D&D 5E Is Tasha's Broken?

[Maxperson]

In my experience it's not like most players think 'I'd like to be an elf barbarian' and then reject it. I know I usually either start with a race or a class in mind. Then I consider my options from there. There are so many race and class combinations where the stats align you can almost always find something that would be fun to roleplay. It's not even that the filtering even happens on a conscious level. It's just player psychology.

I don't actually mind the systems that were in place before Tasha's. I just understand the psychology of it. People naturally respond to incentives. You can lament that people think and process this stuff the way they do, accept the results as is, or change systems to account for it. I'm pretty much fine with either of the last two. Trying to fight against basic player psychology almost never works.

People were also trained to think +s are necessary, because in 3e and 4e they were. Unbounded armor classes meant that you needed those extra +s just to hit some things or to avoid whiffing 9 times out of 10, which is unfun. It's hard to get out of that mindset and realize that there's very little difference between hitting 11 times out of 20 attacks and hitting 12 times out of 20 attacks.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No clue... never played 4E, or even seen it.

From what I have heard of it, I don't think I would have liked it because, and perhaps because it was so balanced, it sounded too structured.

Well, obviously it's hard to communicate a game experience without playing it, but I found it far less "structured" than its critics claimed, even within the combat rules. E.g. the "roles" that people howled about so much aren't "you MUST ONLY play X," but rather "you will be good at X, but you can learn to do other things too."

From my perspective, 4e was actually very good about "getting out of the way" specifically for the flavor and roleplay elements of the game. More or less, the rules stay in their corner (adjudicating skill checks/challenges and combat things), and say, "You know best what the fiction should be, so we keep a light touch there."

 

[Minigiant]

The percentage isn't really all that relevant.

It's 20-30% increase in damage.

If 20-30& increase isn't relevent then half the classes are relevent and we all are falling for in the illusion of choice.

 

[Maxperson]

It's 20-30% increase in damage.

It's one extra hit over 2-5 fights and a piddly 11 damage spread out of the same period of time. It's negligible.

If 20-30& increase isn't relevent then half the classes are relevent and we all are falling for in the illusion of choice.

My mother worries over a 20% increase in the chances of a heart attack. Never mind that the chances are still hundreds or thousands to 1 against. A 20-30% increase of a small number is insignificant.

 

[d24454_modern]

I think one of the biggest issues and losses of 5e is classes not benefiting from every ability score in significant ways.

If a fighter could use INT to feint or a wizard use STR to increase touch to hit with spells...

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, 4e was an extremely well-balanced game, to the point that its detractors explicitly cast it as TOO balanced, treating balance as practically a four letter word. It got more acorn than the modern hate for "white room" arguments. The XP Budget system worked very well, skill challenges were rough to start but we're fixed up pretty well (especially if you used some of the fan advice on how to run them better), and the worst excesses of its "imbalance" usually meant either inappropriate amounts of healing or dealing like, twice as much damage as a normal character would. That's about it. Oh, or on the monster side, things like trying to run a dracolich at first level or the unfortunate collection of features on the needlefang drake.

So...no, it's not at all impossible to do. People are just rather attached to magic being broken and Fighters being kept in their ghetto.

I'm cool with fighters getting out of the ghetto. Level Up did it quite well, imo.

I do still kinda want magic to be broken though, to be honest.

 

[Fenris-77]

Wow. 17 pages is a lot. Anyone feel like summing up the key issues? Other than the stats argument above?

About the issue above specifically, I really don't get how one extra hit over multiple fights equates to 20% more damage (or anything close). So, um, what?!

 

[Minigiant]

It's one extra hit over 2-5 fights and a piddly 11 damage spread out of the same period of time. It's negligible.

If it's 11 damage, it's 11 of your 66 damage for the day. Without it, your damage goes down to 55.
The damage bonus is not from just the extra hit but the boosted damage on every hit* for the day.

It's not trivial but it's also not the biggest deal.
The problem is that if you choose to not get the +2 or +1 to yor primary ability score from race, you are usually not conpensated by the race choice and you could quantify approximately of what you lost.

Because if the +1 to STR on the fighter is trivual, the +1 to CHA on the fighter is even more trivial. Bsse 5th edition is so simple, you know you are getting ripped off by taking a nonmatching race. There's no hiding it.

And a lot of the new fans brought in 5th edition are gamers. So they figure out that about how much weaker a race/class combo is fast.

So the only options where race errata or floating racial ASI.

*for warriors and experts. Not so much for casters. Which causes a problem as warriors and experts as they end to need high stats to stay ahead of caster's at skills and combat until Tier 2.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Wow. 17 pages is a lot. Anyone feel like summing up the key issues? Other than the stats argument above?

About the issue above specifically, I really don't get how one extra hit over multiple fights equates to 20% more damage (or anything close). So, um, what?!

You can pretty safely ignore any post with numbers in them.

In every thread, really.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Wow. 17 pages is a lot. Anyone feel like summing up the key issues? Other than the stats argument above?

Some people think that the book has too much powercreep. Some people think that (outside of a few outliers) the book only gave "powercreep" to the classes/subclasses that needed it (Monks, Rangers, Sorcerers).

Some people think that Tasha's changes to racial ASIs are terrible and will destroy D&D's races and think that the only people that like them are munchkins/optimizers/powergamers. Some people like Tasha's changes to racial ASIs and have been using them in their games. Others don't personally like them but are okay with them existing.

Some people think that Twilight Clerics (and possibly Peace Domain) are game-breakingly overpowered and singlehandedly doom the balance of the overall book. Others think that the Twilight/Peace Domain Clerics aren't overpowered at all. Others think that they are overpowered while believing that one/two subclasses alone don't damn a book to being labeled "broken". Some think that the Twilight Domain is combining too many subclass ideas into one and that the basic concept of the subclass is bad and never should have been published.

Some people think that the magic items and feats in the book are more powerful than they should have been and significantly boost the power of PCs in ways that previous magic items generally didn't do. Others think the feats are on par with many PHB feats. Some think that the balance of magic items doesn't matter because it isn't baked into the underlying math of the game anyways so they can't break your game unless you were already "breaking" it.

Lots of people are debating whether or not wanting a higher number in your main ability score because of the race you chose makes you a powergamer/optimizer, where that threshold between lies, and whether or not any of this matters.

That's about it, from what I've read. There might be a few smaller tangents throughout the thread, but these seem to be the main ones.