D&D 5E If an option is presented, it needs to be good enough to take.

Magil · Sep 24, 2012

Remathilis said:
There comes a point where you experience overload of options however. My elven rogue may have combed over various dozens of various options and optional rules, creating weird synergies that break the game. Its customization as all get, but its really easy to make very broken characters by picking the right variant racial abilities, class features and archetypes, talents/powers/quirks, feats, and magical junk (not to mention spells or skills) to hyperspecialize and break what balance there is.

Though 4th edition DnD had a huge amount of customization for characters, in class, race, theme, background, paragon path, epic destiny... it didn't have very many "break the game" combos. What few popped up, most got errata'd out. The power level across the board was fairly even. Granted, there's a pretty wide range of power between a binder and a wizard, but it wasn't as dramatic as the predecessor edition. So I don't really buy into the belief that customization should be sacrificed in order to make sure stuff is balanced.

Hussar · Sep 24, 2012

Wouldn't another way of stating the OP be: Games need to be balanced to a certain degree?

Jester David · Sep 24, 2012

B.T. said:
I was having a discussion with a friend of mine the other day, and he said something to the effect of: "I think blasting spells should be less good than melee combat because that's not what wizards are supposed to be doing. Wizards should be mostly about utility spells."

Thus, 5e needs to take this lesson to heart: no deliberately underpowered junk. Not everything needs to be perfectly balanced, but if the developers include an option available to players, it needs to be rougly equivalent in power to the other options.

This is all good in theory, but very few game designers will ever purposely make a very sub-optimal choice. They might shoot for below "the bar" set by the benchmark spells/ feat/ powers but a purposely poor choice is never intended.

If you have two choices and both and incredibly closely balanced one will always be better. Even if the powers are equal themselves, there might be more/better feat or magic item or build options that make one option better. Even in 4e, with it's rigid balance and symmetry has some clearly better powers than others, and a wide range of power levels.

Plus, it is phenomenally hard to balance two very different options. How do you balance fireball with haste?

Roger · Sep 24, 2012

Jester Canuck said:
Plus, it is phenomenally hard to balance two very different options. How do you balance fireball with haste?

Random spells known.

Cheers,
Roger

Tony Vargas · Sep 24, 2012

B.T. said:
Thus, 5e needs to take this lesson to heart: no deliberately underpowered junk. Not everything needs to be perfectly balanced, but if the developers include an option available to players, it needs to be rougly equivalent in power to the other options.

'Junk' or 'trap options' or 'Timmeh cards' or whatever aren't great game design, I agree. They're not as devastating to game balance as /over/-powered options, though. Erring on the under-powered side isn't a terrible thing for a designer to do as a general rule. If you make a new choice /interesting/ enough, and keep it viable, it doesn't matter if it's a little sub-optimal. And, if something really does turn out to be garbage it's just worthless, everyone ignores it - it's worst crime is wasting space. It's when the under-performing choice is made to look appealing - a 'trap' - that it crosses the line.

Overpowered options, OTOH, need to be avoided more assiduously, though I suppose you could say that a few overpowered options are no different from everything else being under-powered....

As a side note, this generally punishes non-casters more than casters. Why? Because realism or whatever. (This thread was sparked by a debate about tripping monsters in Pathfinder. The option to trip is available to everyone, but in order to use it, you have to specialize greatly, and even then, you'll probably suck at it. And the response to this was, "Well, monsters are hard to trip, duh.")

Nod. A familiar pattern.

Tony Vargas · Sep 24, 2012

Remathilis said:
There is an issue in balance that PF dialed to 11: moving parts.

In 3.5/PF (esp PF) I have my race, class(es), archetype, prestige class(es), feats, skills, class abilities (fixed), class abilities (chosen), magic items, spells, talents, etc.

That's a lot of moving parts of keep track of. You need decent system mastery to just keep everything in line.

And modular multi-classing, of course, made the combinations and permutations endless.

Lest you think 4e made it any better, It just combined a bunch of those into one list and called them "powers". It also added Paragon Paths, Themes, Epic Destinies, etc...

Actually, 4e made it a lot better. With its common advancement structure, everyone got basically the same number of powers of the same levels (the same also applied to Epic Destinies, Themes and PPs, and Skills, for that matter). So balancing power choices was vastly easier than balancing spells vs bonus feats or class features of different core-class or PrC levels that might be gained at the same level via multiclassing. Feats were still a mess, though, in spite of the attempt to segregate them a bit by tier. And, Essentials, of course, un-did some of that progress.

Less is more. Race, Class, Spells, Items, and maybe Skills/Feats. Customization is good, but the more granular the system, the easier it is to break down.

Less is less. More may run up against diminishing marginal utility.

But, yes, when it comes to RPG choices, more is not always better. If the added choices are strictly inferior, they add nothing, and if their inferiority isn't sufficiently obvious, can make things worse by acting as 'traps.' If the added choices are wildly over-powered, they crowd out other choices, reducing the number of optimal or even viable choices. More choices become fewer 'real' choices. OTOH, more choices that are meaningful and viable (ie, that are balanced) really is just more choices. So it's not so much quantity as quality.

slobo777 · Sep 24, 2012

Tony Vargas said:
So it's not so much quantity as quality.

I tend to agree. There should be no need for 100's of Specialities, if 30 viable and clearly different ones are all balanced nicely, and a player with any race/class combination can happily pick any 5 of them with good synergy to customise their character.

Quality and attention to detail win if the goal is to make a balanced, playable game. They lose, unfortunately, if your goal is to fill space so you can sell content. WotC have the unenviable position of wanting to do both.

ComradeGnull · Sep 24, 2012

I agree with the OP's sentiment, but the more I think about it, what I really believe is this: I miss being younger, and not knowing what was 'effective' and what wasn't, and instead just knowing if I thought things were cool or not.

Aenghus · Sep 24, 2012

As regards the player who wanted a utility wizards, whether that is valid or not depends on his concept and the group he is in.

Many editions of D&D allowed utility wizards that could be better at solving non-combat problems than the system-designated specialist in that particular area through use of magic (at least some of which allows auto-success with no dice rolls). Scrolls, wands and other items obviated limited resources in the standard game as written.

I don't think any PC should marginalise another PC in the latter's supposed area of focus. This is the other side of balance, no options should be so good as to trump everything else.

Kraydak · Sep 24, 2012

DnD is probably at its most balanced if a full burning Vancian wizard can, *just barely* match a fighter in damage, for the first round or two, if he has a relatively target rich environment. Such a setup avoid wizards being the fighter's equal in combat, while simultaneously the fighter's absolute master out of combat. This doesn't make loading Fireball pointless, although it does make loading only Fireballs a rather bad idea. Crucially however, it does make playing a fighter a "good enough to take" option.

If you have actually different classes, then a class, by being "good enough to take", has to claim territory where other classes can only tread in a supporting role. Such is life in a class-based system. It doesn't make people acting in a supporting role useless, when it comes up.

Of course, if you have the option, at char-gen to turn a wizard into a 100% fireballs all the time character (no Invisibility, no Knock, no Fly, no Dispel Magic, no Teleport, no Tenser's Floating Disk, etc...), then that wizard's fireball does have to be quite good.