D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[Majoru Oakheart]

[MAP][/MAP]

but all of those things you said can be tracked with paper and pencil, or a dry eraser board and marker, or in your head, or with minis... if you can do it with 3e I really do not understand why you can't with 4e...

I'm going to completely agree here. Both could be played equally difficult in "theater of the mind" mode. I do believe that both were SO difficult to do in theater of the mind mode that it wasn't worth it. However, if you are capable of running one in theater of the mind, the other should be nearly as easy.

3.5e's rules about positioning were just easier to ignore. All you had to do is hand waive and say "Yeah, you don't provoke any opportunity attacks" or "we aren't using opportunity attacks in this game" and half your problems went away. There were still a number of other feats that needed positioning information but if no one took these, almost everything could be resolved without minis or a grid of some sort. Most abilities only needed to know if you were in melee, short, medium, or long range from an enemy. Which is fairly easy to track in your head.

4e often needs to know whether an enemy is 3 squares or 4 squares or 5 squares away from you and whether the enemy is between you and another enemy or obstacle...and how far away that enemy is from that obstacle(so whether a push 3 will throw them in or whether you need a push 4).

When played precisely according to the rules both equally required minis, however. Opportunity attacks in 3.5e were a big deal when played according to the rules. Just figuring out if you provoked one and planning the entire movement for your round to avoid them took nearly half the time spent planning each round.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Hm. I think the highest level I ran was 37, so you might have me beat on that. But yes, by and large it plays out the same way as in 2e, where high-level magic is a lot of trying crazy things and watching them fail. And then you have those supposedly inferior nonmagical characters taking over at times.

Perhaps the disparity doesn't appear until past level 40?

In my game the disparity started showing its head at around level 5, about the time the Wizard gets 3rd level spells. The disparity just kept getting wider and wider the higher level my players got.

This was a fairly average game at around 17th level:

Wizard: "Alright, I'll teleport us out of this dungeon and back to town so we can rest for the night at the inn. Then I'll teleport us all back here tomorrow morning after we've had a good breakfast. I have enough spells, I don't care if I waste a couple lower level spells for no good reason. That way we can just pay an NPC in town to heal us and we don't have to worry about saving Cleric spells and they can be used on buffing. In the morning, I cast this list of 5 spells that will last all day on myself."

Cleric "Good, in the morning, Mr DM, I cast this list of 14 spells that all last either 1 hour per level, or 10 minutes per level. Since we don't adventure for more than 3 hours per day, they should all last until the end of the day. Just let me know when the 10 minute per levels one run out. These spells increase my AC to above the fighter, my bonuses to hit above the fighter, my saving throws above the fighters, and I'm immune to all fire, acid, and cold damage for the whole day."

Fighter: "I...have my sword, so I guess I'm set to adventure."

*group teleports into the dungeon for the day, walks down a corridor and opens a door. There is a nasty monster behind it. They roll for initiative*

Fighter: "I win initiative. I charge and Power Attack for 5, that seems like a good number. I hit AC 40!"
DM: "That misses. It appears to have a large amount of armor."
Fighter: "Then I make 3 more attacks, but all of them are worse: 38, 32, 29"
Wizard: "Oh, it has a good AC? Good, I don't need to care about AC. I cast a spell that targets its touch AC instead. I Sudden Maximize my Empowered spell for 135 points of damage. I rolled a 3...crap, that only hits touch AC of 15."
DM: "That hits, his touch AC is 12. Anyways, 135 doesn't quite kill him, he's big and nasty."
Wizard: "Oh, then I Sudden Quicken a second spell. It does only 79 damage."
DM: "Yeah, that's 214 damage. He dies."

Fighter: "Wait, so in addition to the Wizard having the ability to whisk us home from breakfast whenever he wants, he also hit enemies on a 2 that I miss when I roll 14? Then when he hits he does double to triple the damage I would have if I'd managed to hit? This is kind of stupid."

 

[Ahnehnois]

This was a fairly average game at around 17th level:

Wizard: "Alright, I'll teleport us out of this dungeon and back to town so we can rest for the night at the inn.

What is a level 17 character of any class doing in a dungeon or an inn?

