D&D 5e Rules – Advantage and Disadvantage!

Gone are the days of juggling a dozen plusses and minuses to a roll. And good riddance.

Part of an ongoing series of 5e Rules notes.

One of the 5e design mission statements was to Keep It Simple, Stupid. This KISS principle was a response to the ultra-crunchy tactical game which was 4e. I like miniatures and tactics, so I liked 4e, but it did, by focusing on numbers and formulae so much, drain a lot of color from the game. As I started up my 5e campaign, I constantly found myself running head-smack into things that 4e did that 5e did not, by design, and having to figure out why.

So what is it?

Rather than having players maneuver a blizzard of plusses and minutes on attacks, 5e tries to reduce it down to a simple set of questions for any Attack, Save, or Action Check roll:

Does the attacker (die roller) have, at the moment, an Advantage over the defender?
Does the attacker have, at the moment, an Disadvantage, compared to the defender?

Then:

If there’s no Advantage nor Disadvantage, it’s a Normal attack — roll 1d20.
If there is both Advantage and Disadvantage, it’s a Normal attack — roll 1d20.
If there is just Advantage — roll 2d20 and take the higher die roll.
If there is just Disadvantage — roll 2d20 and take the lower die roll.

Note that (KISS) these are not additive. There is no “Super-Advantage,” and no “Well, you have one Advantage and two Disadvantages, so that comes out to Disadvantage.” There is either just Advantage, or just Disadvantage; otherwise it’s a Normal 1d20 roll.

So what impact does this have?

There are some fancy graphs out there, but Advantage is roughly a +4 on a d20, statistically. Or, as put another way, “Advantage is an enormous benefit that lands 13 or higher 50% of the time, is almost twice as likely to crit, and has 1/20th times as likely to botch.” So 5e doesn’t hand out the status lightly.

Or, put in pictures (please feel free to ignore if math makes you twitchy):

Advantage and Disadvantage, plotted — What Advantage/Disadvantage does. (Source)

Having Advantage (blue) boosts your numbers up a lot, esp. in the middle range (trying to hit at least an 8-16); having Disadvantage (green) drags your numbers way down.

When do you have Advantage or Disadvantage?

There are a lot of conditions that create Advantage or Disadvantage (since there are very few conditions any more, except cover, that throw numbers, not Ad/Disad). A good survey can be found here:

A few common ones for combat:

Using the Dodge action during combat has any attack roll against you made at a disadvantage until the start of your next turn (if you can see the attacker). DEX saving throws while Dodging are made with advantage. (Note to GMs: bad guys should Dodge a lot more than they do.)
Using the Help action during combat can give an ally advantage in one of their own ability checks before the start of your next turn (see “working together”). Alternatively, it can provide advantage on the first of an ally’s attack rolls against a monster.
Attacking an enemy while hidden (if they don’t detect you approaching) or otherwise unseen grants you advantage on attack rolls. Conversely, attacking an enemy you can’t see has you making the roll with disadvantage.
Ranged attacks whose target is within a weapon’s long range (but not within normal range) have a disadvantage on the attack roll.
Ranged attacks (including rolled spell attacks) in close combat (within 5 feet of a hostile creature who can see you and isn’t incapacitated) have a disadvantage on the attack roll. (Spells that require a Saving Throw don’t have this problem because they have no attack roll.)
Attacks made while prone are at a disadvantage. Attacks at 5′ made on someone who is prone are at an advantage, but attacks beyond that are at a disadvantage.
You can spend a your point of Inspiration to make an attack, save, or action check at advantage.

Advantage also shows up as a balancer. Kobolds, for example, have a Mob Tactics ability; if a kobold is next to an ally in combat, they each get Advantage on their attack roll. Thugs and Wolves have analogous abilities. That makes them more of a threat than you might think.

How do I roll Ad/Disad?

Normal physical tabletop, just roll two D20s and pick the higher (or lower) one as need be.

