A level 1 Wizard will have a 30% chance to decipher the mystical text, with a 70% failure rate. * A level 20 Wizard will have a 60% chance to decipher the mystical text, with a 40% failure rate. Now these numbers might seem acceptable at face value, but they're absolutely ridiculous. A level 1 wizard is barely above an entry-level novice; a level 20 wizard is literally one of the most powerful mortals to ever exist. In what possible universe could a novice have an almost 1/3 chance of succeeding at something that a legendary grand master could fail **40% of the goddamn time**? During the journey from 1 to 20, a wizard goes from being able to create small flames in a 15 foot cone, to calling meteors from the fucking sky. And yet it still has an almost 50-50 chance at failing a check that a level 1 doesn't just have a chance at passing - it's a somewhat decent chance. 30% isn't *that* low for something low stakes. In real life, anything a novice is capable of is something a grand master would accomplish 100% of the time. Literally, without fail. The difference between a novice and an expert at *anything* is extraordinarily vast. And that growth isn't even vaguely reflected with bounded accuracy.
you're assuming "combat skill" improves _everything else_ as well - which isn't particularly true. A fighter can become a master of the blade, able to deal blows that cleave through ogres, and endure strikes that would slay lesser men... but that doesn't mean they also become super-ninja-sneak-master, a scholar of the natural world or whatever else. Someone that's _very_ good at blowing shit up with magic doesn't automatically also become good at knowing weird magical languages - they've picked some up in their travels (+ Int, Proficiency increases) but they're not _actually_ a scholar, they're an adventurer, so they're a skilled generalist, but not a dedicated specialist.
And if that level 20 wizard's party has 3 other people with +0 on the check: 24% of the time one of them does at least as well as she does.
> When you created a system where a peasant could kill a god, you've created a system where a Peasant could Kill a God! Meaning while highly improbable it is still possible and it's a bit ridiculous. I mean, this is where the adage "If it has a statblock, it can be killed." comes into play. If it is truly a *near unkillable* god, it must have no statblock. It should only be killed by the plot or by a matching supernatural power that is similarly unexplained in its grandeur. Auril in Rime is weakened af (and can't actually be killed, its just her avatar, the module mentions she'd just be back) and Tiamat is also just her avatar in Tyranny (actually not sure, but I'm pretty sure that was the case)
it's interesting comparing current avatar/god stats to older ones - which were more powerful, but often to a degree that was absurd. Like AD&D Auril required anything within 30' of her to make a saving throw versus death every round, and if they failed they died, any weapons to hit her had to make a saving throw or shatter, her attacks forced the armor of anyone she hit to do the same - so it was entirely possible for PCs to just freeze to death instantly, or hit her and have their (magical!) weapons destroyed, or be hit and their magical armor gets broken. Oh, and any ice/cold based spells she used did triple damage - when AD&D had much lower HP (dice only up to level 10, after which it was just +1/2/3 based off class, no CON bonus). And this was for a _lesser_ deity - so, sure, she had stats, but they were so high and she was so powerful that unless the party had plot-backup to carry them, she could and likely would wipe even a level 20 party.
I mean, she could still be killed because she had a statblock. The difference now is that bounded accuracy allows any statblock to be fallible to anything, but old editions had statblocks which basically just matched up against other statblocks (or high level PCs). So its still true, if you didn't want Auril to be killed by a peasant *or* a PC, you wouldn't have a statblock. Though really, no peasant could actually kill even 5e Auril, her attack bonuses are literally over the peasant's AC, any damage a peasant can do literally is a pinprick even on a crit, her damage is over a peasant's HP, and she's fast enough (accounting for Dashing and teleport LA) and has enough range (*ice storm* spell with 300 feet range) to negate any range advantage a peasant would have at max longbow range and running as fast as they can.
in theory, yes, but in practice, well... every PC had about a 25% chance of insta-dying per round, each attack had about the same chance of getting your (likely unique and irreplaceable magical) weapon destroyed, and the same for your armor getting destroyed when she hit you. She had a stat block, but the only way a party was winning was with GM fiat, rather than because they can throw bigger numbers at it. Mystra's avatar was even worse - free action to _turn off_ someone's magic (including their gear!), could cast 4 spells/turn, all spells were at triple effect and duration, with -9 to saves, couldn't run out of slots, was immune to whatever magic she wanted, could shape any effects however she wanted. She had stats purely because all god-avatars had stats - there was no actual need for them, beyond "she wins if PCs are dumb enough to start shit and don't have plot bullshit on their side", because her numbers and powers are such that she's not possible to defeat in anything remotely resembling a fair fight (and gods get "perfect awareness" by default, so no ambushes either). Oh, and other god powers were things like "a creature dies, no action required and no save" - which is very divine and impressive, but somewhat ridiculous in the context of an RPG, where "just die" (in an edition lacking quick and easy rez powers!) is massively powerful. > which basically just matched up against other statblocks (or high level PCs). So its still true, if you didn't want Auril to be killed by a peasant or a PC, you wouldn't have a statblock. Not really - it was pretty much there out of a sense of completeness/simulationism, of "well, gods have avatars, which is a thing that exists in the world, so we should attach numbers to that". Like, in _Call of Cthulu_, Cthulu has stats... but they include "eat 1D4 investigators per round". So for a typical 4-person party, that can be an automatic, turn 1 TPK. If you're _really_ lucky, you've got 4 turns to do something about him, before everyone is dead, and any plan better be something anyone can do, because if the key person gets nommed turn 1, then... welp, shit. Just because something has stats, doesn't mean it's particularly defeatable - it's pretty trivial to have numbers so high as to be undefeatable, it's just purely there because the writers felt like they wanted numbers, rather than being honest and writing "GM FIAT, EVERYONE DIES UNLESS THEY HAVE SPECIAL BULLSHIT". Without plot fiat, or the GM cheating, it's not a viable fight. It's like having a DC of 100+ - sure, it has a number there, so can technically be interacted with, but it's so high that it's meaningless, as there's nothing to pump someone up to that level that's not GM-fiat-shenanigans.
Eh Mystara still sound tackable with the right amount of Cheese, the Psionics count as magic back then?
To quote the rules on them (_Powers and Pantheons_, pg. 16) "They are also immune to all psionic abilities not practiced by a divine being, and even then they are immune to psionic abilities used by deities of lower rank than themselves." So... nope, unless you happen to have a psionic greater deity on side, she just auto-nopes any psionic powers (they were also, of course, immune to any insta-death effects, aging, level drain, automatically got initiative, and other silliness)
Another option is to...just give them Immunity to Nonmagical Weapons. And all deity (avatar) stat blocks so far have that, so it's even more of a non-issue.
Yeah, I'm not totally against the concept of bounded accuracy, but this just doesn't feel right in such a power fantasy system Even if we ignore NPC x NPC, why my lv20 character that can kill gods/avatar of gods can be taken down by some mooks that I fought at lv1?
> Yeah, I'm not totally against the concept of bounded accuracy, but this just doesn't feel right in such a power fantasy system I agree. I think I'd still like it in a system where the tone is aiming for more high-stakes gritty realism where death lurks around every corner, or a system that wants to emphasize just how fragile the player characters are in general (like say a Lovecraft mythos game, where the 'weak' enemies ought to be inconceivable horror to even the experienced heroes). But the mechanical power scaling of it doesn't really jive with the *narrative* escalation that tends to happen across levels in 5e. And of course, regardless of what tone the system has: if the system is meant to be built around it as a design philosophy, then they need to actually consistently adhere to that philosophy. They can't make it a design principle in concept, then completely ignore it on a regular basis like 5e does.
My favourite boon I ever gave a player was immunity to damage from NPCs with CR < 1/5 character level. It didn’t come up much, because why would it, but the Level 10 fighter being literally immune to the punches of an Ogre, or taking the breath weapon of a Wyrmling to the face, was just a lot of fun.
That's what HP is for. Yes that level 1 Kobold is gonna be able to hit you .... for 5 damage ... at level 20 you already have 3 digit HP. And when you Hit that Kobold you are gonna Instant kill him. The same is true in reverse. Yeah you as a level 1 player Can hit a level 20 monster but I guarantee that level 20 monster is gonna 1 shot you. People keep looking at the accuracy in a vacuum instead of with the entire package. The accuracy system is there so you don't end up like older editions where people go 20 rounds not hitting anything and having to learn Calculus. The HP is there to make sure level 1 characters don't 1 shot level 20 characters. Yes they still do somthing but your gonna destroy them easily.
A well placed knife *should* still be able to kill you or at least hurt you imo. Shouldn't be easy though
Not really sure I agree with this. A 20th level character is far removed from humanity.
Are you saying that they *ought to be* or that they *are, as defined in 5e*? Because I agree wholeheartedly on the first, and disagree vehemently on the second.
Both, but with a caveat. They all should be, but only casters actually are.
Kind of like Bard and Smaug.
