D&D 5E What is balance to you, and why do you care (or don't)?

[Lanefan]

Look at bards/wizards/paladins, then tell me that adding more fighter or monk capability would be an arms race. Boosting the bottom tiers isnt powercreep.

As I've already pointed out, yes it is: when put in terms of the power level of the party as a whole, boosting the bottom tiers also boosts the overall average power level of the party. That's power creep, even if not every character gets to share in it.

 

[jmartkdr2]

This is a very good point. The question then becomes, should that opportunity to contribute exist all the time, or wax and wane as different phases of the game (exploration, combat, social, etc.) occur?

Obviously you gotta wait your turn.

I, for one, don't like it when there are entire encounters where a player can't do much. Those should be rare - which means in a game with a lot of combat, the inability to add something to combat is a flaw to be addressed. If the game has a lot of investigations, it's best if everyone can participate in those as well.

Pure balance advocates sometimes come across as saying everyone should ideally be able to contribute equally all the time, no matter what's going on in the game.

Any absolute stance is going to be a problem.

To that I say hogwash. As long as the overall total ability to contribute ends up vaguely equal, I see no problem with that opportunity coming in batches: combat characters contribute most in combat, sneaky characters contribute most in scouting and intrigue, social characters contribute most in roleplay moments, and so forth. But note that I specifically say contribute most, not contribute only; characters of different types can IME always find a way to contribute if their players wants them to.

There's a limit on the other end - if I have to play for a whole year before my first opportunity to do something cool, that's bad, and on either the game design or the dm. If I'm antsy after 30 minutes, that's on me.

I'd prefer to read this as "contribute to the game". Oftentimes IME the actions of one or more non-team-player characters provide the best moments of the session! They might not be doing much for the team but they're sure as hell contributing to the game, and that's what matters.

I tend to think of dnd as a team game, so contributions to the game that work against the team are basically impossible.

 

[Maxperson]

So a lot of discussions about the game come down to balance. Is it a goal? Should it not be a goal? I really hope this doesn't bog down in arguments, as all I want is opinions. I have my own feelings on the topic, which often clash with those of others. Every gamer is different and has differing desires for a game system.

I marked this as a 5e discussion since there are rumblings of changes in the game's future, but obviously, this topic is applicable to any game or gaming experience. I'll start with my personal view.

Let's compare game design to music. In the studio, bands can spend long hours, weeks, months even, searching for that elusive quality- perfection. You have a group of creative people, working together, but trying to push their vision to the forefront. The result is a mishmash of different takes, take a little bit from session A, add in a bit from session B, maybe use that awesome drum solo from session C, and sure, we can keep the xylophone bit to please our producer, but then overdub it to the point it's barely audible on the final track! If you did your job right, you have a classic on your hands.

Otherwise, it's a hot mess.

But live? On stage? It's not about perfection. It's about the moment. Connecting with your audience, and blowing them away with your passion and energy. So you're exhausted from touring. You're all out of tune. So you forgot some of the words (decades later, people will remember the time you quipped "does anybody remember laughter?" in the middle of a song). Your drummer decides this would be the perfect time for a 20 minute solo! It doesn't matter, as long as everyone leaves the auditorium energized.

Thus I feel balance is a goal at the design stage, where everything is white room simulations. Get the game running like a fine tuned machine. But be fully aware that, for the players, it's about the moment when Bob's Rogue jumps on the back of a dragon and stabs it in it's eyes! When a Wild Surge explodes in the face of your Sorceress, but takes out the BBEG (or just turns her into a tween girl). When the Barbarian rolls a 1 when trying to dive off a cliff into icy water, lands in the rocks and vanishes into the brine...only to throw a thumbs up out of the water and say "it's ok, I'm fine!" after taking 50 points of damage.

In these moments, the rules need to be able to fall away, and not interfere with the story.

But balance is important. If one class does a thing better than the other, and doesn't seem to give anything up for that privilege. When one Feat is simply better than another in every way. When two spells of the same level have wildly different strengths. That leads to questions. Is this feature too strong? Broken?

Or is the other too weak? If one player is getting too much "spotlight time", or another has an ability that trivializes challenges (be they combat or otherwise), then we switch from "balance isn't important" to "what the heck is this over/underpowered garbage doing in my game?".

Games have rules to resolve conflicts. Otherwise, it's all cops and robbers. "Bang bang, you're dead!" "No, I have armor!" "I shot you in the head!" "You missed!"

