D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[GMforPowergamers]

Also, players that play fighters probably don't want to open magical gates. Also actions surge and second wind was not listed as were the magic weappns the fighter might use (in an average game, the best weapons go to fighters first).

I can't imagine D&D players that would accept fighters to be able to open magical gates except when they took ritual casting as a feat maybe.

I can't imagine anyone not understanding that having a choice form a dozen+ options that CAN do damage, CAN end and encounter or could manipulate and change the game in dozens of ways is NOT balanced by 'gets an extra attack'

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@EzekielRaiden

Do you think 4e was more balanced than 5e? And if so, which iteration?
4e had so many rules updates, that I can't really say, when it was actually balanced well.

Unequivocally. 4e was better-balanced than 5e for essentially its entire run. The worst points of 4e's balance, such as the initial Stealth rules or some of the early math behind Skill Challenges, were comparable to the typical level of balance in 5e.

The vast majority of updates to 4e, again with noteworthy exceptions like the above, were to fix small issues, usually involving individual powers or features that were over- or under-performing to an unacceptable degree. For example, there was a Ranger power that allowed for a potentially infinite cascade of extra attacks as originally written; it was given errata so it could not do that anymore. (I fear I don't know the name of the power but I can go looking later.) Or small tweaks to monsters that likewise weren't quite working as intended. Since there were a lot of feats, powers, and creatures published for 4e, there were many such small tweaks. Many groups would never notice the vast, vast majority of these changes because they wouldn't have more than 6 classes at the table anyway, inherently making the majority of the changes irrelevant to that table, and DMs rarely use exclusively premade monsters as it is regardless of edition.

Even the difference between MM1 and MM3/MV is much, much more minor than most people think. That is, the monsters from MM1/2 we're designed to be too "safe"; the designers had wanted combats to be a little bit longer so there could be more total moments of tension, more opportunities for sudden turnarounds or surprises that have to be managed. That ended up not being what most players wanted. Instead, players wanted somewhat shorter (say, ~4 rounds instead of ~6) combats with fewer but more intense moments of tension. So they adjusted the monster math slightly: reduced HP, slightly reduced defenses, increased damage output. Both the early and late monster design could be simply summarized, but because the MM3 math was much more popular, only that one got the famous "business card" treatment:

If you follow the formulae on this card, you will produce a solid, effective monster for whatever level you have chosen that monster to be. These formulae will work quite consistently across essentially the entire spectrum of 4e play, from 1st to 30th.

The one risk is, if you use 4e math to make a low-level version of a high-level creature, you can create situations where the conditions inflicted by that creature or the special characteristics of that creature gain outsized importance. This is what happened to anyone who tried to down-scale creatures like the dracolich or needlefang drake swarm. The former has tons of nasty conditions which a very low-level party may not be able to handle. The latter, being a swarm, has several defensive benefits that make it very strong, and despite being level 2 by nature, it has powerful and synergistic abilities that make it rather dangerous. More or less, conditions are only lightly considered by the monster design rules, so one should take care about their use with very low-level creatures where characters are somewhat more fragile and have far fewer tools for responding to a monster's mechanics.

Otherwise? 4e is an extremely well-balanced game which can genuinely field monsters anywhere from level-7 (anything more than that would probably be boring...but the occasional cathartic curbstomp is nice) to level+5 or so (anything higher is unlikely to be fun in a vacuum)...and that's without doing anything to play with the conditions to make things more interesting. Just using prewritten creatures in relatively basic non-flat terrain (since there should rarely be totally flat, featureless, empty planes in 4e combats, as that will usually be not very interesting.)

