It's subtle & easy to overlook but keep reading the post in the first link. Look for this very subtle part of the post to see how it continues to hold true even with sword & board....
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D&D 5E What is balance to you, and why do you care (or don't)?
- Thread starter James Gasik
- Start date
Jefe Bergenstein
Legend
17 DPR in the level band actually played, assuming they hit. At the cost of entering melee and dealing with all that it entails. Not to mention basically having no class features. Whatever pittance of extra potential damage the fighter might be getting isn't worth the trade.
BTW Bards and paladins get 2 attacks too, so are only marginally behind the fighter. And actually have class features worth mentioning. Oh, and in case we forget, spells, which further expand their versatility/utility.
How have I been gone almost a month and there are still these arguments?
Shadowedeyes
Adventurer
Really, I think people get a little extreme in their arguments. In combat, the fighter is pretty solid. They have some of the highest single target damage, and can be pretty tanky. Once you add in feats they can even do a bit of battlefield control.
Fighter's problem is out of combat they rely on a baseline competency in the ill defined skill system, with a few extra ASIs for feats or whatever, assuming they are not using them on their combat ability, something actually notable rather than patching their rather glaring non-combat weaknesses.
I also think wizards tend to look better on paper than in practice. Having to actually pick what spells you get on level up, and acquiring others in game rather than simply rattling off the perfect solution, and having to make correct decisions in play instead on having the ability to look up monster stats and think things through at your leisure all contribute to making wizard look better than it tends to be in an actual game. Mind you, I do think wizards tend to outpace fighters, but in practice the gap is usually not as big as theorycraft tends to show in my experience.
Fighter's problem is out of combat they rely on a baseline competency in the ill defined skill system, with a few extra ASIs for feats or whatever, assuming they are not using them on their combat ability, something actually notable rather than patching their rather glaring non-combat weaknesses.
I also think wizards tend to look better on paper than in practice. Having to actually pick what spells you get on level up, and acquiring others in game rather than simply rattling off the perfect solution, and having to make correct decisions in play instead on having the ability to look up monster stats and think things through at your leisure all contribute to making wizard look better than it tends to be in an actual game. Mind you, I do think wizards tend to outpace fighters, but in practice the gap is usually not as big as theorycraft tends to show in my experience.
Helldritch
Hero
Ok, I have read the posts. I will clarify thw monotype encounters.
16 orcs. All identical orogs. Pretty boring and calls for a fireball to end their misery.
Multi type encounters.
8 orogs, 4 eyes of gruumsh, 3 wizards and one orc chieftain. All of a sudden, the wizards provide counter spells and sure to hit stuff with magic missile. Change a bit the spell allotted to the eyes and with two bless and a silence, the fight becomes a lot more interesting and dangerous.
Lower level?
Sure, 6 hobgoblins. Why not make it three with a captain? With reinforcement not far?
I do not seek balanced encounters. In some, players should flee. Period. In others, the fighting seem hard but it can be done. Other fights, the group will use most of their ressources on crowd control and so forth. Encounters should be varied and force the group to be as diverse as possible.
Babau and Glabrezu can use dispel magic and other stuff to ruin prepared players. Including an hobgoblin wizard in a goblinoid encounter will surely bring a lot problems that the caster will try to remove and while they are concentrated on the caster, the invisible hobgoblin assassin will have his shot at the cleric, wizard or whatever.
What I often see, is rooms filled with the same monsters in multiple examples. A room filled with skeletons. Why not have a part of the skellies have short bows and and other part be zombies? Add in a wight and now we are starting to see a bit more variety that might force to find new ways to overcome problems. A sneaky goblin might have a basket full of poisonous snakes and throw them at the casters in the back.
The main problem is that casters are seen as Uber impossible target to reach and hit. Throw some foes that can shut them down and you will see that martials will get a sudden influx of interest.
Also, if you have problems with multiclassing.... you know it is an optional rule don't you?
I do not pretend to have the absolute truth about how to play. But I know what worked for dozens of groups over the years and through all editions that I have had the chance to DM for. Mono type encounters have always been a problem.
