77
This is how skills are supposed to work!
If you are in a situation where there is only one person doing something, and they are rolling a single skill check, then yes, this is how it's supposed to work. Giving help is a natural thing and should be used in situations like this. There is no reason to prevent it unless the task is clearly something that's not ...
70
Yes, advantage would negate disadvantage for purposes of Sneak Attack.
According to the rules on advantage and disadvantage (PHB 173, emphasis mine):
If circumstances cause a roll to have both advantage and disadvantage, you are considered to have neither of them, and you roll one d20. This is true even if multiple circumstances impose disadvantage and only ...
66
No. There is no handed-ness in D&D, so characters do not have a dominant and weak hand. (Unless the player narrates them as such)
In addition, even when wielding two weapons, you don't have disadvantage on the second one you attack with (referred to as the off-hand, but either hand can be your off-hand depending on which weapon you swing first), rather ...
63
The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Performance Improves
It does exactly what it says it does. The Drow House Captain can attack an ally with the whip, and that ally gains advantage to attack rolls. The Captain is flogging subordinates in hopes it will make them fight better, and in this case, it actually works. Note that the whip attack does not include ...
62
Rolling 12d20 and taking the 6 highest is not equivalent
Taking the 6 highest rolls out of 12d20 is not equivalent to 6 attacks with advantage. It is significantly better. I could lay out the probability argument, but it's easier to cherry-pick an example that demonstrates the difference. Let's say you roll your 6 attacks with advantage. On the first 3 ...
61
There's a third option - and it's potentially much better
The other answers have dealt capably with your 1 vs. 2 scenario already. To recap what's been established elsewhere:
Dodge every round - every attack against you has disadvantage
Dash every round - suffer half as many attacks against you
Which is better? It depends on the enemy's likelihood 'to hit'....
55
It levels the playing field
Casting darkness will cancel out both advantage and disadvantage, due to the way they stack.
If your opponent has advantage and you have disadvantage, then cancelling both will be good for you, and bad for them.
It benefits those who can see through magical darkness
Some characters (eg, Warlocks with Devil's Sight) can see ...
54
Having both advantage and disadvantage on your roll from any number of sources always means you have neither. (Even if you have a dozen sources of advantage, and just one source of disadvantage.)
From the Basic Rules section on advantage:
If circumstances cause a roll to have both advantage and disadvantage, you are considered to have neither of them, ...
53
The attacking enemy has disadvantage on the roll.
The relevant quote from the PHB is here:
If circumstances cause a roll to have both advantage
and disadvantage, you are considered to have neither of
them, and you roll one d20... In such a situation, you have
neither advantage nor disadvantage.
It's pretty clear that, in order for the advantage ...
52
The rule on modifiers applies only after you've determined a base roll. And to do that you must first resolve disadvantage (PHB page 173):
Use the higher of the two rolls if you have advantage, and use the lower roll if you have disadvantage.
Therefore, you always take the lower roll.
This is a direct inverse of this answer here for rolling a critical ...
52
About 27%, or a little over 1/4
This is a pretty easy calculation to run in anydice:
As you can see, the percentage chance of rolling at least a 19 one of the d20 rolls is 27.10% So you can expect, on average, to crit a little over once in every four attacks made in this manner.
How do you calculate that without a simulation?
The probability of getting at ...
52
This is going to be difficult to balance
Having advantage on a roll is roughly equal to having +5 to your roll, and having disadvantage is roughly equal to having -5 on your roll, as suggested by applying advantage and disadvantage to passive checks.
Your suggested change would require somebody to have 5 different sources of advantage to get the same bonus ...
51
Not exactly. The rules on Working Together in order to give advantage are as follows:
A character can only provide help if the task is one that
he or she could attempt alone. For example, trying to
open a lock requires proficiency with thieves’ tools, so a
character who lacks that proficiency can’t help another character in that task. Moreover, a ...
51
Possible exceptions:
The player already has advantage; granting them advantage again does nothing, but imposing disadvantage on the monster does.
The 'Lucky' feat allows the underdog with disadvantage to go from "roll two, choose the worst" to effectively "roll three, choose the best".
Asymmetry: Stopping the bad guy from doing something might be more ...
51
You are describing a sound tactic
(in the game and in the real world)
It has been said that the goal of military action is to take a fair fight, and make it unfair. Most of martial history, from drone strikes to throwing rocks from a high place, has been about giving yourself an advantage. And this is no different.
In the real world, when firing from behind ...
50
No, a Crit Fail doesn't automatically overrule Advantage.
