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

[Grydan]

Sure it is. You just make it laborious enough to do that it's a waste of time.

And how, exactly, do you propose going about doing that?

Do you overwhelm the optimizer with too many options to choose from?
Well, no, because this is the sort of environment that optimization thrives in. 3.X, even if you don't take advantage of all of the non-WotC OGL content available, offers more customization options than any other edition. It's also always had a lively char-op community. The more options that are on the table, the more opportunities there are for finding and exploiting combinations the designers overlooked.

Do you take the opposite approach and keep options at a bare minimum?
Well, this certainly limits the enjoyment of optimization oriented players, but it's not by making it laborious. The fewer options on the table, the easier it is to spot which ones are best. It also means you're taking away all of that customization from everyone.

Do you bury it in complex math?
This raises the barrier a bit, making it harder to get into the optimization game. However, for many optimizers it's the sort of thing that's right up their alley. Crunching numbers to find the non-obvious advantage? Music to their ears. For those that don't have the head for the math, once the number crunchers have the system in their hands for a few minutes, someone will share the results, removing the barrier completely. There's also the fact that you likely scare away a good chunk of those who don't pay attention to optimization, as they opt for the choices that don't require a math degree. That makes the gap between the optimizers and the non-optimizers larger.

Even if you can find a barrier, something that makes the combing through options process tedious and unwieldy, as long as some degree of imbalance between choices exists, someone, somewhere, is going to put in the effort to find it. And then they'll tell other people about it, and those people get all of the benefit of knowing the best choices, without any of the tedious, unwieldy, laborious barriers.

But it is possible to have mechanics that tend to dissuade specialisaion and encourage diversification in PC build, for example - whereas, in practice, a lot of optimisation in a game like 3E or 4e is based around specialisation.

Or to have mechanics which offer few and constrained places for player choice about build. (RuneQuest and Classic Traveller are examples of this.)

I'm not advocating for those mechanics - especially not for D&D, which historically, and especially since 3E, has taken a different approach - but they do exist.

Oh, absolutely, you can discourage specialization. I think it's even a worthy goal. D&D tends to over-reward and under-punish specialization*, I think.

Next's dropping the Fort/Ref/Will saves/defences and changing them to ability saves is a decent step in that direction. Where a 4E character can have a perfectly decent Will defence while dumping their Charisma or Wisdom stat, as long as the other gets a decent score, a Next character that dumps either is leaving themselves a weak spot that can be targeted.

Admittedly, this is counteracted to an extent by making it harder to target those weaknesses than it would be in 4E, where almost any character, monster, or NPC can find a way to target any one of your defences with a damaging attack at least once in a fight.

But making specialization less optimal isn't punishing optimization. It's making diversification more optimal. The target has changed, the process hasn't.

* Of course, this doesn't apply equally to all aspects of the game, nor does it apply equally to all classes.

A 3.X fighter is rewarded for becoming hyper-specialized in their tactics, and effectively punished for trying to diversify. A 3.X wizard can quite easily get the best of both worlds, using spell selection to decide each day whether to be a generalist or a specialist (and with enough spells to choose from, a specialist in a different thing each day).

A 4E character that tries to specialize in dealing one specific type of damage (other than the heavily rewarded cold damage) will find that it is often of little benefit, and can easily become a dangerous weakness. If all you ever do is fire damage, you better have picked one of the character types that has a way of avoiding the ubiquitous fire resistance, found on more creatures than pretty much any other damage resistance. Meanwhile, unless you know you're going to be dealing with wall-to-wall trolls, you're not going to encounter all that many enemies who care about the difference between fire damage and untyped damage in a way that hurts them more than it hurts you.

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Any time that player choice exists alongside imbalance, optimization will be rewarded.

You can remove imbalance, but it takes a good deal of effort, constant supervision, will never be perfect, and lots of players seem to take issue with the idea.

You can remove player choice, but it makes the game a good deal less interesting, and it's simply impossible to remove entirely.

