D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[Vaalingrade]

Players will always optimize the fun out of the game. Always. Nova and long rest is the optimal and least fun or interesting strategy. So of course it’s the number 1 strategy in 5E. Players aren’t trying to avoid fights, they’re trying to avoid resource drain. Because it’s optimal to do so.

Or they don't find resource drain fun.

 

[nevin]

Or they don't find resource drain fun.

nobody likes resource drain, real world or game.; but everyone like beating the odds and being the baddasses that did the impossible. Giving people exactly what they ask for is usually a great way to make them miserable.

 

[overgeeked]

It's not shocking if you believe my theory.

5e's 2013 Survey over-represented the wants and opinions of people who would not end up adopting 5e. So the top lever (classes, races, spells, monsters) ended up not matching the styles of the majority of people who actually play 5e.

Look at the 2014 ranger. It looks like what at 1e/2e 1990s D&D hex-crawl player would want in D&D. But they don't play 5e. They play OSR. So the class was not designed for 73% of the 5e player base. And I'm sure that 27% are either ranger/rogue cheeser or have DMs who know how to make the ranger work.

Same with the Fighter vs Wizard math. It was designed for 25-35 offensive combat rounds (AKA 30 rounds of dealing damage) in a dungeons. But a lot of 5e players prefer 15-25 offensive combat round cinematic romps or at least like mixing up 30 round days with 10 rounder, 20 rounder, 50 rounders, and 5 rounders.

Basically

1. Buy gear in Town
2. Travel to Dungeon via Wilderness
3. Dungeon
4. Travel to Town via Wilderness
5. Sell treasure in Town
6. Repeat

is no longer 90% of D&D play.

Trouble is this doesn’t quite hold up in the details. As an old grog who loves OSR you literally cannot play 5E like an OSR game as the system itself fights you every step of the way. They may have designed combat and PC resources around a dungeon delve, but the rest of the mechanics and details do not point towards anything resembling an OSR style of play.

We see this in complaints about wilderness exploration and various basic class and background features and low-level spells or cantrips obviating entire swaths of wilderness exploration. Things like Leomund’s Tiny Hut making resting automatically safe everywhere. Resource management (re: food, water, light, encumbrance, etc) being pointless to track thanks to various changes, cantrips, low-level spells, etc. Hard to kill PCs, high hit points, insane resting, death saves, PCs dirty with healing, etc.

This might be why OSR fans play OSR games instead of 5E, but it’s not quite right to say 5E was designed for OSR players.

 

[overgeeked]

Most monsters don't have the resources to really effectively realistically do much in a week.

It's mostly just caster enemies that can do a drastic change in a couple days post level 5 or so. Via OP spells

Know what happens when the orc calls more orcs. Harder fighter ie more Nova.

That's how 5MWD breeds. Punishing it encourages it

The best way to eliminate the 5MWD is to switch to an encounter-based resource schema or something like recharging mana.

 

[nevin]

Trouble is this doesn’t quite hold up in the details. As an old grog who loves OSR you literally cannot play 5E like an OSR game as the system itself fights you every step of the way. They may have designed combat and PC resources around a dungeon delve, but the rest of the mechanics and details do not point towards anything resembling an OSR style of play.

We see this in complaints about wilderness exploration and various basic class and background features and low-level spells or cantrips obviating entire swaths of wilderness exploration. Things like Leomund’s Tiny Hut making resting automatically safe everywhere. Resource management being pointless to track thanks to various changes, cantrips, low-level spells, etc. Hard to kill PCs, high hit points, insane resting, death saves, PCs dirty with healing, etc.

This might be why OSR fans play OSR games instead of 5E, but it’s not quite right to say 5E was designed for OSR players.

I agree nothing about 5e matches OSR style games.

 

[nevin]

The best way to eliminate the 5MWD is to switch to an encounter-based resource schema or something like recharging mana.

I guess you've never had DM's gather 400 trolls while your party hid, or had an entire legion of Orcs with mid to high level commanders, clerics and casters all waiting when you crawled out of that tiny hut. Or my favorite ogre's piling several tons of rocks over the tiny hut overnight.

I gaurantee you if your pary stops to rest in a dangerous area, DM doesn't need a caster to capitalize on your poor decision.

 

[Oofta]

The best way to eliminate the 5MWD is to switch to an encounter-based resource schema or something like recharging mana.

Which is not how D&D works in any edition other than 4E. If it's that much of a problem and you're unwilling to change your approach, either play 4E (which doesn't totally fix the issue either), change D&D to be something else or find a different game to play.

 

[overgeeked]

I guess you've never had DM's gather 400 trolls while your party hid, or had an entire legion of Orcs with mid to high level commanders, clerics and casters all waiting when you crawled out of that tiny hut. Or my favorite ogre's piling several tons of rocks over the tiny hut overnight.

I gaurantee you if your pary stops to rest in a dangerous area, DM doesn't need a caster to capitalize on your poor decision.

No, because the first thing most referees ban is Leomund’s Tiny Hut.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I guess you've never had DM's gather 400 trolls while your party hid, or had an entire legion of Orcs with mid to high level commanders, clerics and casters all waiting when you crawled out of that tiny hut. Or my favorite ogre's piling several tons of rocks over the tiny hut overnight.

I gaurantee you if your pary stops to rest in a dangerous area, DM doesn't need a caster to capitalize on your poor decision.

Yeah, I've never had that because I if a DM every throws spite monsters at me, I walk and they don't get to DM for the group anymore.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Trouble is this doesn’t quite hold up in the details. As an old grog who loves OSR you literally cannot play 5E like an OSR game as the system itself fights you every step of the way. They may have designed combat and PC resources around a dungeon delve, but the rest of the mechanics and details do not point towards anything resembling an OSR style of play.

Every time I hear something like this, I want to push back that back in the day, everyone played very differently, different DMs, different emphasis, different styles, different variants, and different beliefs about what the 'by the book' rules actually were (often very different). Nevermind that, on top of that, nostalgia makes memory all the less dependable.

But, I realize that is wrong-headed of me. OSR is not how D&D was played once upon a time. It's a modern play style, like anything else popular today, just one that looks backwards for inspiration.

That said, 5e is the latest DM Empowerment edition - and also looks primarily backwards for inspiration, just not at all the same things - and you can make it OSR compliant, just like you can force balance upon it. You don't even have to change the mechanics that much, overtly (like, you don't need extensive written variants), just ignore or radically re-interpret them when they don't work for you. (we certainly did that back in the day! It's what EGG was talking about when he said "the secret is, you don''t really need the rules" [paraphrase, I don't remember the exact quotation]) Not every ruling needs to be a precedent to be written down and adhered to in perpetuity, each situation may be different.

Which is not how D&D works in any edition other than 4E. If it's that much of a problem and you're unwilling to change your approach, either play 4E (which doesn't totally fix the issue either), change D&D to be something else or find a different game to play.

Which is why every other edition of D&D suffers from the 5MWD - or the DM force needed to negate it.... or... well, quite enjoys the 5MWD and the "weird wizard show" EGG warned us about. It's subjective/stylistic at that point.

Of course, aside from being dismissive and maybe even "gatekeeping," the admonition to 'go play another game' is at best unhelpful, when D&D is the only game anyone outside the hobby has ever heard of, so has all the vibrant, new players, and there may be no game that does precisely what you want, and even if there is, it may be so obscure there's no one to play it with, and, even if it's a past edition of D&D, it might not be legally supportable due to a highly restrictive GSL (OK, that last is just 4e, but you brought it up).