Some examples of ways to spice up combats and potentially make a "weak" combat challenging (the first four being examples that actually occurred in games I played in):

• Persistent effect across the battlefield which forces players to make a save or else act as though they are "marked" by all of their allies. This means, unless you include at least one ally in your attacks, you take a -2 penalty to attack, and eat some damage if you successfully hit one of the opponents.
• Minion creatures which pop up (in this case, they were lorewise mechanical turrets popping out of the floor, but mechanically the DM told is afterward that they were some kind of spore creature IIRC), perform an attack...and then switch to a new location at the end of their turns.
• Solo creature which physically changes state (e.g. gets enraged) when Bloodied...and then instead of dying at 0 HP, it immediately transforms into a whole different creature with full HP, creating a back-to-back encounter (so no encounter power refresh.) And, of course, more effects when this second form is bloodied. I still to this day fondly remember fighting GREGOR the duplicitous guide.
• A fight inside a gigantic biomechanical kaiju's gullet, with slick "floors" pushing you toward areas of corrosive acid, forcing you to spend a move or minor action to stay in place to avoid the acid, and creating opportunities for forced movement.
• Storming a tower on a cliff side, where the creatures in the tower can respond to your efforts. Having to conserve resources and exploit cover while the enemy rains down fire on you from a well-defended position can make even very weak enemies much more dangerous. (Plus, who doesn't love proving that Stormtroopers really suck at shooting?)
• Tucker's kobolds! Straight-up. Using traps, terrain, preparation, and area denial, even a platoon of kobold minions can prove a major challenge to a party, despite each individual kobold literally going down in a single hit.

Point being, the encounter math gives you a solid starting point, from which you can creatively embellish with confidence (but not certainty!) because the system is so balanced and transparent. You know the expected difficulty without other factors, and you don't need to be a comprehensive master of every single game rule to see more or less what the effects of the above tweaks will be. Dice and unwise player choices may still force a retreat--I have seen it happen more than once while playing 4e--but you as DM can have a solid idea of how much stuff you're throwing at your players.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

what spread sheets? where are you getting this. Nothing they have said indecated that... the class balance is so out of wack I can give 100 examples if you want (but I mean just search enworld alone for complaints let alone other sites

Many of the examples you speak of are hypothetical and not anything I have encountered in play. Some need certain interpretation of the rules to work.

so again... unless you ALWAYS have a ticking clock that balance falls apart

I agree. 8 encounters with two short rests are a bad assumption to base your balance on. So the rest cycle needs an overhaul in the 24 edition (not too difficult, actually... shifting from 8hours = long rest to 1 day for a long rest solved the problem for me).

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I can't imagine anyone not understanding that having a choice form a dozen+ options that CAN do damage, CAN end and encounter or could manipulate and change the game in dozens of ways is NOT balanced by 'gets an extra attack'

No. It is not. And how would you solve the fighter vs wizard problem*?

*If you feel this is actually a problem. Many people are content to be the fighter and let the wizard open the gate for them.

 

[Oofta]

Honestly, I don't take those seriously, with the exception of Tyranny of Dragons which they later fixed. The balance is not squeaky clean, but it works within parameters.

In addition LMoP, while a good module was released as part of the starter set before any of the other books. Hardly surprising if it ha a couple rough edges.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Unequivocally. 4e was better-balanced than 5e for essentially its entire run. The worst points of 4e's balance, such as the initial Stealth rules or some of the early math behind Skill Challenges, were comparable to the typical level of balance in 5e.

The vast majority of updates to 4e, again with noteworthy exceptions like the above, were to fix small issues, usually involving individual powers or features that were over- or under-performing to an unacceptable degree. For example, there was a Ranger power that allowed for a potentially infinite cascade of extra attacks as originally written; it was given errata so it could not do that anymore. (I fear I don't know the name of the power but I can go looking later.) Or small tweaks to monsters that likewise weren't quite working as intended. Since there were a lot of feats, powers, and creatures published for 4e, there were many such small tweaks. Many groups would never notice the vast, vast majority of these changes because they wouldn't have more than 6 classes at the table anyway, inherently making the majority of the changes irrelevant to that table, and DMs rarely use exclusively premade monsters as it is regardless of edition.