Fighter: "I win initiative. I charge and Power Attack for 5, that seems like a good number. I hit AC 40!"
DM: "That misses. It appears to have a large amount of armor."
Fighter: "Then I make 3 more attacks, but all of them are worse: 38, 32, 29"
Wizard: "Oh, it has a good AC? Good, I don't need to care about AC. I cast a spell that targets its touch AC instead. I Sudden Maximize my Empowered spell for 135 points of damage. I rolled a 3...crap, that only hits touch AC of 15."
DM: "That hits, his touch AC is 12. Anyways, 135 doesn't quite kill him, he's big and nasty."
Wizard: "Oh, then I Sudden Quicken a second spell. It does only 79 damage."
DM: "Yeah, that's 214 damage. He dies."

That sounds like a waste of spell slots. Why not save them and wait a few extra rounds while the fighter mows down this apparently token opponent? Surely he can't get attack rolls that low every time. The ability of the spellcaster to waste limited resources on quickly eliminating non-threatening opposition doesn't prove much.

Fighter: "Wait, so in addition to the Wizard having the ability to whisk us home from breakfast whenever he wants, he also hit enemies on a 2 that I miss when I roll 14? Then when he hits he does double to triple the damage I would have if I'd managed to hit? This is kind of stupid."

Shouldn't the fighter say something more like "call me back whenever we face a real challenge?"

***

But back to that first point. If you're fighting rudimentary battles with scaled up numbers and traveling to stone tunnels that allow teleportation and fighting enemies that somehow have great AC but no defenses against magic, your DM has no comprehension of what high level play is about. What's the point of having these books full of rules if the DM isn't willing to use them?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

What is a level 17 character of any class doing in a dungeon or an inn?

lots of PCs keep doing dungeon crawls into the epic levels... However I agree the game should have moved on by then...

That sounds like a waste of spell slots. Why not save them and wait a few extra rounds while the fighter mows down this apparently token opponent? Surely he can't get attack rolls that low every time. The ability of the spellcaster to waste limited resources on quickly eliminating non-threatening opposition doesn't prove much.

It could have been the end boss of the dungeon, or just the next bad guy, either way the caster could rule the fight... if you are going to wait for someone to finish the fight odds are the cleric is better at combat at that point... the fighter is just there to carry stuff/

Shouldn't the fighter say something more like "call me back whenever we face a real challenge?"

or quaking in his boots that at some point to challenge the casters you will pull out some huge thing that he can't touch...

But back to that first point. If you're fighting rudimentary battles with scaled up numbers and traveling to stone tunnels that allow teleportation and fighting enemies that somehow have great AC but no defenses against magic, your DM has no comprehension of what high level play is about. What's the point of having these books full of rules if the DM isn't willing to use them?

the problem is that the book presents like that is an option... just scale the numbers but you are quite correct it doesn't work.

Just lets look at a dragon...

a red dragon with 660hp and an AC of 41 and a touch attack of 2. he has spell resstance 32 CR 26

so lets take a level 16 wizard and a level 20 fighter...

fighter has 28 str and has a +5 weapon and weapon focus and spec... he then has +36/+31/+26/+21 to hit... he has power attack so lets run some numbers

no PA needs a 5, needs 10, needs 15 needs 20
-5 PA needs a 10, needs a 15 needs a 20 needs a 20
-10 PA needs a 15 needs a 20x3

so Power attacking at more then 5 is dumb...

He has a d12 2 handed weapon... and 2d6 extra non fire damage...

with no power attack he most likely hits twice, with power attack most likely only once but lets make him lucky... say he hits twice with power attack.

he deals 1d12+2d6+32 both times... lets give hima lucky roll of 18 on the dice both times... (mostly because I am lazy and it's an easy number) 50hp per hit and 100 over the round, that is practicly a best case scenero...

with a 32 SR the wizard needs a 16 to get past it... unless he has spell penetration,then he needs a 12... he can touch attack anything except a nat 1...

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

What is a level 17 character of any class doing in a dungeon or an inn?

They were in a Dungeon because they were asked to find an ancient magical item that was supposedly located at the bottom for a patron.

They were in the inn doing the same thing everyone else does: Eating and sleeping. They had nowhere else to do that. They hadn't had a home in years having been adventuring for that entire time.

That sounds like a waste of spell slots. Why not save them and wait a few extra rounds while the fighter mows down this apparently token opponent? Surely he can't get attack rolls that low every time. The ability of the spellcaster to waste limited resources on quickly eliminating non-threatening opposition doesn't prove much.

They only planned on fighting 3 or 4 encounters a day. Each one took about a round or so, if they cast 2 spells a round, they had the 8 slots to spare. Even then, if they were running low for the last combat, they'd let the fighter do his thing for that combat. They could teleport, so they could leave whenever they felt their spell slots were running low.