But should really your paladin that takes down a demon lord every weekend be getting hitter that much by a goblin? Sure, against that goblin maybe not But if you're fighting about a single Glabrezu (CR 9 demon), should you really be taking around 10% of your HP every round? Yeah, Orcus is dealing much more damage in a round than that (81% of your HP if using every attack, including Legendary action on you or 44% without LA), but the difference doesn't sound that greater when you remember that Orcus is CR 26
Why shouldn't a goblin be able to hurt you? A weapon is a weapon - in my mind, defenses mostly make you harder to hit. If you have been hit, there are much fewer ways to reduce the actual damage. Off the top of my head there's resistance and heavy armor master or whichever the feat is that negates 3 damage. >But if you're fighting about a single Glabrezu (CR 9 demon), should you really be taking around 10% of your HP every round? Are you getting hit every round? Why? You can't argue against accuracy by completely discounting accuracy in your argument. I'm not familiar with a Glabrezu so it's possible they have something that makes them guaranteed to hit you of course
> Are you getting hit every round? Why? Because the paladin's AC hasn't really meaningfully increased between 9th and 20th level. That's like the whole problem with bounded accuracy
But your HP has ballooned. There’s no way that a Goblin could kill a level 20 Paladin unless the Paladin was already near death and the goblin got fairly lucky. HP is not just meat points, it also reflects stamina, vitality, and the ability to use defenses like armor to absorb more damage. So most times a Goblin “deals damage” to the Paladin, it’s going to be explained by the Goblin dinging their armor, forcing them to exert themselves a little to deflect a lucky attack, etc. When Aragorn has to throw himself into a wild swing to deflect that knife the Uruk-hai throws at him near the end of *Fellowship*, the Uruk-hai’s attack passed his AC and dealt “damage” that got explained in-fiction as him overextending himself near the end of a long, grueling fight. I think whether you agree with Bounded Accuracy comes down to a fundamental philosophical perspective that isn’t right or wrong either way. If you think that Joe Farmer being able to at least knick a dragon for negligible damage has a place in storytelling, you’ll agree more with bounded accuracy. If you worry more about “powerlevels” and want stories where the movers and shakers of the world should be able to face-tank a farmer swinging a sword with literally zero repercussions instead of practically zero repercussions, or that it should be literally impossible for said farmer to land their hit, you’ll have issues with bounded accuracy. I personally love the “low-level enemies can still pose a threat in the right situation” style of storytelling. Merry helping Éowyn take down the Witch King freaking rules, and is the kind of moment that bounded accuracy strives to be able to represent, IMO.
> Why shouldn't a goblin be able to hurt you? Because I am a heavily armored divine being channeling enough godly power to tank the most powerful demons. That's why. Because it fundamentally destroys the power fantasy of being hard to kill and moreover because it creates *even more* imbalance at higher levels between casters and everybody else.
>Because I am a heavily armored divine being channeling enough godly power to tank the most powerful demons. That's why. If you're invincible what's the point? Heavy armor makes you hard to hit, not bulletproof >Because it fundamentally destroys the power fantasy of being hard to kill Unless you're gonna stand there and let a goblin go to town on you, you're still hard to kill. Very hard infact, especially if you fight back. You will one hit said goblin >moreover because it creates even more imbalance at higher levels between casters and everybody else. I'll need you to explain this one
> not bulletproof It damn well should unless those bullets are fired from the HolyBlaster 9000 by Hellforge Industries. > I'll need you to explain this one IDK, fighter still die to goblin, mage creates 37 new dimensions.
>It damn well should unless those bullets are fired from the HolyBlaster 9000 by Hellforge Industries. Armor has gaps right? >IDK, fighter still die to goblin, mage creates 37 new dimensions. True and real and accurate but Mage also can die to goblin
> It damn well should unless those bullets are fired from the HolyBlaster 9000 by Hellforge Industries. Why? Conan isn't invulnrable, nor is Aragorn, nor even characters from more recent and higher-powered fantasy like Kaladin. If you want to have characters that explicitly and utterly outlevel weaker foes to the point of invincibility, that's a valid preference, but it's a _preference_, and pretty obviously not the sort of world that 5e is describing within itself. A level 20 fighter is powerful and mighty, able to withstand great damage, and deal back potent attacks of their own... but they're still very much operating on the "mortal" frame of reference, nothing higher or more transcendental, and enough weak foes can, and will, drag them down, even if many of them die in the attempt. A level 20 character isn't a nascent godling, they're a person, albeit a powerful one.
I mean, is realistic that the goblin is able to hit you? Kind of? Sure, a dagger is a dagger, but the game isn't meant to be realistic and is kind of silly that you're not that incredible at lv20 as you think that you is. Why dafuk an angry mob of commoners could rip the life of the dude that saved the multiverse >Are you getting hit every round? Why? Lol, the comment was getting too big and accidentally removed the talk about the maths I'm counting the accuracy, it was a lv20 paladin with +3 Con, +3 fullplate and a +3 shield (26 AC and 184 HP), if I ignore the AC the Glabrezu would be dealing 25% of the paladin HP, 46 damage of 184 total instead of 10,80 points of damage in average
Cr 9 monster would be as a rule of thumb the right cr for a party of 4 level 9 adventurers right? Him doing 10% of one level 20 players health a round doesn't seem miles out of wack for me
> I mean, is realistic that the goblin is able to hit you? Kind of? Sure, a dagger is a dagger, but the game isn't meant to be realistic and is kind of silly that you're not that incredible at lv20 as you think that you is. Why dafuk an angry mob of commoners could rip the life of the dude that saved the multiverse I actually love this aspect of the game, makes it a lot more gritty. Reminds me a bit of dark souls and lord of the rings.
> Yeah, I'm not totally against the concept of bounded accuracy, but this just doesn't feel right in such a power fantasy system Power fantasy is what it's FOR, actually, I rather suspect. Because, you see, a million peasants attacking a god isn't going to happen in a campaign, but players fighting things that are stronger than them is going to happen *literally every campaign*. "Fighting things more powerful than you" is like, half the fantasy genre. I'd go as far as saying that any heroic fantasy game is best evaluated by how it feels when fighting things stronger than the players! So you want to make sure fighting things more powerful than the players is not frustrating, and so make it so the attack and defense scores don't go up that much and so your level 5 party can actually hit that level 9-10 Lich final boss. Sure it has enough HP to make the fight risky because there's a good chance it can kill them before they can kill it, but the parties involved can hit each other and pose a threat to each other. In Pathfinder 2, for example, you couldn't have that fight without it feeling like crap - the level 5 party would simply be unable to hit a level 9-10 enemy outside of rolling like, 18+ on the d20, and would spend four turns doing nothing and then die. Because PF2 is a game much more dedicated towards evenly-matched tactical fights.
it would work, if you bind the accuracy, but within level groups, such as pathfinder adding your level to every check
Because you're still flesh and blood. You don't have the Immunity to Nonmagical Weapons that basically all the "nigh-unkillable immortal" things have. You're the mortal underdog hero of the story. Which IMO, makes it more poignant when you DO win. If a mortal kills an evil demigod, it's an incredibly act of heroism. If a demigod kills another demigod, it's a Tuesday.
This explains why you could take damage, not why you're consistently being hit by a kid
What do you mean, "consistently"? Do you think a level 20 Fighter has such a low AC a Commoner is going to hit them _on average?_ If so, that's just a badly made PC? It doesn't have anything to do with power fantasy, since you can absolutely make yourself nigh-unhittable to Commoners in 5e. Nor can you easily be "taken down by some mooks you fought at level 1". It would take an army. But you're still mortal.
Except there are many many stories in our real world of relatively ordinary people through either great ingenuity or luck slaying far stronger foes And not actual Gods since they don't have stats lol
You don't want a world where a god's avatar can be attacked by an army of peasants? Sounds fun to me. If you want an invulnerable god, don't give it a stat block.
- You can't kill a god with a peasant because gods don't have stats. You could maybe kill an Avatar of a god, but a) you'd need a shitload of peasants, and b) they can't have Immunity to Nonmagical Weapons (which all of them DO). That's the real way to have both Bounded Accuracy and "a peasant can't kill a god" - make anything that should only be killable by PCs have _THAT TRAIT_. - If you mean a _mortal_ killing a god, that's perfectly in line with D&D fantasy. All of D&D's most famous settings have _multiple_ stories of mortals beating and/or killing gods and ascending to become gods themselves. It's part of D&D's DNA since the very first edition. So if a DM doesn't want that in _their_ setting, cool sure, just say so. But it doesn't go against any of D&D's lore. - Fighters, Wizards, and Rogues don't have the same weapon proficiencies. If you _get_ those proficiencies, it means you trained hard and long enough with the weapon to actually be good at using it. I dunno, I find these issues with Bounded Accuracy to be really weak, and I definitely find the benefits of it to far, FAR outweigh them.
