D&D 5E Halflings are the 7th most popular 5e race

[MichaelSomething]

Honestly, I'm more of a race as class guy.

But that's not what's being said. Something immersive--Dwarven wizards--is being rejected because it would be imbalanced.

 

[James Gasik]

Until the Yuan-Ti get hungry anyway.

I'm shocked the Lizardmen (folk?) haven't eaten them already.

 

[ECMO3]

See also the "Its more effective to heal people up from unconcious than to do mid-fight healing" deal with 5E.

This is only true if you heal them from unconcious mid fight. If your Barbarian has 5hps left it is more effective not to heal him this turn (unless you are going to cast a really powerful spell that will give him a lot), but once he is put down you do want to heal him for action economy reasons.

 

[CleverNickName]

Because it's definitely 100% true that balance is always in opposition to fun, and couldn't ever support it, in any circumstance, for any reason.

I know you're exaggerating (and fair enough) but that's not at all my point. I said I would throw balance under the bus if it makes the evening more enjoyable for myself and my friends. I didn't say 'always,' or '100%,' or 'definitely,' or anything in that lane.

If we must use the word "always," my goal is to always have an enjoyable evening.

 

[Lanefan]

Seems to me the better choice is to have mages that don't become stupidly powerful simply because you picked up +2 to a stat. That you build the game so it starts out with better balance than "simply picking two of the default options together is broken."

Dwarves in my game can get a lot more than +2 to their Con. The way we do it, the standard 3-18 bell curve is rejigged for each species on each stat, and the bell curve for Dwarves' Con is something like 8-19. What this means is if you roll a 3 it becomes an 8, if you roll 18 it becomes 19, and if you roll 11 it becomes (I think) 14.

The great irony to me is that this exact argument comes from many folks who claim to loathe balance based arguments because they limit player choice and make worse, less interesting games. Yet the alternative, here, is apparently that (for balance reasons!) we must...limit player choice, even if it means a worse, less interesting game.

I'm happy with limiting choice if it means I don't have to ruin a bunch of other things elsewhere to preserve a bit of balance. Here, if I opened up Dwarves to being Mages I'd probably have to chop their Con down to something like a 5-18 range, which would make them much less useful at many other classes.

I'm also quite happy with some species naturally gravitating toward some classes because those classes suit abilities those species tend to have. Better that than have all the species blandly become much the same.

If balance is going to matter either way, shouldn't we try to cut problems like this off at the pass?

I'm doing just that, only in the reverse manner than you'd prefer I do it.

 

[Lanefan]

This is only true if you heal them from unconcious mid fight. If your Barbarian has 5hps left it is more effective not to heal him this turn (unless you are going to cast a really powerful spell that will give him a lot), but once he is put down you do want to heal him for action economy reasons.

This "whack-a-mole" thing is a bug, not a feature.

A character that goes down should IMO be out of the fight, even if cured up from dying.

 

[James Gasik]

This "whack-a-mole" thing is a bug, not a feature.

A character that goes down should IMO be out of the fight, even if cured up from dying.

Except they had the same thing going on in 4e and didn't change it. And it's not like they didn't know about it. So by choosing to put it in the game, I'm left to assume the 5e design team wanted healing to work this way, meaning that, to them, this is a feature, not a bug.

And if they don't change it for Exciting New Flavor D&D in 2024, that just makes it even more evident.

 

[Hussar]

Except they had the same thing going on in 4e and didn't change it. And it's not like they didn't know about it. So by choosing to put it in the game, I'm left to assume the 5e design team wanted healing to work this way, meaning that, to them, this is a feature, not a bug.

And if they don't change it for Exciting New Flavor D&D in 2024, that just makes it even more evident.

I've always kinda wondered about this "whack-a-mole" thing. How long are your combats that this is actually an issue? For all the years I've played or DM'd 5e, combat's pretty generally over by round 4 or 5 at the most. Figure that no one (usually) goes down in the first two rounds, that means that someone might go below zero HP in round 3. Pick them up in round 4. Combat's done.

It's not so much "whack a mole" as just ... well... whack.

Like a lot of criticisms, I find that when the rubber meets the road, these theorycrafted issues just don't happen. Or, don't happen often enough that it needs to be fixed.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I know you're exaggerating (and fair enough) but that's not at all my point. I said I would throw balance under the bus if it makes the evening more enjoyable for myself and my friends. I didn't say 'always,' or '100%,' or 'definitely,' or anything in that lane.

