D&D 5E Spellcasters and Balance in 5e: A Poll

[ECMO3]

When a Bard boosts CHA s/he boosts her core performance (ie casting).

Right. So you dump STR and CON.

Yes, because that is the kind of character I want to play.

I don't know if @Minigiant or any other poster agrees, but to mind the quintessential battle captain - say, Faramir - is capable in melee. In D&D that means STR and CON can't easily be dumped while retaining that capability. (I guess some battle captains might be high-DEX musketeer types, but clearly that's not Faramir or Eomer or Richard the Lionheart or Jeanne D'Arc or a range of other exemplars a player might draw inspiration from.)

My character with an 8 strength and 15 int and 14 charisma is capable in melee. Better at ranged, but still good enough in melee.

Constitution is overated IMO and does not give you many more hps anyway.

Richard was a crussader and is the archetype for a Paladin which uses charisma as a core ability.

The basic framework of the D&D ability scores probably isn't going to be changed at this point. But it's trivial to change other parts of the game to better fit with them. Allowing a battle captain to use INT or CHA to support combat in some fashion - yet to be fully specified, but obviously some options are being canvassed in this thread - reduces the pressure to ignore those stats in order to ensure viability at the character's key role.

They can support combat with INT and CHA already. Any character can do this, regardless of class.

Unless your role is a spell caster, the characters "key role" is for the most part determined by the player, not by the class. If you want to play Faramir then invest in Charisma.

The logic of using STR for Intimidation is that - in the genre, and perhaps in real life too - Fafhrd is more intimidating than The Grey Mouser. And the way to achieve this in D&D, given the stat framework as it currently stands, is to allow the use of STR for Intimidation.

I think that is absolutely not true in real life and makes little sense in d&d world when you can have a 3 foot tall halfling woman deal 100 damage in melee.

I have seen plenty of "dumb jocks" in real life that are muscle bound and not intimidating at all and then other people like gang members, thugs and anyone with a gun that are small and very intimidating. I think being strong may play into it, but it is your ability to use that and leverage that during interaction and that is charisma. A muscle-bound buffon will not intimidate many people, while the mild mannered cold blooded killer will.

If you want strength(intimidation) the rules are there but in my games it is always charisma and the specific threat you use sets the DC. My fighter above with an 8 strength would have a high DC if she threatened to bash your skull in, but would probably have a lower DC if she cast minor illusion and showed the guy a picture of his house burning down with his wife in it. Either way she would use her 14 charisma.

Real in game example - she is a 5 foot tall teifling and we were interogating a prisoner. I used minor illusion make my face show a devilish visage and put glowing circles in front of my eyes. I told him I was putting a curse on him and if he lied he would be dragged to hell. Another character helped by casting prestigitation and making it hotter around him. I rolled an intimidation against a DC 10 with advantage. If I had threatened physical harm if he lied to us it would have been a much harder check. If the Barbarian (whos is strong) had threatened physical harm it would have been a lower DC than me threatening bodily harm, but probably not as low as I got it without some creativity on his part and then if he did not have the charisma he would not get the bonus.

In the fiction, you could suppose that barbarians and fighters, being the toughest warriors, present the most fearsom demeanours.

Spellcasting and race aside I would think assassins would present the most fearsome demeanors as their art is killing people.

 

[Maxperson]

Huh. My marvel handbook says doctor strange has unearthly (100) sorcery. U must have a misprint

FASERIP!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've been advocating for tight, 2-page classes for years now, so I'm totally onboard. I think it's easily doable for a 10 level class that doesn't have subclasses.

How would this interface with the pages and pages and pages of spells? Keep in mind that 5e literally has more pages dedicated to spell text (79) than it has to character classes (76)--and that's counting all the splash art in the latter as pages of "text." If you condensed it down, it'd be closer to about 70 pages of spell text and less than 60 pages of classes, since every class has at least a half-page splash art in it.

I would disagree with that. I think you could do it pretty easy with homebrew subclass and homebrew feats.

My experience says otherwise. Between Extra Attack (2, then 3), Action Surge, and Second Wind, the Fighter is too innately good at boosting its own capacity to break things and not get broken in the process. Subclasses aren't allowed to remove features of the underlying class, so you can never reduce these inherent "I make myself better" components. The only way to make a "Warlord Fighter" is thus to make either:
alternative uses of these features that are so much better than using them on yourself that you regularly go with the alternate use....which is going to be super overpowered, or
new features that blow those things out of the water in terms of ally-support capability, meaning you're now a powerhouse of support AND offense at the same time

And this is exactly where almost every thread on this subject has gone in the past, by the way. We argue for making an actual Warlord class; we get shouted down by others who say it should be totally possible to create a Warlord subclass for Fighter. We then start saying what we want a Warlord character (regardless of implementation) to be able to achieve, and are shouted down again, being told that we either want something ridiculously overpowered, or we merely want an absolutely perfect copy of the 4e Warlord with no changes whatsoever.

It gets incredibly tedious having these debates because it has so consistently followed this formula.

Edit: And it's worth noting...I wrote the above without reading any of the last like 10 pages of the thread (anything after this specific post I quoted). So the fact that you have a post on this very page telling someone "the thing you want is SUPER overpowered!" is not an encouraging sign for this debate being any different from any of those that came before it.

 

[pemerton]

It my opinion it sits a bit oddly with the intended function of the rules - in which what abilities score govern is supposed to be fixed and it's proficiency's that are supposed to be flexible and somewhat nebulous.

In other words, based on the design, a Barbarian waving his gore spattered axe around should by the logic of the rules be rolling Cha(Axe proficiency) rather than Str(Intimidate)

I was curious about this aspect of it when I made my posts.

 

[pemerton]

Richard was a crussader and is the archetype for a Paladin which uses charisma as a core ability.

I've never heard of miracles being attributed to Richard.

They can support combat with INT and CHA already. Any character can do this, regardless of class.

Unless your role is a spell caster, the characters "key role" is for the most part determined by the player, not by the class.

The final quoted sentence is not plausible.

I don't know what you have in mind with the first sentence.

And the second sentence basically makes the case for having a distinct class, doesn't it?

 

[Don Durito]

Richard was a crussader and is the archetype for a Paladin which uses charisma as a core ability.

Hmmm...well I guess Paladin's don't have to be Lawful Good any more.

Oath of Conquest maybe.

 

[Aldarc]

We should really do that with magic.

Just give the wizard the class feature: "has magic". Think about how much space we could save in the rule book! Then the wizard player can just constantly be asking the GM whether he can use his magic in this situation.

That's the amazing thing about this model. It makes magic truly magical when you don't know if it will work or not in a given moment.

 

[pemerton]

That's the amazing thing about this model. It makes magic truly magical when you don't know if it will work or not in a given moment.

It's actually not a bad system. A bit different from trad D&D, though.

 

[Aldarc]

It's actually not a bad system. A bit different from trad D&D, though.

I don't doubt that. My glib comment was more me enjoying a certain satisfaction of imagining this transpire in the sphere of D&D's traditional GMing authority and the inevitable heartattacks of many wizard players as they discover how frustratingly "mother may I" the game would be.

 

[Minigiant]

The core issues is as the editions marched on, Ability Scores became more and more important.

And a class based on STR/DEX/CON won't have many options for out of combat play and will need to be balanced by being dominant in combat