D&D 5E Party optimisation vs Character optimisation

[Tony Vargas]

There's nothing "real world" about a D&D martial. In the real world even the very best warrior would die within seconds trying to stand against a dragon or demon.

Assuming they could find one to stand against, of course. There have always been a few things you could point to in D&D to get across the idea that high-level martial types were not limited to mundane, RL abilities. Surviving falls from great heights without debilitating injury, for instance.

Yet, somehow, those few big-numbers things never seem to open the door for much else. Not even a big number when you attempt a long jump.

For me the ability to survive close combat with extraordinarily powerful creatures is enough for someone like me to enjoy martial characters.

Hey, if that 1 additional hp per level compared to a cleric means that much to you when playing a fighter...

That's what I see them do in fantasy entertainment. Conan is a tough SoB with a strong will, fast reflexes, and extraordinary strength. That is the way Robert E. Howard wrote him. The way he defeats wizards is sneaking up on them or killing them or defeating the enemies they send at him and defeating the magic they cast on him through force of will.

Try coming up with that kind of Will save in 3.5, or WIS in 5e. AD&D fighters had remarkable saves at high level, but that was one of the few things 5e didn't roll back to.

There is also the complete avoidance of relative power. Using Gandalf's limited shows of wizardry fails to mention he was still the most powerful character in the story on the side of the protagonists.

Well, he might have been called that. But all we can really look at is what he actually did. Which, was a lot less that what a mid-level D&D wizard would do each adventuring day as a matter of course.

Though, of course, he did kill a Balrog. In hand to hand combat. Off screen.

Saruman was a major villain few of the martial characters could withstand.

How many martial characters went toe-to-toe with him? Maybe he'd've folded like the Witch King.

Even with the Lord of the Rings universe, wizards were still far more powerful than martials.

Sure. That's why they gathered armies and manipulated kings instead of blowing their enemies to bits.

Even The Witchking of Angmar was the most powerful servant of Sauron.

And ganked by Eowen and a hobbit. The Witchking was prettymuch MacBeth. He received a prophecy of invincibility. It wasn't he was so powerful because he had 'witch' in his title, it was that Fate was saving him for Eowen to kill.

It is the same in Conan stories. The relative power of wizards makes them Conan's most formidable and frightening enemies besides gods, demons, and powerful monsters. It is this way in most fantasy literature.

In most fantasy literature, yes, wizards are depicted as powerful - powerful villains. And heroes - mostly martial heroes - defeat them anyway, just like they defeat huge dragons and terrible demons.

When casters are protagonists, OTOH, their powers get dialed down, a lot. Or, failing that, every protagonist in the story becomes a caster.

Discussion of the exact nature of wizardry in the fantasy genre is pointless given the vast array of magic created by authors. One point I see avoided at all costs in these arguments, is the fact that 99.9% of the fantasy genre portraying the relative power of casters always has them as the most powerful beings in a fantasy world besides gods and monsters.

When they're villains, or plot devices, sure. When they're the heroes, themselves, not so much.

And, again, if you look at the abilities displayed by any individual caster in genre, they're usually a lot less varied and powerful than what D&D wizards are playing around with. The more so when they're the heroes of the story, rather than some plot device character giving the hero a lift to hell or a villain trying to re-locate him there permanently.

I guess I don't see how PC martials don't have agency in fantasy adventures. Agency implies being able to affect the story in a meaningful way.

So you don't see how the beatstick whose only choice is what order to kill the one or two monsters he'll chew through before the casters' spells annihilate the other 40, might not be making too big an impact?

D&D martial classes lack choices, let alone meaningful choices, compared to casters. It's that simple. You can't affect the story in a meaningful way without 'em. Otherwise you might as well be scenery.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Discussion of the exact nature of wizardry in the fantasy genre is pointless given the vast array of magic created by authors. One point I see avoided at all costs in these arguments, is the fact that 99.9% of the fantasy genre portraying the relative power of casters always has them as the most powerful beings in a fantasy world besides gods and monsters.

This quote seems appropos. From the intro to "Not Long Before the End" by Larry Niven:

A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time.

In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity's average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

Note that this story was written in 1969 and predates D&D.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

That's what I see them do in fantasy entertainment. Conan is a tough SoB with a strong will, fast reflexes, and extraordinary strength. That is the way Robert E. Howard wrote him. The way he defeats wizards is sneaking up on them or killing them or defeating the enemies they send at him and defeating the magic they cast on him through force of will.

Try coming up with that kind of Will save in 3.5, or WIS in 5e. AD&D fighters had remarkable saves at high level, but that was one of the few things 5e didn't roll back to.