Also: I reiterate what I have said earlier. 4ed was great, but in reaching the balance so many sought, it failed in having classes that had distinct feelings from one an other. This blandness of the classes caused its ultimate downfall. When everyone is special and equal, no one is interesting in the end.
16 orcs. All identical orogs. Pretty boring and calls for a fireball to end their misery.
Multi type encounters.
8 orogs, 4 eyes of gruumsh, 3 wizards and one orc chieftain. All of a sudden, the wizards provide counter spells and sure to hit stuff with magic missile. Change a bit the spell allotted to the eyes and with two bless and a silence, the fight becomes a lot more interesting and dangerous.
Lower level?
Sure, 6 hobgoblins. Why not make it three with a captain? With reinforcement not far?
I do not seek balanced encounters. In some, players should flee. Period. In others, the fighting seem hard but it can be done. Other fights, the group will use most of their ressources on crowd control and so forth. Encounters should be varied and force the group to be as diverse as possible.
Babau and Glabrezu can use dispel magic and other stuff to ruin prepared players. Including an hobgoblin wizard in a goblinoid encounter will surely bring a lot problems that the caster will try to remove and while they are concentrated on the caster, the invisible hobgoblin assassin will have his shot at the cleric, wizard or whatever.
What I often see, is rooms filled with the same monsters in multiple examples. A room filled with skeletons. Why not have a part of the skellies have short bows and and other part be zombies? Add in a wight and now we are starting to see a bit more variety that might force to find new ways to overcome problems. A sneaky goblin might have a basket full of poisonous snakes and throw them at the casters in the back.
The main problem is that casters are seen as Uber impossible target to reach and hit. Throw some foes that can shut them down and you will see that martials will get a sudden influx of interest.
Also, if you have problems with multiclassing.... you know it is an optional rule don't you?
I do not pretend to have the absolute truth about how to play. But I know what worked for dozens of groups over the years and through all editions that I have had the chance to DM for. Mono type encounters have always been a problem.
Also: I reiterate what I have said earlier. 4ed was great, but in reaching the balance so many sought, it failed in having classes that had distinct feelings from one an other. This blandness of the classes caused its ultimate downfall. When everyone is special and equal, no one is interesting in the end.
That could work to lower ther damage but you still need to increase non combat abilities of fighter
Helldritch
Hero
The soft cap stone for 1ed is 11th, and for 5th it is about the same. So I consider my comparison a valid one.Of course it can! It's not a fair comparison, given the in-system context.
In 1e a 20th-level Wizard is sitting at about double the game's soft-capstone level; where in 5e a 20th-level Wizard is right at the captsone.
So, to make the comparison fair it'd either have to be between a 10th-level 1e Wizard and a 20th level 5e one, or a 20th-level 1e Wizard and a 40th-level 5e one. (good luck finding anything that runs 5e design out to 40th level)
Sorry, @Helldritch , but it's thinking like this that got us into this mess in the first place.
First thing: stop treating the 5MWD as a problem to be solved and instead see it as something wise adventurers would do as a matter of course. Then, design as if the 5MWD is the standard, or close - two or three encounters a day maybe, rather than 6 to 8 like 5e seems to want.
Second thing: don't use damage output as your only metric for comparison. There's many other ways a character's abilities can be more or less effective in play, though they're not always as easily quantifyable/measurable as damage output.
Third thing: harshly limit casters (all of them, not just Wizards) by making spells harder to cast in combat and by giving less of them per day. Get rid of at-wills. Flip side: make the spells that do get cast actually able to Do Cool Stuff, albeit sometimes with risks attached.
Ideally, Wizards are the hares. Fighters are the turtles. And who won that race?
This assumes such foes are commonplace in one's game, also that the PCs have no idea what they're getting into when embarking on an adventure i.e. no info-gathering is done first so their lineup can be adjusted to suit.
That said, I agree monotype parties (of any class) are far more all-or-nothing than are more class-diverse groups: they either blow the adventure away or themselves get blown away, depending how well they happen to suit - or not - the situation.
