This isn't evidence to support your claims. It looks like a form of ad hom directed at other posters. I'm pointing it out because I think the conversation goes better if we avoid that type of discussion, or at least demonstrate how you think it's dismissive so some constructive criticism could help others with their arguments too.
The reason why these discussions become so incredibly frustrating is because some people see a problem that other people argue don't exist, and heck we've seen the exact same thing play out even back in 3.0 and 3.5 with the same kind of arguments by, quite possibly, the same people debating whether or not the system is balanced, and this was back in the days when a druid's pet was stronger than the fighter and monk was a tier 5 class.
Spells aren't the limitation. Spell slots are the limitation on spells.
And martial classes are typically better at skills than casters unless we start comparing the best skilled casters to the worst skilled martials. This discussion point gets back to my favorite thing about rogues who are clearly better skilled than any other class in 5.x rules.
So I'm starting to see the problem. You see skills as useful. I don't. Skills, in D&D, are basically trash, because the system doesn't establish a baseline for what you can do with them. This is why it is almost always better to have a spell that definitely can solve some particular categories of problems, vs having a skill that might quite possibly work in the right kind of weather and with an agreeable GM.
I have shown already, though possibly not in this thread, not sure, that D&D isn't a marathon. It's a drag race. Therefore spell slot limitations become less and less of a problem.
At low levels? Sure, I agree that casters are absolutely not out of hand at that point, but as their number of slots increase the system becomes more and more tilted in their favour.
I can go more in to depth on martial skills benefits versus caster skills benefits if you want, but I think that's a topic that could have it's own thread if you want to argue the point.
If we look at using simulacrum to bypass the the negative effects of wish then yes that is OP. It's easy to accomplish with wizards and bards. But is it's also not most of the campaign and I'm not convinced it's really more OP than the champion's 18th level survivor ability. Not dying is a pretty solid ability.
Wish and Simulacrum are spells I pretty much ignore because they are outliers and they only become available at the levels where martials are so outclassed that any potential difference they create is basically irrelevant.
Survivor is cool, but it has the same problem a lot of martial abilities have, it isn't an "actionable" ability. Something that you can go and actively use.
That's because it's a class based system where different classes have different abilities. Wizards don't have evasion because martial classes also have abilities caster classes do not.
I'm perfectly fine with different classes having different abilities. My problem is simply that martials have fewer abilities.
I can build a monk who can teleport around the battle field on every attack or magic action at very high levels and also raise the dead too.
No comment on the monk issue. They do have some cool stuff.
I think it shows one of the issues though in how martial abilities are so very spread out among classes and subclasses. Whenever a spell is introduced it's added to a pool that becomes available to some spellcasting class at some point. By contrast whenever a martial ability is introduced it either needs to be attached to a very specific subclass, or they need to create a specific subclass to support it.
Martials don't need to everything casters do because that goes in a direction where martials have all the benefits of casters and none of the drawbacks.
That's not what I want. I want martials to be
competent at high levels. They don't need to be able to do the exact same things that casters do. I want them to have their own unique martial flavour. They obviously need weaknesses.
I'm going to ask you to prove this with evidence instead of repeating yourself. It looks to me more like the bias is required to favor spell casters with things like easy access to long rests or low numbers of encouters.
Right, sorry, the post you're replying too wasn't finished. I started writing that bit while being distracted and posted without finishing it.
So my example was going to be this. It's for sure possible to be creative in the system as it is, anyone who says you cannot is obviously wrong (unless you have a weird kind of "no fun allowed" game master), but one problem that appears is that in order to be creative you need something to act upon.
So if you have, say, a fighter, all that they can act upon as an outlet for creativity is themselves, but if you have a wizard, they can also use their spells.
So a few examples of what I mean regarding creative uses of things.
- Can a spell that does fire damage be used to set fire to things?
- Can a spell that does cold damage be used to freeze water?
- Can a spell that does lightning damage do electric damage to multiple creatures in water as an AoE?
- Can you use a dimension door to teleport someone else?
These are just creative applications of spells. Some of them or all of them might be shut down by a GM, but they may also be perfectly fine with them... What I'm saying here is that spells also open up creative play and they do so by being tools that can do things no other tools can do. There's no way for a martial to instantly create fire, for example.
Note that my main objection with the design of D&D is not, in fact, that what I just mentioned above is possible. The above just illustrates how, if you have a GM that is unbiased not in favour of either class, and they enable creativity, then that will benefit casters more than it will benefit martials because casters have tools that very open to creative uses.
