The SECRET NUMBER Every GM NEEDS to Know! (Ep. 326)

Awesome video! Personally, I like advantage/disadvantage even though it involves another dice roll. I like it simply because of the tension. Plus or minus 15% is enough to make a statistical difference, but not enough to make something a certainty. Feels kinda like getting a free pull at the slot machine; or with disadvantage, being forced to take the whiff instead! I like the table drama. But it's true that this is less efficient as far as keeping things moving as briskly as possible. The most important thing is that the rules can change to suit the group, as long as the fundamentals of the d20 mechanics are there (and even then, you don't technically need a d20 to run the game if you don't want to use it!).

Oh Yeah... by level 10 they are lucky to have a +2 weapon, if a plus weapon at all (depending on the DM- official adventures mostly do not hand out + items, because they break the sacred bounded accuracy- which is really what is described in this video) so, using at in your example is poor form.

What size is that d20 your holding in the video, I love it!!!

thinking about it in terms of percentages is very helpfull

The DC chart was originally a thing in D6 Star Wars, in case you were not aware. Loved that they incorporated it into 3ED D&D.

First off, this was great advice. Not gonna lie, I really needed this information. Also, I love Deathbringer's tantrum at the end.

Question for you sir. In the video you show the Lost City and talk about how people in that edition kind of whiff too much. OK, fair enough. But in Cook & Moldvay, you didn't get a bezillion hit points. Hitting is therefore a bigger deal Your thoughts?

Bravo. Thank you.

I understand that the way the bonuses work it can make the game feel kinda arbitrary. But I always felt that the challenge of the later parts of the game came from your skills, spells, abilities, and knowledge and not the bonus you get. Yeah sure, rolling an 8 at basically any point in the game might be a success for a skilled character, but the real challenge is knowing what situation to put yourself it to need to roll that 8. When you get more spells and higher level spells you open up more variety of options for how to solve problems, when you get skills and abilities you do the same thing. When you run into more enemies with more unique powers and abilities you have to make better decisions to put yourself in a situation to win. Thats where I always felt that challenge of the game is.

I could listen to you for forever 🥰

You can't just eliminate advantage from 5e. It's the cornerstone of the system. Advantage isn't just a +3 to the roll (or the +5 that Wizards says it is). It's a second opportunity to crit.

And here's the next subtle yet still overwhelming game effect. The monsters' to-hit bonus at high level play is so high, they're going to nail the players almost every time anyway, even if their AC is 25. An Ancient Red Dragon is +17 to hit, so we see your 8 in action right there. While advantage is allowing the players more crits, imposing disadvantage on the monster prevents it from critting the players. Yes, I still hit you, I'm +17. But I have to use the 12 I rolled, not the 20.

I'm not saying these mechanics are better than yours. I've been running 5e games for nine years now, and I'm sick to death of advantage and disadvantage. The entire game revolves around it now, and every new player who comes to the table just assumes you use non-existent flanking rules because God forbid they ever have to make an attack without advantage. Just saying you've missed a huge facet of this mechanic's impact. Love your channel.

I remember playing old school DnD, it was like 1984 and we were 1st level and fighting kobolds. The fight took 45 minutes because neither the party nor the kobolds could hit the broad side of a barn. Fun times.

If you want combat to feel better, drop the AC and increase the HP of monsters.

Skilled characters get that +5 bonus, and it is damn-near 1/3 of the range of a d20. 20/3 = 6.66, round that up to 7 and that's where the "roll an 8!" comes from. So the DM/Monsters/Cruel World "owns" 1/3 of the D20 and the players typically "own" the other 2/3. That's a pretty good rule of thumb for a standard challenge roll.

Like Prof DM said: assuming that 13 AC is the most common AC starting out and the baseline DC for most checks:

1/3 of the D20 is failure (1-7), ~1/3 of the D20 is marginal success (8-12), and the final ~1/3 of the D20 is a solid success (13-20). So every roll there is a 35% chance of failure, 40% chance of solid success, and a 25% chance of success but with either a complication or something interesting/unexpected/dramatic happening. To me, this "feels" like the baseline of good TTRPG probability; the numbers favor solid success for the players, but it's spread fairly evenly with marginal success to allow room for dramatic moments, and the failure rate is still decent enough to keep the game interesting.

