D&D 5E How much should 5e aim at balance?

[TwinBahamut]

Ergo: the only practical way to present core is /without any daily powers whatsoever/.

There is one alternative to this that I can think of. It is equally possible to create a core system that links all "daily" abilities to a single unified daily resource that is equally used by all classes. Equal dependance helps preserve balance, and if it is "associated" then it preserves the desires of the people who care about that kind of thing.

I know I'm walking into a land mine of disagreement here, but I think something akin to the healing surges system from 4E could work for this, if you make a few adjustments. That mechanic works very well as a general representation of fatigue and works well to give players and characters the same opinion on matters. Within the story, a character who is full on healing surges is healthy and full of energy, and when they run out of surges they are sore, tired, hungry, and would much rather eat and get some sleep than fight any more. At the same time, players want their characters to fight on if they have lots of healing surges and hesitate to continue if they don't. It is probably more associated of a mechanic than hit points are. If you tie in something like a Wizard's spellcasting into that resource, so that it is evenly depleted by both Fighters taking damage and wearing themselves out and Wizards draining themselves with taxing magic, it would work quite well.

Unfortunately, I doubt I could get many people to agree with either the idea that healing surges are an associated mechanic or that Wizards and Fighters should make use of the same resources. Which is exactly why I don't take the "associated mechanics" discussion very seriously. Who cares if something is associated or not? Association in of itself doesn't matter at all in determining whether a game is fun to play. The way people interact with games and stories doesn't work like that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

There is one alternative to this that I can think of. It is equally possible to create a core system that links all "daily" abilities to a single unified daily resource that is equally used by all classes. Equal dependance helps preserve balance, and if it is "associated" then it preserves the desires of the people who care about that kind of thing.

How could such a thing be 'associated,' then, particularly with regard to the horror and anathema that is martial 'dailies' of any kind?

I know I'm walking into a land mine of disagreement here, but I think something akin to the healing surges system from 4E could work for this, if you make a few adjustments.

I could see that. Starting with the name. (Heroic Surges maybe? or just 'Surges.')

That mechanic works very well as a general representation of fatigue and works well to give players and characters the same opinion on matters. ... If you tie in something like a Wizard's spellcasting into that resource, so that it is evenly depleted by both Fighters taking damage and wearing themselves out and Wizards draining themselves with taxing magic, it would work quite well.

That has some potential, and some magic - like rituals, and magic items - already consume healing surges, anyway. And, it could certainly be workable. I doubt the 'dissociative' camp would be OK with adapting and expanding a 4e mechanic like healing surges - especially as it, too, has been deemed 'dissociative.'

 

[Emerikol]

Maybe you can't, but others /can/. That suggests to me the issue is too subjective to be of much value. But, for the sake of argument, say that we grant that dailies for all classes is impossible for the core system, for the reason that /some/ may find the the offense to their anti-dissociativistic sensibilities insuperable.

Others may accept the use of dailies but a dissociative mechanic is a defined thing. And a daily is one. It may not feel dissociative to some people. I'm going by the popular definition of the term. Obviously being dissociated is subjective. But there is a thing called a dissociative mechanic that I suppose is only dissociative for some people. So I'm using it in the proper noun sense.

Similarly, the giving of /some/ classes, but not others, significant daily resources produces an unavoidable balance issue that, likewise, makes such a core approach impossible.

Ergo: the only practical way to present core is /without any daily powers whatsoever/.

I know you believe this but I don't. I suppose a large enough group believing it though might influence the design for that reason.

From there, modules introducing daily mechanics could be presented. Those wishing to evoke a certain feel could selectively add those mechanics only to those classes they feel are deserving of them, while those concerned with balance could either decline to use them entirely or introduce them to all classes. Even those wishing for both could tailor a campaign to allow it, by keeping to a very strict formula for challenges presented in an average adventuring day, in order to hover near whatever balance point is dictated by their particular mix of disparate class abilities.

Your solutions are of course workable. My own suggestion was having classes already setup with with all the combinations and then in the DMG suggesting that DMs ban what doesn't fit their playstyle.

 

[Lanefan]

Similarly, the giving of /some/ classes, but not others, significant daily resources produces an unavoidable balance issue that, likewise, makes such a core approach impossible.