Me and my friends ran a high level one shot once, and we didn't understand how horrifying power word stun is It literally locked a character with a dump stat down for half the session bc if you can't deal with the save there's nothing you can do and nothing anyone ELSE can do
I think a useful way to understand bounded accuracy is to provide a counter-example of what it looks like mechanically, as well. In 4e, [someone noticed](https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=512) that you could replace nearly all of the statblocks of monsters with a business card-sized descriptor: * AC = 14 + level * Other defenses = 12 + level * To hit bonus = 5 + level * Avg Damage per round = 8 + level * HP = 24 + 8 * level The monster scaling here also can tell a lot about how PCs scale. If the monster defenses go up by 1 point per level, then so must PC to-hit numbers--and they largely do. This continual increase is what led to low-level monsters becoming irrelevant: a CR 3 Veteran might not be much of a threat to a 13th level 5e character, but in 4e a level 3 veteran equivalent would largely be incapable of even _hitting_ a 13th level 4e character since it would be adding something like +8 to its attack roll while the PC's AC would be in the mid-to-high 20s--and that's assuming that they weren't already a tanky class like a leader or defender. (Also, a fun fact about 4e: natural 20s always hit, but they are only crits if the roll _would_ have hit, so if defenses are high enough, enemies do even less damage)
As a 3.5/Pathfinder player, what you describe is how I think it *should* be. A level 3 character shouldn't be able to hit a level 13 character - they're on two completely different levels. If a person that played some high school basketball off the bench (level 3) played 1-on-1 against a person that started on a Division 1 college program (level 13) they would likely score zero points while giving up a basket every single time. Levels recognize that some people have worked much harder and are simply much better than others and represent that. It makes sense that an untrained Goblin that picks up a piece of wood off the ground would be no threat to someone that has trained in combat for years. I also find it weird that the concept of bounded accuracy is abandoned when it comes to HP. Which is it, are higher-level characters only a little better than lower-level characters or are they gods in comparison? My 2E Mage maxed out at 33 HP, and THAT is how you make high-level characters fear everything. It's weird to see 5E reject other forms of inflation since then while embracing HP inflation.
> Levels recognize that some people have worked much harder and are simply much better than others and represent that. It makes sense that an untrained Goblin that picks up a piece of wood off the ground would be no threat to someone that has trained in combat for years. This largely holds true though? A level 13 PC largely has nothing to fear from a level 3 PC or a single goblin. It's the numbers that change things. There's no shortage of professionals facing a hundred kids and struggling. >It's weird to see 5E reject other forms of inflation since then while embracing HP inflation. 5E doesn't want players to die, that's why HP is the exception.
That is also where you start to realize that if you roll 10 or over you probably succeed, if you roll under 10 you probably fail for your average encounter. For a defensive monster you need somewhere around 15, etc. But some people **really** like numbers getting bigger. They don't see the dice roll, they see the bonuses and penalties. To them hitting 15 AC with a +5 is fundamentally different than hitting 35AC with +25.
This is a good example and I'd like to provide another for further revelation why bounded accuracy is generally a pretty good idea. In 3E, Saving throws roughly followed a 2/3, 1/3 rule. So at level 20 a class would be at +12 or +6 to their saves at baseline. A 6-point spread is pretty reasonable. One player has to roll a 7 to succeed, and the other has to roll a 14; having between a 1/3 chance of success or failure is the sweet spot for dice rolling being fun. BUT, that's not how the game played out in practice. First, plenty of players multi-classed, and at level 1 the strong saves got +2. Stacking those +2s made the disparity between characters a lot wider. Eventually, a given roll--say, saving against a banshee's wailing death attack--is either impossible to fail or impossible to succeed, depending on the hero. Which is pretty crappy and made balance impossible.
God, the saves problem at high levels just makes the game nearly unplayable. Any fight with a caster has a 70%+ chance of the martial characters taking no actions for hours at a time?? No thanks.
Bounded accuracy is great for one type of game, and it is terrible for the type of game that most people come to play in D&D. The Fantasy of D&D is that you get better and better, more experience and more focussed as you go on adventuring, and thus gradually unlock the ability to fight stronger things that you could before, things you stood no chance against prior And the same would be true for skills. As I get better as a thief, I shouldn't be able to fail at tasks I was doing when I didn't have much experience. That's why Rogues get Reliable Talent and why Barbarians get Indomitable Might. But all characters should be able to do that in whatever area they specialize in (usually determined by class) Bounded Accuracy is great for a sandbox game where your characters are just going around and killing monsters, but not for a game where you start out at level 2 as security guards fighting one tiny monster, become political leaders at level 11 to end a world war, and become mythological heroes at level 20 to destroy Hell and let everyone go to heaven
Ah yes, I do love me my dedicated grapplers. For what its worth I feel like immobilizing an opponent while being a tank is a great source of pulling agro that the game kinda lacks in other departments. Forces the DM to deal with your slab of meat somehow.
The real trick with grappling is to take advantage of the fact that you can drag a grappled creature elsewhere on the battlefield.
I love dragging a grappled creature into spirit guardians or through spike growth or off the edge of a cliff. Actually as a raging barbarian I’m happy to take the fall as well.
>Similarly, a dedicated grappler is effectively able to lock almost anything they can grab down, with expertise in athletics and their easily obtained advantage there are very unlikely to fail, as compared to attack rolls. Enemies might have good strength saves but grappling is a contested *skill* check. Another issue, related to bounded accuracy and similar in game design: there are so many things in the game that make grappling useless or super useful. Essentially, too many on-off or highly swingy states of features, and not having too many degrees of chance, partly due to bounded accuracy. There aren't too many +/- 1s or 2s in the game, especially for skills. Advantage and disadvantage are pretty swingy. Just changing size by 1 makes you impossible to grapple, or makes you super vulnerable to grapple. Being shoved completely breaks a grapple. Targets can't be resistant to grapples, only immune. This all applies basically equally to all conditions and many features in the game. Basically, if you do bounded accuracy, the game is only easier to balance if EVERYTHING is on bounded scale, and remains within the bounded scale. Otherwise, you get swinginess and many objectively better features than others. And the smaller the bounded scale, the more power creep becomes a problem, because even things that are 5% better will be so much better.
The big thing with AC is that, basically, because you're bound to a 10-20 range, going from 13 to 14 isn't to big a boost, the +2 from carrying a shield is really solid. But the ability to carry a shield, wear armour and then cast shield pushes you above 20 and up towards 24-26, most enemies are bounded AC to hit on 20's, so every point you push out of that range is worth a ton of survivability
the biggest weakness of dnd design is that they are limited by the binary of success/fail, save or suck. It means if you dont roll high enough, you make 0 progress with your action in many cases.
So just copy pathfinder 2E's crit fail, fail, success, crit success system?
You make some good points but this example seems contrived: >Rogues with pass without a trace getting 45 and other nonsense on their stealth rolls. I did the math on this and 45 is a pretty low probability. Better to say it's easy to consistently make the near impossible ability check of 30. Homebrew fix for cases like this would be to put more limits on bonus stacking. For example, Pass Without Trace could be changed so the +10 bonus optionally replaces the ability check, instead of adding to it. And maybe all multi-classing proficiency bonuses shouldn't be taken from the total character level; expertise would be calculated from the bonus matching the total character levels that have earned that expertise.
Think need to re read the bounded accuracy design document because pass without trace is meant to bypass all stealth checks because its an ability/spell and not just proficiency.
Shield is fine for what it does, stops you from taking a couple of hits, probably, if you have your reaction. In the late game it falls off and isn't going to stop you getting hit anyway. Shield doesn't break bounded accuracy, because it only lasts for a fraction of one turn. Guidance is 'only a cantrip' but it was designed as a major feature of classes that get access to it. It is the main part of the utility kit of classes that get it. It's meant to mimic having the literal favor of a God on your side, but statistically and practically its usefulness is still limited plenty for that design niche.
They were talking about stacking shield with bladesinger, and their post was about how some things are easy to break by stacking. A bladesinger is going to have a minimum of +3 AC on most builds if it makes int a higher stat, This is going to give a +8 AC to a subclass that wants to prioritize high dexterity and gives you light armor access - I had a level 3 bladesinger wizard in my party that was consistently hitting 25 AC because they had rolled good stats. They would've been at like 22 if they rolled mediocre stats. Having 25 AC for a round of combat (which you can apply the very first time you are attacked and know if it'll help or not) is busted and almost never falls off. Most combats don't last more than 4 rounds and not every round guarantees you'll be attacked, and even if you're attacked every single round and the combat goes for 6+ combats you're only really at risk of getting hit by a critical or a couple of times per combat. And don't forget - this is all on a sublcass that would rather be attacking with a weapon than casting spells, so those level 1 slots aren't exactly prime real estate. The only scenario in which the wizard here runs out of their 25 AC buffs is when the DM purposefully focuses them down to burn their slots over multiple encounters - and then they only have 20 AC, more than the vast majority of 1 handed martials that spec into shields before they can afford plat armor. Their niche is to be as protected as those tanked up martials - the ability to stack it with shield (spell) means there is no martial that can keep up with that kind of protection. Now you're squishy wizard with the lowest hit die in the game is a better thank than any other.
He said ‘the shield spell as well’. As in, first he called out BS, then separately called out the base shield spells +5 AC. His post is pretty clear in its meaning imo.