If we must use the word "always," my goal is to always have an enjoyable evening.

My point was that balance is, almost always, actually really important for fun to happen. It's a bit like saying "I'd chuck out the atmosphere on the spaceship if it would increase safety." There are very few situations where completely venting the entire atmosphere of a space-faring vessel would be an actual improvement to safety--and if it were an improvement, that would mean things had gone truly horrifically wrong.

Hence, even bringing it up as a "I'll happily sacrifice it for fun" is specious at best. Actually good, effective balance enhances fun in 99.999% of cases. It does so in a huge variety of ways:

• enabling both GMs and players to play "no holds barred," because the underlying system won't break if they do, and thus no one needs to hold back;
• reducing or even eliminating dull "calculation," because if most paths are closely balanced against one another in quantitative measure, then qualitative measure must prevail;
• fairly and earnestly supporting nearly all player preferences (e.g., races, classes, specializations, etc.) and player goals (e.g. how they see a character evolving over time);
• promoting both interoperability (a character can leave one game and join another quite easily) and a shared understanding of impact or significance;
• making rules errors (regardless of their source) generally quite obvious and, in the ideal case, quite easy to fix as well;
• reducing cognitive load for the GM, both via reliably functional systems that don't need constant checking and second-guessing, and via well-made tools that perform their intended function consistently;
• and, consequently, freeing up significantly more time for GMs to focus on the things that absolutely require their attention, like crafting new adventures, building on expressed player interest, and exploring possible new developments.

It's continuously infuriating to see people constantly portray "balance" as though it were this horrible boogeyman that must be fled from, if not at all times, then at least constantly defended against, lest it poison the beauty and fun of D&D.

Balance is a very significant part of what enables D&D to be as enjoyable as it is. But "balance" is not, and has never been, perfect mathematical uniformity (because equality and uniformity are two very different things.) It is not, and has never been, the ridiculous strawmen people love to knock down (pick your poison, they're a dime a dozen.) "Balance" literally just means making sure options are sufficiently evenly matched, despite being different, that you cannot usefully employ mathematical analysis to distinguish the "best" one. That, over a sufficient range of time and within reasonable statistical boundaries, you can be confident that most options will perform close enough to the same amount, by different means, such that you have to start making value-judgments, not number-cruching, in order to decide what is the correct choice in most situations.

Such balance is quite achievable. It takes effort, to be sure, but it's far from impossible. And it almost always makes MORE fun. While it might not be impossible for it to somehow, someway make less fun...that's going to be incredibly, almost incalculably rare.

Chucking balance means making more broken combos. It means making more trap options. It means making more things that are unplayable. In what world is that productive for improving the group's fun? I mean, I guess if the group gets their jollies by one person being godlike and everyone else fawning over them for it. That's certainly one of the playstyles of all time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Dwarves in my game can get a lot more than +2 to their Con. The way we do it, the standard 3-18 bell curve is rejigged for each species on each stat, and the bell curve for Dwarves' Con is something like 8-19. What this means is if you roll a 3 it becomes an 8, if you roll 18 it becomes 19, and if you roll 11 it becomes (I think) 14.

Sounds like an awful lot of work to me for...very little benefit. Like, I genuinely don't understand what benefit you get out of doing this.

I'm happy with limiting choice if it means I don't have to ruin a bunch of other things elsewhere to preserve a bit of balance. Here, if I opened up Dwarves to being Mages I'd probably have to chop their Con down to something like a 5-18 range, which would make them much less useful at many other classes.

Okay, but like...I'm dead certain we've had a discussion in the past where you have (in not so many words) said something to the effect of balance being a bad reason to do game design of any kind. That you would do so here, and indeed do so exclusively for balance reasons, is...more than a little baffling.

I'm also quite happy with some species naturally gravitating toward some classes because those classes suit abilities those species tend to have. Better that than have all the species blandly become much the same.

My question is just: Why should species be what makes an individual special? It isn't what makes humans special. Why should other sapient creatures have every relevant characteristic of theirs summed up by their physiology, when that's trivially obviously a foolish concept when applied to human beings?

I'm doing just that, only in the reverse manner than you'd prefer I do it.

It doesn't seem to me that you're doing so at all--you're simply saying, "Oh, this would be unbalanced. Better that I just say that can't happen." That's...not actually heading the problem off at the pass. That's letting the problem fester until it's gangrenous, and then chopping off the limb. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.