D&D 5E Martials v Casters...I still don't *get* it.

[ph0rk]

You're not removing DM fiat, you're exercising it by saying a 20th level Wizard who can easily make 25,000 GP in his down time, does not have access to iron and silver filings or other costly spell components!

I guess the Fighter also doesnt have access to plate armor and weapons either!

In other words its an unrealistic experiment. You're hamstringing the wizard by making him impoverished, and unable to cast half his spells!

Which is precisely why engaging in a forum thread exhibition match is a fool's errand.

 

[Flamestrike]

See to me this argument is faulty to begin with though. We are assuming the standard campaign exists as an endless series of 6-8 encounter days...back to back, with no downtime in between.

No, we are not making that assumption and the game does not expect you to play that way.

There will be single encounter adventuring days. There will be adventuring days even longer than 6 encounters, where long resting will be challenging at best.

There will be days with more than 2 short rests. There will be days with less.

As long as the rough median is around 6 encounters/ 2 short rests, there is nothing wrong with having the occasional single (deadly+) encounter AD, or having the occasional (3 deadlies, 2 short rests) AD, or even the occasional 9 encounters/ 3 short rest AD.

It all evens out in the end, with short rest classes doing better on the longer days, and long rest classes tending to do better on the shorter ones.

All you're doing is moving the spotlight around.

i have never played or seen a game like that outside of a canned module, there are breaks, there is downtime...there is more realistic exploration than encounter encounter encounter. Sometimes you just have 1 thing a day...often times you have nothing.

Days with nothing are not adventuring days.

An adventuring day isnt even a day. It's the arbitrary amount of time between effective long rests, with 1 or more encounter in between. That amount of time could range from as little as a day to a week or even a month or more (with Gritty realism).

in those scenarios, the limited resources matter little. It’s “can you do the thing or not”. And casters can.

You're finding out the hard way in our little Adventure thread that this isnt actually true though arent you?

 

[Asisreo]

You're not removing DM fiat, you're exercising it by saying a 20th level Wizard who can easily make 25,000 GP in his down time, does not have access to iron and silver filings or other costly spell components!

I guess the Fighter also doesnt have access to plate armor and weapons either!

In other words its an unrealistic experiment. You're hamstringing the wizard by making him impoverished, and unable to cast half his spells!

But I feel the general opinion is that martial characters cannot be given any benefit of the doubt without it being a feature in their statblock. So any sort of rewards are brushed aside as something the DM gave away out of pity or obligation.

But when it comes to casters, they're owed their components, regardless of how a DM might feel about an encounter.

You've seen some of the post replies. Giving these components away really would have trivialized the encounter end-point. And its somehow acceptable to allow that and if a DM is unsatisfied, its the system. But a Fighter with a Vorpal Sword that instantly kills them on Round 1 is brushed off as the DM's fault that they would lend a powerful ability-enabler into the hands of a fighter.

It seems so lopsided not because of the system and what WoTC can do about it, but because of the tables that want to make a fighter out to be completely helpless.

 

[Stalker0]

You're finding out the hard way in our little Adventure thread that this isnt actually true though arent you?

For Pete's sake, we have done a few encounters with stone cold dice and suddenly we have proven the case? The experiment has just started, no-one should be referencing it in the slightest in our current debates, and the fact that people keep doing so is starting to irk me.

Days with nothing are not adventuring days.

But they are days players care about! That is my point. Downtime for many people is not just "oh I get some ale and whores and wait for the next thing". Players like to do things, they like to shape the world, investigate things on their own, interact with npcs....etc.

 

[Minigiant]

What kind of sessions do you run where one spell slot obliviates the need for all the lower ones? Clearly you did not actually check the way spell slots gains progress before saying that. Just for something to compare to & since you mentioned them,

Spoiler: here's how they used to scale

View attachment 137081
From eyballing page 43 of the 2e phb where wizard spell slot progression is listed it looks the same.

