D&D (2024) Symmetric Balance vs Asymmetric Balance.

[Shardstone]

Wizards aren't better, it's just that better players play wizards!
That's a bold strategy, Defcon1. Let's see if it pays off for you!

Anyway, I think that we are missing two important things when it come to the question posed by @Asisreo above.

In terms of asymmetric class balance, there is one other way that should be considered-

Niche protection. One of the big issues with 5e, IMO, is that there has been a lessening of the barriers between classes. Through the feat system and the ubiquity of spellcasting, as well as the desire to harmonize DPR, there just isn't a lot to fully differentiate classes in the same way that there used to be.

To compare this to (American) football- if D&D is a team sport, you need players at different positions. You need a QB, sure, but you also need RBs, and WRs, and offensive lineman. And that's before you think about the defense.

The problem, such as it is, is that every player in D&D wants a QB. And maybe that's the best way to make the game! But it does lead to less differentiation between classes when every player wants their class to be equally good at all the things that other classes do.

Personally, I don't believe in niche protection anymore. I did for a really long time, but I think its better if the niche is based on BOTH the class and subclass, and not the class. This is precisely because of your last line about how every D&D player wants to be a QB.

However, I will point out that a big reason every player wants to be a QB is because the game has really mediocre options for being a support character. Outside of boss fights, its usually better to use spells on damage. Things like Bardic Inspiration have a lot of uses for a small pool depending on the Bard subclass. Most Channel Divinities are offensive or outside of combat utility. There isn't a varied AND strong set of options, be it in spells, classes, or magic items that lets me be like a Support in League of Legends. The closest is save or suck spells, but that's only one part of being a support.

That aside, every class should be able to at least dip its toes into every role. Like Blade Singer being a melee dodge-tank Wizard or College of the Moon being a melee tank Druid. The alternative is you end up having a situation where certain classes are necessary. You always need a druid, paladin, bard, or cleric because you need heals. You always need a fighter, barbarian, or paladin because you need someone to keep them off the "squishies." When you offload that weight into the subclasses, even just a little bit, you can have a party of all druids, all wizards, all fighters, etc. Or you can have things like Warlock (Celestial heals), Druid (Moon melee), Bard (Swords backup melee), Ranger (environmental utility magic).

 

[Shardstone]

I think one thing holding the fighter down is people asking for customization choice and different builds.

I say, subclasses are enough to differentiate different fighters. We don't need a fighting style choice. IIRC the 4e fighter got every base class ability at first level. The only difference lied in the powers. And I think, even that was too much.
A wizard can learn all spells and chose which one to utilize.
A fighter should have all fighting styles at their hand and should just decide which weapon to use on the get go.

Thos "build" choices (including feats) introduced in 3e was not giving access to better abilities. It was restricting abilities behind a paywall.

It also shifted the game from being played at the table towards the drawing board.
It also shifted the optimization from what is best in a certain situation to a wgite room.

/rant over

I'm not following your logic. How does customization hold the fighter back? In any way? If anything, it needs MORE customization -- Fighting Styles could provide a high level benefit, or you could choose from Epic Fighting Styles at 9th+ level.

Optimization has always been pretty white room. The only time it wasn't was during 2E when there wasn't really any optimizaiton to be had. And I don't get your complaint about restricting abilities behind a paywall. If you want more stuff to be made for the game, you have to pay for it if it is first party. We shouldn't just have the PHB options and that's it. That's fine if you want that, and you can, but that shouldn't be the rule for everyone.

BUT, on the COMPLETELY opposite end, I do think "mechanical weight" should be PARTIALLY taken from classes and more heavily put into subsystems (Bastions, guaranteed magic items, and boons earned via gameplay).

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I'm not following your logic. How does customization hold the fighter back? In any way? If anything, it needs MORE customization -- Fighting Styles could provide a high level benefit, or you could choose from Epic Fighting Styles at 9th+ level.

Duelling style. Now you don't have protection to help your buddies.
Oh you find a magic greatsword. Too bad.

In 3e: You want to grapple? Do you have the feat? Otherwise you suffer more than your opponent.

If you have access to all styles. You look at the upcoming challenge and decide how to best utilize your abilites. You don't have to anticipate what is coming when you create your character.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I would have a lot more confidence in that if I thought that WoTC was treating the monk as anything more than an afterthought.

Based upon the fact that it was the last class released for playtesting, and we still haven't seen the second iteration (with the actual release of the game just around the corner) ... I do not share your optimism.

Plus I was not impressed, at all, by the first package.

Luckily they already shared what they intend to improve. And that makes me hopeful.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Luckily they already shared what they intend to improve. And that makes me hopeful.

I really hope that you are right.

Alas, the belief that the monk will get better is the triumph of hope over experience.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I really hope that you are right.

Alas, the belief that the monk will get better is the triumph of hope over experience.

Probably. But it can't get worse. And going from the first rogue test, where they just got nerfs instead of improvements, a little bit of hope is warranted. Also the elemental monk subclass seems usable now.

 

[Shardstone]

Duelling style. Now you don't have protection to help your buddies.
Oh you find a magic greatsword. Too bad.

