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

[Maxperson]

Barely - Superman is a 15, Batman is a 12. Those are close enough to be in the same combat, and close enough that Batman could beat Superman in an unfair fight.

Batman and Supergirl are at the same PL.

No. Batman only has a chance because plot coupon. In a real fight Batman dies before he even knows he's in a fight. Superman is A) that fast, B) that strong, and C) can kill him from miles away if he really wanted to.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

Good luck. The designers themselves don't want that world. They haven't wanted it for over 20 years. I would argue they haven't wanted it since at least 2nd edition.

You are asking for a thing that D&D, as made by the people who make it, and as sought out by an extremely influential and demonstrably successful vocal minority, has not been and is not likely to ever be.

One option is, of course, to sustain the call for these features despite the vocal pro-caster minority and (likely subconscious) pro-caster bias among the designers. This strategy has thus far failed to produce any headway at all, except during 4e, and that was because someone actively trying to reduce the power of spellcasters was at the helm and constantly fighting a rearguard action against persistent backslide. The only major new limit on caster power in the past 40 years (as opposed to the steady removal of such limits) has been in the form of Concentration, and even that isn't as significant as it could (or, IMO, should) be.

The other option is to accept that we will never put this genie back in the bottle. Powerful casters are here to stay, and the designers simply do not want to take that away. We can then either shrug and say "well, guess it just sucks to not be a full caster," or we can work to bring up the power level of non-casters yet further and to extend (to what limited extent we can) the limitations on caster power and flexibility, especially in the domain of setting the expectations of when and how often the party takes a break.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.


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?


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...

You really should play Level Up. Every class has options in all three pillars.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

Well, I was one of those people during 3e. I genuinely thought the game was for me, but that it just had a few wrinkles. That it had a great overall balance concept and just struggled with particulars, so if I just kept working on it, if I talked with my DMs enough, if I could just find the right house rule or homebrew class tweaks or alternate class features, then the game would be excellent and I could just relax and play as I liked.

Something like eight or nine years of doing that simply, straight-up failed. The dissatisfaction never went away. I was always struggling, and as I now know, it was because I legit did not see the gap between what I thought I wanted and what I actually wanted. A gap that none of my DMs, nor any of my friends, saw either, because none of us had seen what the alternative was or could be.

You really should play Level Up. Every class has options in all three pillars.

Oh, I'm sure that would be a big help. What I've seen of it looks decent.

The big problem there is that it's not official, and in my experience, 5e DMs are so completely opposed to the use of non-official rules (proposed by players, that is; DM non-official rules are The Best Thing Ever™, natch) that 75% of the time it isn't even worth the time to ask for them, and the remaining 25% of the time they'll say they'll think about it, and may on rare occasions actually do so, but they'll never actually approve it.

I spent six months trying to find any game that wasn't ultra hardcore so I could playtest my homebrew Silver Pyromancer PrC. I had exactly two DMs do more than briefly consider it. None of them actually accepted it, and I was not selected to play in any of their games.

 

[Horwath]

You really should play Level Up. Every class has options in all three pillars.

this. only thing what I'm thinking is axing expertise die mechanics from LU5E, and just having default expertise.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, I was one of those people during 3e. I genuinely thought the game was for me, but that it just had a few wrinkles. That it had a great overall balance concept and just struggled with particulars, so if I just kept working on it, if I talked with my DMs enough, if I could just find the right house rule or homebrew class tweaks or alternate class features, then the game would be excellent and I could just relax and play as I liked.

Something like eight or nine years of doing that simply, straight-up failed. The dissatisfaction never went away. I was always struggling, and as I now know, it was because I legit did not see the gap between what I thought I wanted and what I actually wanted. A gap that none of my DMs, nor any of my friends, saw either, because none of us had seen what the alternative was or could be.


Oh, I'm sure that would be a big help. What I've seen of it looks decent.

The big problem there is that it's not official, and in my experience, 5e DMs are so completely opposed to the use of non-official rules (proposed by players, that is; DM non-official rules are The Best Thing Ever™, natch) that 75% of the time it isn't even worth the time to ask for them, and the remaining 25% of the time they'll say they'll think about it, and may on rare occasions actually do so, but they'll never actually approve it.

I spent six months trying to find any game that wasn't ultra hardcore so I could playtest my homebrew Silver Pyromancer PrC. I had exactly two DMs do more than briefly consider it. None of them actually accepted it, and I was not selected to play in any of their games.

