D&D General The perfect D&D edition (according to ENWORLD)

Lanefan said:

Players tend to want this sort of character, and IMO designers have to fight this desire in order to preserve niche protection and to encourage ensemble or party play. Everyone should have a key thing he-she is good at and a bunch of things he-she isn't so good at, leading to party inter-dependence once they get into the field.

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Niche protection isn't the only way to get to ensemble play and party inter-dependence - or, dare we say it, teamwork. It's just the crudest, most coercive, and most restrictive on players. ;P

The classic example is the Cleric. If you're looking at the Big 4 classes, you /need/ the fighter to get killed by wandering damage, the thief to get killed by traps, and the Cleric to extend their useful lives by a few CLW spells/day. The Fighter archetype is a clear, familiar, relatable one, and seems tough at a glance, so it's never hard to find players to fill it, you often ended up with two or three (until players figured out they could be an elf fighter/magic-user, anyway). The Thief, likewise, with a bad-boy image, and in leather, no less, you rarely had to push someone into it, there was always at least one guy who wanted to play a thief or a halfling.
Then there was the Cleric, only source of Band-aids, only way to survive huge undead encounters, but not a concept that much appealed. So you had this familiar stereotype of the last player to the table getting stuck playing the Cleric.

The solution is to keep the niches, but lose the protection.
So, in 5e, Clerics - but also Bards and Druids - can be your go-to source of Band-aids for the whole party. (And Turning isn't too OP, so undead encounters are scaled about like any other.) Thieves are the main trap-finders, lock-picks and sneaks, but a Bard with expertise can theoretically match them, and anyone with the Criminal Background can have a go. Fighters are the walking meat-shields, but Barbarians are just as expendable.

Lanefan said:

IME if there's a couple (or more) options given then DMs feel less constrained re adding others, where if there's only one option it just is what it is.

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Yes, but if you say that these are co-existent types of kobolds, as a canonical fact as it were, then you are just creating a new "it just is what is."

Thing there is if you've got Druids, and you've got nature-based or nature-domain healing Clerics, then before long they'll end up looking and playing very much the same even if they get their spells from different sources. Thus, simplicity (which usually wins out where there's a choice) says get rid of one of them by folding the two together - and as Clerics already have all the "infrastructure" in place to support other Cleric types, making Druids into Clerics means one can also scrap the underlying infrastructure of the Druid and thus make things simpler.

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I don't agree here, but this a difference largely of aesthetic differences.

Put another way, in effect all magic comes from the same place; and only the means of access differ.

From there, it's pretty easy to set things up such that each method of access allows those people to do some things but not others; hence the divine-arcane divide.

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I'm not the biggest fan of post hoc explanations that exist mostly to justify the pre-existing traditions, and I'll leave it at that.

My concern here is that on first read this system looks like it wants each character to be able to do a bit of everything...and maybe even a lot of everything. A gish that can heal itself, for example, is a one-man band and has no need for a party beyond simple strength in numbers.

Players tend to want this sort of character, and IMO designers have to fight this desire in order to preserve niche protection and to encourage ensemble or party play. Everyone should have a key thing he-she is good at and a bunch of things he-she isn't so good at, leading to party inter-dependence once they get into the field.

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IME running the system, that wasn't really the case. Again, a lot of the niche protection was built more around the class playstyles. Wanted to be a really good healer? Pick the Greenbond. Wanted to be archmage? Pick the Magister. Wanted to be the gish? Pick the Mage Blade. Their class features that they gained meant that their niches were less defined by particular spells but by how their classes were designed. Sure, a Mage Blade may have healing, but as a gish, they will want to use their spells to enhance their fighting. A Greenbond usually picked support spells, though they may still have a few spells to assist in blasting. You would still need your team to get through challenges. But it creates less of a state where "if we don't have someone play one of the handful of classes that can heal or revive the dead, then we are screwed." You have flexibility in that, but your niche is less rooted in your spells, but, rather, in the class itself. So everyone does have a key thing that they are good at. The Akashic, for example, is the undisputed skill monkey of the game. The Greenbond is the pound-for-pound best healer. The Magister is the most versatile spellcaster since it has the greatest variety of spell selection. And so on...

Tony Vargas said:

RaW was very much a thing in the 3.x era (and, I suppose, still is, over on the PF side of the hobby). And it's not hard to understand why. 3e adopted a design philosophy from M:tG, rewarding mastery of the system. Mastering the system, which was intentionally complex and even deceptive was not a casual undertaking, acquiring system mastery constituted sunk costs. So if DMs were /constantly changing the rules on you/ they were essentially taking away all that effort.
Thus, the insistence on RaW, ideally, or, if you had to house rule, defining house rules at the start of the campaign, and sticking to them even after the players had found ways of exploiting them.

Yes, it seems pretty awful from an old-school perspective. But it was an incentive built into 3e, precisely because it succeeded in M:tG, and it succeeded with 3e, so well that it continued making good money for Paizo long after WotC abandoned it.

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It's older than Magic, really. It's a design philosophy voiced by Skip Williams that putting the rules in the hands of the players is empowering to them in making meaningful choices. "How far can I jump?" is a question answered by the 3e rules quite clearly compared to earlier editions. When faced by a 15' gap, a player can look at their jumping check modifier, apply the rule, and have a good idea whether or not they could succeed at the task, how likely they were to fail, and therefore make a rational choice based on that knowledge. I doubt he only came to that philosophy after WotC bought TSR - my read on him and his reputation is that it was a much longer time coming through his TSR days and working the Sage Advice columns.

