D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[Parmandur]

one character with a combat focused everything and another with some resources going to combat being only slightly diffrent... whent he combat focus CAN'T do any other thing the other one can is not balance at all

either guy combat spells or give fighters non combat stuff

Combat balance is the balance of the game. Out of combat stuff is about narrative balance, which is also fine. My Fighter can use his Skills thanks to Bounded Accuracy to do narratively awesome stuff.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Combat balance is the balance of the game. Out of combat stuff is about narrative balance, which is also fine. My Fighter can use his Skills thanks to Bounded Accuracy to do narratively awesome stuff.

Yes, bit a little more mechanical help would be appreciated.
Even something like: needs less rest and can stand guard in the night without being exhausted.
Supernatural alertness. (I know, this is what you could use your extra feat for*).

*also something I see a lot: people try to squeeze every little point of damage out of the fighter by chosing combat feats, while magic adept or actor or alertness will offer a bit of the supernatural feel some people miss. And I can tell you: in our group, actor and magical adept and ritual caster had way more impact than 1 nore dpr.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Yes, bit a little more mechanical help would be appreciated.
Even something like: needs less rest and can stand guard in the night without being exhausted.
Supernatural alertness. (I know, this is what you could use your extra feat for*).

*also something I see a lot: people try to squeeze every little point of damage out of the fighter by chosing combat feats, while magic adept or actor or alertness will offer a bit of the supernatural feel some people miss. And I can tell you: in our group, actor and magical adept and ritual caster had way more impact than 1 nore dpr.

You are spot on here. There is a lot of difference between a 6th level champion and a 6th level eldritch knight if the latter takes say fey touched and magic initiate or say shadow touched. The criminal Al background adds something too.

You can almost do the f/m-u/thief of old with a single class. Unless you take a champion with soldier background and gwm. Nothing wrong with either but they ain’t the same!

But what I’d the champion takes a magic feat or two with gwm? Lots of choices in fact. And maybe his int is not a total dump…maybe he takes some knowledge INT based skills?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Actually the core of 3e was not that imbalanced. A few spells here or there became unbalanced because 3.0 dropped caster restrictions.

I will be honest, if any edition exsists that I don't want to go back to read or remember it is the combine 3es so I will just take that as a fact I don't remember what was what version

It was 3.5 and splat books that heavily unbalanced 3e and it was a lack of explanation of the math and the intend behind it what had it break down.

CODzilla was makeable out of the 3.5 PHB... no splats needed (although I full understand each splat made it worse)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

You are spot on here. There is a lot of difference between a 6th level champion and a 6th level eldritch knight if the latter takes say fey touched and magic initiate or say shadow touched. The criminal Al background adds something too.

You can almost do the f/m-u/thief of old with a single class. Unless you take a champion with soldier background and gwm. Nothing wrong with either but they ain’t the same!

But what I’d the champion takes a magic feat or two with gwm? Lots of choices in fact. And maybe his int is not a total dump…maybe he takes some knowledge INT based skills?

take a concept that can be martial... use the same stats, the same background and the same list of feat/stat increases as you get them

make a hexblade
make a champion fighter
make a battle master fighter
make a war domain cleric
make a melee combat bard
see what the differences are at level 9

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For monsters, their equipment has no relevance for the monster math. And this is straight from the 4e guidelines.

When has equipment been relevant for monsters in 5e?

Yes, you could deviate from the guidelines, but the default rule was exactly what you can find on your index card.

There is no "default rule." 4e never published explicit "rules" for how to design monsters. Any ideas like this were always calculated from observations of published monsters.

To clarify my point: 4e math scaled with your level. Especially later even skills DCs scaled relative to your level. Monsters AC scaled with your level. For us there was no feeling of progression. Just more of the same powers but with bigger numbers. I really fought against that feeling by varying my encounters and so on, but in the end, I failed or better said, it was more work than I was willing to do.

Skill DCs did not "scale with level" unless the DM chose for them to do so. That is explicitly not what the Page 42 rules are for. They are for determining what a skill DC should be, if you already know that it's supposed to be challenging for an Xth level character.

Doors had fixed break DCs in 4e. I'm fairly sure I can get you the table if you really want it. It has always been false to assert that the difficulty numbers of objects or beings in the world automatically scaled up the moment players did.

So who is right: you or me?

I cannot question your experience, particularly not of 5e. Your feelings are yours, and require no validation from anybody, least of all me.

But you have made at least two incorrect statements about what the 4e rules do or what the books advise doing. In that sense, relevant to those statements, it is possible for one person to be right, and another to be wrong.

Arguing that 5e math does not work is just a wrong statement, because it does (in most cases) for us, while 4e math made several of us leave the game.

You are using two very different senses of "does not work" here, and as a result making an unfair comparison.