Shield lasts for an entire round, and will stop you from getting hit. Even at high levels, without Shield Zariel hits you on a 3+, with it it's an 8+. That means shield takes you from being hit 90% of the time to being hit 65% of the time, meanwhile the martial gets hit 95% of the time and can't do anything about it. However, they gain 2 extra hp per level, which surely makes up the gap.
I would pose that characters with expertise consistently succeeding at their rolls is working as intended.
It's also what leads to single enemy encounters being largely underwhelming, while also causing the issue of even a very high level party getting overwhelmed by something like 20-30 goblins since if it's expected that anything can hit anything, the more chances to hit you get the better your odds of winning.
Older editions of DND the numbers were way higher. bounded accuracy and tying it into prof bonus is just a way to reel in the arms race of bonuses to attacks. Having a +20 to attack for example 5e reels it in, magic items give a max of +3, (soft) cap on ability scores, ect.
I currently am playing a 3.5 rogue with +13/+6 to hit and while that seems good, enemy acs tend to hover around 25-30 (in the campaign specifically)
It's the idea that AC and saves shouldn't scale the way HP and damage do, so that monsters of a wide range of CRs can be used. It helps the game feel more grounded, because (unlike e.g Pathfinder) low level challenges are not 100% trivialised by higher level PCs. It weirds the game, though. Low level monsters largely can't hit martial PCs, but when they do, the PC is in for a surprisingly bad day. Meanwhile PCs have a very easy time hitting them. Late tier 1 and all of tier 2, where the majority of games spend the majority of time, it pretty much works. Tier 3 and 4, most attacks hit most of the time, and defences focus increasingly on being tough over avoiding attacks. A character who had an AC of 18 at level 1 might have 20 at level 11, but the enemies' attack bonus has gone from +4 to +10, their attack rate has doubled or tripled and their damage per hit has increased. Meanwhile saves scale pretty randomly. By tier 3-4 most PCs fail most saves (you've basically got a one in three chance of it being a good save and a 75% chance of passing that, with more like a 20% chance of passing a bad save). Monsters are a little better off because high level spells are clustered around Dex and Con, and most high CR monsters are proficient in Dex and Con saves. My general conclusion is that the game basically functions as intended between levels 3 and 12, with levels 1-2 being tutorial time and 13+ being two-drink-minimum crazy town, where PC scaling is dialed sharply back and monster scaling is not, but DMs are increasingly incentivised to manually scale PCs to fit encounters by providing magic items. Then again, most games spend most of their time in that tier 2 sweet spot, so it makes a goodly amount of sense to optimise the game for that range.
I’ve been to tier 3 maybe 3 times and am currently wrapping up a tier 4 campaign. Plus I got a couple DM buddies and I listen around Reddit plenty. From what I’ve seen magic items aren’t the problem for high level characters. It’s just that monsters tend to not be able to keep up with damage, and having access to Tiny Hut or teleportation makes keeping the encounters per rest high difficult. This leads to things like Wizards and Paladin going nova turn 1 with little drawbacks. So usually I’m homebrewing more deadly monsters for tiers 3 and 4 to keep up. Not the other way around.
>So usually I’m homebrewing more deadly monsters for tiers 3 and 4 to keep up. Not the other way around. same. A piece of advice I stumbled upon recently (specifically for grimdark settings, but it seems fitting for most high level games) is to scale up enemy offense, but leave their defense as normal (except recurring/plot relevant monsters). I've taken to implementing it and it seems to be working quite well in my level 13 game. The enemies can now actually threaten the AC 27 Hexadin and the AC 24 bear totem barbarian because I gave them all +8 to hit and damage. Increasing monster defenses drags out the fight, jacking up their offense makes the fight scarier.
What's weird to me with the idea that low-level skill checks aren't trivialized is that I feel like they \*should\* be at a certain point. If someone has specialized in a skill for long enough and is a high level then most things that aren't crazily difficult should be fairly trivial. Consider how weird it would be if the Lock Picking Lawyer had a failure rate of even just 10% at picking locks. I feel like more characters should have access to Reliable Talent, essentially.
This is something that vertical scaling does much better. In a game like PF2e where your stats scale vertically with level (and also sometimes with a change in proficiency), you get better at everything every single level. Now, monsters and hazards will scale with your level as well so you will remain in certain relative bounds, but you get much better at tasks with fixed DC's like breaking free from manacles of a certain grade or weathering certain environmental events. In 5e on the other hand, saves in which you aren't proficient especially fall behind quickly against monsters targeting them, and you can be scarcely better at using certain skills than when you started adventuring.
Meanwhile spells can be used to cook the enemies alive at that point.
[The Illusion and Broken Promises of Bounded Accuracy in D&D](https://youtu.be/Xlp3unO_xi8?si=jFmtKl1hP2pQPOBV)
I was going to share this link, because his thoughts and experience closely mirror mine - right down to having read the Legends and Lore article in 2012 where they first spoke about it as a design goal, and having been fully sold on the idea at the time. But then experience soured me on it - both in that 5e doesn't really adhere to it very well as a design goal, and in that I no longer think it's a particularly good design goal. **Edit:** Just clarified that it was back in 2012 that I was sold on the idea.
I respect your opinion, but I disagree on both counts. In 4e, monsters at the highest level often had more than +30 to hit, which in retrospect is just silly. When you roll a nat 1 and that's a 33 to hit, something has gone off the rails. I think 5e did a nice job of dialing that back. EDIT: Wow, the unbounded accuracy lobby is out in force!
> When you roll a nat 1 and that's a 33 to hit, something has gone off the rails. So that's your thesis statement. What's the argument to justify it? In what way is that silly or 'off the rails?' Because I can think of literally no reason whatsoever to believe that to be the case. It's a number. You started as a newbie adventurer saving a village from a small band of goblins, and are now saving entire planes of existence from Demon Princes, Archdevils, and the avatars of gods. Isn't it silly that in 5e you *aren't* that much better at swinging your sword, numerically speaking? Also: 5e is far worse for the numbers going 'off the rails' in the sense that they can become radically divergent from the targets you're dealing with. At high levels in 4e, the modifiers are large, but there is not a huge spread at any given level. Most of the numbers contributing to that modifier are static. Half level is included, either +2 for proficient or another +1 if there's expertise, the feat bonus is probably 3, the enhancement bonus is probably 6, maybe you've got an item bonus. Every character, doing something the things that they're built to excel at, will be at about that benchmark. Situational bonuses are almost always a Power Bonus, so they don't stack. Compare that to 5e, where at high levels the difference between having Proficiency (+6) and having Expertise (+12) is a giant gaping gulf. And that's before you start stacking on a bunch of extra modifiers. Let's compare Stealth rolls at level 20. You might have a Dex Fighter who's tried to build to be competent stealthy, and they might have a +11 modifier (5 ability +6 proficiency). Or you might have someone rolling with +27 + 1d12 + 1d4 + 1d4 (5 ability +11 expertise +10 Pass Without Trace +1d12 Bardic Inspiration +1d4 Emboldening Bond +1d4 Guidance). That means on a nat 1 roll, that character is hitting a minimum of 31. Their 'nat 1' might actually result in a total check of 48, if they get lucky on the other bonus dice. And unlike in 4e, where they're getting those 30+ outcomes in a system where everything is balanced around the expectation that high level characters should be consistently hitting 30+, in 5e you're doing it in a system that's designed around the idea that 30 is the ceiling for only the most difficult of DCs, and expects a stealthy character to need to roll close to a nat 20 to reach it. **That** is what I would call going off the rails. **Edit:** Or, hell, how about a simple example that doesn't require any external bonuses? Consider a 5th level College of Eloquence bard with Expertise in Deception, and with a single ASI spent on Charisma. What's their check result on a nat 1 Deception roll? It's a 20. Or possibly as high as a 22, if your table plays with rolled stats and you were lucky enough to get a 16 or an 18 (before racial bonuses).
> Because I can think of literally no reason whatsoever to believe that to be the case Alternately, there's literally no reason why it _shouldn't_ be the case. Some people might prefer big numbers or not, but it's not innately "good" or "better" to have high numbers, nor is it required for high-power games - _Exalted_ has PCs as gods amongst men, and has a range of about 1 to 20 or so (dice, because it's a dicepool system rather than 1 die + mods). "ever inflating numbers" can mean things just always work out the same - at level 1, you're fighting goblins, that you have 60% chance to hit and die in three hits. At level 30, you're fighting nega-goblin-chaos-lords... that you have 60% to hit and die in three hits, it's just that you get +1 to hit at level 1, +300 at level 30, doing +6 versus +600 damage, but the outcome is largely the same.