The Roll20 VTT standard 5e character sheet provides multiple ways to roll advantage, set through the Settings (gear icon) on the sheet toggle (CORE|BIO|SPELL|gear):

Advantage Toggle — You’ll see a ADVANTAGE | NORMAL | DISADVANTAGE toggle at the top of the character sheet which you can adjust for each roll. [This is what I do, because I like to be sure I have all my settings right and am not throwing more dice than needed.]
Advantage Query — For each Attack/Save/Action Check roll, you’ll get as pop up window asking if you have Advantage or Disadvantage. [I find this annoying, myself.]
Always Roll Advantage — This will roll 2d20 on everything, then you can apply the roll (higher number for Advantage, lower number for Disadvantage, left-hand number for Normal). [This is a very common way people do this, and for the DM the monsters are all done this way.]
Never Throw Advantage — Always just roll 1d20; if you need to roll a second die, do it again.

D&D 5e Rules – Action Economy!

It’s a bit Inside Baseball, but understanding it can be the difference between PC Life or Death

Part of an ongoing series of 5e Rules notes.

So this is less rule than game design philosophy. It feels a little Inside Baseball, but understanding it is fundamental to understanding a lot of the reasoning behind the rules in 5e, and in why the game behaves the way it does.

What is the “Action Economy”?

In short, action economy means what a character (or NPC or creature) can do each turn. How many attacks can they make? How many abilities can they use? How many spells can they cast? A lot of the rules I’ve researched in here orbit around that concept of action economy.

Essentially,

the larger your action economy ⇒
the more things you can do in a turn ⇒
the more powerful you are

And that’s true for individuals, as well as for groups.

A big part of character advances are adding more attacks, more Bonus Action options, etc. Similarly, more powerful monsters have more attacks and actions in a turn (including legendary and lair powers).
All things being equal, the side that has the greater numbers of combatants has an advantage in combat, because their action economy, the opportunities they have for success in combat, is greater.
Bounded Accuracy , as one person put it, “makes everybody dangerous no matter how weak but does so at the cost of making everyone vulnerable no matter how strong.” Which means, by implication, over time a bunch of weak (but dangerous) characters can overwhelm a strong (but vulnerable) one.
PCs often have advantage in combat because encounters often have more PCs vs fewer (but individually more powerful) enemies. Sure, that monster can do three physical attacks, or maybe a big spell effect. But PCs much more often get more Attacks, Spells, Bonus Action abilities, etc., than enemies, individually or (and this is important) in aggregate. They often also get specialized Reactions others than Opportunity Attack. This only starts to partially equalize when you get up to epic creatures that have legendary and lair actions, but even there, numbers tell.
Everything you can do is part of your action economy: Actions, Bonus Actions, Reactions, and Moves. The more you can set yourself up (tactically, in a battle, or strategically, in your character design) to do something effective with all of those options in a turn, the more effective (and deadly) your character will be.

5e Player Action Economy — All the things you can do as a player. Source

In short, the action economy is your range of actions in a round (see above), and by extension, maximizing your effectiveness by using as much of that economy as possible.

How do GMs cope?

GMs bitch a lot about this: the boss fight that’s got the arch-critter-demon you’ve had the players trembling about for months … ending with the boss going down in two rounds as the 15 attacks the party can generate per turn (action economy!) overwhelms the 4-5 the boss can.

What (just to offer notes) do GMs/module writers do in the face of this?

They add Minions! They’re not just color text — they help balance the “overwhelming numbers vs very powerful foe” equation by mitigating the former so that the latter can get some licks in.
As mentioned, epic-level legendary creatures — dragons, liches, beholders, etc. — can get legendary and/or lair powers, which basically add to their action economy (and hurt like the dickens). GMs often add these non-canonically to other bosses, too.
Do other things to add to a boss’s action economy. One suggestion that seems to have legs is making bosses, in short, multiple creatures (with different capabilities and HP pools and initiatives) presenting as a single creature.
Split the Party. If the party can’t bring all of its power to bear — because it’s split up (by its own choosing or through an external force), or maybe because the attack vectors are limited (a narrow hallway, perhaps), it’s action economy is restrained.

The converse to all of these can be used (usually by the GM) to weaken a boss that seems too big to tackle.

Some good articles to check out:

GM counter-tactics (as, ahem, thought experiments):

D&D 5e Rules – Overview and Table of Contents

I’m trying to make use of stuff I’ve researched and written up for my players to help the community at large.