I feel we need to be able to trust these rules to function when they are needed. Not "well we didn't fully balance the game, but you can figure that out". By that same token, you could create a game where the rules work perfectly fine, and we can figure out when we can ignore them, no?

Obviously, comparing apples and oranges is impossible. We know that Fighters are supposed to be strong in combat. We know that Rogues have many more out of combat options than Fighters. So obviously, no one expects Rogues to be able to fight like Fighters. But at the same time, we don't want to get into a fight and have a Rogue stand around and plink things with arrows and try not to die! Perhaps like me, you saw way too much of that in the murky past, when Rogues were called something that started with a "T".

But the reverse is true. We don't want Fighters scratching their heads and looking dumb when the game shifts to "so we need to infiltrate the Slaver's fortress". We need a game that says "no Rogue? no problem!"

And yet...when we give ways for other classes to succeed at these tasks, we run the risk of trivializing the Rogue. Stealth mission? "Hey I can cast Pass Without Trace! or Invisibility!". Sure, those are limited resources, but it doesn't matter if, that one time the Rogue was like "alright! time for me to shine!" and another character, who already has had times to shine, comes in and steals their thunder.

A lot of this falls upon the DM/GM/ST/Judge/Referee to balance. To create scenarios where that shouldn't happen. Or hand out nerfs to abilities that are working too well/buff abilities that aren't working well enough.

The question I always have when this occurs is "did it have to be this way? Did the developer of the game think to themselves 'say, this is a really good option? too conservative?'. Or were they just tasked with creating 30 new spells to round out a new product for sale?".

And that's why I think balance is an important goal. Otherwise, you could just as easily create your own game (such as the version of D&D under construction on these very forums).

Balance to me is for the PCs to be in the same ballpark in terms of affecting the story/game. I don't care much if the mechanics are balanced.

 

[Campbell]

Here's what I care about in class design:

1. Skill cap versus skill floor - It's important to me that regardless of the class I play that I can distinguish myself and that there is a real cost for poor play. I want "man can that person play a fighter" to be a thing in the same way "man can that person play a wizard" is.
2. Having the ability to pull out play of the game type moments. It's important to me that I can have those decisive moments where everyone looks at what I am contributing to the team and goes "if you did not pull that off, I'm not sure we would have pulled through".

Neither needs to be based on limited resources. It can be based off of execution in the moment as well, but it's important to me that the player of the fighter does not get to shine just because the wizard is on their break.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not a strawman. You literally seem to want every class to have some feature or other special rule they can use for their benefit in basically any situation. In any situation everyone will have a fancy bespoke tool to use. That is wanting them to be 'good at everything'.

Nope. Not what I said, not even a vaguely charitable reading thereof. Having something meaningful to contribute to combat does not mean "literally all combats, you WILL be a star." Having something meaningful to contribute to socialization does not mean a "special rule" for literally all possible social contexts and it is ridiculous to assert that that is what is being said.

Combat, exploration, and socialization are not "everything," and "having something meaningful to contribute" is not the same as being "good" at it. The fact that you, again, have enforced a false dichotomy of "literally incapable beyond absolute rock bottom baseline" and superlative skill is an error. There are many, many more possibilities on a spectrum between the two.

Also, why would we even have skills and ability scores if they're never good enough to be used for anything?

Because having at least one meaningful contribution is in no way a guarantee that it works in absolutely all possible conditions and states of affairs? Huh, imagine that, it is almost like I'm not calling for absolute universal perfection, but rather clear and at least somewhat defined areas of competence. Which is a far less dramatic request than "good at everything" and far harder to knock down...almost as though my position were being characterized in a extremist and illogical manner so it could be dismissed without actually engaging with it....

As I've already pointed out, yes it is: when put in terms of the power level of the party as a whole, boosting the bottom tiers also boosts the overall average power level of the party. That's power creep, even if not every character gets to share in it.

Then power creep cannot possibly be a universal evil. If you intend to define the phrase this way, you're going to have to accept that some of the time, power creep is a straight-up good thing. Because, for example, 5e is an increase in Fighter and Monk power relative to 3e. By definition, if you think 5e does better at full-caster vs non-caster balance, you are in favor of at least some amount of power creep. Importantly, this means calling it "power creep" is no longer a slam-dunk "that's as many as four tens" argument; you will have to explain why THIS power creep is bad while 5e's other, baseline forms of power creep were not.