Even the difference between MM1 and MM3/MV is much, much more minor than most people think. That is, the monsters from MM1/2 we're designed to be too "safe"; the designers had wanted combats to be a little bit longer so there could be more total moments of tension, more opportunities for sudden turnarounds or surprises that have to be managed. That ended up not being what most players wanted. Instead, players wanted somewhat shorter (say, ~4 rounds instead of ~6) combats with fewer but more intense moments of tension. So they adjusted the monster math slightly: reduced HP, slightly reduced defenses, increased damage output. Both the early and late monster design could be simply summarized, but because the MM3 math was much more popular, only that one got the famous "business card" treatment:

If you follow the formulae on this card, you will produce a solid, effective monster for whatever level you have chosen that monster to be. These formulae will work quite consistently across essentially the entire spectrum of 4e play, from 1st to 30th.

The one risk is, if you use 4e math to make a low-level version of a high-level creature, you can create situations where the conditions inflicted by that creature or the special characteristics of that creature gain outsized importance. This is what happened to anyone who tried to down-scale creatures like the dracolich or needlefang drake swarm. The former has tons of nasty conditions which a very low-level party may not be able to handle. The latter, being a swarm, has several defensive benefits that make it very strong, and despite being level 2 by nature, it has powerful and synergistic abilities that make it rather dangerous. More or less, conditions are only lightly considered by the monster design rules, so one should take care about their use with very low-level creatures where characters are somewhat more fragile and have far fewer tools for responding to a monster's mechanics.

Otherwise? 4e is an extremely well-balanced game which can genuinely field monsters anywhere from level-7 (anything more than that would probably be boring...but the occasional cathartic curbstomp is nice) to level+5 or so (anything higher is unlikely to be fun in a vacuum)...and that's without doing anything to play with the conditions to make things more interesting. Just using prewritten creatures in relatively basic non-flat terrain (since there should rarely be totally flat, featureless, empty planes in 4e combats, as that will usually be not very interesting.)

Some examples of ways to spice up combats and potentially make a "weak" combat challenging (the first four being examples that actually occurred in games I played in):
Persistent effect across the battlefield which forces players to make a save or else act as though they are "marked" by all of their allies. This means, unless you include at least one ally in your attacks, you take a -2 penalty to attack, and eat some damage if you successfully hit one of the opponents.
Minion creatures which pop up (in this case, they were lorewise mechanical turrets popping out of the floor, but mechanically the DM told is afterward that they were some kind of spore creature IIRC), perform an attack...and then switch to a new location at the end of their turns.
Solo creature which physically changes state (e.g. gets enraged) when Bloodied...and then instead of dying at 0 HP, it immediately transforms into a whole different creature with full HP, creating a back-to-back encounter (so no encounter power refresh.) And, of course, more effects when this second form is bloodied. I still to this day fondly remember fighting GREGOR the duplicitous guide.
A fight inside a gigantic biomechanical kaiju's gullet, with slick "floors" pushing you toward areas of corrosive acid, forcing you to spend a move or minor action to stay in place to avoid the acid, and creating opportunities for forced movement.
Storming a tower on a cliff side, where the creatures in the tower can respond to your efforts. Having to conserve resources and exploit cover while the enemy rains down fire on you from a well-defended position can make even very weak enemies much more dangerous. (Plus, who doesn't love proving that Stormtroopers really suck at shooting?)
Tucker's kobolds! Straight-up. Using traps, terrain, preparation, and area denial, even a platoon of kobold minions can prove a major challenge to a party, despite each individual kobold literally going down in a single hit.

Point being, the encounter math gives you a solid starting point, from which you can creatively embellish with confidence (but not certainty!) because the system is so balanced and transparent. You know the expected difficulty without other factors, and you don't need to be a comprehensive master of every single game rule to see more or less what the effects of the above tweaks will be. Dice and unwise player choices may still force a retreat--I have seen it happen more than once while playing 4e--but you as DM can have a solid idea of how much stuff you're throwing at your players.