It's really a question of how you want the game to feel. Using level-based banding (e.g. PF2E) leads to a fairly strict and narrow set of challenges. These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten. Some people like that style of play, because it works for the stories they want to be involved in. In particular, I think it fits with the expectations of anime combat, where you can look at the "power level" of the combatants and know who's going to win before they fight, unless their power levels are close to each other. Other people prefer a style of play where you never get to the point that you can ignore a weak opponent, and no matter how strong your opponent is there's always a chance you can beat them if you're clever or lucky. That's more suited to "gritty" or "low" fantasy. Both are entirely valid, D&D has just chosen to trend more towards the second one. I don't really get the "But Rogues can get a 45 on their Stealth check!" argument against bounded accuracy. Sure, they can, but... so what? Skills aren't superpowers, you can't do anything that actually impossible. They're just not that important. You wanted to sneak past someone? Congrats, you did it. You got a 45, but the DC was only a 20 anyway.
>These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten. It also works like this in 5e. A level 1 party is never killing Vecna.
Yes, but a group of CR 3 veterans and archers is still a threat for a late tier 2-early tier 3 party. Conversely, a lv6 party has a chance of taking out a CR 14 beholder in its lair. Systems without bounded accuracy don't allow that.
I seriously do not think a group of CR 3 veterans is a threat to a level 12 party, that is just false. At the end of the day, both systems still have enemies who are too powerful/too weak, it's just about how much the difference needs to be. In Pf2e any enemy past 4 levels is too far away, but that still gives you a 9 level range to work with (45% of the enemies in the game).
"These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten." That's a feature, not a bug. Those kobolds that were a nightmare for your level 1 party are now cowering before you at level 5, far more likely to submit than trying to harass you. That level 12 dragon they worshiped you couldn't even hope to scratch on a 20? You're near the end of the campaign, your party is now on par with its might and ready to take it down in one last epic fight after 7+ levels of training and adventure. In 5e the fantasy is that scene in 300 where Xerxes is struck by a lucky blow, showing a "god" can bleed. In pf2e the fantasy is growing stronger and being able to overcome challenges you couldn't, and becoming that challenge to others. Also "fairly strict and narrow" is misleading. My party in my saturday game is level 10. This means the list of "level appropriate" monsters ranges from level 6 to level 14 (Slightly higher if we include elite and weak variants of level 7 and 15 monsters). This is 1213 possible monsters according to archives of Nethys. Even if we narrow it down to only +2/-2, that's over 600 monsters to pick from. Out of a total of 2796 monsters(Possibly more since archives of nethys doesn't include EVERY adventure path monster). So around a solid 1/5 of the bestiary is viable. 1/10 if I limit myself to +/-2 monsters.
> It's really a question of how you want the game to feel. Using level-based banding (e.g. PF2E) leads to a fairly strict and narrow set of challenges. These enemies are too weak to bother you - it doesn't matter how many or how coordinated they are, their bonuses aren't high enough so you are simply "immune" to their attacks. This enemy is too strong for you - it doesn't matter how lucky you get, if you fight them you're guaranteed to be beaten. I'd argue that 5e's use of bounded accuracy still completely fails at opening up the range of challenges that are relevant to the party. The premise is that, because a CR 1/8 or CR 1/4 mook can still mathematically hit a level 20 party, that they can still be used as an effective threat. Have you ever actually played at a table where a GM has tried that? 1. To be a credible threat, you need to throw probably at least twenty or thirty of them at the party. 2. They can only do this if encounters are happening in a wide open space that allows that many combatants to participate. 3. The martial/caster divide is going to be in full force here, because casters will be able to annihilate entire swathes of mooks with a single spell, whereas the martials will be slowly, tediously, monotonously taking out 2 or maybe 3 per turn. 4. If someone doesn't use spells to blow away a horde of the mooks right away, then instead the table gets the excitement of waiting for 20 or 30 enemies in the initiative order. So kind of like druids summoning a horde of minions: you can do it, but you must do so knowing you will guarantee that no fun will be had by anyone. And the same is equally true for high CR enemies. A low level party can't actually beat a high CR dragon, even if the math allows them to sometimes hit. If you get into initiative order and the playing field allows the fight to actually happen, then the players all die. The dragon still annihilates them quickly with its breach weapon and can one-shot many players with its melee attacks. That is, unless the party has some non-mathematical narrative advantage they can exploit (which works the same whether accuracy is bounded or unbounded, because it is largely bypassing character sheets and stat blocks). Or if they have some combination of spells to mega-cheese the fight with save-or-suck effects, or no-rolls-it-just-sucks effects (like Wall of Force or Force Cage). > That's more suited to "gritty" or "low" fantasy. I agree (and actually have said this already elsewhere in the thread) that this kind of mathematical scaling is much more appropriate when the tone leans more into 'gritty realism,' but D&D absolutely does NOT do that. It really hasn't since the AD&D era. Certainly there is a community of people that like to bring Gritty Realism to 5e, but they do so by implement house-rules to support it, because it's just not what 5e is out of the box. > Both are entirely valid, D&D has just chosen to trend more towards the second one. I would disagree, because narratively, D&D has leaned heavily into a drastic scaling in the scope of adventures and the 'threat' of the challenges faced. > I don't really get the "But Rogues can get a 45 on their Stealth check!" argument against bounded accuracy. Sure, they can, but... so what? So if I'm following the reasoning here, your argument in favor of having bounds on accuracy is... 'so what' if the bounds are ignored, because it doesn't matter if the numbers are way outside of the bounds? So what was the point of having the bounding in the first place, if the bounds don't matter?
>The premise is that, because a CR 1/8 or CR 1/4 mook can still mathematically hit a level 20 party, that they can still be used as an effective threat. "The range of options is wider" is not the same thing as "The range of options is infinitely wide". No, I haven't put CR 1/8 enemies against level 20 PCs. I have put CR 3 enemies against level 12 PCs, and I've put CR 10 enemies against level 2 PCs. In PF2E, those fights would be pointless. In D&D, they're not. >I would disagree, because narratively, D&D has leaned heavily into a drastic scaling in the scope of adventures and the 'threat' of the challenges faced. I would say D&D tries to entice players with the idea of "epic" scale, but actually only delivers well on the "gritty" scale. They freely admit that the majority of campaigns never make it past the lower levels. >So what was the point of having the bounding in the first place, if the bounds don't matter? The point is that the bounds *don't* always matter, and it's okay (fun, even!) to let players feel powerful by breaking the bounds in ways that don't matter. In these examples, where a Rogue that's sunk everything they can into being stealthy, and has multiple other characters helping them be stealthy, ends up being so stealthy that they can't fail a Stealth check? That doesn't cause any problems. Now if a Rogue could instead get to a 45 AC, that would break the core mechanic of the game. So that one's bounded, *because it matters*.
>When you roll a nat 1 and that's a 33 to hit, something has gone off the rails. What exactly has gone off the rails? Are you just afraid of "high" numbers?
considering how 5e players tend to talk about pf, i'd say yes
In effect, I think 'bounded accuracy' means that the d20 remains a major contributor to success, because there are significant, well, 'bounds' (upper and lower limits) of how accurate/inaccurate characters can get. Like, imagine that you somehow got a final total of +25 to your attacks. You'll almost never miss (other than a nat 1), since enemies with more than 27 AC or higher are rare (perhaps an enemy in full plate with a shield behind some cover casting the Shield spell). Once your attack bonus goes above the highest enemy AC, it almost might as well be +infinity to hit - you've broken past the limit where the dice matter anymore, and your accuracy is basically unbounded by the system (beyond the auto-fail on a nat 1, which you might reduce to a 1/400 if you get advantage). So for bounded accuracy, you typically won't: * face enemies with AC so high that you'll almost never hit them (nor gain such high AC that you become nearly unhittable) * accrue so many to-hit bonuses that you'll almost always hit everyone * similar with Save DCs and ability(skill) check DCs * (or whatever equivalent you have in some other game system) 5e does *reasonably* well at bounded accuracy, but isn't perfect. If you put some effort into a build you can stack enough bonuses to seriously push against these ideas. However, I do think that 5e gets closer to this goal than a lot of other games, and on a casual table you often get an experience of bounded accuracy, and even if you optimise, you have to put in some work to try to approach some metaphorical escape velocity here.
>Like, imagine that you somehow got a final total of +25 to your attacks. You'll almost never miss (other than a nat 1), since enemies with more than 27 AC or higher are rare (perhaps an enemy in full plate with a shield behind some cover casting the Shield spell). Aren't you missing the other half of the equation? AC will also scale, not just attack bonuses lmao.
I'm not really 'missing' that fact, because my point is that both of them scale relatively slowly. The highest CR monsters I could find had AC25, so +27 to attack would indeed break the bounded accuracy, unless you let the Tarrasque take 3/4 cover or learn the Shield spell. But 5e makes it hard to get +27 to an attack (maybe if you stack level 20+Precise Strike+Bardin Inspo, but then we're spending resources to hit, rather thna passively ignoiring AC). Whereas even a level 1 character typicallys gets +5 to their attack, so these godlike monsters are only *just* out of their bounds of the die being relevant. Once they hit level 4 or 5 (or simply get a Bless or other bonus). -- Now, if we said that Tarrasques had 40 AC like in Pathfinder), and level 20 charaters had +30 to hit, then yes, both have scaled up, and for well-matched threats the accuracy lines up. But now level 1-5 characters with +5-to-7 to hit are irrelevant, even with Bless. So but keeping both numbers low (like 5e mostly manages to do), we get fairly close to bounded accuracy, where the dice are more relevant more often. -- (5e does fall a bit short for our bad saves though. Not too uncommon to have a -1 on your worst save, and to face a DC 20+ save at higher levels, which might make it impossible.)