That doesn't mean that is some gold standard or anything, but it shows sme important differences. Before getting into the 5e version, notice how all levels but 9th pretty much scale 1 2 2 3 3 3 444444 once that level slot is obtained?... that's the important difference

Spoiler: "the 5e spell slot gain progression

View attachment 137083

Right out of the gate things start slowing with second level spells capping at 3 rather than 4slots. Then with 5th level slots rather than 2 levels with 2x of that slot it slows to nine of them before jumping to 3 at level 19. Finally 6h 7th 8h & 9th level slots effectively or literally never go past 1 slot. The dominating "power" people are claiming exists could exist if spell slot gains were not strangled in the crib with those high level slots... but that's not the game we have & fixing it could be difficult. This all translates to a massive reduction in spell slots ranging from 1 less at level 9 to 11 less at level 20.

Meanwhile magic weapons that were once created to balance out LFQW are still going into the hands of martial characters . With such a reduction placed alongside the removal of -5/-10/-15/etc on second/third/etc attacks you'd expect spells to be notably more powerful, but the inverse is true with those spells generally being weaker in almost every meaningful way they could be

My point is the power of some lower level spells wane compared to your enemies. A 1st level level 1 magic missile isn't going to be a huge help to a 13th level Mage. This offers freedom in high level mages to take obscure stronger niche spells.

 

[Stalker0]

I will also say, though I am on the side that says "casters can be dominant at times"....I think people really do need to reduce the spell levels they are referencing. Again, standard games just don't adventure at the highest levels...WOTC research reconfirms that again and again. For the vast majority of people, high level play is only something they've heard about, but never really experienced. Its the equivalent of debating the balance of the epic boons in DMG....a fun exercise but doesn't impact many groups.

6th level spells I think are the absolute highest we should be considering in reasonable discussion. That's 11th level, which is according to the research is the apex of the vast majority of campaigns.

 

[Dausuul]

But I feel the general opinion is that martial characters cannot be given any benefit of the doubt without it being a feature in their statblock. So any sort of rewards are brushed aside as something the DM gave away out of pity or obligation.

But when it comes to casters, they're owed their components, regardless of how a DM might feel about an encounter.

You've seen some of the post replies. Giving these components away really would have trivialized the encounter end-point. And its somehow acceptable to allow that and if a DM is unsatisfied, its the system. But a Fighter with a Vorpal Sword that instantly kills them on Round 1 is brushed off as the DM's fault that they would lend a powerful ability-enabler into the hands of a fighter.

You're drawing absurd equivalences between legendary magic items and mundane gemstones. If the fighter can find an armorsmith and buy 1,500 gp worth of plate armor, the wizard can find a jeweler and buy 1,500 gp worth of rubies.

And by the way, if no one has any magic items at all, how is the fighter coping with the near-universal resistance to nonmagical weapon damage at this level?

 

[tetrasodium]

@Stalker0 most of my campaigns run into the low to mid teens, well into the point 5e goes LWQF & it's very much not a simple thing to correct without doing things like denying martials cool toys rebuilding the magic system for wotc, or introducing screw the fighter monster after screw the fighter monster in a transparent fashion. Because WotC is still full throttle on trying to fight the sins of 2e/3e I even look like a lunatic if I bring it up at the table or like I;m playing favorites with the casters.

My point is the power of some lower level spells wane compared to your enemies. A 1st level level 1 magic missile isn't going to be a huge help to a 13th level Mage. This offers freedom in high level mages to take obscure stronger niche spells.

It's not so simple though. Sure they could load up on knock or whatever, but a prep slot is a prepslot, it's not prep by spell slot anymore & at higher levels casters have a whole lot fewer prep slots(1 -11 fewer). The caster still needs to function in a fight & one 5th/6th level slot for the entire day won't cut it there. Even if the wizard has those spells in their spellbook to prepare they aren't usually needed very often & even when they might be useful it's usually not a big hurle for someone else in the group to handle it

The whole thing ties back to your earlier point about trying to avoid having as many scrolls as 3.x by not providing any guidance beyond xge135 where a 1-4 fighter with a +1 greataxe & +1 platemail is totally the same as a wizard with a single use scroll of fireball & scroll of dispel magic.

addressing the problems of past editions is great & all, but there comes a point where it's gone past addressing them & moves deep into creating new ones. There are so many places they have done something to address a 3.x problem that it's leagues beyond solving it.

