D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Vaalingrade]

I once saw a single outlier example to a premise.

Therefore nothing is true.

 

[Micah Sweet]

D&D's dishonesty is why there are crabs even in the bucket.

The focus is always on the Stereotypical PCs:

1. The big dumb strong heavy armored fighter
2. The undead hating heavy healbot cleric
3. The blatantly criminal thief rogue
4. The master of all magic wizard

These four crabs are outside the bucket laughing their way back into the sea.

Play any of these four in any of the five editions and you will have no problems. Go against of the grain and pick something else or tweak the character and you're running into a crapshoot depending on which edition.

Yeah, like I said, most games are honest. It's very unfortunate that one of the ones that isn't is the poster child for the industry.

 

[Clint_L]

The premise is correct.

The premise is subjective. Meaning it doesn't really work for a logical syllogism - all it does is lead to endless debate. It's a lousy basis for an argument, and that is why this one just keeps spinning in circles. That won't stop folks creating endless additional threads on fighters v. wizards, though.

The best you can do when dealing with subjective problems, such as the relative status of existing classes in D&D, is try to identify broad consensus and then try to narrow that down to identify specific causes, which is exactly what WotC's methodology is designed to do. Given their proposals, and information we have such as the overall popularity of the class, I argue that the following premises are likely correct:

1. There is a broad consensus that the existing 5e fighter is a competitive class that is generally balanced against other classes (i.e. no big nerfs or buffs are needed to their overall power). In other words, WotC does not perceive them as a problem class, unlike monks, druids (moon in particular), to a lesser degree warlocks, rogues and rangers, and arguably paladins.
2. There is a broad consensus that the existing 5e fighter is a bit simple and could use a few more options.

Note that WotC's proposed changes to the fighter address premise 2, particularly the new "tactical mind" option. Weapon mastery being made fairly ubiquitous suggests that WotC also sees premise 2 as an issue for all melee combat oriented classes.

There is not much in this playtest to suggest that WotC is seeing a broad consensus that primarily martial-oriented classes are underpowered as compared to primarily spell-oriented classes. For example, we are not seeing broad nerfs to spells, nor broad buffs to combat (though I do think weapon mastery is a stronger indirect buff than most folks realize, and this may eventually become an issue).

Anecdotally, I mostly see this issue brought up in the context of very high level play and in discussions by min-maxers, again who focus on very high level play (WotC keeps reminding us that virtually all games are actually played below level 10. Speculation: it may be that WotC does recognize some imbalance at very high levels but doesn't see it as a significant problem because it affects so few players, and those that are affected are expert enough to deal with it. I am reminded of World of Warcraft, which has the opposite design issue: the game is intentionally designed to be tightly balanced only at maximum level.

Personally, I rarely play at those levels, though I do watch plenty of actual play shows up to 20th level. I don't see fighters struggling to have an impact; when someone can open a combat by making eight consecutive attacks for well over 100 damage to a BBEG, you tend to remember it.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

The premise is subjective. Meaning it doesn't really work for a logical syllogism - all it does is lead to endless debate. It's a lousy basis for an argument, and that is why this one just keeps spinning in circles. That won't stop folks creating endless additional threads on fighters v. wizards, though.

It's only subjective in terms of people seeing it, though. The problem still exists whether or not people see it. D&D being more balanced wouldn't make it a worse system.

The best you can do when dealing with subjective problems, such as the relative status of existing classes in D&D, is try to identify broad consensus and then try to narrow that down to identify specific causes, which is exactly what WotC's methodology is designed to do. Given their proposals, and information we have such as the overall popularity of the class, I argue that the following premises are likely correct:

1. There is a broad consensus that the existing 5e fighter is a competitive class that is generally balanced against other classes (i.e. no big nerfs or buffs are needed to their overall power). In other words, WotC does not perceive them as a problem class, unlike monks, druids (moon in particular), to a lesser degree warlocks, rogues and rangers, and arguably paladins.
2. There is a broad consensus that the existing 5e fighter is a bit simple and could use a few more options.