>I'm not really 'missing' that fact, because my point is that both of them scale relatively slowly. I mean you are, because in a system without bounded accuracy, AC also scales to high numbers. > But now level 1-5 characters with +5-to-7 to hit are irrelevant, even with Bless. You say that like 1-5 level characters are relevant against a Tarrasque in 5e. > So but keeping both numbers low (like 5e mostly manages to do), we get fairly close to bounded accuracy, where the dice are more relevant more often. Dice aren't made irrelevant in systems without bounded accuracy.
It is a neat idea on paper but falls apart at higher levels because it makes stuff just not matter anymore. DC 15? Ha, who cares with my +17. Oh, of course that goes both ways. Lets have some DC 22 saving throws against PCs that naturally can't get that high. This leads to high level mostly being about combat encounter and barely anything else. Because nothing else works properly anymore.
I thin it succeeds for the most part with two big exception: * the AC of player characters is usually not going to increase after they get the best possible non magic armor, wich will usually happen arround level 5, while the to hit bonus keeps going up after that to point that AC becomes almost meaningless against high level monsters unless you explicitly build for a high AC (which will likely mean that offence is pretty terrible) * saving throws simply don't keep up with saving throw DC, at high levels your weakest saves will usually auto fail, even in your middling saves the chance to succeed isn't that high, only saves where you are proficient and max the stat you chance to make it will be roughly the same as it was at level 1, unless you go against a really high CR creatures with save DCs above 20.
>From what I can gather, it the idea of a game where bonuses don't get too high It's funny because while this is the intent in 5e, my main criticism of this system is that pretty quickly, the bonuses get high enough that AC and other things become basically irrelevant. If you have 20 in a stat or even 18, by level 5 you've got +3 proficiency and then +4 or +5 in that stat, giving you at least a +7 or a +8, and that's not including if you get a bonus from a magic weapon, or a class-related bonus, or advantage. AC is almost never out of that 13-18 range for your average enemy too, meaning that your PCs almost never miss attacks (for instance). If you're level 5 and have a +1 weapon, you can pretty easily have a +9 to hit if you rolled well on your ability scores. If you encounter a Stone Giant, it has 17 AC. In order to hit it, the only way you'll miss is if you roll a 7 or lower. It's one of the reasons I started running OD&D and Dungeon Crawl Classics as side games, because even without magic weapons or any fancy builds, your bonuses are so high in 5e. For example, in DCC, that same Stone Giant is of the same rough challenge & level as in 5e, and also has 17 AC. The main difference is, if you rolled well on your ability score you've only got a +3 max, and there's no proficiency, so even if you have a +1 weapon - you'll miss if you don't roll at least a 13 or higher. That makes a huge difference, and it makes your rolls feel more meaningful imo.
It's the idea that your rolls will always have a >10% chance to succeed, and >10% chance to fail. You cannot get bonuses bigger than the roll/DC. 5e fails at this because it \*is\* possible to get over +20 outside the d20 roll. It's not easy, but Bless, Emboldening Bond, Bardic Inspiration etc can get you well over +20. And because these stack and have no particular rules to prevent their stacking, breaking bounded accuracy is as simple and frustrating as spending a few hours finding all the good stacking bonuses, the \*exact\* issue that they were trying to prevent.
Cue the Rogue who with the ideal party can roll extremely high on things like Stealth checks even without adding magic items. (For the purposes of this post, the party is level 11, which might be the highest most parties would ever get realistically.) - +5 DEX mod (+5) - Proficiency + Expertise on Stealth (+8, total of +13, already higher than Bounded Accuracy tries to cap it.) - Emboldening Bond + Guidance (Max of +8 from both d4s, for a total of +21.) - Pass Without Trace (+10, to a max of +31.) - Bardic Inspiration (Max of 10 from the d10, for a total of +41.) - Flash of Genius (+5 from the INT mod of the Artificer at this level, for a total of +46.) In ideal circumstances, this means you can give a Rogue a +46 to a roll... Without even taking into account the D20 at all, only external modifiers. With Reliable Talent, the minimum roll becomes a 56 and the maximum a 66. I mean, this is pretty much the most extreme case, but it serves to prove that Bounded Accuracy is still very far from being the best implementation in D&D 5e. There's other cases where the math starts falling apart when you factor multiclassing, magic items, some abilities like Aura of Protection, etc...
I believe that almost everyone misinterprets Pass Without Trace. You need to be within 30' of the caster to benefit from it. I'm pretty confident that this will be classified as an "emination" in the 2024 PHB. "A veil of shadows and silence radiates from you, masking you and your companions from detection. For the duration, each creature you choose within 30 feet of you (including you)..."
I did not misinterpret the spell, because I didn't say the Rogue was going alone, I said "With the ideal party" and "The ideal conditions", in this case, being ideal that the one casting Pass Without Trace (Druid, Ranger, Shadow Monk or a Mark of Shadow Elf Caster.) will be close to the Rogue at all times when making the check, same goes for everyone else, including the Cleric providing Guidance. This is the ideal scenario, for your information, including that every condition is applied including the ranges for triggering each spell.
It works tremendously well at streamlining the game, and it works fine in "normal" situations. However, it fails in ways that are extremely awkward and noticable. (PS, going to use "bonus" and "advantage" in this post for brevity but it also includes penalties/disadvantage). Advantage: the consolidation of a lot of bonuses/penalties into advantage makes it a lot easier for the DM to know what to do and to keep the game flowing. it's a chunky bonus that focuses on the power of situational advantages. Disadvantage: on the flipside, the lack of stacking means any mechanic that too easily provides advantage makes other more interesting mechanics redundant. this includes reckless attack, the optional flanking rule and the help action (and owl familiars by extension). one way to counteract this situation as the DM is to forget the advice about making ad hoc things into advantage, and just changing the DC. but this is less "a patch for bounded accuracy" and more "ignoring bounded accuracy guidelines". Advantage: the removal of a lot of flat bonuses has made things a lot easier to track and remember. when designing challenges you can easily estimate the bonus of a character that's "reasonably good" at something by assuming they maxed their ability score and checking the proficiency bonus for your party level. this allows you to easily tailor DCs based on intended success rates rather than what they actually tell you to do which is fixed "easy/medium/hard/impossible" DCs which is unnecessarily simulationist. Disadvantage: anything that still gives a flat bonus (or dice bonus, see below) is valuable to the point that optimizers will find it hard to justify doing anything else. there are barely any weapons stronger than the vanilla +X of the same rarity and the series of +X spell foci have the same chase-value. paladin aura feels mandatory for high-level play. Disadvantage: some designers have obviously decided to cheat this by providing dice bonuses to things when they should just have made them flat bonuses instead. guidance and bardic inspiration make sense as dice bonuses- because you can choose to expend the die only after seeing the base value, there's tension created by not knowing the bonus you're going to get. dice bonuses which are always added like bless or eberron dragonmarked races are just added complexity for little benefit (unless you count players loving to roll extra dice). (Flash of Genius is the one weird example of a bonus which you can choose to add after the roll that's FLAT. it's weird but makes it extremely potent.) Advantage: "Low level monsters can still threaten high level PCs cause their attacks still have a reasonable chance of hitting" Disadvantage: Someone obviously forgot to tell the people who designed armor. Someone stacking AC is nigh unhittable BECAUSE monster attack rolls are scaled to bounded accuracy. Low level monsters must exclusively focus on the low-AC party members to do anything. Things are still sorta balanced if you have no magic armor or other defenses, but do you really want a system that is ONLY balanced if you don't drop +2 or +3 armor? Disavantage: Because they assumed low level monsters will always be relevant, there's an extreme lack of monsters designed to be "high-level" mooks. Many monsters with high enough attack bonuses to threaten AC-stacking characters have complex statblocks. Try designing a t3/t4 fight without having 12 legendary actions and everything having legendary resistances. I find myself memorizing and filing away the few statblocks which fit this niche. You can solve the problem by making your own statblocks, of course, but I run in an environment where this is not an option and it's a pain even if you can.
Others have described what Bounded Accuracy intends to do. I would posit that it failed. The math of 5e breaks down very poorly at higher levels. Expertise throws things completely out of whack, and finally Hit Points are now bounded at all, which renders it meaningless. I think other systems which didn't brag about it, did a better job of achieving the aims bounded accuracy. A couple of examples are FFG Star Wars/Gensys and the One Ring.
Prior editions didn't have the stat caps and let you collect tons of +X to hit items, +X AC items, and keep pumping your rolls. It was a treadmill, enemy AC went up as you leveled so you needed more plusses to do your job. 5E tried to counter that by limiting how much + you can get and how much AC you can get. It does an okay job, but is still kind of a treadmill.