Tougher to manage, perhaps, but not at all impossible.

Consider two characters whose usefulness in a given situation is rated on a 1-5 scale; and let's look at 6 situations and the usefulness rating each time.

2-5-3-2-1-1
2-2-2-2-3-3

This one is balanced - the top line might represent a caster who goes off on the second encounter, the bottom one might be a fighter whose usefulness increases as the day goes along and other powers/spells/etc. get used up. But over the day they've each pulled their weight.

5-5-4-3-3-2
2-2-2-2-3-3

1-5-1-1-1-1
2-2-4-4-4-4

These two are not balanced - in one the caster is too useful too much of the time, while in the other she is only useful once and then packs it in for the day.

The challenge, of course, is to stop the first (balanced) party from ending their day after the second situation once the caster goes off; as that forces it out of balance. That comes down both to the DM keeping a strong pace going, and the players not being over-cautious and just getting on with it.

3-3-3-3-3-3
3-3-3-3-3-3

This is obviously perfectly balanced at all times. It is also impossible unless every character is the same both in mechanics and personality; and that'd get boring pretty quick.

Lanefan

 

[Grydan]

Tougher to manage, perhaps, but not at all impossible.

Consider two characters whose usefulness in a given situation is rated on a 1-5 scale; and let's look at 6 situations and the usefulness rating each time.

2-5-3-2-1-1
2-2-2-2-3-3

This one is balanced - the top line might represent a caster who goes off on the second encounter, the bottom one might be a fighter whose usefulness increases as the day goes along and other powers/spells/etc. get used up. But over the day they've each pulled their weight.

5-5-4-3-3-2
2-2-2-2-3-3

1-5-1-1-1-1
2-2-4-4-4-4

These two are not balanced - in one the caster is too useful too much of the time, while in the other she is only useful once and then packs it in for the day.

The challenge, of course, is to stop the first (balanced) party from ending their day after the second situation once the caster goes off; as that forces it out of balance. That comes down both to the DM keeping a strong pace going, and the players not being over-cautious and just getting on with it.

3-3-3-3-3-3
3-3-3-3-3-3

This is obviously perfectly balanced at all times. It is also impossible unless every character is the same both in mechanics and personality; and that'd get boring pretty quick.

Lanefan

Impossible, perhaps not.

Improbable in any campaign that doesn't conform to a set number of "situations" (or as we called them in 4E, encounters) per day? Certainly.

Look, I'd love to have the freedom to have a campaign in which, on any given day, the players do not and can not know how many situations they are going to face, without tossing balance out the window.

In the genre sources that inspire me, characters might have weeks of peaceful travel, followed by intermittent skirmishes (one per day or less), more down time, then an intense non-stop period of danger.

I want a day with only one situation to be at least approximately as balanced as a day with a dozen, so that I don't have to worry about parcelling out a specific number of situations per day or per adventure.

To me, the idea that every adventuring day happens to wind up having the right number of scenarios to balance out the different asymmetric resource expenditures of the various characters is at least as immersion breaking and out and out weird as martial dailies.

The longer the time period we try to balance the game around, the more assumptions we have to make about how time is spent during the "typical" campaign. The more we do that, the more the "atypical" campaign suffers when and where it deviates. Asymmetric resource expenditure contributes greatly to the problem.

Imagine if, instead of the encounter or the adventuring day, we were balancing around the adventuring year. If you give a class a potent yearly ability, intended to balance out against characters without such an ability over a 12 month campaign, what happens to campaigns in which the characters find a way to wrap things up in 6 months? What about campaigns where the adventurers spend 3 weeks on the adventure, then return to the safety of their homes for the rest of the year?

 

[Ratskinner]

Hit Points all the time may be boring, though, because you first only whittle down hit points until something meaningful happens.

I like to have a mix. One way I could see it work is if you get people over certain hit point threshold (like Bloodied), you already get an effect. Say, you may have 4 thresholds:
3/4 hit points, 1/2 hit points, 1/4 hit points, no hit points.
An effect that can inflict a condition can state that it inflicts that specific condition if you bring the target down to that condition level (either with that attack, or simply because you hit it and is at that condition level after the attack, regardless of why it was there before. Needs tweaking.)