 

[Yora]

I think the best scenario would be a game in which it doesn't really matter much how balanced things are.
A game in which every character has clear limitations what he can do and what he can't do. It does not matter if a warrior can attack harder in battle than a rogue can attack from stealth, because those are two different situations that require different characters to use different abilities.
And it would not matter if a wizard can kill 20 goblins at once at 5th level, as long as he can not kill a troll with just a single spell. While at the same time a fighter can kill the troll with three or four rounds of combat.

In such a case, there isn't really much that would need balance. Different classes are able to do different things and it is up to the players to come up with plans that get the most effect out of the parties abilities. All the balance you need would be things like making sure that it is always better to have a rogue backstab a single large enemy than to have a warrior attack it.

And I think easily 98% of things that are a problem in 3rd Edition are spells, feats that modify spells, and class features that modify spellcasting. And the later two only become a problem because of the first one.
If one would attempt to make a balanced version of 3rd Edition, one could pretty much only work on changing and removing spells that allow spellcasters to do things better than the classes that are specialist for the same thing.
(That, and monks being able to use their two main features at the same time.)

 

[Magil]

I generally agree with your posts around this issue, but not with this particular point. Choices can matter although they have no implication for mechanical effectivenss: they can matter because of the change they make to the shared fiction. A game like HeroWars/Quest relies heavily upon this dimension of meaningfulness. A game like Burning Wheel or 4e relies upon it less, but still relies upon it to an extent: because 4e, for example, assumes that the GM is adapting encounter difficulty to reflect the level and general prowess of the PCs, to some extent optimising has no effect on relative effectiveness. The reward for having a tougher PC is a "story" reward - the fictional stakes are higher (eg you're fighting Orcus) - rather than a mecanical reward - the combats are still just as mecahnically challenging, because the GM has stepped them up.

A player might also get a degree of pleasure from the absolute effectiveness of his/her PC (eg my 20th level PC can solo Orcus!) but if that's the sole or even principal pleasure you're getting from an RPG, my feeling is you're missing out.

There is a contrast here with a game like, say, classic D&D, where improved absolute effectiveness is expected to also produce a degree of improved relative effectiveness. D&Dnext seems to be going back this way, too, with bounded accuracy.

I think this change away from the 4e approach to scaling and setting encounter difficulties may make it easier to break the game via optimisation.

Saying they are "meaningless" was a bit of an oversimplification, I agree. However, where there are choices, optimization will exist--I can't help but feel that will be the case, always, for the kinds of games I want to play. There will always be choices that are better than other choices, and the only way to stop that from happening is to remove choice altogether. And I strongly feel that choices should mean something within the system, not just the story.

I don't know if I'd say that pleasure derived from the mechanical aspects of gameplay is my principal source of enjoyment in playing/DMing these games, but even if it were for someone, I do not feel it's for others to judge whether they're "missing out" or what not. I do know that it's largely why I got into it, and where I tend to devote the largest amount of my efforts. In any case, I feel my way of enjoying the game is just as legitimate as anyone else's.

Same point applies on a larger scale, though - does the game really have to be designed to rein in the one table in 10 that's going to go out of their way to break it?

Considering I doubt you have any non-antecedental numbers to back anything like this up, this is hearsay at best.

I find this interesting: as a self-admitted optimizer you choose to run the edition that is least suited to optimization. Is this because your players won't rein themselves in?

Not at all, it has nothing to do with the players. In fact, 4th edition has some massive imbalances. They're just the kinds if imbalances I can live with. For example, really terrible powers exist alongside amazing powers, and so-narrowly-situational-it-hurts feats exist alongside "any character can use this, often!" feats. You can still screw up your character, hard, in DnD 4E. Of course, built-in retraining rules and an overall more forgiving system help to deal with that. More importantly to me, however, class imbalance isn't a major issue. Characters will generally have equal opportunity to contribute, despite being very different, with minimal fudging from the DM required.