For the 5mwd
It has been a problem since 3.xed. This is a fact and it introduced a type of gameplay that I truly despise and actively counters with all my powers as a DM. And I succeeded exactly by enforcing the amount of encounters expected in a day. The natural tendency of layers is to fight with all their options available or not to fight at all. The nova I the ultimate tool of the 5mwd and this is exactly the reason why martials are seen in a bad light. When allowed to move all the time, martials simy can not keep up.
As for your other solutions, I fully agree. Though 1ed was a mess to find the rules, it was not as badly balanced as some might want to make us believe.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Well there's your problem.
Most groups do not actually follow these guidelines. Crawford has said as much. This is why they're (tacitly) switching to a "PB per long rest" model rather than a "1 or 2 per short rest" model going forward. 5.5e (if that ends up being what they call it) is extremely likely to heavily reduce the importance of short rests. There will likely still be abilities that trigger when taking them e.g. Arcane Recovery, Song of Rest, etc., but these will either be for just one short rest per day (which most groups DO take) as with the former, or will be simply triggered by and confined to those rests so there are no knock-on consequences or losses as with the latter. (Song of Rest is useful, but it doesn't define a Bard's utility for the day.)
But yeah. If you were running numbers presuming people actually followed the 6-8 encounters and 2-3 short rests per day model, you have fallen into exactly the same trap its original creators did.
DrunkonDuty
he/him
The OP said this was a broader conversation than just DND so in that spirit and to get away from the endless martials vs. casters in DnD debates...
Yes I think balance is important. Why? I think most players want their chance to shine, to be in the spotlight, to be the one who walks in the sun. (Thank you, Cyndi Lauper.)
Balance comes in two main flavours: Player vs. Player and Player vs. Adventure.
Now, when I say Player vs. Player I don't mean in a knockdown fight between the characters. I don't care for that in-game and so I don't worry about it much here in theory land. YMMV. What I mean is the competition between the players for the limited spotlight time.
Given the limited time we have to play it can be a problem when a player misses opportunities to shine due to other characters overshadowing them. Fixing this sort of issue will vary greatly depending on the specific cause of the problem, frequency, and the group dynamics. It might require a character rewrite (either a power up or a power down), or a change in player dynamics, or a change in player expectations, and I'm sure other things I haven't thought of.
While I'm on the topic I have a good example of mismanaged player expectations:
Back before the pandemic I wrote up a set of adventures as an introduction to the Champions RPG. Like a good writer I play tested it a couple of times with 2 different groups of friends before taking it out into the world. I got some contradictory feedback about 2 characters; not-Black Widow, and not-Wasp.
In the first test I got feedback from 2 players that they felt not-Widow and not-Wasp were underpowered compared to the other PCs.* This despite the fact that these two characters dominated in the exploration and infiltration. They got most of the screen time in the first half of the adventure and about an even share during the second more combatty half. But they only did about 75% of the damage that the big hitters (not-Thor and not-Hulk) did. It was this, the lower damage, that caused the players to feel dissatisfied. That they got so much screen time didn't seem to register with them but I'm pretty sure the other players were aware it. (ie. the other players wanted some more screen time.)
In the second test the characters were played in a pretty much identical manner but the players loved not-Widow and not-Wasp. The players had a ball doing the infiltration and generally being all techy and nimble and out-smarting the baddies.
The different players just had different expectations of what it means to be effective.
My take away as an adventure writer is make sure your players know what their characters are good at. Both in general and game mechanical terms. Make this part of the Session 0 discussion. (My other take away was streamline the exploration/infiltration bits of the adventure.)
With Player vs. Adventure the problem arises when nothing the character does adds positively to the adventure.** Again, how to correct this will vary depending on the group's needs at any given time. But to generalise, make sure there's variation in encounter*** design such that all players get a chance to do their schtick. And make sure the encounters are a good mix of challenge, from cake walk to knuckle-biting. I feel adventure balance is easier for the GM to mitigate because they only need to manage their own behaviour as opposed to managing that of others.
The two flavours of player vs player and player vs adventure obviously have a lot of overlap. eg. The character who tries to do something they should be good at fails then another character steps up and succeeds. Is this a player stepping on another player's schtick? Or a badly designed encounter? Or both? Well, it depends.... so many variables.