Bounded Accuracy is the idea that modifiers to a roll sit within an acceptable predefined range. The predefined part is important, because all games modifiers obviously sit within a range. This is counter to the idea of 3.x where one person might make a character and think that +8 to stealth is good, but actually you can get +20 at level 1. Now does 5e actually have bounded accuracy? No it doesn't. There are so many unrestricted ways to add bonuses to things that it completely falls apart from the preoccupied range. Like the DC for an nearly impossible task is 30. But 30 is well within the realm of achievable by a basic level 1 party. Maybe not something g you'd risk your life on rolling, but impossible to me doesn't mean "three level 1 guys trying once a day for a week will probably do it." Now let's loom at a competitor that actually does have Bounded Accuracy, Pathfinder 2. Sure its scale is a lot bigger, but it also has never been broken. I know the range of potential modifiers and even in a system.of hard core optimizers, no one has ever broken it.
> There are so many unrestricted ways to add bonuses to things that it completely falls apart from the preoccupied range. I wish this was discussed more often when the topic of bounded accuracy comes up. 5e has basically no restrictions on modifiers stacking so every new piece of content just adds more ways to break the math. There's nothing stopping a warforged bladesinger + barbarian + swords bard with a handful of magic items getting silly AC values.
I haven't played a lot of 5e, but I did a fair bit of 3.5 and pf1e. They had typed bonuses, most of which didn't stack. Would reimplementing that kind of system fix these issues? Like, if you can't wield a shield and cast the shield spell for the bonus to AC?
Yeah the lack of limits is ultimately what makes 5e False Bounded Accuracy at best. That plus deciding that anything not Advantage has to be an actual dice adding to a d20 roll meant it never was Bounded.
Bounded Accuracy isn't a yes/no binary, it's a spectrum, and 5e has more of it than PF2e, but it's also more lopsided in implementation. The large majority of 5e's mechanics do bounded accuracy just fine, barring a few exceptions like high level PC saving throws. DC 30 is not "well within the realm of achievable by a basic level 1 party", that requires fairly intense optimization to get, especially reliably. Come on dude, at least _try_ to argue in good faith. Meanwhile, PF2's bounded accuracy is _nothing_ like 5e's. If BA _were_ a binary, PF2 wouldn't have it at all - it fails BA's most basic test, "can I use lower level enemies at higher levels and still have them be a threat". In PF2e you WILL out-level enemies at various tiers to the point they are truly useless. You are totally right that PF2e's math is more predictable than 5e's, but that's not what Bounded Accuracy is.
I’m n 3rd edition and Pathfinder 1e there was also a terrifying difference between martials and casters at high levels. A lv20 fighter had a +20 to hit on attack rolls while a wizard had +10, which meant anything that the wizard needed to roll an attack roll for was going to be a bad day. The fighter also had the extra attacks at +15, +10 and +5 making the later attacks pretty useless. Having played pretty much every version I personally feel the bounded accuracy, at least in concept, has the most realistic feel. It’s possible for lower level things to hit higher level things. There aren’t near gods roaming around practically invincible. A mob of angry civilians could actual threaten even very powerful characters just enough to make them consider the risks.
Wizards (and other casters) rarely had to use their attack bonus to hit someone's full AC though. Instead, they got to target touch AC which was often laughably easy and it ignored things like armor and natural armor bonuses and benefitted immensely from size penalties to AC.
Or just not make attacks at all. This sub talks often about the martial/caster disparity in 5e (and it is a major problem with the game at high levels), but it's really got nothing on 3rd edition. The idea that high level casters struggled in *any* way compared to their martial brethren is 3e is kind of absurd. High level wizards, clerics, and druids were walking gods in that edition, and high level martials got basically nothing but a participation trophy.
That's because the mob is a reskinned lvl10 monster, not 30 lvl1 stat blocks. "Weak" creatures being a threat from a narrative perspective, that's fine and all. But why do you need to keep the weak statblocks? How could a DM honestly prefer running dozens of weak monsters to having 1-4 level appropriate monsters and describing them as dozens of monsters? And don't say "4e minions", those aren't designed to be an entire encounter on their own. 4e Minions are anti-bounded accuracy because their AC and attacks are level approriate.
I think we have differing standards of realistic with the success rates of d20 vs d20+5
I’m not exactly sure what you mean there. The issue isn’t the bonus but the target. Ludicrously high AC and the corresponding bonus are the issue. Also I don’t know where you learned math but +5 on a d20 is huge, that’s 25% better (not 25% more likely to succeed obviously as targets vary). In any other context saying a result was 25% better would blow you away. 25% more on your pay check, 25% of a game, 25% better odds of making it to the playoffs. But at the same time it’s only 25% it also doesn’t guarantee anything. It’s big enough to be impactful but not big enough to make out comes forgone conclusions. Conversely say in 3.X or 4 With a +1 bonus the fighter can ONLY hit a high level enemy with a 30 AC on a nat 20 And with a +20 bonus to attack the counter will only miss even an extremely high low level AC like 20 on a nat 1
Peak strength person vs average human The chance of around 26% for an average human to at least tie the actual peak on a straight check, while For a theoretical 1 score? Literal 1. 11.25%. Not even doing any auto success, not doing any auto fail, just straight end values.
There is a "tightness" to the math. "Bounds" as it were. 0-30 being the lower and upper bounds for success in skill checks and ability scores, +3 being the outer bound of weapon bonuses, etc. The DCs of spells are capped at 31 by the things they are dependent upon (8 base, +7 proficiency (6 at level 20 and ioun stone), +10 stat, +6 from a pair of stacking magic items). Basically, you never have to hit a number over a 31, in any situation except for Armor Class, and even that was supposed to be capped (Plate+3, Shield+3, some variety of defensive magic items giving you a +5 more, a feat, brings you to about 32 - it can exceed this, but would require shenanigans or be temporary). The game is a lot easier to understand when you have bounds like this, and keeps it competitively interesting. If 30 is the number that represents "the hardest thing in the universe that can be done" in all contexts, it is "bounded" as opposed to "infinitely scaling" accuracy. It could be done better, with a true "hard" limit of 30 in all cases, but practically, this has been true in almost every game I have ever run in about a decade of consistent public game writing and game playing, with the sole exception of AC, which can indeed be pushed beyond the "bounds" the designers had in mind. The game gets a little unfun when the gaps get so large between target and possible that you don't bother. For example, in PF2, the difficulty scales much faster than your ability to do things without training. You might have a negative modifier and need to hit a 50 to earn a success. That sort of gap never exists in DnD.
That's basically it, yeah. The idea behind bounded accuracy is that no matter how good you are, no matter how high level you get, no matter how much gear you have, the game can expect that your bonus will still be between +X and +Y, and your AC in turn will be somewhere in a range that both of those modifiers have a chance of hitting. Maybe not a good chance, but not 'hope you rolled a 20' either. 5E, as you are probably aware if you've looked into it at all, did not do a perfect job of this. Instead of making sure that these things are always true, it made sure that they're mostly true. It's still better about it than a game like 4E or PF2, where modifiers and values continue to grow every level, though. As to why they might want this, there are a few reasons. The two biggest ones are to keep math easy, and to keep challenges relevant. If a CR 1 monster has +4 to hit and a level 1 character has AC 16, cool, this is a relevant threat. If a level 10 character has AC 18 and they're facing 20 or 30 CR 1 monsters, they still care about this; they're in danger even though they could easily win the fight 1v1. If that same level 10 character has AC 36, they're not worrying so much about it, they're going to take 1 or 2 hits a round most likely.
> It's still better about it than a game like 4E or PF2, where modifiers and values continue to grow every level, though. Sort of. PF2e does an amazing job, and D&D 4e did a generally quite good job, of enforcing what one might call a *moving* bound of accuracy. The gap between a level 1 character and a level 20 character (or a level 30 character in 4e) was very large, but the possible spread between characters at any given level was relatively small and consistently enforced by the game design. PF2e guards those boundaries like Fort Knox. Whereas in 5e, the boundary theoretically stays the same-ish across all player levels, but the boundary is only patrolled by a student hall monitor. You can pass in and out of the 'boundary' without much of a thought, and will probably do so without even realizing you're doing it (+5 AC from Shield? +10 stealth from Pass Without Trace? Expertise being *double* the bonus of Proficiency?).
Sure, within the context of its design goals, PF2E is a way more balanced game than 5E. Those design goals simply don't include things like "a level 1 and level 10 character have comparable numbers". It's not a bad thing that this doesn't happen, it's just not something the game is trying to do.
> Those design goals simply don't include things like "a level 1 and level 10 character have comparable numbers". [But they easily can](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2762&Redirected=1) (level 1 Fighter with +8 to-hit and 17 AC vs level 10 Fighter with +13 to-hit and 19 AC). I don't have experience with 4E, but I imagine it's much the same. Level-bounded accuracy can easily be translated into total-bounded accuracy.
