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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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In theory bounded accuracy does this with DnD 5E. Unlike 3.5 where a first level fighter has a base of +1 to hit and a 20th level fighter has +20 (setting aside ability scores), in 5th edition a 1st level fighter has +2 to hit and a 20th level fighter has +6. AC also scales less so it is easier to be hit. And magic items are as a baseline fairly rare and powerful ones need to be attuned which limits how many you can have.

It has advantages and disadvantages but even reasonably low CR monsters can be a threat to a high level party. Well the martial half at least. Spell casters still scale into the stratosphere. Even though their save bonuses don't improve much, they just get more and more tools. Which is a slightly different issue than the fundamental maths of the game.

The catch is that character improvement is exponential. Increased hit chance, yes, but also number of attacks, damage per attack, and additional triggered effects. Bounded accuracy reins in the biggest of those but leaves the others untouched.

E6 puts pretty hard caps on attacks and (via magic item limits) damage per attack. It does allow feat progression, so there are still options to add damage kickers, but that’s a soft cap on the power provided by higher-level class features.

Same goes for survivability. Bounded AC and saves or not, having 20 hit dice offers a certain insurance. Fireball and other standards simply cannot threaten someone with enough HP. They have to be superseded by bigger, stronger spells.

This was actually one of the explicit motivations for E6. Stopping before casters get 4th-circle spells was intended to rule out some of the more absolute effects—globe of invulnerability, dimension door, enervation.

Yup it still has issues, but it does make 30 basic goblin archers able to actually hit and damage a high level party in a way that 30 goblin archers in 3/3.5 would have been unable to do. And if using cover/prepared positions the party might actually miss them in return on occasion.

Spell casters are as always the fly in the ointment. Whether there should be a martial/caster divide in power/utility levels and if so how big it should be has been an ongoing debate since Elves were both a class and a race, Pathfinder 2E has kind of answered one way DnD 4th tried to answer another and got scorched whereas 5th (and the upcoming 5.5 or whatever it will be) basically wearily throws up its hands and says fine, you want Linear Warriors and Quadratic Wizards, then you have them, but just slightly less so than 3rd.