I wasn't one to tell them what to do with their spell slots. They decided to do that on their own.

Shouldn't the fighter say something more like "call me back whenever we face a real challenge?"

I don't know what he SHOULD say, only what he DID say. This was a real game with real players. I don't tell them how to feel. I just ran it. The player knew that they faced a EL 20 encounter and that was APL+3, also known as a fairly hard encounter. The enemies they faced averaged APL+2 so this was one of the harder ones.

But back to that first point. If you're fighting rudimentary battles with scaled up numbers and traveling to stone tunnels that allow teleportation and fighting enemies that somehow have great AC but no defenses against magic, your DM has no comprehension of what high level play is about. What's the point of having these books full of rules if the DM isn't willing to use them?

I was running an adventure out of Dungeon Magazine in 2004: Return to Maure Castle written by Rob Kuntz and Gary Gygax.

I ran the monsters that were in the dungeon as they were written. The adventure is designed for Levels 15-19 or something like that. It's been a couple of years. They were 15 or 16, I think when they entered.

They had gotten from 4th(we started at 4th level) to 15 by going through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil by Monte Cook.

A lot of monsters have great ACs and no protection against magic, however. It is a side effect of the process used to create monsters in 3.5e. Monsters that were the "Brute" monsters were almost all so vulnerable to magic that they were nothing more than a speed bump. At the higher levels, a large number of monsters were just Brute monsters. In order to protect yourself from magic, you pretty much needed a large number of magic items or the ability to cast spells yourself. If the monster was non-intelligent it pretty much precluded it from having any of those abilities.

Even the ones that do have protections against magic, their protections can be bypassed fairly easily. Resistance to elements? Use force damage...no monster has resistance to it. Spell Resistance? Just cast spells that don't allow Spell Resistance. Really good saves? Simply cast spells that are touch attacks that don't allow saves. Most monsters touch AC was WAY below their normal ACs. As an example: Horned Devil: AC 35, Touch AC 16. Marilith: AC 29, Touch AC 13. Tarrasque: AC 35, Touch AC 5.

Orb of Force was a popular spell in that it was a touch attack with no spell resistance or saves allowed. A Maximized, Empowered one did 75 points of damage. Which is about 50-75% of creatures hitpoints when they are a "caster" variety(low hitdice with lots of magical abilities).

Against creatures with low ACs and lots of hitpoints, you instead would resort to Save or Die spells that targeted Will if possible since these creatures almost always had low Will saves. Take, for example: Behemoth Gorilla. CR 19, 366 hp. Will save: +16. At level 17, I assume most Wizards will have a spell DC of 38 on their level 9 spells. Also known as "enemies need to roll a natural 20 or they die" with any spell level 6 or higher. In this particular case it has spell resistance but there are other high level monsters without it that aren't in the SRD.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Just think of the EL of a creature able to keep multiple Tarrasques (from multiple planes maybe?) in a treasure pile! Keeping a horde of Tarrasques in your hoard would be hard work! Either that, or it's just a Monty Haul game.

You make a good point. Horde is the appropriate word. Stupid spelling.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

thanks for the biology lesson, I didn't know that... but what do doctors see when they shine that light in your mouth? I just assumed down your throat

That's why doctors tend to have you lean back and say "ah". That particular sound opens the muscles in the back of your mouth more so they can see better with a light.

When you speak, it does open and close repeatedly. So, it certainly is possible to see in. Though not really important.

wait if I had different players my game would run differently is news to who?? of cource every table sometimes even night to noight at the same table is different... DMs need to make the game fun FOR THERE PCS

I don't. I buy an adventure, it tells me what monsters to use and what the plot is. I then tell my friends to make up characters of an appropriate level and I run the game.

When I run Living Greyhawk or Living Forgotten Realms, I get handed an adventure that someone else wrote and I run it exactly the same. Even when I have to run the same adventure 7 times like I did at GenCon a couple of years ago.

The rules of D&D don't change because of the players at my table. A wall of force doesn't work on a monster simply because the players at that table think it's cool.

so If I say "I punch the guard" you make me roll initiative?

Yes. That's the entire point of initiative. The enemy can see you, you can see the enemy. The roll determines who acts first.

That's why in real life, if I walk up to a martial artist and go to punch him, he'll likely see it coming before it hits him and have me on the ground crying in pain before my punch ever got close. It's likely he'd see the intention in my eyes even before I wound up since he's trained to fight.