It could basically also substitute for a wound system. Everytime you take 1/4 of your hit points in damage, you take a "wound" - except some effects do not create physical wounds but special conditions, like charmed or disintegrated or whatever. Wounds take time to heal off, and some conditions may likewise require some extra effort to fix.

I kinda like the idea of "trip" or "trigger" points along the way, if we're going to keep combatants around with several dozen hp. I suppose you could even have unusual things that trigger only or differently when they "bloody" something, and not when they drop them. It turns hp into strictly a pacing mechanic for the fight though, so I would think they should be divorced from ability scores, and maybe even class.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Tougher to manage, perhaps, but not at all impossible.

"Impossible" in the sense of presenting a core that is not objectionable, not in the sense of impossible to deal with - obviously, DMs & players have been dealing with such balance issues for a very long time... when not actually reveling in them, that is.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I know you believe this but I don't. I suppose a large enough group believing it though might influence the design for that reason.

That's the idea. There's a faction of the player-base that reject martial dailies for what ever reason. That means that balance by giving everyone dailies is off the table. There's a fraction of the player base, however, that want balance (and has had it in D&D for a few years, so can no longer be told it's impossible or not D&D) that can't be achieved by mixing and daily-less classes. Setting aside the often absurd arguments and hostilty between those two factions, and just accepting that 5e intends to try to please them both, then, dailies just plain have to be exiled from Core.

Your solutions are of course workable. My own suggestion was having classes already setup with with all the combinations and then in the DMG suggesting that DMs ban what doesn't fit their playstyle.

That's doubling (at least) the complexity of core, but an equally good option for experienced players on either side of the fence (6 of 1, half-dozen of the other, really). Maybe not so great for core as the likely face of the game to new/casual players, though.

 

[Hussar]

Lanefan, I'd argue that your first example isn't actually balanced. The first character is totally dominating one encounter, and is riding the pines in two of them. I'm assuming that 1 out of 5 is pretty much the equivalent of throwing daggers at giants - sure, you did damage, but, the contribution did not really affect the outcome of the situation at all.

I do not want to see a return to this sort of "balance" where we swing so far between useful and riding the pines. Your first example actually looks like a 3e rogue, where the last two encounters are ones against which the rogue's sneak attack doesn't work. Sure, he had that one really good encounter, but, the rest of the time he's either average or well below average.

Sure, 3's across the board isn't going to happen either. But, I would hope that everyone at the table is a 2-4 in every encounter with specific reasons for a 1 or a 5 (PC got killed/incapacitated in the surprise round would be a good example of a 1 PC nails several crits in a row for a 5).

So long as everyone is in the same ballpark, I'm pretty content. Barring some very specific circumstances, characters should never be 1's or 5's.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Tougher to manage, perhaps, but not at all impossible.

Consider two characters whose usefulness in a given situation is rated on a 1-5 scale; and let's look at 6 situations and the usefulness rating each time.

2-5-3-2-1-1
2-2-2-2-3-3

This one is balanced - the top line might represent a caster who goes off on the second encounter, the bottom one might be a fighter whose usefulness increases as the day goes along and other powers/spells/etc. get used up.

That one's actually pretty imbalanced to my eyes. For one, the fighter is strictly and massively behind if there are as few as four big fights in the day. You need to be depopulating small towns as a party for the fighter to catch up. For two the wizard decides when to use the 5 - giving him much more ability to be useful when it matters. The fighter might well be stuck being a 2 there.

5-5-4-3-3-2
2-2-2-2-3-3

1-5-1-1-1-1
2-2-4-4-4-4

These two are not balanced - in one the caster is too useful too much of the time, while in the other she is only useful once and then packs it in for the day.

In a three fight day, the caster in the second is still about as useful as the fighter. Especially as the caster gets to allocate that 5. It's only if you're depopulating small towns or killing multiple companies of enemies the fighter pulls ahead. (Of course, most dungeons basically are villiages or small towns).

The challenge, of course, is to stop the first (balanced) party from ending their day after the second situation once the caster goes off; as that forces it out of balance. That comes down both to the DM keeping a strong pace going, and the players not being over-cautious and just getting on with it.

It also massively limits the DM and the type of adventures that are possible. "We haven't had our ninja quota of the day".