In 3e: You want to grapple? Do you have the feat? Otherwise you suffer more than your opponent.

If you have access to all styles. You look at the upcoming challenge and decide how to best utilize your abilites. You don't have to anticipate what is coming when you create your character.

Having access to all styles is good for a certain set of players. I have been running games for a lot of casuals these last 10 years and they would have option paralysis and would only really know what a few of the styles did.

I think Fighters should be getting more fighting styles as they level up, however.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This underscores what I think is the driving force behind concerns about the power and utility of the wizard compared to other classes, particularly the fighter: the edition by edition erosion of basic limits on the wizard. From much shorter spell lists to limits of spells known and chance of failure to learn spells, to a relatively small number of spells per day, the wizard has historically been subject to a lot of limitations on their power. Most of those limitations have been stripped away in the name of fun and playability, and the result is a class whose only weakness is a slightly lower hp total. To be fair, 5E did concentration right, but bring back a few of those other limitations and wizards won't look so good.

Now fix the cleric and druid: full casters that are also better fighters than the fighter...

Though some of those were bad balance tools even back in the day; "chance to learn spells" was one of those things that might have balanced MUs over-all, but it did so at the price of having favored and unfavored characters; i.e. if you made the rolls you were still overpowered, where someone who didn't was sometimes so lacking in useful support and combat capability that you'd wonder why the party went out with them. Baking that much swing in one-time rolls has not been a virtue in any place I've seen it, no matter what other benefits it provided.

 

[Composer99]

I am inclined to say that a team-based roleplaying game is balanced when any set of player characters (a) built and played by players with roughly equal skill and engagement (b) will contribute to the success of their group (the achievement of each characters' individual goals and/or the goals of the group as a whole) with about equal effectiveness (c) across all modes of gameplay deemed to be core to the system (d) when viewed over the course of multiple sessions of gameplay.

Suffice to say there is room for a lot of variance:
(1) Players may not be of equal skill. Players who are better at working the mechanics of character-building, or who have a better grasp of applying their know-how to the goings-on in the in-game fiction will contribute to a greater extent - to my mind, regardless of the design effort made to ensure a baseline level of balance. (In TSR-era D&D, with less opportunity for character-building optimisation, discrepancies might be more likely to arise from the way ability scores shook out - there's rather a large difference in melee combat effectiveness between a fighter with 17 Strength versus a fighter with 18/90+ Strength!)
(2) Players may not engage with the game in equal measure. Looking at D&D, some players might not care about non-combat aspects of play; others might enjoy combat and social interaction but not exploration, and so on. The more or less engaged a player is with a particular expected mode of gameplay, the more or less their character will contribute during gameplay, again, to my mind, regardless of the design effort made towards balance.
(3) Apropos of "core modes of gameplay", in D&D 5e I am thinking of the idea of the three pillars of play: ideally, each player character should be able to contribute about equally to each pillar of gameplay, if that's what their players want. But it's probably not a concern if the balance of the game falls out of whack in "non-core" modes of play, such as downtime.
(4) Naturally, some characters will find they are contributing more to a group's success in certain game sessions than in others.

The fact of such variance doesn't mean balance as I discern it is not worth designing for, of course. It's just something to watch out for, in discourse as much as in design. At the same time, such variance can't explain away all perceptible imbalances! E.g. one of the reasons the LFQW/martial-caster discrepancy keeps coming up as a point in discussion is that it is rather more than merely "caster players engage with the game more". (Or say rather that if they do engage with the game more, it is because they have more mechanical points of engagement with gameplay as a result of the mechanical imbalance.)

Edit to add: The above, I have to acknowledge, didn't really speak to the idea of symmetric vs. asymmetric balance discussed in the OP. I do think that balance as a whole is not dependent on being either kind of balance, though I daresay that asymmetric balance, while harder to achieve, "looks"/"feels" better in play. For instance, ideally, in a MOBA game, supposing you have two players playing different support classes/heroes, they will be about equally effective in supporting their squad as a whole while doing so using sufficiently distinct mechanics that it feels different to play one versus the other.

 

[Blue]

What is really splitting is preference. I think most folks like to argue their preference is objectively better, but both are valid design choices. Folks often neglect looking at them separately and seeing the better and worse implementations of each type. Things get real dicey when you have both symmetrical and asymmetrical in the same system.

Saying that there is a preference on each side does not in any way support that there is an equal amount of preference on either side. That can be demonstrated that there is a strong preference for one over the other, and therefore a "right" pick when designing for the masses.

One side is "my choices don't matter, I will do the same result regardless if I take a different mechanical path to get there".

The other side is "my choices impact the style of play I want to do personally, and how the synergy works with the party". Because after you remove the the white room you get actual play, and while a tank and a striker individually could both eventually kill a foe, together the tank can use their higher defenses and survivability to protect the tank, and the striker can help kill the foe much quicker so the tank gets hit less rounds.

Look at D&D. There are a number of classes, and they don't do the same thing. Even if you reduced it just to the primary single-target damage dealers they have a lot of variation in it. As D&D is incredibly well selling, we can take from it that most people prefer when the choice matters.