Great video. Deathbringer made it awesome. More Deathbringer please. And more characters too - is Deathbringer a member of a party? How about some Deathbringer short videos (new and existing) and more OSR Grognard Angry Dwarf.

Arbitrary 😂 I ran a game where the max bonus players got was +3 on anything and everything. No set skills just a concept like Ranger, our Spy as a character concept. Whole system worked flawlessly, can a spy do this? Probably, have +2 on this d20 roll lol

“The game was rigged from the start”

One of my favorite videos of yours 😀

this is must see D&D content.

Love this concept. Generally though I tend to set my DCs around 15. Any DC lower than 10 doesn't seem worth rolling for. Some DMs make you roll for too many things and too often. If there is no time constraint then most times I don't make them roll for minor stuff.

Very good video. Thanks!

"I'll buy you a Starbucks and we can drink it in the rain." That is great!

"The illusion of improving" kinda reminds me of level-scaling in most games; where enemies always scale equally to players.
I find that my players enjoy leveling up, and if I dont include weaker encounters routinely, then there isnt any real improvement. It becomes static.
Leveling up isnt leveling up if the status doesnt change.
Sure, i definitely have select encounters that are either equal or higher than their difficulty class, because challenges are fun.
But if you arent demonstrating that your "improved " stats are actually improvements, then it really is just an illusion

I think this type of thinking where you boil it down to "what needs to come up on the d20?" is what really pulled me in about Modiphius's Fallout TTRPG. It takes the math out of the to hit roll and you just know what your dice should come up as. Fallout TTRPG is a 2d20 system where lower = better, and you're aiming to roll at or below a target number, with a 1 being 2 successes and 20 adding a complication (even if you succeed on the other dice, you just complicate the success which I find interesting). And then you just add together your attribute and skill. Making an attack with a club? Strength + Melee = your target number, roll the dice, see how many successes you get, difficulty of the task is based on how many successes are needed vs the number itself.

I know a while back I used a system similar to your player facing rolls so that players would roll for their saving throw spells and enemy attacks instead of me, and rather than explain to them how it all worked, I just said "here's how the math works if you want to verify, but I'll just tell you what you need to roll" and it worked ok. Granted, I personally didn't like it because I like rolling dice, so taking that away from myself made it unfun for me, but it did make things a bit simpler just telling them a number to roll and taking the mid combat math out of the roll.

Further evidence, how do you calculate a spellcasters save DC,

you use the number 8

+3 sword at 10th lvl!!! Man, I want to play in your games.

It's refreshing to see an RPG content creator who doesn't just gob on how fantastic 5E is.

In one of your older videos you said "in the first level everything is DC 11, in the second it's DC 12" my view of D&D changed foerever. Thank you.

Always great content from PDM!

Hobgoblins have 18 AC because they wear chainmail (AC16) and carry a shield (+2.)

i'll just note these three numbers down on my dm screen or notepad,i might go cryptic and put them on a t shirt ;)

I never thought of it this way. This is great, thank you!

What are your thoughts on how Troll Lord Games handles their DC checks?

I really like games that lean into this, so you know the number the that needs to show up on the die before you roll. It’s so much more dramatic that way!

One thing that I've been thinking to implement our campaign its a battle variant system that I've found. In few words, it continues progress in battle even with a miss, so I can throw high AC enemies and cause less statements. The idea its to create a EC(Evasion Class), a value lower than AC, but not giving a 100% chance to hit, when the attack doesn't hit the AC it can hit the EC, but hitting EC does half damage or less. The way to the players and mobs not abuse to the system its to keep it working only for close combat and physical attacks, so magic still have its power and ranged attacks can still just zone the enemies.

This is one of the most useful pieces of advice all DMs should know.

I don’t care how well you have memorized the phb and the dmg. I don’t care if you are a mental-math wizard and embrace the calculation crunch in all of its glory— if you DM long enough, you will end up using this advice.