When you refer to the 4e math, you speak of it working (in the sense that it does what it was designed to do), but your approach to it (and some, as noted mistaken, beliefs about how to use it) caused it to feel wrong to you. Conversely, when you speak of the 5e math "working," you are referring to the fact that some people have gotten enjoyable, successful games out of it, therefore it cannot fail to work in a universal sense.

These two senses are sharply different, and one is clearly more favorable than the other. When I say "the math of 5e does not work, while the math of 4e does," I am using that in one consistent sense. The math of 4e, as actually presented in the books using its default state, performs the functions for which it was designed admirably and consistently across a large spectrum of possible inputs and outputs, with the few exceptions generally arising from the impact of features that are not directly considered by that math, or from attempting to down-scale a very high-level monster to extreme low levels (e.g. 1-3.) Conversely, the math of 5e, as actually presented in the books using its default state, frequently produces undesirable results, specifically in the areas of: resting, healing, damage output, class balance, encounter balance, and non-combat contributions. It requires active attention from the DM essentially at all times in order to correct for these issues. This characteristic is not present in 4e. Thus, 5e math "does not work."

I think you might be remembering 4e with rose-colored lenses. People freaked out when they learned that the fighter was a "defender" in 4e and that making a damage-based fighter was essentially impossible. And if you wanted to make a fighter with a bow? Well, all the archery stuff belongs to the ranger. If you didn't want to be a ranger... too bad, buddy. Archer warriors in 4e were rangers, and if you wanted to be a remotely effective character of that type, it was ranger or go home.

Yes, I'm aware. I am of the opinion this is vastly superior design, because it means the classes can actually be designed in such a way that you know what you're getting. I find it silly--well beyond the point of unreason, even--for someone to get so upset that their damage-dealing, armor-wearing, non-magical, weapon-using character is called "Ranger" rather than "Fighter" by the rules that it makes them unable to play the character anymore.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet. (Emphasis added.) But apparently if you call a rose a fnord, you destroy its fragrance in D&D-logic.

So invoking 4e as an exemplar as "players can play what they want" is really odd to me. The player base voted overwhelmingly with their wallets that 4e failed at doing exactly that. Mind you, I liked 4e, I loved the warlord class, and I adore what I know of 13th Age, so I'm kind of on your side here. But I'm well aware that I'm a minority opinion on this point. Players overall seem to think that 5e does a much better job of allowing you to play what you want than 4e did.

I disagree with much of this, as well, but have no real interest in even further litigating the 4e edition war. Suffice it to say, I think 4e was massively a victim of circumstance, faulty presentation, and (in some cases extremely) poor decision-making on WotC's part, in ways that had literally nothing whatsoever to do with the rules themselves.

More to the point: the archetypes all existed, and were very well-supported. You had the swordmage as your martial-inclined spellcaster. You had the entire Primal power source instead of literally just Druid and maybe Ranger a bit. You had support for playing Ezio Auditore and being damned awesome while doing it. You had the Warlord, and it was really good, and it finally re-introduced the "leader of men" archetype D&D has been missing for so long. And all of these things were available from level 1. No need to wait for subclass. No need to push all the way to 6th, 10th, 15th level before you're allowed to get your cool stuff.

Yes, it meant people had to stop being so precious about writing "Fighter" at the top of their character sheet. That's still something I think most D&D players need to get the heck over. People are so willing to do what works when it comes to zany madcap character schemes. I truly do not understand why the exact same logic applied to what character class one chooses to play is blasphemous anathema.

Thus -- attempting to loop back to our original prompt -- yes, 5e is special. It's the most user-friendly edition of D&D ever, and it's not coincidence that the huge renaissance happened under 5e.

It is absolutely NOT the most user-friendly edition of D&D ever if you consider DMs to be users. That edition was 4e.

And there it is: you ran the numbers, and they balanced out. That's the balance of the game. That's all there is to it. Playing the game contrary to the advice of the book so to undermine that balance will, obviously, undermine it.

Er...no. Sorry. Having someone who can do 80% of my job and also 100% of his job and also 60% of a third person's job is not "balancing out." It just, flat, isn't.

You do want supernatural fighters. Many people don't want them.

Which wouldn't be a problem, if non-supernatural fighters were allowed to have nice things. But because they aren't supernatural, they are forced into the ghetto of "less capable than actual IRL Olympic athletes." And that's really the problem. The same people who demand that Fighters be totally devoid of the supernatural (even though they apparently accept things like self-healing...) also demand that the supernatural be always, consistently, significantly superior to the non-supernatural.

That's not an acceptable state of affairs. One of the three requirements must be broken: either Fighters must be allowed to be powerful without being supernatural, or they must be allowed to be supernatural so they can be powerful, or supernatural character options must be brought down so they are not objectively more powerful than non-supernatural alternatives. But because all three paths are unacceptable to the pro-caster crowd--not surprising, this is asking them to voluntarily give up power, solely so other people can gain, a rationally self-interested agent would never do that--we are left in the limbo we've been in since 2e at least.

