D&D 5E The Fighter/Martial Problem (In Depth Ponderings)

[FrogReaver]

one of the big balancing factors in older d&d was

fighters were the most durable, saves, ac, and hp and also came with the highest attack bonuses. New spells were mostly treated as equivalent to finding magic items - meaning wizards often didn’t have full casting and a full array of magic items whereas fighters made the better magic item platform.

Doing away with Christmas tree fighters, while giving wizards spells for free on level up really broke things - without offering any replacement.

 

[Tony Vargas]

There is absolutely no evidence it is not the case either.

I play a lot of D&D, with players from around the workd. I can only attest to what I have seen at tables I play on, but what I have seen does not support the theory that the game is less fun for most players due to the imbalance.

Game balance is an older concept than TTRPGs, EGG was openly trying, however baroquely and unsuccessfully, to build balance into the system back in the 1e DMG. Balance is a positive quality that games can posses.

If you want to argue that balance is bad, you have a very difficult uphill battle. You're going to need more than the standard-issue unverifiable anecdote from an anonymous internet source, or fallacious appeal to popularity.

Assume all options are equally effective. Then anyone that finds meaning solely on the axis of effectiveness is not going to find meaning in those choices - for them it would be as if ‘none of these choices matter’

Someone with that attitude should probably prefer competative games to cooperative ones, then. The social contract of a competative game is that there will be losers, so making good while othes make bad choices is a path to winning, which is part of the point.
In a cooperative game, everyone contributes to the win, and if anyone contributes too little, it's a loss for everyone. If the only thing that makes choice meaningful is power, then making a meaningful choice would mean some of the players choosing meaningfully less powerful options, which would then reduce the players' chance of winning the game - so, really, only the viable choices, the ones that can lead to a win, are real, which makes them meaningless, again, once system mastery is applied.

...OK, I see it, if the point of choices is only to separate the sysetem masters from the mass of the player population....

i don’t think I want perfect balance if perfect balance means equally effective. What I want is more balance than we have now. I want to be able to build martials that aren’t outperformed at nearly every niche by casters.

Equally effective or equally contributing does not mean equal or identical. It just means they're all viable, really.

I think we get hung up on trying to visualize equality, and, sure, exact numerical & functional equality can be readily visualized by an example like two things that are identical. That it might take a bit more effort to visualize things being distinct, unique, but still equal should not stop us from striving for that.

 

[Pedantic]

Someone with that attitude should probably prefer competative games to cooperative ones, then. The social contract of a competative game is that there will be losers, so making good while othes make bad choices is a path to winning, which is part of the point.
In a cooperative game, everyone contributes to the win, and if anyone contributes too little, it's a loss for everyone. If the only thing that makes choice meaningful is power, then making a meaningful choice would mean some of the players choosing meaningfully less powerful options, which would then reduce the players' chance of winning the game - so, really, only the viable choices, the ones that can lead to a win, are real, which makes them meaningless, again, once system mastery is applied.

You're mistaking a cooperative "game" for a cooperative "activity" here.* The incentives to play well remains regardless of whether you're playing in a cooperative or a competitive environment, that goes with "game" not with "competitive." A meaningful choice requires it result in different board states, and that players be able to discriminate between board states they want and board states they don't in pursuit of their goals.

Now I think it's a lot less clear that initial character creation (particularly at the level of something with such long spanning consequences as class selection) is the correct place to start putting choices in with that much impact, but I think it's completely reasonable to prefer a game where a player making choices during ability selection and level up will reliably outperform a random number generator doing the same thing, or even a simple algorithm.

To avoid that, you'd either need to not print synergies into your abilities or remove choice altogether from the class chassis.