At some point, your players will do something that falls into a “rules grey area” and you will have to rely on just picking a DC that “makes sense”. And this “rule of 8” will be the baseline to go off of.

Love your vids! Do you typically tell your players the DC or do you like to keep that hidden. I can see pros for both sides but was curious on what you all thought.

Cool, so when a player excitedly tells me how he has come up with a way to set up things in his favor before making a roll, I can just pretend to listen & see if he rolls over an 8.

Thanks for the "eight"-xplanation.

Wooo woop

Brilliant !

Love this. Mörk Borg seems to follow this vibe, in that PCs, by default, need a 12 to succeed, and most crappy first level characters have maybe a +2 in what they are good at.

But its a scum-born, gallows humor system, so needing a 10 a level 1 feels about right, and will quickly shift to needing an 8 after a few level ups. Nice work, PDM.

I recognize the speed and simplicity of this approach, but why would you even use a d20 in this case? 5% probability intervals mean literally nothing when the DC is always 8, 11, or 14. That's 65%, 50% and 35% for reference. Why then not just use a d6 and rule; easy = 4 in 6 (66%), moderate = 3 in 6 (50%), hard = 2 in 6 (33%)? You are now less than 2% off any of the above probabilities and you have streamlined the game to the simplest and most common die. That sounds nice... If that's what you like.

I can't really say I agree with this direction as a whole. Sure, speed and simplicity are very desirable; but I think there is a lot to lose by doing away with static mechanics like this. The point of static DCs/ACs is that they allow a repeating comparison between a static difficulty and an increasing ability, enforcing a strong sense of progression. A goblin's AC doesn't change as a character levels up, so as the character improves in combat, hitting goblins becomes easier. Without a static AC, at what level does the GM decide that hitting a goblin is easy, moderate, or hard? For the fighter, specialized in swordplay, does the target number stay 8 forever, even as he climbs through the levels? Ok, say the GM for this new leveled-up fighter, lowers the target to 5, just for him. Cool, GM decided to make the game easier. The system of static target numbers does this without GM intervention, and smooths the progression into 5% intervals to boot.

Not to mention, this approach very quickly removes a large portion of the mechanical depth from the game. What good is a bless spell when the GM insists "the die roll must be 8 or better". Where before you could stack your advantages to make the most of your accumulated powers, now your strategy relies of convincing the DM to lower his dictate target number. The players now have no frame of reference to judge their PCs abilities, nor any sense of progression beyond GM illusionism. No, your PC did not get better, GM just decided you should win more often.

Also, as an aside, the games is not arbitrary. There is ordered logic behind differing ACs, DCs, bonuses, modifiers, etc., though they may not mesh into a fully logical whole. It will never be perfect, but abandoning the logic that is there in favor of DM fiat IS arbitrary, and kind of throws the baby out with the bathwater. Kobold with shield is harder to hit than kobold without shield. Psych! GM says the target number is 8 cuz your a good fighter.

This is very similar to the approach of milestone advancement, or fudging die rolls. There is vastly less player skill or empowerment in this approach to the game. Instead of the rules of engagement and character advancement being known before the game begins, for players to take advantage of, the GM just decides when you level up, and what the results of inconvenient die rolls get to mean, for the sake of the "story". You didn't earn your victory through a clever plan of action, or by playing to your character's strengths, the GM just gave you the win, or took it from you.
What you gain in speed and simplicity, you lose in mechanically enforced progression, verisimilitude, player freedom, an any possibility of a real challenge. This is why I am bored to tears whenever I play modern D&D.



For me, old-school D&D is the way.

That works for the most part, but then there's my level 5, standard array eloquence bard rogue dampier who can't roll lower than 19 on persuasion. Is my build just a cheese build, or, how does the math work there? Now obviously I don't expect my GM to allow it to work like charm person lol, but it's fun being a face character.

This is why AD&D is the only version. If you want superheroes read a Marvels comic.

Well that explains the combat focus of 5e. The magic number is the sacred number of Khorne.

" You can't roll a 30"
Laughs in DCC 😂😂😂