Unfortunately, the initiative section of the rules in both 4e and 3.5e are both poorly worded and hard to understand. Initiative is one of the rules I've seen argued most often.

or a funny scene in an otherwise seriuse book... or who knows no one scene makes a story...

No one scene makes a story, but one scene can ruin the tone of an entire story. It's hard to take an epic seriously when it gets too silly, even for one scene.

The Hobbit isn't a very serious book to begin with but I think it wouldn't be considered the class it is if Bilbo saw Smaug and then tripped over a coin and it caused a large gem to hop into Smaug's mouth and for him to choke to death. Especially not after an entire book hyping up exactly how powerful dragons are and how the entire might of the Dwarves was unable to defeat him.

I think he is a player who makes up the world and adventure and trys to move the game along in fun ways...

True. But it's fun to defeat the monsters without trying sometimes. It irritates others because it feels horrible to win with no skill required. These two goals are incompatible. Whenever two goals are incompatible, the DM should be considering the rules and "fairness" for arbitration. The game can't be 100% fun for everyone 100% of the time. Sometimes you miss, sometimes your spell doesn't work, sometimes you die. Especially if you try something ill advised...like trying to kill a CR 24 dragon when you're 9th level. The player should be aware that it is suicide based on them understanding the rules. If a player asked me to do this, I'd figure that they either have no knowledge of the rules of the game we're playing and I'd inform them OR that they were making a joke OR that they honestly wanted their character to die and were being a jerk to try to get the other players killed as well.

The idea that they honestly expected me to agree with their idea wouldn't have crossed my mind once.

I run at cons all the time and at my FLGS and for new people... the best way to run any table is to the desires of the players....

How do you know the desires of the players if you've never met them before? Also, what if one of them desires to do one thing and another desires to do something else?

so you didn't have fun... if you don't have fun it wasn't run well...

That's my point. He thought he was a great DM and his DMing style likely would have worked fine for his own players.

yes if things were different they might of went different... so what it was an example of a one off joke everyone loved....

I'm just saying that finding a DMing style that works equally well for ALL groups instead of just your home group seems like a better idea that catering specifically for them.

I doubt someone in your group would break down in tears if you said no to their Wall of Force gag.

oh, ok... I find that good DMs have to improvise all the time...

Everyone has to improvise at least a little bit. I find improvising too much makes a game feel...directionless. Like the DM doesn't have anything planned and is making things up on the fly. I'm waiting for the cool reveal of all the work the DM put into the adventure revealing that the villain was really the NPC that had been traveling with us the entire time...when he hadn't planned that far in advance.

wait... you write level 15 at level 1 and if the PCs don't follow your railroad you punish them and make them... and you hate when they go away from your planed events??? WTF? you insult my DMing that most people enjoy and then come back with one of the most hated DM tactics ever...

Depends on which people you ask. There are definitely a faction of people who HATE this with a passion. There are others who love it a lot. I try not to plan TOO far in advance for this reason. I have ran Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, however. It goes from level 4 to 15. I knew what the PCs would be doing when they got to level 15. They'd be entering the last section of the dungeon and killing the boss. I knew it would take them that long because there's no way they could gain access to the boss without the information and the key that they found along the way. Which the adventure doles out at the appropriate time and place. If players made an attempt to get around that time and place I'd likely say no. The adventure wouldn't be very fun for them if they skipped to the end boss and died because of how high level he was. It wouldn't be very fun for me either because I was really looking forward to seeing what they did when they encountered the cool traps and puzzles the adventure had planned for right before the final boss. Not ever encountering those at all would make it feel like the adventure was kind of wasted.

I'd also be careful with throwing around the word "most". Your group likes your DMing. However, it wasn't just me in this thread who thought that the ruling was kind of silly. There are a lot of people who would not liked to have been in that game.

no I said run an adventure in there house for the game th PCs were making... you know what... I would have rolled with it and made a game you threw your hands up and rage quite... but you think me making a fun game would be bad DMING....

No, I wouldn't have any problem with another DM rolling with this situation. But it wasn't the game I wanted to run. They were changing the world in unacceptable ways. Infinite money made them cocky and annoying to run for. These particular players would try to get away with anything if they could. I had to tell them no to 90% of the things they suggested or they'd be ruling the world or the entire universe in no time.