Okay. Conan: level 18 battlemaster.

ST 20 DX 16 CN 18 IN 14 WS 14 CH 14 [yes, he obviously rolled his stats]
Feats: Great Weapon Master, Lucky, Resilient(Wis), Alert, ASI x2 (already in stats above)

He's got +8 to Wisdom saves, plus Indomitable, plus Lucky. If a wizard tries to dominate him with a powerful DC 16 spell, it has a 1.5% chance of working on him. And even if it works, if it's anything like most spells, Conan gets another save in six seconds and likely breaks free then. Even against an ultra-powerful DC 19 spell (20th level wizard with maxed Int) there is only a 6.25% chance of the spell working against Conan.

His chances could be boosted even further with Mage Slayer, but I dislike that feat (too situational) and I didn't want anyone quibbling about whether Conan could get within 5' of the wizard, so I left it out.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Okay. Conan: level 18 battlemaster.

ST 20 DX 16 CN 18 IN 14 WS 14 CH 14 [yes, he obviously rolled his stats]

Wow, just, right off the bat.

An array-using caster has no problem getting a 20 caster stat by these levels, while WIS and DEX are tertiary for a high-STR fighter.

Feats: Great Weapon Master, Lucky, Resilient(Wis), Alert, ASI x2 (already in stats above)

He's got +8 to Wisdom saves

Cool, he hits the WIS DC of a monster of his level on a 10 or 11.

The good news is that makes Indomitable actually worth something - which it really isn't for a more typical fighter who used an array or point buy and thus didn't have the extra feat to devote to getting proficiency on his Will save after getting his most important stats up.

He still lacks proficiency in DEX, INT, and CHA saves - the last two still rare, for now.

While it's nice to save vs an instant-lose spell DC of 75% percent of the time instead of 48% (without the optional Reslient feat) or 30% (without Indomitable), it's still a far cry from a 16th level AD&D fighter failing only on a 2 thanks to his crazy-good save matrix & collection of save bonus items. Even losing 1 in 4 such contests off the bat like that is not going to make for a long series REH pastiche for our would-be Conan.

 

[Zardnaar]

Dave I see what you mean about Paladins being great. We played a quests of Doom Adventure last night full of lycanthropes, elemental's and a Medusa+Basilisk combo. Without the Paladins 20 charisma they would have been in trouble. The Cleric got stoned so to speak and is still a statue.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Wow, just, right off the bat.

Cool, he hits the WIS DC of a monster of his level on a 10 or 11 - that of a similarly pimped out caster on a 13.

The good news is that makes Indomitable actually worth something - which it really isn't for a more typical fighter who used an array or point buy and thus didn't have the extra feat to devote to getting proficiency on his Will save after getting his most important stats up.

He still lacks proficiency in DEX, INT, and CHA saves - the last two still rare, for now.

While it's nice to save vs an instant-lose spell DC of 21 57.75 percent of the time instead of 35% (without indomitable) or 15% (without Resilient/Wis), it's still a far cry from a 16th level AD&D fighter failing only on a 2 thanks to his crazy-good save matrix & collection of save bonus items.

CHA saves aren't all that rare, and INT saves aren't really rare either (Mind Flayers, illusions), but neither of those were part of the Conan description being modelled, and he will still be pretty good at saving against those effects anyway, making on the order of 80% of his saves against DC 16 Int/Cha saves. Note that that's actually better than an AD&D fighter, who at max level made 75% of his saves vs. spell. (Yes, you can have magic items on top of that, and Bless effects and whatnot, but none of those really fit the Conan model.)

Yes, this Conan has amazing stats, but that's pretty much par for the course for Conan. He's amazingly good at everything he tries, clearly a high-stats guy from day 1.

The claim that you can't model Conan in 5E has been thoroughly debunked.

Edit: incidentally, what instant-lose DC 21 effect are you thinking of? And is it something that would be in-genre for Conan to shrug off? My math says that he'd have an 87% chance of beating it anyway if it's a Wis/Con/Str save, and a 35% chance of beating it if it's a Dex/Int/Cha save, which honestly seems to me like a pretty decent model for what Conan should be able to do.

 

[Tony Vargas]

CHA saves aren't all that rare, and INT saves aren't really rare either (Mind Flayers, illusions), but neither of those were part of the Conan description being modelled. Part of the /one/ example - pushing through some sort of mind control spell long enough to chop the evil wizard in half. Which is still prettymuch a beatstick function.

Yes, this Conan has amazing stats, but that's pretty much par for the course for Conan. He's amazingly good at everything he tries, clearly a high-stats guy from day 1.