Further, I don't find 4E generic at all. I've played several games, and been DMing one for more than a year now. Each experience has been very different, and every time a player changes or returns or whatever, things become very different in feel and play, both from a storytelling perspective and a mechanical perspective. I also played a fair amount of 3rd edition before the switch, and I have no desire to go back to that style of gameplay--I knew 4th edition was way better for my way of playing from the very start.

 

[slobo777]

And I think easily 98% of things that are a problem in 3rd Edition are spells, feats that modify spells, and class features that modify spellcasting. And the later two only become a problem because of the first one.
If one would attempt to make a balanced version of 3rd Edition, one could pretty much only work on changing and removing spells that allow spellcasters to do things better than the classes that are specialist for the same thing.
(That, and monks being able to use their two main features at the same time.)

Yes spells. They often retained their spell level when moving from AD&D to 3E, without making allowances for how they affected the game, and how they shifted balance of class effectiveness around. The general feel I get from looking at the 3E and before spell lists is a collection of cool ideas bundled into a self-referential power scheme. 4th-level spells are better than 3rd-level spells etc, but the relative power level is only attempted with any rigour within the spell lists - outside of the spell system, in comparison to non-casters, the effect on class/class balance is only considered very loosely.

Using a spell slot up is a small, short-term resource. Usually less than 1/4 of what the caster can do in a day. So it makes sense to compare that 1/4-of-what-I-can-do-per-day versus what other classes are supposed to excel at at the same level. Or perhaps what one spell slot spent on one combat could do (assuming a game goal of 4 "meaningful" combats in a moderate difficulty day).

A 3rd-level spell for instance should not cause the caster to outperform a 5th-level fighter over the course of a combat, or auto-solve an exploration problem suitable for a 5th-level rogue. If the same spell had impact roughly equal to what a 3rd/4th level rogue or fighter could do, then a Wizard can still contribute (and get to choose flexibly how and when to do so, which is a benefit), but not outshine those two classes at what they are best at.

That doesn't necessarily mean removing spells or moving spell levels around, but it might mean adjusting the rules for them. The combined rules for Invisibility and Stealth for example should make it clear that any non-Stealth expert with invisibility cast on them is not quite as effective as a level 3 Rogue who has specialised in stealth, but who is not invisible. There are lots of routes to this - shorter durations, ensuring that Hidden is a better game mechanic than Invisible etc, etc.

 

[Ahnehnois]

This from the person who never uses a monster straight out of the monster manual?

You seem to assume that this is somehow laborious or difficult, which I don't get. It isn't.

Seriously, all you've done by making it more labourious is set a challenge. Which just makes it more interesting to unpick the system and work out how it works.

Yes, it certainly does. Nothing wrong with that.

Optimisation is a game in its own right - and can be seen as a mix of simulationist and gamist play. The simulationist element of finding out what is there and how it works combined with the gamist element of keeping score. The harder you make it to figure out what is there the more of a challenge it becomes.

I think I've probably undersold my point. There's making it hard for the player, and making it hard for the character. If you add in new rules elements that make Charisma worthwhile for everyone, or add in prerequisites or drawbacks for powerful spells, you've made it harder for both the character and the player. The bottom line (that your cleric can raise the dead and your wizard can teleport across the country and your fighter just attacks people) hasn't changed, but the landscape of a typical game changes greatly.

As for making it laborious for the people who want to just produce a powerful character, this might have worked before the internet. But the first guides - the first netdecks - will hit within a couple of weeks of launch produced by people who like understanding how things work and the kudos they get for this. And once they are out there anyone with google and an interest can follow them.

The average player doesn't have that interest though. Personally, I like the guides, and refer my players to them sometimes, but they tend to assume a narrower style of play than I like, and they tend to actually help me find the overpowered combos and other rules abuses I need to ban. DMs read these things too.

If the game is well designed, yes. Gygax did it. 4e did it. 3e set out to reward system mastery.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that 3e rewarding system mastery is a problem. This is essentially the same as saying that baseball rewarding better hand-eye coordination and more time spent in the batting cage is a problem, or that grandmasters being better at chess than amateurs is a problem. Of course people who are more knowledgeable or more driven make better characters. If two people set out to make characters of different power levels, or if two people of different skill levels tried to make characters the same power level, and one character wasn't clearly better than the other, that would be a problem.