Although I think today less people would mind fighters having a few supernatural powers at higher levels than 10 years ago. But I am just guessing without proof.

I would not be at all surprised if modern players had far, far fewer hangups about a ton of this stuff. I think the vast majority of new players brought in by 5e would be baffled at the concept of being so attached to the label "Fighter" that you flip the table if someone tells you, "Oh, you want to start out doing lots of damage? Ranger is a better fit for that starting out. Fighters can become good damage-dealers if you work for it though!" Likewise, it was older players who turned up their noses at these newfangled dragonborn and their obvious Mary Sue/Gary Stu tendencies. Someone working at WotC during the D&D Next playtest even published a blog post explicitly making a bunch of jokes about dragonborn fans and how he couldn't understand their bad opinions (it was clearly tongue-in-cheek....but it also, like with Mearls' jokes about "shouting hands back on," clearly indicated which side of the edition wars the staff had rooted for.) And now, dragonborn are the third-most-popular non-human race in 5e, after elves and half-elves, at least as of the last time we got D&D Beyond statistics, having risen past tieflings.

Of course, as you say, neither of us has any proof of these assertions. But I am pretty well convinced that they are true. There is a changing of the guard going on, driven almost purely by generational turnover. (After all, if Gygax were still alive today, he'd be in his mid-80s. The earliest adopters of D&D are succumbing to the ravages of time. Genuinely a loss for the hobby in many ways, but at the same time, an opportunity for growth and change.)

Here is something I wish they retained from 4e: paragon paths. This would be an easy way to add a supernatural layer over a mundane fighter.
Or just add a few abilities to chose from at higher levels baked in the base class, some of which might be clearly extraordinary.

Oh I'm with you on that. PPs were great. EDs were even better, but I can see how there are folks who wouldn't want those. I love myself some high-flying action or even outright gonzo gaming.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Combat balance is the balance of the game. Out of combat stuff is about narrative balance,

no there are three pillars no one needs to be more or less balanced then teh others...

which is also fine. My Fighter can use his Skills thanks to Bounded Accuracy to do narratively awesome stuff.

really, what skills do fighters get that hexblades, bladesingers, and sword bards don't?

the bard gets double prof on some skills AND full caster AND only 1d lower on HD and the same # of attacks until level 11 (half the game)
the fighter does get action surge and second wind and an extra feat or ASI for those first 10 levels... but bards also get the inspiration ability song of rest and... you get the idea

 

[Warpiglet-7]

take a concept that can be martial... use the same stats, the same background and the same list of feat/stat increases as you get them

make a hexblade
make a champion fighter
make a battle master fighter
make a war domain cleric
make a melee combat bard
see what the differences are at level 9

Sure. That said extra attacks at higher level plus action surges are more…martial. I also think that the lack of strength can be an issue for some situations.

That said I have the unpopular opinion that the hexblade was a mistake.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

no there are three pillars no one needs to be more or less balanced then teh others...

Completely agreed. In fact, I find it ridiculous to even propose the idea that "narrative balance" is a thing. Narratives are not "designed" the way rules are. You cannot "balance" a novel.

So what on Earth does "narrative balance" even mean, @Parmandur?

Edit: Also, uh..."Bounded Accuracy" has nothing to do with skills. Like, at all. So I'm doubly confused now, because that phrase is irrelevant even within the narrow confines of "5e as it actually exists."

 

[Warpiglet-7]

no there are three pillars no one needs to be more or less balanced then teh others...

really, what skills do fighters get that hexblades, bladesingers, and sword bards don't?

the bard gets double prof on some skills AND full caster AND only 1d lower on HD and the same # of attacks until level 11 (half the game)
the fighter does get action surge and second wind and an extra feat or ASI for those first 10 levels... but bards also get the inspiration ability song of rest and... you get the idea

I think I’m all of this we miss something. Some people want to play a non magical warrior.

Or a priest. Or whatever. That something can do more does not mean I want to necessarily.

What you are saying is that action surges, extra hit points, generally heavier armor and strength and more attacks at higher level are not worth as much to you as spells.

I get it! I can’t argue with your preferences.

But I can say that I don’t necessarily want to play that. There is a role playing element to the game that is a bigger proportion of fun for some over others.

If you want say you fighter to cut a path through enemies as big as a fireball every round, I can see where you would be disappointed. You’re right. Not everyone does the same things.

And yet…people keep playing fighters. Unless the argument is “they just don’t know better” I would say the need for better balance is a personal preference not indicative of the game’s quality or sustainability.

And you freely said balance is more fun for you. I cannot argue with that.

I do think 1e did better here. Magic users could lose a spell when hit for 1 pt of damage. The fighter was very necessary. Or at least men at arms that were hired.

There was no tie to toe success for magic users in my groups. We seemed to have more of a football team experience: we need the linemen and wide receivers with our quarterbacks. That has admittedly changed.

By trying to balance things out there are no true critical roles. People do fine without healers and to be honest, vanilla fighters.