The Advantage and Disadvantage section of the PHB clearly states:
Use the higher of the two rolls if you have advantage... (pg.173)
Nothing in there says anything that would suggest rolling a 1 would cancel out Advantage so you would still take the higher of the two rolls.
The Rolling 1 or 20 ...
49
In this case, the Cloak is better
To explain this, let's first look at some stats.
When no bonuses are involved, the Chances of rolling a 20 normally is 5% (1/20), while the chance for rolling 18 or higher normally is 15%. So, from the start, it seems as if having a 20 AC is a better thing.
But not so fast. According to this source, who used a Monte Carlo ...
48
Neither advantage nor disadvantage
As you say, you have several sources of disadvantage and one source of advantage - being unseen. These cancel, leaving you with neither.
Even if you don’t particularly like this source of advantage, there is a strong argument for advantage from a non-conventional source: every way is toad. If you can just wiggle your ...
47
This is possible and not broken
No part of the rules prevents the scenario you've described so it does work. Now let's address why it isn't as strong as you think:
This requires a very specific kind of encounter environment.
You must be in an unreachable position, have enough ammunition, and be able to see your opponents who cannot be too far away lest you ...
45
If you cannot see your opponent then you cannot use any spell or feature that says "that you can see".
For example, you cannot:
Use Protection fighting style.
Use Uncanny Dodge.
Make Opportunity Attacks.
Cast any spells that require a target you can see.
Your attack rolls will be at normal (the advantage for the target not seeing you is negated by the ...
45
It complicates what is intentionally simple.
One of the aims of the advantage/disadvantage system is to remove the payoff for "bonus-scrounging". It isn't desirable to have your players constantly trying to find one more reason to get a little plus in their column; that has historically led to a lot of friction, book-diving, and absurd arguments to ...
45
AnyDice is straight forward for this
If you want to save yourself going through the maths, AnyDice will solve this for you.
While doing more complex things can get tricky (up to not possible), it's quick and easy for stuff like this. You need to use the highest N of DICE and lowest N of DICE functions and comparisons, which give the outcomes (1 being true ...
45
It depends on your situation (typically, getting Sneak Attack is key)
Let's get something out of the way first: in the simple analysis, attacking twice is usually much better than attacking once with advantage. In both situations, you roll two d20s: when you attack twice, you hit each time one rolls a hit. On a single attack with advantage, you hit if either ...
44
Yes, that is the rules-as-written.
It's worth noting, additionally, that there's actually no need for the archer to step out of the fog cloud in most circumstances: despite being effectively blinded, per the rules of the game, a creature would still know the location of another creature they cannot see, so long as that creature does not take the Hide action ...
44
Depends on the probability of your enemies hitting you with an attack.
If you Dodge, the damage you take, on average, is given by the probability p of hitting you (squared because of disadvantage) multiplied by the average damage d they deal times 10 rounds times the amount of attackers a: $$\text{AvgDamage}_{\text{Dodge}} = p^2 \times d \times 10 \times a.$...
43
Your ruling is unlikely to break anything. However, the rules on their own (and the underlying fictional significance of the rules) appear to answer this with a No.
The surface rules difficulty is that a there's no object duplication involved — you start with a spell scroll and end with a page in a spellbook. These aren't identical objects, as the ability ...
43
Use a Tree Diagram
Because I am bad at remembering formulas and bad at probabilities in general I like to use a tree diagram. The other answers provide good straight forward solutions you can apply but I hope to show why those methods work.
For Case 4: Rolling 4 d20s and taking the lowest value
If we roll a d20 4 times, the tree will have four levels with ...
42
Net attacks RAW are made perpetually with disadvantage.
They act as a normal ranged attack, so you are either always throwing them at long range (10-15 feet) and incurring disadvantage, or you are throwing them at short range and as a result are in close combat and throwing them at disadvantage. The description of the net in the PHB gives it no special rules ...
answered Sep 12 '14 at 17:33
Joshua Aslan Smith
40.5k14 gold badges133 silver badges213 bronze badges
41
No, because you're breaking bounded accuracy
Rolling a d30 would let you achieve results far beyond what the character can normally achieve. D&D 5e's 2d20 advantage mechanic specifically prevents this.
D&D 5e follows a design philosophy called bounded accuracy, where the range of numbers a character could roll is intentionally limited. Part of this ...
40
Just give advantage
I’ll get to the math in a minute, but the math really should be moot: there is no guidance for altering DCs based on PC actions because the point of the advantage mechanic is to eliminate the hundreds of ways of tweaking situational probability.
Advantage (and disadvantage) exist entirely to handle exactly these sorts of situations. ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible