To state, we don't mean ill with this question. Genuinely, I've never really understood the appeal of dnd5e's +/-0-19 modifiers whose only interaction is nullification with its counterpart or direct effect versus other games' granular ones that can circumstantially compound or reduce. Why is it preferred?
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in reply to @khromatic-abberation's post:
If I am following the question correctly, the "advantage cancels disadvantage" and "+2 cancels -2" approach is to make things easy to parse in play. While more nuanced systems like 3.x or Pathfinder 1e give you a lot of interesting options, they also slow the game down as folks try to remember every modifier that applies. D&D 5e in particular is built to pull-in as wide an audience as possible, so I imagine defaults to "simple to remember" over "nuanced, but harder to remember" to meet that design goal.
We meant a comparison between [dis]advantage to flat bonuses at all, really. And the fact that it was designed to be simple and accessible is also something it acknowledges.
But barring that as a reason then, which I should've clarified, is there any other reason people would prefer only one of +/-0-19 versus multiple +/-Xs?
Ah, okay!
Legit, I think it ultimately comes down to "it's simple." D&D has flirted with and pioneered more complex systems in the past. I think the design goals of 5e just led the developers to choose simplicity over nuance here.
Especially with D&D and Pathfinder, not only do you have to track the numerical part of each bonus but it's type too. If you had multiples of a type of bonus they don't stack so you have to parse that on top of the number addition and subtraction. It can get to a lot of mental overhead.
- rolling two dice is easy and fun
- math is boring and hard (especially with multiple bonuses/penalties)
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