If your party is in a city where magic and-or its use is banned then your Wizard becomes an ordinary person (or an outlaw, your choice ). If your party is engaged in a mass melee then your Rogue becomes little better than an ordinary person. If you're trying to sneak somewhere then your tank Warrior-types become ordinary people.

As others noted upthread, casters being denied in this way gets players bloody rioting. Do it to a Fighter and that's par for the course. You present as symmetrical a situation that is fundamentally not and the fact that you refuse to see the asymmetry is part of the problem.

That said? Your example of sneaking is exactly on point. Yes, that is the kind of thing where a Fighter (that has not chosen to invest any resources into it) SHOULD find herself with few options, and possibly nothing more than the baseline. Because "exploration" means a lot of things, and stealth is only one small but often salient component thereof. The un-stealthy plate-wearing Fighter may be forced to doff her armor, putting her in greater danger in order to lay low. Or she may try to leverage her eagle eyes to be overwatch for her more stealth inclined teammates, at the cost of being unable to directly assist should an area of her greater expertise (like combat and surviving within it) suddenly become relevant. Or she may need to rely on her teammates, like the covert-ops Warlord who can guide her through some basic exercises he knows to get ready for something like this, or the Wizard casting a muffle spell on her to ameliorate her weak ability to conceal herself (but in so doing, committing some or all of their concentration to it, making further choices tougher). Conversely, these choices may be useful in that the Fighter's mighty thews and indefatigable back may be incredibly useful for getting past blocked paths (DW's Bend Bars, Lift Gates), an example of a well-defined contributiom to exploration (and sometimes yes, even specifically stealth challenges) that IS NOT omnicompetence in all possible exploration challenges.

Noe of this means those characters can't contribute anything. They're just mechanically limited for a while.

Not all contributions have to be backed by game mechanics in order to be relevant.

I tire of Fighters and Rogues etc. being separate but equal. It has a long, long track record of being continuously unsatisfactory for the non-casters and always taken over the variable strident objections of casters. You know, the ones who actually have to give up some amount of power to those denied it. Funny how that happens.

D&D characters are to me just ordinary people in the setting who have some cool abilities tacked on; and at times when those cool abilities aren't useful they are - and can always act as - the same ordinary people they always were.

Unless, of course, they're Wizards, Druids, Clerics, or Bards. Then they're magical superbeings adventuring alongside horse jockeys.

And you're always, ALWAYS better off making sure Angel Summoner is well rested and ready for action. People rarely, if ever, say, "man, I know our Wizard and Cleric are totally out of spells and can't do anything but cantrips, but thankfully we brought a Fighter so we can keep going even without that!" That's another facet of the asymmetry.

My namesake character is a 10th-level Fighter who can bring some hard-core badass to any party he joins, but when fighting isn't appropriate I still find ways for him to contribute just by speaking or acting as himself the person rather than himself the Fighter.

Cool.

Question: Assume your character was, instead, a badass Paladin. Same (or as close as possible) personal story arc. (Perhaps a devotee of a more athletic, Strength-based dudebro deity like Kord.) What would change about your statement above? Does being a Paladin somehow impede or restrict your ability to "find ways for him to contribute just by speaking or acting as himself the person rather than himself the [Paladin]"?

Because unless you are asserting that being a Paladin (or hell, even a friggin' Barbarian, with the right subclass anyway, looking at you Totem Warrior) actually PREVENTS you from "finding ways...to contribute just by speaking and acting as...[oneself] the person," you would seem to be admitting that you are relying on stuff literally anyone (as a player) could do with literally any character, making the choice to be Fighter superfluous.

It ain't rocket science, and it doesn't need game-mechanical support.

The sustained dissatisfaction from a significant chunk of the audience seems to belie this assertion. Because isn't it curious how it's always the ones upset about the gap being told to suck it up, and always the ones totally cool with the current state of affairs that get to decide who gets what?

I should also point out that sometimes the best contribution a character can make to an in-game scene or situation is to Do Nothing and Stay Quiet. I hit this the other night: our party are engaged in some intricate spying and info-gathering in an off-world city. My PC has been invisible the entire time and nobody outside the party knows she's even there, allowing her to better act as a spy and scout; so when we got into a bunch of negotiations last session my entire contribution was to sit quietly unseen in a corner the whole time with my (un-needed, as it turned out) lie-detection device on high alert.

And yet you were contributing, because you had been given DM favoritism via a magic item that (surprise, surprise) replicates a low-level but useful spell. Had your little lie detector gone off, would you still have Done Nothing And Stayed Quiet? I am more than a little skeptical about that.