*That's also a misunderstanding of competitive games, which are as often played for exploration as dominance. Half of those designs are about using other players essentially as imperfectly predictable randomizers. Through trying to achieve the game's goal, players produce novel board states and puzzles that each of them tries to solve; there's a whole class of competitive play wherein trying to win is a means, and the gameplay itself is the end. You'll get players who will happily offer advice to their opponents or essentially pause play to analyze the board collectively.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Assume all options are equally effective. Then anyone that finds meaning solely on the axis of effectiveness is not going to find meaning in those choices - for them it would be as if ‘none of these choices matter’

i don’t think I want perfect balance if perfect balance means equally effective. What I want is more balance than we have now. I want to be able to build martials that aren’t outperformed at nearly every niche by casters.

just because all options might be equally worthwhile it doesn't mean that all options are the same, balance doesn't just refer to damage, there is meaningful choice in being able to choose to heal vs making skill checks vs dealing damage vs having magical utility, it just means that because you chose to be good at one of those it doesn't mean that you'll have significantly less impact on the game, your impact just takes a different form.

 

[FrogReaver]

just because all options might be equally worthwhile it doesn't mean that all options are the same, balance doesn't just refer to damage, there is meaningful choice in being able to choose to heal vs making skill checks vs dealing damage vs having magical utility, it just means that because you chose to be good at one of those it doesn't mean that you'll have significantly less impact on the game, your impact just takes a different form.

I said nothing about them being the same. Instead I spoke about the same efficiency. Please don’t impute my posts with claims I’m not making.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You're mistaking a cooperative "game" for a cooperative "activity" here.* The incentives to play well remains regardless of whether you're playing in a cooperative or a competitive environment, that goes with "game" not with "competitive." A meaningful choice requires it result in different board states, and that players be able to discriminate between board states they want and board states they don't in pursuit of their goals.

Sorry, not my intent. The point was exactly that there's an incentive to make the best possible choices whether the game is cooperative or competitive, the difference is that bad choices, in a competitive game, will lead to you losing, which is to bad for you, but fine for the player that wins - depending on the player, it might be annoying due to the lack of challenge, or not, if it's just all about winning for them. Avoiding bad choices is part of the challenge, and making better choices than the next player is part of what winning is measuring.
In a cooperative game, bad choices hurt all the players, and making a better choice than the next guy is not necessarily going to help you win, while everyone making the best choices will help you win.
In an RPG, there's a whole extra layer beyond winning/losing - there's genre emulation, character concepts, storytelling, &c - that needs to coexist productively with the game elements. Balancing the game elements facilitates that.

Now I think it's a lot less clear that initial character creation (particularly at the level of something with such long spanning consequences as class selection) is the correct place to start putting choices in with that much impact, but I think it's completely reasonable to prefer a game where a player making choices during ability selection and level up will reliably outperform a random number generator doing the same thing, or even a simple algorithm.

Obvious examples abound in D&D, you don't go dumping both STR and DEX with a fighter, for instance, which an entirely randomized chargen might do. Dumping INT might be less destructive to a wizard guild, if you avoid spells that require attacks or saves, but a randomized chargen wouldn't avoid them.
Designing a balanced game certainly doesn't mean removing complexity, and optimization is always going to be possible... balance aspires to keeping choices viable, if done well, optimization ekes out a modest advantage that doesn't obviate the contributions of others.

(Optimization isn't the enemy of balance, it just leverages imbalance - in a very imbalanced game, optimization can just stop being engaging because it's too easy to pull too far ahead of both other players and the challenges the game presents. )

To avoid that, you'd either need to not print synergies into your abilities or remove choice altogether from the class chassis.

Removing choice in the name of balance is, like, really missing the point. You can cope with imbalance by formally or informally setting aside the bad choices. But it's not really an improvement, just an acknowledgment.

there's a whole class of competitive play wherein trying to win is a means, and the gameplay itself is the end. You'll get players who will happily offer advice to their opponents or essentially pause play to analyze the board collectively.

I have certainly had experiences like that. It's interesting that there's a genre of games that emphasize it.

 

[FrogReaver]

just because all options might be equally worthwhile it doesn't mean that all options are the same, balance doesn't just refer to damage, there is meaningful choice in being able to choose to heal vs making skill checks vs dealing damage vs having magical utility, it just means that because you chose to be good at one of those it doesn't mean that you'll have significantly less impact on the game, your impact just takes a different form.