One of these players used to call me up and ask questions like "I know this armor isn't big enough for my character because I'm a giant monster...but could I get someone to make a custom suit of it so I can have all the powers of the giant monster race and all the powers of the most powerful power armor in the game? Also, I want to be able to learn magic. Can I just pick some spells and say I learned those from a wandering mage? I know my class doesn't get spells, but I figured if it was part of my background you would make an exception."

Even after I told him no, he'd spent an hour on the phone attempting to justify his ultra power gaming with story reasons. He wouldn't accept no for an answer and would instead just try to negotiate.

To tie this in with the theme of the thread, this is why I'm very interested in balance between classes and I think that rulings that disturb the balance between classes harm the game. Because I need a set of rules to point at and say "No, the rules say you can't do that. Please get off my back and stop demanding stuff your character doesn't get according to these rules."

what??? your anology fails again... I didn't have someone jump genre...

Of course you didn't. That's why it was an analogy and not a direct quote of what happened. The point here is that someone is asking for something that is not part of the game: "They'd like a plasma rifle" or "they'd like to kill a dragon with a wall of force". You are saying you had to say yes because they thought it was awesome. If a player thinks its awesome to have a plasma rifle would you allow that as well? No, you wouldn't.

Thus, my point was that every DM has a line that they won't cross. You were berating me for not allowing PCs out of their "box". I'm saying you won't allow PCs out of their box either, it's just a different sized box. You're perfectly ok with wall of force killing a dragon with no saving throw or rolls. I'm not because I believe that it's out of the genre of "heroic fantasy" in which heroes have to fight and fight hard while risking death in order to win. An immediate death from a spell makes the game a different genre to me.

um... not in my experience...

You're saying that if someone sat down at your table and said "Hi, I'm a Jedi. I carry a lightsaber and a Blaster Rifle and high tech armor that is better than the best armor in this world" that at least one of the players at the table wouldn't object and say "What? Why is he allowed to be a JEDI in our D&D game? That's stupid!" even if you allowed it as a DM?

To us, allowing the use of the Wall of Force is a very similar thing. It says that one player is allowed to do something that isn't allowed in D&D. I'd definitely have a player saying "Why is he allowed to kill a dragon in one hit without rolling? I'm a Fighter! I don't have that power! Wizards don't even have that power if we're following the rules!"

I would go with that.... the fun is how you get him there...

It's WAY too easy to come up with a way to do that. I pretty much expect players will come up with idea on how to get the water elemental out to the lake without blinking. It's likely they already have a spell that will simply put the Elemental into the lake.

I don't consider looking at a spell list and picking a spell to be creative or interesting. It's a good idea, but not hugely creative. I'll give them an advantage but that advantage needs to be in line with the power of the resource they expended. A level 1 spell does not immediately kill a monster that would have taken 5 or 6 higher level spells to kill if done the "normal" way.

all that matters is if everyone has fun... I would rule create water would do 1d6+caster level damage myself... but in a game with guns we once used create water to make the guns not fire (like they had been in the rain and soaked)...

Both of those rulings would make me have no fun. Especially if my character was based around guns. I'd argue that it was completely unfair to give my weapon this huge disadvantage unless I got a huge advantage to go with it.

I'd also get kind of annoyed that a Wizard can use a level 1 spell to do the same damage as a couple of level 4 spells simply because the creature was a Fire Elemental.

That creates an EXTREMELY unbalanced game.

But if I was at the table would you rule differently because what matters is that your players have fun?

 

[Hussar]

Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a for...

Ahn, I think the issue is that some people actually use the monster manual and don't tailor every encounter around the caster classes.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

With regard to the wall of force trick, can we agree on one thing? If it worked for GMForPowerGamers and his group, and they had fun and there were no repercussions down the line, then they were doing it right. The rules do not support such a maneuver, and I think most games would suffer for it--I certainly would have issues if it happened in a game I was playing in, and I would never allow it in a game I was running--but every table rolls in its own way.

I will agree that it worked for his group and that anything that works for your group isn't necessarily bad. Though I'm not willing to say they did it "right". The right way of doing it would have worked regardless of who was at the table.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

Ahn, I think the issue is that some people actually use the monster manual and don't tailor every encounter around the caster classes.

Not sure what you're trying to prove here, but if you actually went by real games, then you would know that corner cases did happen, but not all of us DM'd or played with a DM who put the dungeon in suspended animation so that everything is in the exact place when the players came back.

I can also tell you that we didn't leave dungeons unless everyone wanted too. We had wizards who left while everyone else kept going.