D&D General Requesting permission to have something cool

[Crimson Longinus]

I guess people could be worried that third party stuff is not balanced, but then again WotC published both four elements monk and twilight cleric so how much worse could it get?

 

[Pedantic]

I'm very much the one shoving rules at my players. Increasingly, they just give me an archetype or idea and I offer them like two or three character builds that might support it.

Part of it is that they would absolutely prefer to use D&DBeyond given the option and just aren't used to wrangling character sheets and organizing information from a bunch of sources. That and they think my binder of character builds based off a neat mechanical synergy I spotted somewhere is a strange thing to do in one's spare time, which makes me want to cry softly in 3.5.

 

[Scribe]

I guess people could be worried that third party stuff is not balanced, but then again WotC published both four elements monk and twilight cleric so how much worse could it get?

We joke, but seriously. The concerns about balance in this regard is highly overblown.

 

[Corinnguard]

Which is one of several reasons I don't use DDB.

I am currently using DDB with the rest of my group. While I wish I could import 3pp material into it for my own personal use, I do like the DDB character sheets. They are a lot better than the fillable character sheet PDFs in a number of ways. You can type as much info onto your character sheet as you want, and the font size will stay the same. Updating it when your character levels up is easy. And it does all of the math for you at the click of a button.

 

[TwoSix]

We joke, but seriously. The concerns about balance in this regard is highly overblown.

This. I've only rejected a homebrew option a player brought me once, and it was only because the balance was egregiously bad, like fighter attack progression with paladin smites on a full caster chassis bad.

 

[Raiztt]

The technical term is an informal fallacy. It is not a fallacy due to the structure of the argument (e.g. the fallacy of the excluded middle is a formal fallacy because the form fails to connect the conclusion to the premises), but rather because the argument is unsound. For Oberoni, the fallacy is the claim that, because house-ruling/homebrewing/DM adjudication exists, any flaws in the rules aren't actually flaws, so the rules are always without fault. It is by and large a particular application of the fallacy of equivocation: flaws/faults/etc. are used in one sense as "errors or problems that have to be addressed," and in the other sense as "fatal problems that completely prevent play." When spelled out as such, rather than preserving the ambiguous terms, the failure to connect premises to conclusion becomes obvious:

1. A ruleset exists which contains elements that do not function as intended and thus cause problems.
2. The GM of any game can modify the ruleset to improve its function or address problems.
C. Therefore, no ruleset exists which contains elements that do not function as intended and thus cause problems.

The weaker argument, non-fallacious but also much less meaningful, is that "Rule Zero" etc. mean that no ruleset can have completely fatal flaws, because no flaw is so egregious that sufficient application of Rule Zero cannot fix it. But that claim is pretty risible--it's literally just saying, "If you work hard enough, no matter how badly made a game is, you can force it to be good. It just might take a bottom-up redesign!" Of course if you're willing to work for literally years, replacing every part and redesigning every element as needed, you can address literally all problems ever--but that's an admission that there are problems that do in fact need to be addressed, which was the point in question to begin with.

"You can fix any machine by replacing all of its parts" says very little. "No machine is ever broken because you can always hire a repairman" is fallacious--doubly so because the only reason to hire a repairman is to repair something.

Firstly, I know how to check the validity of a formal syllogism.

Secondly, How many times has invoking this solved the problem? 0. Sure, you can win the argument... but you don't actually solve your own problem. So... congratulations, I guess?

It's not that I don't know what Oberani meant - it's that what he meant doesn't matter as a practical solution to a real problem. In other words,

"Ok, the game is broken, now what are you going to do about it?"

The answer cannot be "complain on the forums". The answer is the homebrewing/house ruling/rule zeroing/brainstorming on the forums.

 

[Minigiant]

How about just the stuff that interests you and/or is presented to you by players?

In 5e or 4e it is not so bad.

In 3e, it could easily be too much seeing how stuff was so spread around. Especially with feats.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In 5e or 4e it is not so bad.

In 3e, it could easily be too much seeing how stuff was so spread around. Especially with feats.

There was a lot, but too much just for stuff you like and stuff your players like? That's sure not my experience.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Problem is - and I here speak from experience - sometimes the only way to get adjacent to the game you want to play in is to a) design it and then b) run it.

This is true. It is what I do as well. But you (and I mean this as a compliment) are not shy about trumpeting your preferences and explaining why you support them. Same for those who want more versatile and competitive fighters.

5e generally does a poor job supporting martials and fighters in particular. My homebrew fixes this in games that I DM.

But:

• a lot of people complaining online may move the needle for WotC in 2024;
• these posts serve as a warning to new DMs that they need to pay attention to martial/caster balance;
• I don’t expect a DM I play with to adopt my system, so it might be nice to be able to play a martial character and not worry about being overshadowed by casters.

Finally, for the claims that « WotC doesn’t check these boards so complaining about fighters is just spitting in the wind », it seems to me that the loudest voices for keeping the fighter as it is wouldn’t be posting so loudly UNLESS they were worried that WotC might change the fighter substantially to deal with low satisfaction. After all, Tasha’s already contained a rebalancing of short rest to long rest rest abilities.

 

[Corinnguard]

In 5e or 4e it is not so bad.

In 3e, it could easily be too much seeing how stuff was so spread around. Especially with feats.

3e had lots of material for both the DM and the players to like. You had your campaign setting books (Forgotten Realms, Eberron, etc.) and their various accessories. You had the Complete books which provided new Prestige classes and material for pre-existing classes and new classes. You had more material for the Player Character races. So much to go through and like.

5e otoh isn't bloated like 3e was, which is a good thing. But it would be nice to have an edition that has a Goldilocks amount of information. Not too much as 3e did, not too little as 5e has right now, but just right.