Still doesn't fly. You can't have the standard for martial characters being "if you roll crazy good stats, you can kinda hold a candle to the corresponding genre archetype in one example" while the standard for casters remains "you can do anything and everything the corresponding archetype can do in any example from genre, far more dependably they can."


Edit: the 21 was playtest math, already fixed it. It felt good participating in the playtest, but I keep conflating playtest rules with final 5e ones. It's frustrating, but I'm sure I'll get over, I just have to keep running lots of games.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Still doesn't fly. You can't have the standard for martial characters being "if you roll crazy good stats, you can kinda hold a candle to the corresponding genre archetype in one example" while the standard for casters remains "you can do anything and everything the corresponding archetype can do in any example from genre, far more dependably they can."

That's called "shifting the goalposts". First you claimed that you can't model Conan in 5E. That's not true. Now you're claiming that not every 5E fighter is a Conan. That is true, but I fail to see how it's interesting. Not every 5E wizard is HPMOR!Lord Voldemort either, and not everyone rolls 18s in every stat. (And the ones who do roll 18s in every stat are disproportionately likely to be played by idiots, so will fail to measure up to the Nietzsche superman archetype by virtue of stupid actions as opposed to low stats.)

The claim that "you can do anything and everything the corresponding archetype can do in any example from genre" just isn't true either. In case you haven't noticed, 5E wizards are incredibly weak compared to genre wizards. They're maybe 0.1% as powerful as Pug, 1% as powerful as Macros the Black, 1-10% as powerful as Lord Voldemort (although hopefully a whole lot smarter and therefore more effective--Lord Voldemort has access to unlimited Imperius/Avada Kedavras! In 5E terms that's like being able to cast Disintegrate and Dominate Person at will, and the domination is permanent, and you can use your dominated puppets to dominate others--and yet somehow, Voldemort plays the game so poorly that he's about as scary as a psychopathic neighborhood gangster, not an evil archmage), 1% as powerful as Niven's Warlock, 1% as powerful as Brandon Sanderson's Lord Ruler, 0.1% as powerful as Rand al'Thor, 0.00001% as powerful as David Edding's Belgarion (who almost accidentally used the orb to rearrang the constellations to spell his name out in giant glowing letters)... Needless to say there are other wizards in genre fiction like Harry Dresden who are more roughly on par with D&D wizards, but the claim that D&D wizards can do "anything and everything" genre wizards can do is just plain false.

I think I'm done here. Conan works in 5E. He's a little uninteresting on the combat battleboard due to the blandness of 5E martial combat, but then again, most of the interesting stuff Conan did didn't involve personal weaponry anyway AFAICT. (Does Conan even have any interesting personal fight scenes?) If you do try playing Conan in 5E, you may play out the combats, or you may just have a gentleman's agreement that Conan automatically kills up to (level) mooks whenever he wants to, and focus on the story atmospherics and politicking and ambushes and stuff. Conan stories seem to be as much about atmospherics and the decadence of civilized men as they are about Conan smiting things.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's called "shifting the goalposts". First you claimed that you can't model Conan in 5E.

No, first I claimed that D&D failed to model genre. Then we went into a little inconclusive examination of whether it maybe didn't model the Dying Earth all that badly. Then you zeroed in on Conan, zeroed in on standing up to some sort of mind-affecting magic as one thing Conan could do, and that a crazy-lucky-rolled 18th level fighter using an optional rule system could probably do 3 times out of 4, and declared victory.

The claim that "you can do anything and everything the corresponding archetype can do in any example from genre" just isn't true either.

Try finding some spell being cast by a protagonist mage - or even a plot-device mage or villain - in genre (that actually goes off and works, rather than being countered or promptly reversed by some Deus Ex Machina), that can't be duplicated or bettered by a D&D spell. The D&D spell might be Wish some of the time, but you won't exactly find a lot of 'em.

In case you haven't noticed, 5E wizards are incredibly weak compared to genre wizards.

I think you're comparing the bluster and reputation or relative power of genre casters (relative to throwaway 'red shirt' type characters, for instance), rather than what they actually /do/. The wizard might casually kill a minion who displeases him, maybe even incinerate or disintegrate the poor mook - but if the guy is the equivalent of an 11 hp guard in D&D, a high level Wizard's cantrip is going to do the same. Difference is that's probably the evil wizard's go to attack that he throws at the hero (who always seems able to 'dodge' it since he has triple digit hps) a few times before the hero finally ganks him, with any other tricks up his sleeve requiring long rituals or the like, while the D&D wizard has a ton of spell slots that do /more/ craziness in a matter of seconds.

