D&D 5E How Can D&D Next Win You Over?

[Shadeydm]

Right - so, if you're only going to have one battle in a day, it has to be an absolutely *huge* one: equivalent to 4 or 5 smaller, "normal" battles all happening at once.

Because, if you don't do that - by, say, having the evil nobleman have 30 guards immediately at-hand instead of a more reasonable, say, 10* - then the encounter (and adventure / daily!) balance doesn't work.

* Alternatively, all his guards have to be specially trained spec forces commandos, rather than, you know, halberd-jockeys.



In which case, the balance doesn't work out, and the Wizards "win" the encounter.

Its easy to pick corner cases, Its a 4E game and the encounter is all minions. The wizard wins the encounter the balance doesn't work.

 

[Jester David]

Continuing my debate with [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] regarding if fighters cast spells.

Manbearcat brings up various ball related sports as an analogy to potentially show how silly my argument is, in that if you remove some descriptions of ball sports they all sound identical.
Which, contrary to his intended point, I agree with.

The thing about martial powers in 4e, like most team-based ball sports on a field, is there are small differences between them an other "spells". Mostly the lack of energy types.
Bursts and blasts are not excluded. The fighter has a few close bursts and blasts, and classes like the rogue and ranger can make blasts as well. So, really, the difference between spells and martial exploits seems to only be different damage types and the ability to make ranged bursts.

As an example, lets look at stances. These are kinda one of the few keywords limited to exploits, although there are a number of other classes and power sources that use them. They're pretty much identical to rages and polymorphs: you use the power and cannot use another without causing the first to expire.
Yes, the flavour is different, but in play at the table, they function mechanically identical. The paint job is different.

As mentioned in a different thread or discussion, people, by their nature, will always seek out differences. When you look at the various on-field team-based ball sports you spot differences. American and Canadian football uses pads. There's less padding in Rugby and no offensive/defensive separation. Soccer/football does not let you use your hands. Basketball uses the hands instead of the feet and moves the goal vertical.
Huge differences.
Until compared to any other sport. When consider the length and breadth of the term "sport" the kick ball sports do seem rather indistinct and confusable.

Limited to 4e and just 4e it's easy to say "oh, there's lots of differences between spells and martial exploits". The name for one. Keywords seem to be HUGE. So just saying one is martial and one is arcane apparently makes the differences. A rose by any other name won't smell as sweet.

But when you consider just what other editions of the game have done with spells and martial powers the difference is huge. Not only do exploits kinda look like spells but most powers do kinda look the same.
To counter my complaint/question of how many powers were pretty much "#d8 + ability score damage plus a condition", Mr. Vargus once said:

A few. How many classic spells can be summed up as "do 1d6/level damage to some creatures."

To which I answer 1-2 per spell level, with 6+ being nothing like that. The vast majority of spells did different things while every 4e spell is the same: a blaster wizard spell.
Yes there are differences in flavour and description, but that's not only ignorable, many people actually re-write that to better describe their character. The ease and commonness of reflavouring powers makes the fluff text description irrelevant.

But name apparently matters.
So I think I have a good solution amicable for all. Since just calling a spell an "exploit" makes it a martial power, when 4e launches, take the sorcerer or wizard and rename their spells into exploits. Magic missile can be carefully aimed dagger, burning hands can be oil soaked blade and the like. As long as you don't call it a fighter it will be.

 

[Neonchameleon]

To which I answer 1-2 per spell level, with 6+ being nothing like that. The vast majority of spells did different things while every 4e spell is the same: a blaster wizard spell.

Oh, now I know where you are going wrong. You're looking at a subset of combat spells and declaring them to be all the spells in 4e. Totally ignoring utility spells and, at least as importantly, Rituals. If your problem is that it's hard to make a non-combatant 4e character, you should have said so.

And then you're ignoring a large proportion of 4e wizard combat spells (although to be fair few of the PHB spells are other than evocations).

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Oh, now I know where you are going wrong. You're looking at a subset of combat spells and declaring them to be all the spells in 4e. Totally ignoring utility spells and, at least as importantly, Rituals. If your problem is that it's hard to make a non-combatant 4e character, you should have said so.

And then you're ignoring a large proportion of 4e wizard combat spells (although to be fair few of the PHB spells are other than evocations).

To say nothing of control. 4E may lack save or die/suck, but control is still powerful in 4E's different context. Many Wizard spells are powerful control(by 4E standards), many of which deal low damage or no damage at all.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Its easy to pick corner cases,

Investigation and assassination scenarios are not "corner cases."

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Sorry I am not following your logic here. Are you saying that bad adventure/encounter design can't lead to a 5 minute adventuring day? That if the DM starts the day off with an encounter that totally thrashes the party and expends all thier hit points/healing surges/resources that he bears no responsibility for this 5 minute adventuring day?

I see that you are apparantly not following me, but I don't know how to express it otherwise.

Maybe my example must be more specific and explicit?

Let's say the party is looking for a murderer. They are following his tracks, interviewing witnesses, and all the stuff. After 6 busy hours walking through the entire city, they finally catch up to him, and confront him and his associates - A fight inevitably breaks out. Now, the Wizard and the Cleric finally get to cast all those offensive spells they prepared in the morning (they may have used some utility spells, but they each still got at least 4-5 powerful combat spells). They have little reason to hold back,t hey are sure they have the culprit, and they need to stop him. So they'll use these spells, dealing a gazillion damage or whatever they can do with them. While the ROgue and the Fighter are just swinging their swords and contribute very little to the Fight.