If you’ve made them all equally effective then there is no meaningful choice on the axis of effectiveness.

There might be a different axis you find meaning in but it won’t relate to effectiveness.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If you’ve made them all equally effective then there is no meaningful choice on the axis of effectiveness.

OK, that sounds like a more limited claim, you can have equally effective choices that are meaningfully different in a variety of other ways...
but, still...
.... if you have a number of choices, and one of them is much more effective than the others, isn't that also a lack of meaningful choice on the axis of effectiveness - just always choose the best one, if you can even consider it a choice. It doesn't even need to be that much more effective. If effectiveness of choices is made different situationally, than the DM, who y'know, describes the situation, simply decides it's effectiveness arbitrarily.
So, really, what would be a meaningful choice on the axis of effectiveness?

But it still doesn't seem right, you can have overall equally effective choices that are still meaningfully different in how they achieve that effectiveness, and how/when that effectiveness manifests in play, and how they synergize with other choices....

 

[Oofta]

It's funny some of the things that people assert as fact that simply are not. For example that more character mechanical options are inherently better, or more balanced. That balance in and of itself, for that matter, is better for the game. I think the claims are baseless.

First it assumes that all the important contributions that a player can make to the game do so through what is written on their character sheet as if D&D were some glorified chess game. That may be true in some games, especially hack-and-slash games. Of course there's always going to be the litany of responses that "everybody can do stuff outside of their character abilities". But to me there's two factors here. One is that if you have 1 person in the party who is good at persuasion, do you really need 2? Or 3? There's nothing wrong with contributing in different ways than others. Those other factors may not be as flashy, doesn't mean they aren't important. If you want flashy, if it makes the game more fun for you, there are plenty of options. But the other thing which is just as if not more important is that most of the truly critical things that happen in games I've played have little to do with character abilities. It's all about the decisions the player makes.

Second it assumes that more options are inherently better. I disagree. More options just mean more complexity. I don't care about "balance" which does not mean "equal amount of complexity". I care about "Does the person playing the character have fun". From my perspective and from what I've seen in actual play and, even if people don't accept that it's supported by popularity, what people actually play certainly does not contradict that many people enjoy playing characters with fewer mechanical options. D&D is a game. People have different reasons for playing, different capabilities and inherent capabilities.

People playing in any games I've played have enjoyed classes of all stripes, some with more complexity and options, some with fewer. So balance to me is a red herring that's pretty much meaningless. I have enjoyed in the past and would have no issue with playing a bog standard champion fighter if it made sense for the character. Meanwhile playing a wizard can be distracting and lead to higher anxiety levels and therefore less fun, wondering if I have the right spells, what should I do next, if only I had that one spell available, etc.. I enjoy playing wizards but because I DM so much, when I do get to play sometimes I just want simple. For a fair number of people, fewer options will be better depending on what they want out of the game.

 

[FrogReaver]

OK, that sounds like a more limited claim, you can have equally effective choices that are meaningfully different in a variety of other ways...
but, still...

Same claim I made the first time.

.... if you have a number of choices, and one of them is much more effective than the others, isn't that also a lack of meaningful choice on the axis of effectiveness - just always choose the best one, if you can even consider it a choice. It doesn't even need to be that much more effective. If effectiveness of choices is made different situationally, than the DM, who y'know, describes the situation, simply decides it's effectiveness arbitrarily.
So, really, what would be a meaningful choice on the axis of effectiveness?

In that scenario your effectiveness depends on the choice you make. That makes it a meaningful choice on that axis. That you may know the correct answer and thus can always choose the most effective choice might make it an uninteresting choice, but it’s still a choice that has meaning in relation to effectiveness.

But it still doesn't seem right, you can have overall equally effective choices that are still meaningfully different in how they achieve that effectiveness, and how/when that effectiveness manifests in play, and how they synergize with other choices....

Sure. I think what you are trying to claim is that people don’t only find meaning in effectiveness. And I agree. I’m just asserting that they also find meaning in effectiveness - which perfect asymmetric balance around effectiveness would undermine.