I struggle to see where system mastery is not rewarded in any version of D&D, but more importantly, I struggle to see why you think it shouldn't be.

That's tricky, because what is a "waste of time" for one person is "a worthy challenge" for another. It also seems to me to be pretty much guaranteed to backfire, no matter how you went about it.

D&D is indeed diverse.

If you make character optimization not pay off, however, then you have an impossibly generic system, because your choices don't matter at all. The system would have to be "perfectly balanced."

It's amazing to me that some people on these boards don't seem to see that.

 

[pemerton]

Any time that player choice exists alongside imbalance, optimization will be rewarded.

You can remove imbalance, but it takes a good deal of effort, constant supervision, will never be perfect, and lots of players seem to take issue with the idea.

You can remove player choice, but it makes the game a good deal less interesting, and it's simply impossible to remove entirely.

I'm not sure that it's so hard to make a system without significant imbalance and with player choice: HeroWars/Quest is an example. PCs are built out of freeform descriptors, with a certain number of good and middling bonuses to assign to them, and rules on the GM side to balance broad against narrow descriptors.

The scope for player choice isn't in relation to the dimension of mechanical effectiveness, but rather in relation to the fiction that a given PC generates and leverages (via the descriptors chosen).

Admittedly this is quite different from D&D, and especially 3E and 4e D&D; and it requires dropping all pretence to simulationism in your PC build rules. But 4e is definitely closer to this than 3E: more of the difference between PCs occurs in the realm of the fiction, as there is a greater degree of mechanical homogeneity (eg the AEDU structure; the fact that bards' harsh words do damage, but it's [psychic] rather than untyped).

However, where there are choices, optimization will exist--I can't help but feel that will be the case, always, for the kinds of games I want to play.

Because I'm not sure what kinds of games you want to play, it's hard for me to judge the truth of this! My point is more modest - that there can be RPGs with meaningful choice but no mechanical optimisation.

A clear example: if I buy my PC the power "Deal handily with undead" and you buy your PC the power "Deal handily with corrupt governmental officials", and if the encounter design rules tell the GM to build encounters that reflect the signals sent by the players in buidling their PCs, then neither of us is more optimal than the other - in play, for example, we can expect to have to deal with a city government corrupted by a death cult. But the choice to build the different PCs is still meaningful - my PC is going to live out the story of Van Helsing, yours the story of Antonio Di Pietro.

I strongly feel that choices should mean something within the system, not just the story.

Well, in the above example, the choices have systemic significance: when we enter the town hall to confront the corrupt mayor, your PC has the advantage - until the mayor reveals that he is really a vampire, at which point my PC has the advantage! But, on the assumption that the GM is following the scenario and encounter-building guidelines, there is no question of one PC being optimal compared to the other.

you can discourage specialization.

<snip>

But making specialization less optimal isn't punishing optimization. It's making diversification more optimal. The target has changed, the process hasn't.

I think that this proposition, as you state it, is a bit abstract. I'm not sure if you're grounding it in play experience of a system that encourages diversified PCs.

What I have in mind is this: that once PCs are diversified, and the GM - in response - starts framing a wide range of challenges, which both collectively and invididually invite different ways of responding to them, then the likelihood that any given PC is going to consistently have the "I win" button reduces, I think.

Of course, this is only true if there is no PC build that dominates others in all the salient domains of PC activity.

A 3.X wizard can quite easily get the best of both worlds, using spell selection to decide each day whether to be a generalist or a specialist (and with enough spells to choose from, a specialist in a different thing each day).

The 3E wizard is a case of a build that does dominate other PC builds in most of the salient domains of PC activity - in particular because you can rebuild your PC every game day. A system based on balance via diversification won't work under those parameters, I don't think, unless the options for the rebuilding PC are markedly weaker than those of the fixed PCs.