 

[FrozenNorth]

What does 'gaming time' have to do with long rests? There is no rule in the DMG that says people get a long rest at the end of a session

There isn’t. But (for instance) travelling 1 week from a city to a different city, you may have several one-encounter days. You definitely aren’t going to have 10-encounter days getting from Waterdeep to Bryn Shandar or your players are going to get impatient.

Likewise on a single day in the city. The DM might through in a combat or other encounter to spice things up, but they aren’t going to throw in 6 encounters without slowing everything down to a crawl.

Name those spells.

Invisibility, polymorph, dimension door, skill empowerment, spider climb, find the path, pass without a trace, glibness, fabricate, tongues, comprehend languages etc.

I mean pretty much every spell that can be cast out of combat allows a spellcaster to contribute outside of combat.

And explain how they're both more useful than say a Rogue with reliable talent and expertise in Persuasion and Insight, even before you get to the problem casting a spell in front of the King, an important NPC or any other social encounter might cause.

There are definitely some social encounters you could try to sway by using enchantment magic (and if you are a subtle sorcerer, you don’t even need to worry about the social ramifications of doing so), but there is a much wider array of both social and non-social non-combat encounters that can be resolved by magic, often exclusively so.

For instance, a character or NPC that fails their save against mummy rot.

But those abilities to shine out of combat generally use the same resources used to shine in combat. If you want to Charm an NPC, Teleport to the Dungeon, and Fly up a wall, you're burning resources that are needed in the combat encounters for that day.

Riding a horse, using Persuasion and climbing a rope are all just as effective and dont use resources at all.

That depends. At higher levels, spellcasters have so many resources (and many low level spells continue to be useful at higher levels), that burning resources is not a concern. Not forgetting that a lot of useful out of combat spells are rituals and therefore do not burn resources.

At low- and mid- level, you have a point. Of course, spellcasters get to choose where they get to be effective (which isn’t the case for non-spellcasters), and even if they choose to be effective outside of combat, they still remain reason effective in combat, due to cantrips.

That's not my reading of the downtime rules.

Many of the most effective things spellcasters can accomplish during downtime are not mentioned in the downtime rules.

If a DM wants to implement stupid houserules to punish martials, and not police the AD, then of course they're gonna suck.

I think you are overestimating how easy it is to police the adventuring day, particularly if you are aiming for a default of 6 encounters, 2 short rests.

The point that I always come back to is that this is extra work for the DM.

I absolutely take great pains to ensure that spellcasters don’t overshadow martials, including liberal use of doom clocks. But it is extra thankless work.

And guess what, in large parties, with lots of casters, 6 encounters isn’t enough, since each caster can take time to shine, leaving non-casters with very little opportunity to distinguish thrmselves.

Only if he lets it happen. If the PC wizard exists, then those spells are known and countered for. Enemy troops have a wizard of their own for example, and soldiers know to wake up comrades affected by the spell.

Works less well for the many fantastic monsters the DM may want to use.

Again; this is the fault of the DM - not a fault of the rules.

I think it is an easy out to blame the DM for not doing extra work to restrict casters by having enemies counter spells and adding additional encounters.

I think that even having the balance point for classes be 4 encounters with 1 short rest would greatly diminish the complaints of martial-caster disparity.

 

[Stalker0]

@Stalker0 most of my campaigns run into the low to mid teens

Happy that you make more use of the system than most, but if we are going to debate those levels, we need to reframe the discussion.

If people think casters or martials are dominating "only" at 13-20th level.... ok that's fine to debate....but we need to respect the fact that for the vast majority of people, if things are balanced at 1-12th.....then they are balanced. At that point, a debate on the high levels is not debating the airplane, your debating the paint color choice on the end of its wing.

And if we think casters or martials dominate at lower levels than that....then debating the high levels just dilutes the argument. Better to argue the levels that impacts most people and make the case there one way or the other.