 

[Li Shenron]

The problem here is that, by definition, all of the pillars are vital to play. That's literally why we call them pillars, as in, they are the foundation of the play experience. If they're supposed to be pillars, everyone is supposed to be able to meaningfully participate. Otherwise they're something else.

They are something else, in fact. None of the pillar is "vital" to every gaming group. Some groups don't like a pillar or two and gloss over it/them.

However, it is actually a group which decides to focus on a single pillar that eventually needs everyone effective in that pillar. If another group dedicates attention to all pillars, it can afford to have players more invested in a pillar and less in another.

That said, don't think that pillars are a science. WotC designers discussed about a model and decided to settle on 3 pillars but the game is MORE than those.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not directly, perhaps, but their indirect way of nerfing them is - and for a while has been - to make the spells themselves less effective and-or useful.

Sadly, this is probably the most boring route they could have taken, but whatever.

....and now you contradict yourself. You claim to want to bring the casters down to a 7. And then you call bringing the casters down to a 7 "the most boring route they could have taken."

You cannot have it both ways. Either magic gets more restricted or it doesn't, and casters remain at a 9, which you seem to oppose. Pick one. Unlike many of the other dichotomies here, this actually IS a real one. You can't drop the power level of magic without dropping the power level of magic. And making magic dangerous or unreliable, the only other real tool in that toolbox, would be dramatically more than just going from 9 to 7. (It's the "accuracy chance" problem from computer games, particularly ones like X-COM that tell you your chance numbers. Dropping from 100% to 90% is not a 10% effectiveness reduction, it's significantly greater in terms of how people think about it. You'll notice those few misses and they will impact a hell of a lot harder than a 10% reduction in your appreciation of the tool/option.) Going from "magic just works" to "magic is risky," even if the risk is very low, is a huge reduction in utility because of how risk-averse we are. A 0.1% chance of accidentally fireballing your teammates is, for many, many people, a 100% chance of it eventually happening (which, while not technically true, is also not entirely an unwarranted analysis either). There's a reason wild magic generally has a bad rap even though it's been mostly defanged in 5e.

So. What would you have had them do?

 

[Scribe]

Magic users should be more restricted, Bards shouldn't be full Casters, resting shouldn't be as easy, and without spells, full casters should be very weak in any combat scenario.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They are something else, in fact. None of the pillar is "vital" to every gaming group. Some groups don't like a pillar or two and gloss over it/them.

But they have been designed as vital parts of the game. If a group chooses to ignore one or more, that is their prerogative.

We don't design cars for the people who never drive them other than in school zones. We design them for all the functions they are likely to fulfill and for the safety concerns of the dangerous things that can happen, not the risk-free things that can happen.

However, it is actually a group which decides to focus on a single pillar that eventually needs everyone effective in that pillar. If another group dedicates attention to all pillars, it can afford to have players more invested in a pillar and less in another.

Does this not mean that the game should offer every class resources for every pillar? The designers cannot know which pillar(s) any given group might wish to focus on. They can, however, know that SOME groups WILL focus on any single pillar....because that's the whole point of it BEING one, it is a thing one can choose to focus upon. So, if you know that SOME people definitely, unequivocally WILL focus on each pillar...why wouldn't you design the game to support that?

That said, don't think that pillars are a science. WotC designers discussed about a model and decided to settle on 3 pillars but the game is MORE than those.

They aren't, and I never said they were. Indeed, it is my critics who have suggested the opposite, e.g. @Crimson Longinus saying that I must want characters to be "good at everything" because I want them to be a least "more than rock bottom competent" in the pillars. Because the only way to be "good at everything" if one has more than absolute minimum competence in the pillars is if the pillars are in fact all things...

 

[Li Shenron]

The sustained dissatisfaction from a significant chunk of the audience seems to belie this assertion.

I would REALLY like to see how these people play their games. Because I played D&D since almost 30 years across several editions and had encountered people with dissatisfaction about specific rules or specific adventures, but never a "sustained" dissatisfaction.

My personal opinion is that if someone has a "sustained" dissatisfaction maybe they just don't like this game. They want to like it because they find the idea interesting, but rather than tormenting themselves with eternal dissatisfaction, they should check out other games.

Or, maybe their real sustained dissatisfaction is that they aren't really playing the game as much as they want, they have way too much time thinking about it instead of playing, and are blaming it on the game.