D&D (2024) Do players really want balance?

[Sulicius]

What does balance look like?

 

[CreamCloud0]

Balance or not, in my view the bolded is a real problem.

A front-line sword-and-boarder should be the damage dealer...and damage absorber. Giving and taking damage is its job.

i'm of the opinion that the design of bounded accuracy ended up bounding things a little too much in certain circumstances, armour AC is one of these things. IMO a fully defensive specced martial (fullplate+shield+def fighting style)should be like, a flat 26AC, so that at 5th level(aproximately when i expect someone to get nonmagic fullplate) an opponent with +3 PB and +4 modifier who thus has a +7 to hit, has the 1-in-10 chance to hit but which is only going to increase as their modifiers grow.

 

[Distracted DM]

What does balance look like?

You'll get lots of different answers, and it depends on whether you're speaking from a player or GM perspective, but balance in design looks like: all options are good choices. That is, there are no trap features, that look useful but are actually awful. There are no choices that are so much better than everything else that you'd be intentionally hamstringing yourself by not taking them.
It's hard to do without making everything bland, but it can be done. Subclasses, for example: some are so good that they outshine every other subclass.. like the Zeal domain or some stuff from Tasha's. iirc the Purple Dragon Knight is the opposite.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

in basic terms I have played with people that want challenge and excitement.

For example, we all took turns playing 1e thieves! Out pal might have 18/perecentile str and specialized in the longsword while we are wanting to see what we can pull off as thieves. Did we know there was a power imbalance? Sure we did, but our goals were different and we wanted variety.

Had I been at a gamestore with randos who think might is right, strongest takes the treasure…well that would be a different game and different goal.

Nowadays the kind of balance people are worried about is not on our radar. Character X does 25% more damage! Means nothing to my group of friends who play what they want to imagine and hope, as a group, to get tot the next encounter alive.

We did it! Va. “I did it!”

That said, if a player was ineffectual and did not play a role, who would want that? Does that even exist in 5e?

 

[FrozenNorth]

I run into this problem all the time. As the modern game gets easier and easier for the players, and PCs get more and more powerful, the percentage of variant rules that come down to making the PCs lives harder in some way goes up..and up. And that's without the variant rules themselves getting any tougher. It's relative. As the book sets the standard, you will (and I do) see firmer pushback on those kinds of rules as the gap between what the GM might want for the setting tone and gameplay and what the text says the player should assume is "normal" get wider...and wider.

You don’t even play 5e. How could you run into this problem “all the time”?

 

[Oofta]

Balance or not, in my view the bolded is a real problem.

A front-line sword-and-boarder should be the damage dealer...and damage absorber. Giving and taking damage is its job.

They are if you have more than 1 or 2 combat encounters per long rest. The balance also shifts at various levels, like when the fighter can action surge and get 6 attacks in a round. Against individual targets anyway, there will always be those encounters where you're facing a mob of enemies that just happen to show up in fireball formation. Even if it was so the wizard felt like they were contributing equally when I DMed.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

I default to something game designer John Wick said, and I believe: When people talk about 'game balance', really what it seems they're talking about is 'equal spotlight'.

In my experiences, it's not that players are concerned that the thief does X more damage always, as much as they want their own actions to be 'as cool', as meaningful.

My son has just started playing, and he is an unruly destructive barbarian. Doesn't matter to him that he can soak serious damage or rage - he just loves he has a class that can use another living creature as an improvised weapon that does a d12 (Path of the Old Gods from Sebastian Crowe's Guide to Drakkenheim). He doesn't try to make everything combat, and he sits back and lets other players do cool things like when the warlock did some weird ritual that let him commune with his patron.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

They are if you have more than 1 or 2 combat encounters per long rest. The balance also shifts at various levels, like when the fighter can action surge and get 6 attacks in a round. Against individual targets anyway, there will always be those encounters where you're facing a mob of enemies that just happen to show up in fireball formation. Even if it was so the wizard felt like they were contributing equally when I DMed.

Side note: one thing I noticed in the 24 PHB that I'm not sure I saw in 2014, and I'm sure I didn't see used at tables I was at, was the clarification that you can only take a long rest once every 16 hours. No alpha strike, sleep for eight hours, alpha strike, sleep for eight hours.

That definitely makes the fighter feel more productive and useful

 

[Micah Sweet]

You don’t even play 5e. How could you run into this problem “all the time”?

I play in a D&D 5e campaign with my kids. My friend runs it for us. It comes up nearly every session there's combat. And before that I played multiple D&D 5e games a week. Came up often there too.

I also don't play Level Up straight. I often experiment with rules variants that, as I said, often amount to making things harder on the PCs in some way. I stand by my statement.

D&D or Level Up, it's all 5e, and many discussions like this one apply in a broader way than you're apparently willing to allow me.

 

[Maxperson]

Well, yes and no.

If I can do X and you can do X just as well as I can, plus you can do Y and Z, it can start to get a bit frustrating. I remember watching my 5e sword and board fighter standing beside another sword and board paladin. Almost identical stats for the characters. Both human. About the only real difference between the characters was the class.

And because of Divine Smite, he was doing a LOT more damage than I ever could. Yes, I was playing a Battlemaster, so, sure, I got an extra handful of D8's every short rest. But, by about 10th level, he was dealing nearly double the damage my character was doing, plus defending just as well as I could, being a tank just as well as I could and pretty much outshining my character in every possible way. And, let's not forget having a handful of spells on hand as well.

Totally not deliberate on his part by the way. The campaign rarely had more than a couple of encounters per day, so, he could nova all the time. I mean, sure, I'm playing a sword and board fighter. I'm not going to be the damage dealer. Fair enough. I got that. But, because of balance issues, his character was doing everything I could do, a lot better than I could do it.

So, yeah, balance can be a mechanical thing.

What you are describing there isn't a mechanical balance thing. That was a DM created issue because you guys rarely had more than a couple encounters per adventuring day.

With a proper adventuring day the paladin will either flame out in the first few fights and dribble the damage compared to the battlemaster in the other fights, or will have to spread those smites out and the two classes would do comparable damage.

I get why you don't want to have lots of fights every day, which is why I went to the adventuring week with the long rest happening every 7 days. It wasn't a perfect solution, but allowed me to put out the full complement of adventuring day encounters without slamming the group with one encounter after another.

While I really like 5e, the game being balanced around resource attrition over the adventuring day is my biggest issue with it.