Tony Vargas said:

Niche protection isn't the only way to get to ensemble play and party inter-dependence - or, dare we say it, teamwork. It's just the crudest, most coercive, and most restrictive on players. ;P

The classic example is the Cleric. If you're looking at the Big 4 classes, you /need/ the fighter to get killed by wandering damage, the thief to get killed by traps, and the Cleric to extend their useful lives by a few CLW spells/day. The Fighter archetype is a clear, familiar, relatable one, and seems tough at a glance, so it's never hard to find players to fill it, you often ended up with two or three (until players figured out they could be an elf fighter/magic-user, anyway). The Thief, likewise, with a bad-boy image, and in leather, no less, you rarely had to push someone into it, there was always at least one guy who wanted to play a thief or a halfling.
Then there was the Cleric, only source of Band-aids, only way to survive huge undead encounters, but not a concept that much appealed. So you had this familiar stereotype of the last player to the table getting stuck playing the Cleric.

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Your experience doesn't match mine, then - Cleric is just as popular as the other classes* in our crew.

* - except Fighter, of which there's always been more than any other class by a large margin. Somewhere - I forget where (Dragon article? DMG?) - there was once listed a rough expectation as to the breakdown of classes played, including sub-classes:

Fighter - 40%
Cleric or Thief - 30% (I can never remember which order these two are in)
Cleric or Thief - 20%
Mage - 10%

Over the very long term our breakdown goes more like

Fighter - 40%
all others - about 20% each.

The solution is to keep the niches, but lose the protection.
So, in 5e, Clerics - but also Bards and Druids - can be your go-to source of Band-aids for the whole party. (And Turning isn't too OP, so undead encounters are scaled about like any other.) Thieves are the main trap-finders, lock-picks and sneaks, but a Bard with expertise can theoretically match them, and anyone with the Criminal Background can have a go. Fighters are the walking meat-shields, but Barbarians are just as expendable.

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Which means if you've got a Bard you don't need a Cleric or a Thief as one class can do the key functions of both.

That to me would be an immediate red flag that the Bard is OP as a class.

Lanefan said:

Your experience doesn't match mine, then - Cleric is just as popular as the other classes* in our crew.

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Cleric - or, rather, Priest - /became/ popular in my little group as it got more interesting in 2e, too.

But, prior to that, yeah, every group I was in, every convention game, prettymuch lived up to the stereotype - it was a stereotype for a reason.

Every ed has struggled to make the Cleric more appealing. Even 1e, relative to 0D&D, gave em more spells and sooner. 2e, had three takes on 'specialty' priests, each more generous than the one before. 3e tried so hard it created CoDzilla. 4e dubbed them "Leaders."

Which means if you've got a Bard you don't need a Cleric or a Thief as one class can do the key functions of both.
That to me would be an immediate red flag that the Bard is OP as a class.

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It's arguably Tier 1, these days, so yeah, maybe for the first time, that could be true - but not because it can theoretically match the Thief's Expertise at lockpicking.

Lanefan said:

Which means if you've got a Bard you don't need a Cleric or a Thief as one class can do the key functions of both.

That to me would be an immediate red flag that the Bard is OP as a class.

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In 5e a cleric only needs a background that provides proficiency in thieves' tools to be able to disarm traps, plus they already have a high wisdom for perceiving traps. I don't think that we should conclude then that therefore the cleric is OP. It just means that a lot of classes in 5e are already divorced from strict notions like "key function." WotC provided rules that allow players to cover the same niche in different ways without requiring "the one class for the job." Consider: how many ways can you build a gish in 5e?

Tony Vargas said:

Cleric - or, rather, Priest - /became/ popular in my little group as it got more interesting in 2e, too.

But, prior to that, yeah, every group I was in, every convention game, prettymuch lived up to the stereotype - it was a stereotype for a reason.

Every ed has struggled to make the Cleric more appealing. Even 1e, relative to 0D&D, gave em more spells and sooner. 2e, had three takes on 'specialty' priests, each more generous than the one before. 3e tried so hard it created CoDzilla. 4e dubbed them "Leaders."

It's arguably Tier 1, these days, so yeah, maybe for the first time, that could be true - but not because it can theoretically match the Thief's Expertise at lockpicking.

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What are the three takes?

PHB, Complete Priest, Faith's and Avatars/Dragon?

I can also think of Forgotten Realm Adventures (revised in Faith's and Avatars), Tome of Magic, and Skills and Powers.

We had that one guy who liked clerics, otherwise the specialty priests IMHO were bribes to play one.
I do most of the healing in my group, celestial warlock plus healer feat.

Zardnaar said:

What are the three takes?
PHB, Complete Priest, Faith's and Avatars/Dragon?

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Those're the 3 I had in mind.

the specialty priests IMHO were bribes to play one.

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Not the nicest spin, but prettymuch, yeah.

Tony Vargas said:

Those're the 3 I had in mind.

Not the nicest spin, but prettymuch, yeah.

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And yet I don't recall any of them breaking the game like the 3E cleric. And we had a priest of Horus packing a holy avenger.

Personally in fine with power creep as long as it's on weak options.

Zardnaar said:

And yet I don't recall any of them breaking the game like the 3E cleric.

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Nod, I did say each iteration was more generous, the level of "bribery" implicit in offering CoDzilla was arguably the peak.