D&D 5E You Cant Fix The Class Imbalances IMHO

[Quickleaf]

Over last 13 years or so played a variety of D&Ds.

What broke the modern game was 3.0 which stripped out a lot of restrictions and downsides of magic and nuked defenses vs said magic.

3E and 5E spell DCs are out of whack. Hence why they're needing spells like banishment.

4E stretched out level 3-10 over 30 levels and stripped out tge worst offenders.

Rewriting the game itnt much of an option (if it was level 1-10 tweak things).

You can't really balance dailies without massive nerfs vs always on classes. You xan make the always on classes usefully later on in a variety of ways eg having magic fail more (spell resistance/immunity and saves).

Sample.
AD&D T-rex makes its saves vs spell 85% of the tone. 5E it fails around 75% of the time (assuming it's something like hold mobster/banishment).

Once PCs hot level 8 or so they can drop a big spell pretty much every encounter (eg fireball, hypotic patter).

2 spellcasters even of DM does the 6-8 enco7nters its very trivial.

That's assuming no 5MWD.

I gotcha. One kludgy workaround that I’ve used a bit in 5e is material component scarcity - for example, I made diamonds (for resurrection) really scarce in Tomb of Annihilation which tied into narrative of Acererak forcing people to mine them for massive rituals he cast on the Tomb.

IIRC banishment requires “an item distasteful to the target” which gives the GM lots of leeway to interpret that & house rule that it’s not covered by mundane stuff in a materials component pouch.

Some 5e players would freak (eh, let them).
Some would play sorcerers with subtle spell and try to argue it.
Some would research and hoard “distasteful items” for final bosses, making this a “problem deferred” thing rather than a “problem solved” thing.

But it’s one way to recognize all those issues you brought up and say, ya know I am not going to try to fix this at the nuts and bolts level, let me do this one thing and make certain spells I judge to be disruptive really rare by making their components scarce.

 

[jgsugden]

Geesh. This place is a broken record. Why do people keep insisting that the game is horriby broken when it is the most successful edition in history. If you can't fix it, perhaps it just isn't broken.

An insane number of people have enjoyed playing every class and every race in 5E. Some are more optimizable than others, and some are a little underpowered - but you can have a blast playing any of them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Actual play number only tells the lesser half of the story. The recently revealed player satisfaction survey data clearly shows that people aren't happy. They still play the classes and subclasses, but they're dissatisfied.

That's a pretty clear rebuke to the idea that everything is fine, nothing to see here, no reason to change anything, move along.


It seems to me that only one of these two statements can be true.

Again, this implies that there should never be player dissatisfaction from the "weaker" classes/subclasses, so long as the concept still appears. WotC's actual player satisfaction data proves that (a) people do keep playing these options but (b) their player satisfaction rating is low, often very low, sometimes less than 50%. (IIRC, Champion was specifically 54%, which if you account for margins of error, that's effectively the same as "people dislike it about as much as they like it.") Unless you think WotC is conducting bad surveys with faulty data, I don't see how it is possible to hold the "players really don't care at all about effectiveness, only concept." They DO care about concept! If they didn't, we wouldn't see so many of these underpowered classes and subclasses. But they also do care to at least some degree about effectiveness, which is why they keep playing things they're unhappy with.

Because it is complicated. Because playing something is not identical to loving it. Because you can love specific parts of something while hating or just not really liking other parts. Because it is possible to feel, intuitively, that something isn't quite right without knowing what exactly is wrong.


I had not realized you were so keen on killing the game. Full TSR style play would do that. It is not in keeping with the expectations and interests of modern-era gamers. This style absolutely should continue to get support and some modern players love it just as some longtime vets do. But to make it the only properly supported style would kill D&D within five years. Murderhobo fantasy heistery where all that matters is the gold and every character that dies is instantly replaced with another cardboard cutout and PCs die every other session? Nope. Not gonna fly as fhe default experience. Doubly so if you try to bring back all the intentionally frustrating rules.

Fair enough. My perspective is simply that 5e no longer has any need of WotC to continue as a viable path of D&D, so I don't really care about their future or how successful they are. Going back to TSR's design may not be financially viable for WotC, but it's my preference and WotC is not my concern. 5e will survive without them just fine.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Geesh. This place is a broken record. Why do people keep insisting that the game is horriby broken when it is the most successful edition in history. If you can't fix it, perhaps it just isn't broken.

An insane number of people have enjoyed playing every class and every race in 5E. Some are more optimizable than others, and some are a little underpowered - but you can have a blast playing any of them.

Because popularity and quality are not directly related. The most popular thing is not always the best.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And?

Seriously. And? What else? Because TWF sucks in 5e. It always has and I'm genuinely shocked to see anyone defending it now. The only reason it works for Rogues is that it lets them proc Sneak Attack more often.

TWF is kinda silly in real life as a fighting style anyway.

 

[Micah Sweet]

TBF, the classic game was also already broken in spite of those restrictions and punitive measures. Like I say sometimes, 1e at least tried for balance, just in a way that modern eyes look at and go "but that'd never work" - no, it didn't, but it tried.

This statement has been perplexing me, since 4e scaling was comparable to prior eds and Heroic-Paragon-Epic covered the same things in concept, 3.5+Epic Handbook had.

But I finally see it.
3-10 is about the 5e sweet spot, the range of levels where a given ed of D&D is at least somewhat playable, after the random/pointless lethality of 1st level (and, in 5e, when everyone has their sub class, at 3rd) but before it falls apart at high levels.
Yes, 4e did stretch that out to cover all 30 levels.

But it was 30 levels of treadmill, where the PCs are incentivized to play the same game the same way over their entire career, just with bigger numbers and supposedly higher stakes.

It was the same in 3e and 5e to be fair.

 

[Scribe]

Again, this implies that there should never be player dissatisfaction from the "weaker" classes/subclasses, so long as the concept still appears.

No implication as such was made. There is a difference between acceptance, dissatisfaction, and perception of imbalance.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Alternatively, you could end up with the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Nobody complains about balance there!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because popularity and quality are not directly related. The most popular thing is not always the best.

Indeed. Moreover, something can be "popular" while also being "unpopular," because people use these terms in squishy, inconsistent ways.

If something is played frequently, it is called popular. But if something has low player satisfaction, that pretty clearly would seem to be **un***popular. Yet there are things in 5e that are, demonstrably, both widely-played *and suffering abysmal player satisfaction. They are "popular" by one metric and "unpopular" by another.

Hence why I say the amount of people playing something is the lesser half of the story. It's also a perfect example of surrogation. The quantity or rate of people playing something is an indirect measure of whether that thing is good or successful at its intended purpose. Yet for years and years folks have ised it as though it were a direct measure: clearly, there's no way players would frequently play things they don't really like! But the satisfaction survey data, which actually does directly measure how folks feel about these things, paints a very different story, one of shockingly low player satisfaction despite continuing to play these things. All of which is excellent evidence for the claim I've made for years, that players care a great deal about concept and presentation, but they do in fact also care about effectiveness.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No implication as such was made. There is a difference between acceptance, dissatisfaction, and perception of imbalance.

How so? The explicit standard was simply that the player gets to feel awesome and the concept is present. No consideration for being dissatisfied with the way that the concept actually works in practice. "Feeling awesome" is far too nebulous, and by the poster's own words must have little to nothing to do with mechanics.

TWF is kinda silly in real life as a fighting style anyway.

Sure. It had a very brief flowering in the early Renaissance and that was about it. But romantic notions of what is plausible are kind of the bread and butter of fantasy, even if we ignore the magic aspect.