Now, it is true that a genre caster might well be able to so something a lot more /often/ than a D&D wizard, because of Vancian casting, and that's nothing to sneeze at. But not that many somethings compared to what the wizard has in his spellbook.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No, first I claimed that D&D failed to model genre. Then we went into a little inconclusive examination of whether it maybe didn't model the Dying Earth all that badly. Then you zeroed in on Conan, zeroed in on standing up to some sort of mind-affecting magic as one thing Conan could do, and that a crazy-lucky-rolled 18th level fighter using an optional rule system could probably do 3 times out of 4, and declared victory.

It wasn't me who "zeroed in" on Will saves actually, it was in fact you. See above where you responded to "The way he defeats wizards is sneaking up on them or killing them or defeating the enemies they send at him and defeating the magic they cast on him through force of will." with "Try coming up with that kind of Will save in 3.5, or WIS in 5e. AD&D fighters had remarkable saves at high level, but that was one of the few things 5e didn't roll back to." The challenge was easily met.

I will plead guilty to "zeroing in" on false claims that interest me, perhaps ignoring your larger point inadvertently in the process. That's the nature of Internet forum discussions, especially on Enworld where context gets lost with every quote, and if that's the case here feel free to say, "I concede the point. But I was really more interested in discussing such-and-such" and if I then have anything to say about such-and-such, I will. Otherwise I'll bow out and the people who want to discuss such-and-such will do so. That's what happened with Dying Earth; notice that I bowed out as soon as you stopped making factually incorrect claims about Phandaal's and Pandelume's respective limitations.

Try finding some spell being cast by a protagonist mage - or even a plot-device mage or villain - in genre (that actually goes off and works, rather than being countered or promptly reversed by some Deus Ex Machina), that can't be duplicated or bettered by a D&D spell. The D&D spell might be Wish some of the time, but you won't exactly find a lot of 'em.

(The below is written in the assumption that by "D&D" you mean "5E D&D", since that's the forum we're on. If you just mean that there is some edition of D&D somewhere where wizards are powerful, then I apologize for misunderstanding your claim.)

Well, Pug's a protagonist, and he creates wormholes between the stars (not possible in 5E), he can travel backwards through time (also not possible in 5E), and destroys the planet Kelewan by creating a rift big enough to hit it with its own moon (definitely not possible in 5E). As mentioned previously, Lord Voldemort can permanently mentally dominate other people, which is beyond the abilities of any spell in 5E. He's not a protagonist, but guess what? Any wizard can cast that spell, including Harry Potter, the 17-year-old protagonist! So that counts too. It's hard to measure the limits of Niven's Warlock (also a protagonist, facing a barbarian with an enchanted sword that makes him invulnerable to everything but itself), but he tells a story to Hap the Barbarian of casting powerful spells in his younger days, before he'd learned as much as he knows now, of using flashy, showy spells like "armies turned to stone, or wiped out by lightning, instead of simple death spells," so whatever his limits are, he's also clearly working at a scope beyond anything a 5E wizard can manage. (Maybe an AD&D wizard could do it, but 5E wizards can't.)

I trust the point is made? I don't care how you play your game, and I don't even care if you dislike 5E--I just care about the correct facts. You can say that you don't like 5E wizards and think they are too powerful and I won't mind. YMMV. But if you say they can do anything and everything that genre wizards do, well, I will take exception to that because it's factually incorrect, and I don't want someone reading that claim and believing it.

My counterclaim is that 5E wizards are relatively weak compared to AD&D wizards. (Obviously they are weak compared to Pug/Anomander Rake/Warlock et al., but that's not a claim interesting enough to discuss here on this board.) This is of course by design.

I think you're comparing the bluster and reputation or relative power of genre casters (relative to throwaway 'red shirt' type characters, for instance), rather than what they actually /do/. The wizard might casually kill a minion who displeases him, maybe even incinerate or disintegrate the poor mook - but if the guy is the equivalent of an 11 hp guard in D&D, a high level Wizard's cantrip is going to do the same. Difference is that's probably the evil wizard's go to attack that he throws at the hero (who always seems able to 'dodge' it since he has triple digit hps) a few times before the hero finally ganks him, with any other tricks up his sleeve requiring long rituals or the like, while the D&D wizard has a ton of spell slots that do /more/ craziness in a matter of seconds.

Now, it is true that a genre caster might well be able to so something a lot more /often/ than a D&D wizard, because of Vancian casting, and that's nothing to sneeze at. But not that many somethings compared to what the wizard has in his spellbook.