A 4E character that tries to specialize in dealing one specific type of damage (other than the heavily rewarded cold damage) will find that it is often of little benefit, and can easily become a dangerous weakness.

True, especially for [fire] as you note. But it also lets you stack all the feats/items etc that enchance or play off one particular damage type or keyword.

In fact, 4th edition has some massive imbalances. They're just the kinds if imbalances I can live with. For example, really terrible powers exist alongside amazing powers, and so-narrowly-situational-it-hurts feats exist alongside "any character can use this, often!" feats. You can still screw up your character, hard, in DnD 4E. Of course, built-in retraining rules and an overall more forgiving system help to deal with that. More importantly to me, however, class imbalance isn't a major issue. Characters will generally have equal opportunity to contribute, despite being very different, with minimal fudging from the DM required.

I strongly agree with all of this - your comments about retraining, about the forgiving nature of the system, about the PC differentiation that gives PCs equal opportunities to contribute, and about how these compensate for the evident imbalances that the system makes possible.

 

[pemerton]

It's amazing to me that some people on these boards don't seem to see that.

Because it's not true. It assumes that the only dimension of meaningful choice is mechanical effectiveness. Games like Maelstrom Storytelling and HeroWars/Quest show that this need not be so.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think the best scenario would be a game in which it doesn't really matter much how balanced things are.
A game in which every character has clear limitations what he can do and what he can't do.

The only way you are going to get that is by having a game where if something isn't listed on your character sheet you can not do it. And that might work in a boardgame or tabletop wargame but is utterly unacceptable in an RPG.

You seem to assume that this is somehow laborious or difficult, which I don't get. It isn't.

What it means is that you need to be several steps ahead of your players and know in advance what you are going to throw at them. I need to use monsters at 3 seconds notice sometimes.

I think I've probably undersold my point. There's making it hard for the player, and making it hard for the character. If you add in new rules elements that make Charisma worthwhile for everyone, or add in prerequisites or drawbacks for powerful spells, you've made it harder for both the character and the player. The bottom line (that your cleric can raise the dead and your wizard can teleport across the country and your fighter just attacks people) hasn't changed, but the landscape of a typical game changes greatly.

And that doesn't even do anything to slow the optimisers. All you have done is changed balance points. If anything that makes it easier for both the explorers and the munchkins.

DMs read these things too.

Some DMs do. Some of us write them. But the game shouldn't need to be pitched at experts.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that 3e rewarding system mastery is a problem.

You don't. What I'm saying is that deliberately rewarding system mastery is stupid. System mastery brings its own reward. Monte Cook has directly admitted that there are trap options and superior options in 3.0 to put in a reward for people who mastered the system. This is essentially equivalent to giving the grandmaster a rook headstart because he is better at chess.

To be fair, 4e does the same although I don't believe it set out to do it. But it does it in a different way - system mastery in 4e increases the flexibility of the characters you can create rather than the power. Did you know that using just the PHB you can create a highly competative spear and shield fighter in 4e?

 

[billd91]

You've made it very plain that you create characters (and expect others to create characters) for story reasons. Whether something is powerful or weak does not matter to you. So "nerfing certain options" doesn't seem like something that you would care about.

Oh, yes it does, particularly when "nerfing" in this case is narrowing the scope - like a whole lot of the magic in 4e.

 

[billd91]

You don't. What I'm saying is that deliberately rewarding system mastery is stupid. System mastery brings its own reward. Monte Cook has directly admitted that there are trap options and superior options in 3.0 to put in a reward for people who mastered the system. This is essentially equivalent to giving the grandmaster a rook headstart because he is better at chess.

OK, you link right to it but you're also saying, pretty much directly, that you're missing his point. He says there are superior options, sure, but the so called "trap" options are not described as such. They're not traps and they're not actually "Timmy" cards. They're weaker options that have their uses, most of which won't apply to PCs in most circumstances, and that would have been better served with more explanation in that regard.