Now, as if this post isn't long enough, I should say that all the above is really only considering the game mechanical side of things. Spotlight time is also going to be a matter of the social dynamics of the group. I mention this because I feel it should be considered. But it is such a huge topic that I don't want to go down that rabbit hole just now.
* Yes, specifically the other PCs.
** I know, that's a very broad statement.
*** BTW, I say encounter not combat. Combat is a subset of encounter.
Yes I think balance is important. Why? I think most players want their chance to shine, to be in the spotlight, to be the one who walks in the sun. (Thank you, Cyndi Lauper.)
Balance comes in two main flavours: Player vs. Player and Player vs. Adventure.
Now, when I say Player vs. Player I don't mean in a knockdown fight between the characters. I don't care for that in-game and so I don't worry about it much here in theory land. YMMV. What I mean is the competition between the players for the limited spotlight time.
Given the limited time we have to play it can be a problem when a player misses opportunities to shine due to other characters overshadowing them. Fixing this sort of issue will vary greatly depending on the specific cause of the problem, frequency, and the group dynamics. It might require a character rewrite (either a power up or a power down), or a change in player dynamics, or a change in player expectations, and I'm sure other things I haven't thought of.
While I'm on the topic I have a good example of mismanaged player expectations:
Back before the pandemic I wrote up a set of adventures as an introduction to the Champions RPG. Like a good writer I play tested it a couple of times with 2 different groups of friends before taking it out into the world. I got some contradictory feedback about 2 characters; not-Black Widow, and not-Wasp.
In the first test I got feedback from 2 players that they felt not-Widow and not-Wasp were underpowered compared to the other PCs.* This despite the fact that these two characters dominated in the exploration and infiltration. They got most of the screen time in the first half of the adventure and about an even share during the second more combatty half. But they only did about 75% of the damage that the big hitters (not-Thor and not-Hulk) did. It was this, the lower damage, that caused the players to feel dissatisfied. That they got so much screen time didn't seem to register with them but I'm pretty sure the other players were aware it. (ie. the other players wanted some more screen time.)
In the second test the characters were played in a pretty much identical manner but the players loved not-Widow and not-Wasp. The players had a ball doing the infiltration and generally being all techy and nimble and out-smarting the baddies.
The different players just had different expectations of what it means to be effective.
My take away as an adventure writer is make sure your players know what their characters are good at. Both in general and game mechanical terms. Make this part of the Session 0 discussion. (My other take away was streamline the exploration/infiltration bits of the adventure.)
With Player vs. Adventure the problem arises when nothing the character does adds positively to the adventure.** Again, how to correct this will vary depending on the group's needs at any given time. But to generalise, make sure there's variation in encounter*** design such that all players get a chance to do their schtick. And make sure the encounters are a good mix of challenge, from cake walk to knuckle-biting. I feel adventure balance is easier for the GM to mitigate because they only need to manage their own behaviour as opposed to managing that of others.
The two flavours of player vs player and player vs adventure obviously have a lot of overlap. eg. The character who tries to do something they should be good at fails then another character steps up and succeeds. Is this a player stepping on another player's schtick? Or a badly designed encounter? Or both? Well, it depends.... so many variables.
Now, as if this post isn't long enough, I should say that all the above is really only considering the game mechanical side of things. Spotlight time is also going to be a matter of the social dynamics of the group. I mention this because I feel it should be considered. But it is such a huge topic that I don't want to go down that rabbit hole just now.
* Yes, specifically the other PCs.
** I know, that's a very broad statement.
*** BTW, I say encounter not combat. Combat is a subset of encounter.
Vaalingrade
Legend
re: Cantrips:
I'd much rather shed the last clinging vestiges of Vancian casting and move to a mana system or all Eldritch Blast model where you customize your one or two at-will spells with rituals doing the other heavy lifting.
I'd much rather shed the last clinging vestiges of Vancian casting and move to a mana system or all Eldritch Blast model where you customize your one or two at-will spells with rituals doing the other heavy lifting.