Note that WotCs proposed changes to the fighter address premise 2, particularly the new "tactical mind" option. Weapon mastery being made fairly ubiquitous suggests that WotC also sees premise 2 as an issue for all melee combat oriented classes.

There is not much in this playtest to suggest that WotC is seeing a broad consensus that primarily martial-oriented classes are underpowered as compared to primarily spell-oriented classes.

There are other developers that actually see an issue with this and heck even WotC saw it back when they made the good edition (4E). Paizo is making PF2 which is much better balanced than 5E is, and Enworld has the A5E which is supposedly an attempt to deal with the same problem.

I'm willing to bet that it's purely a design team problem.

Anecdotally, I mostly see this issue brought up in the context of very high level play and in discussions by min-maxers, again who focus on very high level play (WotC keeps reminding us that virtually all games are actually played below level 10. Speculation: it may be that WotC does recognize some imbalance at very high levels but doesn't see it as a significant problem because it effects so few players, and those that are effected are expert enough to deal with it. I am reminded of World of Warcraft, which has the opposite design issue: the game is intentionally only designed to be tightly balanced at maximum level.

I mentioned in another comment that the problem is highly amplified if you have a player who is min-maxing and when it happens it can happen pretty much as early as 5th level, when 3rd level spells come into the picture.

Personally, I rarely play at those levels, though I do watch plenty of actual play shows up to 20th level. I don't see fighters struggling to have an impact; when someone can open a combat by making eight consecutive attacks for well over 100 damage to a BBEG, you tend to remember it.

I retired a character because of balance issues. That's what actually made me realise this was a problem in the first place. Before that I mostly dismissed the problem entirely. I remember a friend of mine refused to play D&D because he argued magic was overpowered and I didn't see his point. Then one day I did.

 

[Scribe]

It's only subjective in terms of people seeing it, though. The problem still exists whether or not people see it. D&D being more balanced wouldn't make it a worse system.
There are other developers that actually see an issue with this and heck even WotC saw it back when they made the good edition (4E). Paizo is making PF2 which is much better balanced than 5E is, and Enworld has the A5E which is supposedly an attempt to deal with the same problem.

You realize of course the subjectivity of everything youve said here, right?

 

[Micah Sweet]

You realize of course the subjectivity of everything youve said here, right?

Seriously. 4e is "the good edition", without any indication that you're describing your opinion? You expect that to go unchallenged?

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Seriously. 4e is "the good edition", without any indication that you're describing your opinion? You expect that to go unchallenged?

When did I ever say that 4th edition being the good edition was not subjective? I was not in any way intending for that little parenthetical to come off as a non-subjective statement. I should've added a smiley or something.

 

[overgeeked]

When did I ever say that 4th edition being the good edition was not subjective? I was not in any way intending for that little parenthetical to come off as a non-subjective statement. I should've added a smiley or something.

Not necessarily. There's a subset of people who will argue that every single thing you ever say on the internet is, by default, a statement of objective fact unless you include "in my opinion" in the statement somewhere. These people are incredibly silly and should simply be ignored.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not necessarily. There's a subset of people who will argue that every single thing you ever say on the internet is, by default, a statement of objective fact unless you include "in my opinion" in the statement somewhere. These people are incredibly silly and should simply be ignored.

Well, that is why I always try to include that in my statements.

 

[Scribe]

Not necessarily. There's a subset of people who will argue that every single thing you ever say on the internet is, by default, a statement of objective fact unless you include "in my opinion" in the statement somewhere. These people are incredibly silly and should simply be ignored.

Conversely, there are people on this very forum who will evade and dodge any attempt at getting them to admit that their opinions are not objective fact. So why not simply clarify what one feels is their opinion, an opinion expressed by others, or, in those rare cases, actual objective fact, like ASI being tied to species being better for the game?