We have a balance problem (Type 2), but not a problem for believability - that only one big fight might hapepn in this scenario is plausible, and one could very well argue that this wasn't a 15 minute adventuring day at all for Type 1 - the player characters were pretty busy, doing all that legwork. Time pressure in this scenario wouldn't work (at least not more than it already did). Wandering monsters? Well, maybe you could have put in some hostile gangs or some such, but it's not exactly likely that much threats would occur in a typical city if you're a band of adventurers. The only thing that may have cost the WIzard or Cleric their resources would be the use of heavy divination and enchantment spells - but they may not necessarily have needed them, or not prepared them. It could very well be that the only character that really would contribute the most in this scenario is either a Rogue or a Bard, thanks to their social skills, while the rest may have been mostly been the players thinking, but not necessarily character abilities. But that's not really the important part. The major aspect here is - the first few hours of the day were not sitting idle around, they were busy, the characters were doing all kinds of things, but these did not involve a major resource expenditure yet. But it lead eventually to a violent conflict.

And we can experience this even directly with wandering monsters during traveling, as well. THe party travels the whole day, and manages to not meet any wandering monsters, or evade them. But as they approach nightfall, their luck leaves them and they encounter a wandering monster and have to deal with it. They now know that they will go to rest soon, so it's inevitable that they will spend a large amount of their resources, knowing they'll be back soon (and that dead characters don't recover spells).

 

[Crazy Jerome]

It should be noted that the kind of thing Mustrum is discussing in his example is particularly susceptible to problems not from long-term resources in general, but daily resources in particular. You could, for example, make spells a week or even month resource, multiply the slots out to compensate, and not have much of a problem with this in some kinds of games.

On some days, the wizard would use a lot, on other days, not so much, but you could adjust the average so that it worked out pretty well. Of course, the wizard would have even more nova potential, but the uncertainty and costs about what happens over the next week or month would tend to restrain him (or cause lack of sympathy from the rest of the group when he didn't restrain himself).

In fact, this is why BECMI or AD&D in the 5th to 9th level range can work pretty well in dungeon crawls. With the idea of a "turn" of several minutes being the main unit of work, "per day" is actually a fairly long time. Plus, if you are in an environment where you may average 10 or 12 encounters, variance in the number and toughness is easier. When you get down to zero, 1, or 2 encounters, you don't have nearly as much room for error. "Per day" is an inherently problematic unit of measure with very few encounters in a given day, whatever other good or bad effects it has otherwise.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I believe that they in fact said if you wanted only one big battle you just spend your full XP budget on that battle. Nice try though.

And still, the spellcasters would be more powerful in this scenario then the non-spellcasters that only have at-wills. Unless you manage to ensure that the fight takes exactly as many rounds as individual fights would be. But that would mean, for example, that Wizards cannot have area effects (at least not any that are better than Fighter or Rogue area effects) and no save or suck abilities (at least none that are any better than the Fighter or Rogue effects), and no spells that have a duration that covers this entire combat but may not be sufficient to cover multiple combats spread around the day.

Either you satisfy the encounter budget with more monsters, or with more powerful monsters. If there are more monsters, AoE will likely hit more monsters than in smaller combats, if the monsters are more powerful, save or suck affects a larger component of the XP budget as represented by the monsters than usual.

In fact, the use of a large encounter budget in 3E and 4E was usually the likeliest to trigger a short adventure day, but only in 3E it made the superiority of Vancian-based spellcasters evident (in turn, Warlocks would suck under such situations.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

every 4e spell is the same: a blaster wizard spell.

Let's see how far we need to go through the wizard list to prove you wrong... oh, look, Sleep, level 1, no damage.

Wrong again, Jester

If the only thing that differentiates a spell from a martial exploit is that one is called a spell than that's unimaginative design.

Being 'called' a spell means that a power is arcane. Swapping the arcane keyword, alone, would mean it was no longer called a spell. Find a spell that, swapping out /only/ the arcane keyword, is identical to an exploit. Post the spell and the exploit. Or a retraction.

 

[Manbearcat]

Continuing my debate with @Neonchameleon @Manbearcat @Tony Vargas and @pemerton regarding if fighters cast spells.

Manbearcat brings up various ball related sports as an analogy to potentially show how silly my argument is, in that if you remove some descriptions of ball sports they all sound identical.
Which, contrary to his intended point, I agree with.

Hmmmm...You'll have to elaborate further as it seems we're missing each other or something is very much lost in translation here. I thought I was very clear in both editorial and deconstruction of the tautology you created by way of Reductio ad Absurdem. What may help is some clarificaton on your end.

Could you tell me what:

A) Your precise point is (my take on it below, again)?
B) What you think my precise point is/was (answer below, again) and how I did or did not illustrate it?
C) How my "intended point" somehow actually "supports" your position?

Argument via rhetoical reduction to lowest terms/common elements in order to dismiss something as "simple", "common", "trite", "shallow" or "without distinction" is a very common one. It also happens to be one of the more easy ones to deconstruct and illustrate how patently false it is as it is almost universally a contrived, tautological construct:

- Item 1 (whatever it may be) has depth, complexity and distinction by way of various meaningful elements.
- Reduce Item 1 by several of its meaningful elements that provide depth, complexity and distinction.
- Items without depth, complexity and distinction are shallow, simple and without distinction.
- Item 1 is now shallow, simple, and without distinction.

The post that I've quoted (the entirety of it) does not explain your position in some way that provides insight into what I may be off on...it is basically just an explanation of the inner workings of your mind as you compose the contrived tautological construct. Could you please clarify how the above is not what you have done and answer the three questions that I've posed (with focused specificity)?