That is a good summation of our experience with 4e (and we played it from the end of 3.5 up to the 5e playtest) for many hours at a time on a biweekly basis.

One exception is your assertion that level - 7 to level +5 was fun. Due to hitpoints and AC going up with level, the scaling was quadratic instead of linear and easily threatened to turn an othewise balanced encounter into a boring hour long fight.

A second exception is that what you call a feature: monsters on an index card, I felt was a bug. Especially with how scaling up and reskinning was promoted. We really despised how the outlook of a creature did not tell you anything about how hard it is to hit or how dangerous it might be (minion I look at you).

A last exception is that we thought that every encounter being balanced relative to your party is boring by default.

So in the end, we were not satisfied with that kind of balance and the time combats consumed.

That does not mean that if you took away the battelefield dependence and flatten the math a bit and add some more variance in AC and HP (and equippment that actually matters) that the system would not have been salvageable.

 

[Oofta]

Can we not get into yet another fighters sukk thread? There other threads for that.

 

[Reynard]

In addition LMoP, while a good module was released as part of the starter set before any of the other books. Hardly surprising if it ha a couple rough edges.

All of them have rough edges, because design is hard and 5E has a lot of moving parts. This isn't a condemnation of the design team, it is a fact of life. Pretending that such problems don't exist and calling people "whiners" for pointing them out isn't constructive.

 

[Umbran]

Cuz many in the community are a bunch of whiners?

No, but really...

What I mean is simple. People like to complain, they like to point out "flaws", they like to prove themselves better than others. They have the very real need for an ego.

Mod Note:
So, you call folks whiners, give the commonly insincere "no, but really" as it to step back, and then to go on calling them egoists.

As if folks wouldn't find this to be insulting ad hominem nonsense? As if getting insulting wasn't going to be an issue?

It is almost like you are actively looking to be the first person removed from the conversation. Clean it up, and be respectful going forward, please and thank you.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Balance is relative, and totally depends upon how broad of a spectrum one is concerned with (i.e. is a variation of 3% DPR significant?) and what aspects of the game (other than DPR) are valuable. Again, you can optimize a DPR queen who sucks in social encounters, is that balanced? Depends on your view.

So, people like to complain because their expectations and values differ. Because you know, we are humans with our own opinions.

This is why I have repeatedly (not in this thread) said that balance requires that you, as designer, decide what is actually important, set clear and testable goals for getting to those things, actually do serious testing to see if you've gotten there, and review to make sure that the results are in keeping with your intent. Or, to quote myself:

What is balance, in the TTRPG sense? It is:

1. Defining the purpose and intended experience of play in clear and useful language,
2. Forming specific, testable design goals based on the previous definition,
3. Writing provisional rules which seek to implement those design goals,
4. Setting ranges of acceptable performance for meeting those design goals,
5. Performing rigorous, thorough testing, preferably statistical in nature,
6. Modifying the rules from step 3 where they fail to fall within the ranges from step 4,
7. Repeating steps 3-6 until no further areas remain which are outside the parameters, OR until you come to believe the design goal you set is not feasible, at which point, return to step 2 and revise that goal, then proceed as before.

Any game which performs these functions will, by definition, be balanced. This does not guarantee that it will be a good game, nor a game that is enjoyable. Those qualities are bound up in the decisions the designer must make, that is, they are about making wise design choices and correctly identifying what players value about the gameplay experience.

Balance cannot make a poor game idea good. But imbalance can make a great game idea fail. That is the crux of design: you must have an idea worth pursuing and a solid execution of that idea. Stumble in either part and you lose.

Balance is inherently contextual, yes, but that doesn't make it wildly capricious and arbitrary. Context is part of the decision-making process as a designer. Balance is part of the analytical, technical effort of design. You cannot design without context. That doesn't mean balance has no grounding. It means balance needs to be provided the grounding in advance.