I’ve been DMing D&D going back to the AD&D v1 era, and recently wrapped a 2½ year 5e campaign. One of the things I ended up doing for that was writing a lot of “rules summaries” explaining or exploring (or in some cases “house ruling“) on concepts or specifics that need a bit more explanation than what shows up in all those expensive D&D books.

We were using Roll20, so I’d been keeping those rules summaries in the Campaign Forum there for my players, but I think I’m going to start posting copies of them here on my blog, as a longer-term (and more searchable) resource.

A few caveats:

I tend to try to go with Rules As Written (RAW) when given a choice. When I need something more clear than that, I lean heavily on the RPG Stackexchange, because those folk are rules lawyers in a very reasonable fashion.
That said, this is still just me saying things, though I try to document what I say. If you, or your DM, think differently on any of this, that’s up to you and your table.
There are cases where I go with house rules that I think make things easier, more sensible, more fun — without, I hope, gutting major gaming subsystems.
This is all going to be focused on D&D 5e — and with One D&D (or whatever it turns out being called) ramping up, all or most of this may be obsoleted (claims of backwards-compatibility notwithstanding). Caveat lector.

House Rules!

… to be continued …

“One D&D” to rule them all (maybe)

So WotC has announced what they’re doing with D&D 6e. Or 5.5e. Or, maybe … no e.

Instead, they say, we will have “One D&D,” with the whole concept of “editions” becoming instantly obsolete, because WotC believes 5e doesn’t need complete revamping, just evolution. Sort of like an OS being constantly patched, the baseline ruleset will be updated over time so that there is just “D&D the way it is today” and no need to ever, ever, roll out a new version.

How that will work with books isn’t clear. Will they keep coming out with “patch” books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything? Or will the core ruleset be republished (and rebought) every X number of months/year. In either case, that’s different from what we have now because …?

Of course, maybe the idea is that we won’t have “books” at all, but online rules that can be slipstreamed electronically to the current text (with some sort of versioning so that you figure out what’s going on), but that you have to subscribe to …

None of that was really discussed, just three broad pillars for “One D&D”:

Ongoing updates to the current baseline 5e (ssshhh!) rules.
Expansion of D&D Beyond, the compendium toolset they recently bought.
Creating D&D Digital, apparently a 3D VTT, the pre-alpha version pictures for which look pretty impressive, and which will be both a content delivery tool (“Here’s the dungeon for this game”) and content creation tool.

Now, just because they are dealing with the rules on a patch basis doesn’t mean there are potentially significant things coming out beyond additional content. For example, Backgrounds are being completely revamped, to give Ability score modifiers and feats, which does sound kind of keen.

Other changes already raised: simplification of spell lists, and making a Nat 1 a miss for any roll, not just attacks.

Color me … somewhat dubious.

I get the idea that completely revamping the rules every several years is increasingly more difficult. I even buy the idea that 5e is a pretty decent platform to build on, with caveats.

But one reason why D&D is still with us, several editions on, is because audiences and tastes change. What people want in terms of crunchiness vs simplicity, hack-and-slashery vs role-playing, not only changes with an individual over time, but with the industry.

If D&D doesn’t change, in its bones, every now and then, those changes in society and audience will lead people to go elsewhere.

Here are the dates for rule releases:

1974 – original
1977 – AD&D 1e
1989 – AD&D 2e
1995 – AD&D 2e Revised
2000 – D&D 3e
2003 – D&D 3.5
2008 – D&D 4e
2014 – D&D 5e

5e is already 8 years old — older than any except the longevity from the original AD&D to 2e, when the audience was much smaller. It’ll be a decade old 2024 when One D&D is planned for release.

At what point will everything start to feel a little creaky, no matter how many patches and content packages are released?

So maybe — and if how rules changes are handled is well-planned and -executed — this extends the 5e platform another 5+ years, with the homebrew variations that we have today multiplied as various rules continue to evolve and change (and the similarity on the surface to the 5e of 2014 continues to dwindle, without, somehow, breaking the “backward compatibility that WotC has promised). When will whoever owns Hasbro decide what the world needs is to put out One D&D 2nd Edition?

Playtesting for the rule updates can be found here.