I'm sorry you've had that experience. I feel it's best to use Level Up as the default, and add 5e stuff you want to it. That's my plan. Maybe if people think of 5e as the house rules it'll go down easier.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

This one isn't all that important to me - I don't really care how well people think I can play something, I care more about what the character can do in the fiction...which leads to...

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".

...this, which is the key thing of all key things!

But it's not just having the ability, it's having the willingness. Pulling off play-of-the-game type moments often involves one's character taking on a pretty high degree of risk...and if the dice don't co-operate it can bite you hard (says he, who has lost many a character* via attempting play-of-the-game type actions and failing dismally). So, not for the faint of heart or the risk-averse; and an ongoing pet peeve of mine is that more players don't try as hard for these moments as I do.

* - and class here is almost irrelevant. I can try to fashion play of the game moments with any class of character, given the opportunity.

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.

Having played many a Fighter I can assure you that Fighters can shine pretty bright even when the Wizard is going full blast.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

There's many reasons I didn't adopt 5e when it came out, this is but one.

All three of 3e 4e and 5e are highly overpowered compared to the type of game I want to both play and DM. That said, I still feel it's worth pointing out the risks of additional power creep within an edition.

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]"?

The alignment of said Pally will obviously affect how I draw up his personality in the first place. Lanefan the character is about as far away from Paladinic as you can get, so obviously the personality would be much different, but being a goodly Paladin instead of a rather nasty Fighter wouldn't impose any restrictions on how (or how much) I could and would contribute to a non-fighting situation.

Oen thing that would hella restrict my ability to contribute in these situations would be any sort of vow of silence, meaning that as player I'd never build that feature into a character in the first place.

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.

In some moments my class is superfluous, yes; those being the moments when my class abilities don't have anything to do with the situation at hand. My point is that there's nothing wrong with this! My character's class doesn't have to define everything my character does in the game and-or how he goes about doing it.

Think, for example, of freeform roleplaying your party sitting in the tavern before their first adventure, introducing themselves and getting to know each other. Sure each of you will probably say what class you are and give some examples of what you can do, but will any of you actually do any of it then and there? Of course not. For the purposes of that scene, nobody's class matters in the slightest other than that each character has one to describe to its fellows.

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?

Yes. All I would have been able to do at the time would be to take mental note of who said what as a lie, otherwise I would have blown my cover. Passing any such info along to the other PCs would have had to wait until after the negotiators had left (this was taking place on our party's sailing ship, docked in the city's harbour).

Also, how is the acquisition of a magic item - which anyone in the party at the time could have claimed from the treasury it came from, but IIRC nobody else wanted it - a sign of DM favouritism?

I am more than a little skeptical about that.

I'm not.

 

[Lanefan]

....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.

There's other and IMO much better ways of restricting casters than by simply nerfing their spells:

--- make some of the spells risky to cast; for examples see the 1e versions of Teleport, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Polymorph Other, etc.
--- make spells much easier to interrupt, NO casting while in melee, NO combat casting (or equivalent) feats
--- make interrupted spells able to cause wild surges (this is part of the make-casting-riskier piece)
--- force aiming rolls for area-effect spells such that they don't always necessarily go exactly where you want them to

In short, lean into spellcasting being the high-risk high-reward means of getting things done.

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?

Go the high-risk route and damn the consequences.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

It is what you have been saying, as you label the basic kit of abilities, skills and attack rolls as unacceptable rock bottom! So only logical conclusion is that you want some special rules and features or you feel you're unable to contribute!

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.

The problem is that you reject the existing methods of contribution.

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....

You seemed to find the idea that there are times when characters have to fall back to the universal basic tools unacceptable, so how can characters have defined areas of competence? If they do, this also means they have areas in which they're not terribly competent, which exactly is the thing you seem to have an issue with. I am not being intentionally annoying contrarian here, I genuinely do not understand your stance here and it appears contradictory me.

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.

And this is already how the game pretty much works...

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.

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

Casters definitely should use some nerfing and martials could use some buffs on utility department. I'm not disagreeing with that.

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.

So what? Again, you seem to be demanding that each class must have some special features that they can leverage in every situation. That is not needed, the game has base universal task resolution for a reason. It is meant to be used. (That being said, our Totem Barbarian's ability to communicate with animals has been pretty useful.)