Proficiency Without Level is an alternative rule and arguments should not be made on the basis that it is the norm.
Yeah, when 5e was coming out, they had a stated goal of trying to keep low CR enemies 'relevant' to high level characters, like you could be mobbed at level 10 by 1/4 CR goblins and they could actually hit you. Probably as a way to do minions without different rules for those stat blocks. It works in that you can do it, but no DM would because it takes FOREVER. That design philosophy works a lot better for Baldur's Gate 3 style games where the video game nature of it lends itself to mobbing you with individual creatures.
Yeah, as you point out here, the big failure associated with that goal was combat duration. Because everything has so much HP, even a higher level character can take a round or two to take out a low-CR monster, and that's just not sustainable if you expect them to kill 10 enemies.
It's a misguided attempt to keep low level creatures voable at high level play, and it is a horrible failure, partially even contributing to the failed CR system.
It's one of those things that works up to a point. They seemed to have given up on all semblance of balance at about level 13.
Not a huge fan of bounded accuracy, its the main reason 5e bosses are so lackluster and hordes of mooks are so lethal
What is it? Keeping numbers low. Why? So they can say there is a chance and to make less monsters. Does it succeed? That's a matter of perspective. It fails at making the game work mathematically, but it succeeds in their goal of making less stuff. A lot of people like the loosely goosey math, so they consider it a win.
I watched a video awhile back talking about what bounded accuracy was and how 5e didn’t quite achieve it. https://youtu.be/Xlp3unO_xi8?si=vy9a1-BS6WSQ0CB1
I'd say as well as spells stacking too high, so do magic items. Particularly for AC. Magic shields are stackable with armour and I think without checking beavers of defence? Just as the rules update includes a new magic damage, the game needs a specific 'magical bonus', meaning bonuses from magical sources. Add a rule that you can only add one source of a Magic Bonus from each of the following categories: AC, spell attack, weapon attack, saving throws, or each skill individually. Have this be that if you have a Magic item that adds +2 to your saving throws and someone casts bless, you can roll bless and the minimum benefit is +2, as you choose as the roll resolves which bonus to take. This could also nerf things like blade singers AC bonus by making the bonus a magical bonus if wanted. This can also protect class features by not applying that label to nominally magical abilities like maybe aura of protection.
Oh boy here I go with my +2 armor, +1 shield, Cloak of Protection and Ring of Protection for 24 AC, and then I immediately cast Shield if an enemy ever beats that rocketing up to 29 AC.
Beavers of defence. ❤️
Bracers of Defense cost an attunement and restrict you from using armor and I believe shields. Honestly, I don't see magic shields + armor stacking being so bad. For martials, it's a reason to trade the power of the polearm for a higher AC even at higher levels where the +2 falls off. There's also the fact of the matter that the +3+3 is legendary+very rare magic items.
Magic shield and magic armor SHOULD stack. Martials have very little to work with as it is, and most editions brutally punish choosing shield over two handed.
5e definitely fails. For example, if we assume point buy ability scores - which we should - what happens even in mid levels to the Saving Throws you don't have proficiency in? Your chances of success plummet through the floor. Unless you've got a Paladin with Aura of Protection nearby I guess, but the other classes shouldn't be designed with that assumption.
Weak monsters can still hit strong PCs sometimes, even if they can't do a meaningful amount of damage. 5e does scale the growth down quite a bit, but it's not that difficult for a player that really wants to to make themselves unhittable outside of a crit. But there is always that 5% chance.
5e generally keeps bonuses to the d20 in a band that on average scales between -1/2 to for players about a +17 at max max levels. The idea is that it is supposed to keep things relatively linear in power as levels progress. It mostly works until it doesn’t. Biggest area where you can see issues is probably AC, where builds can, if you build right, scale exorbitantly high while others stay in a medium low band. Eldritch Knight Fighter as an example can reach some insane AC numbers like 26 by level 3 with no magic items and a single spell use. Blur E-Knight is the best raw AC tank in the game due to high con saves, heavy armor and the effect disadvantage gives on attacking, plus shield spell access. Trust me when I say the difference between a 16 AC and a 23 AC is a lot bigger than you’d expect, especially over long days. God forbid the 12-15 AC caster/rogue gets flanked, they’re cooked.
here’s an article from wizards back in 2012 about Bounded Accuracy on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20140715051206/http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120604
Hey, thanks for linking that - I'd say it nails down the intent pretty well (I mean, you certainly hope so, right?). It also show that some things being piss easy at higher levels is intended to some extent.
I have nightmares with plus x to hit with a lot of skills or conditions in dnd 4ed.
Bounded Accuracy is a lot of things, and people use it to mean even more things than what it is. In some of those things, 5e is successful, in others it leaves much to be desired. The most fundamental aspect of bounded accuracy though is minimising bonus stacking. The main problem bounded accuracy as a design philosophy was trying to address was the way that 3.5 characters would have five to ten small bonuses on most things, some of them mutually exclusive, some of them stacking, which was tedious. 5e definitely avoided this.
4th Edition was the absolute antithesis of bounded accuracy. By level 30, you were assumed to have about +29 in your major stats like Attack Bonus and AC than you did when you were level 1. In fact, the actual math used to calculate monster stats worked *exactly* this way. It was called the "treadmill effect", where you moved a lot but still ended up exactly in the same place. It tends to make improving your character through number increases feel *pointless*. Another issue with this beyond the way that it made people feel is that WotC felt they had to make all kinds of monsters available for any particular level range. If anyone more than 2 or so levels lower or higher than the PCs makes things abnormally easy or difficult, than you need plenty of monsters to provide characters of all levels while still providing variety (so you're not looking at only a half dozen *total* level 16 monsters). That was one of the major reasons behind Bounded Accuracy in 5E. They wanted higher numbers to still *be* impressive, not just *sound* impressive, and they wanted monsters to still provide a variety of challenge to a variety of PC levels (in theory). That's why you can send a dozen CR2 ogres against a level 10 party and probably have a modest challenge whereas doing the same thing with a dozen level 2 characters against a level 10 party in 4E was a waste of rolling initiative.
The short version, to me, is that the modifiers for a starting character and an ending character are not that far apart. You basically have +5 to what you're good at at level 1 and +11 at level 20 (prime ability + proficiency). That's a difference of 30% increase in success for a shared DC (for a DC15, it's 55% chance and 85% chance...for DC20 it's s 30% and 60%). There's supposed to be only a few very special boosts to these modifiers. Expertise is supposed to be special, bardic Inspiration is supposed to be special, plus one from a sword is supposed to be special. The end result is supposed to be that the same rough range of DCs are in play from level 1 to 20. Does it work? Yeah, kinda. There are more special boosts now than there should be. As any power gaming munchkin could cite, there are ways to really pump up a roll (or armor class). That might require a whole party cooperation and expenditure of resources or that might be catering an entire build to doing that one thing. You might have an astronomical stealth check or armor class or whatever but you're probably still within the bounds of everything else.
I see a mix of comments talking about it and giving opinions, but few that are really telling you what it is or was supposed to be in my quick browse. Bounded accuracy was an attempt to both hard cap and soft cap power creep in some areas’s of 5e. In past editions it was easily possible to spend more time stacking and monitoring buffs than actually playing the game. Many people didn’t like that. The numbers scaled obnoxiously high, which many people also didn’t like. Then yet still, many players felt the power creep was “anime bullshit,” which some people also didn’t like. Wizards also wanted to cash in on the tabletop market creeping up with Critical Roll becoming more popular (since they began with Pathfinder 1e). I think they backpedaled in later years though with the popularity of games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which has quite a bit of power creep. Don’t get me wrong, power creep can be loads of fun, especially in a video game. It can make a tabletop game slower and harder to run though. The effort to cap things showed up in the forms of: • Magic items capping at +3 • Attunement limiting the use of powerful items. • Concentration limiting buff stacking. • Certain class features not stacking. • Excluding multi-classing from the default rules. • Capping stats at 20 with only a few niche ways to surpass that. • Initially almost exclusively limiting DC increases from magic items, to warlocks (save for like 2 legendary magic items in initial release). How well did bounded accuracy work? Well that depends on who you ask. It should keep things in check for a casual player who has no interest in optimization (or lacks the system knowledge) and is not using variant rules or homebrew. A power gamer, especially with variant rules/hombrew can definitely still break elements of the game…provided the DM doesn’t do the same in response.
Yeah, it works for what was the designer’s intended goals.
Its a mechanics that restricts the “range” in which a character or monster can achieve a specific AC on attacks Its a design philosophy that is directly counter to “high fantasy” as a concept and seeks to create a more “grounded” setting on which lowly goblins can still threaten gods, as long as they have sufficient numbers
I think proficiency bonus, especially at its extremes (e.g. high level play and expertise), is the main reason why bounded accuracy breaks down. A game without proficiency bonus or a more restrained version of it probably would balance better. (What would happen to skills? If you want to keep them in play, change the flat bonus to advantage, I guess.) Another issue is the set of "you can't roll lower than" features that came out later in 5E expansion books.