So as Mearls finally admitted and expressed mathematically, though most of us have known it for a long time: D&D's combat was balanced for the slow release of power over a much longer adventuring day and not the alpha burst we've been seeing for a decade.
And there's really two reasons the game plays like that:
1) Spreadsheet Play.
Over the past 20 years or so, with the rise and fall of the MMORPG and online forum involvement in maximizing gains to minimal effort, 'Solving' gameplay has become more of a thing than it has been in the history of the world. D&D is 'Solved' by using a handful of extremely strong combinations of class features, spells, or creative interpretations to hit an 'I Win' button at the start of a fight. Then you take a long rest and do it again. Unless your build includes Warlock, then it's a Short Rest.
2) Long Rest/Short Rest Structure
Because the mechanical recharge of player power is tied to a 'no-risk' purely narrative mechanic, you quickly get the 5 minute adventuring day. Which the game, hilariously, wasn't designed for.
How do we address the problem?
So. How do we fix this without creating a new edition of D&D, which WotC has shown incredible reticence toward due to 5e's immense (Covid and Crit Role) popularity? Easy... you don't. At least WotC doesn't. But you might be able to wend your way in that direction with a 'new' system hidden in a setting.
For this to work you'd need to create replacement classes for all the base classes. These wouldn't be a 'New Warlock' where it fulfills the same niche, perfectly, while using a more constrained structure. Otherwise people would just play the original, alpha-capable, version of the class.
Rather than a Warlock, specifically, you'd need to play with the warlock concept and apply it to a new structure. Like maybe "People whose parents sold their firstborn child to warlock patrons for power" and then you still get power from the patron as they use you as a pawn in the world... but the relationship is different and more hostile than the typical warlock-patron relationship... Or more maternal, as your Hag or Fey 'Stepmother' raised you with love or whatever.
Thus you retain much of the narrative identity but get to slap a whole different mechanical structure underneath it, like making them a core "Magical Rogue" character class.
Then it's a matter of simply saying "These are the classes of this specific setting, which we are packaging them with, and the traditional core classes do not exist in this setting"
Is it perfect? No, obviously not. You're still going to get people on forums, like this one, min-maxing the classes. Especially by trying various combinations of the classes you create with the baseline game classes. Or having DMs be like "I don't want to disappoint my players, so they can play whatever at my table" which is also going to happen a lot. And that's fine. That's going to happen. We can't actually stop them from doing that...
But we can explain -why- these classes are designed to be standalone within the new book/setting as part of the Classes chapter introduction, and the initial introduction of the book. Etc. And then hope some of those DMs and Forumites will be dissuaded from that course of action.
But how do you do the actual balance itself, I hear you ask. Well...
4e got it mostly right.
... for those of you that know me, you recognize how difficult that was for me to say. 4e, mechanically, was significantly more balanced than 5e has been. Especially for extending the adventuring day across multiple fights to better represent pacing in dungeons and large-scale encounters or encounter-series. And, truly, it doth burn me to admit this. My tongue shall be swollen a month and a day from this blasphemy...
Okay, yeah, so it's not -that- bad I'm just being playfully dramatic.
Specifically: Encounter Powers.
The ability to always have access to several options with a limited use is a great concept. The problems I always had with the implementation of that design, however, were:
1) Writing Structure
Encounter Powers were, largely, expressed as the same ability over and over and over throughout 30 levels with some slight changes at different level breaks to make it keep up with the level progression. This was TEDIOUS and boring, and made trying to build new classes a massive exercise in frustration as you slowly, incrementally, increased the W modifier or added on the occasional ribbon to try and make it feel 'different' while still fulfilling the same function. Daggerheart took some of that to heart with their card-based character classes but tried to make it less overt.
2) Repetition
Not only was the mechanical description repetitive, so was the gameplay. You had access to a handful of encounter powers and once a given power was used up you couldn't use it, again. So actual combats often felt fairly samey as you specifically took the exact same encounter actions over and over with the occasional Daily power to alpha-strike or At-Will power as filler.
Rather than have a fairly large number of options with limited uses, 4e went with you getting between 2 and 5 encounter powers at a time and each one had a single use. I think this was a mistake as compared to having between 5 and 10 -choices- and 2-3 encounter power uses per fight. That would allow for a player to engage in a lot more variety, fight to fight, on what they want to do while still keeping the number of encounter powers at a reasonable level.
So building classes around the idea of limited use encounter-powers would really help to sell the core identity of a game where you go through multiple encounters over the course of the day. And giving them Dailies, perhaps with a 'one daily per encounter' general rule and only a handful of daily slots in general, could keep the Alpha Strike and 5-minute workday to a minimum.
But why a setting, though?
I'm getting good at boiling these things down to two reasons so let's see if I can do it, again!
1) Class Specificity.
Because core 5e basically locked in on the 'generic classes' as hard as it could to be as flexible across settings as possible, you really need to make the classes you create, here, specific to a specific setting and/or structure. Well. Within Reason. You're still going to want the classes to be as broad as you can make them for narrative purposes, it's just not going to be as broad as "Fighter" or "Rogue".
2) Class Connection
By giving the classes a specific place in the world, with organizations, identities, and structures, you create elements that DMs and Designers can lift out, whole cloth or piecemeal, to drop into their own homebrew games. This is something most of us are 'guilty' of to various degrees, but who cares? If you design the connection to feel natural enough, or tropey enough, it'll fit in anywhere.
3) Conveying Class Identity
By introducing a bunch of new classes with somewhat more narrow identities than "Wizard" you need to develop a method of showing, not telling, what they're narratively 'about'. How their mechanics impact the world and the social differences in structure that go with that are super important. So having a setting where you can show their impact, their connections, and their identity is super useful.
Ah, damn it. And I was doing so well! Anyway.
By using a setting you provide a contained example of what the classes are, how they interact with one another, how they interact with the setting, and how they function on their own. You can create example characters fulfilling class roles within the setting itself, provide character arcs and connections, and use the setting as a testing ground and playground for the classes for new DMs and Players trying them out.
Would people buy it?
I mean... you tell me.
Settings are among the worst-selling books there is for a TTRPG because people tend to create their own. Back in the 90s, setting-spread nearly killed D&D for good and pushed the value of the brand and material so low that WotC was able to buy it for a song and wound up having to get rid of massive quantities of unsold stock because of how narrowly designed a lot of it was for specific settings and their identities. Sure, Dark Sun and Ravenloft, but also the lesser used settings like Thunder Rift or Red Steel. I'd be more surprised by people recognizing those names than not. Red Steel, in particular, sold about 17,000 copies, total, before it was discontinued.
You'd also have the issue that you'd be undercutting your own audience if you worked on both 'versions' of the game by expanding materials designed for the setting in particular. Players and DMs who don't like "Those Classes" just won't buy "Those Books" no matter how nicely you package them or how heavily you market them.
However...
What's the best case scenario?
If you can get the big, initial, buy-in and you manage to capitalize on it with further releases, you could effectively splinter off a portion of the 5e fanbase through more evocative class identities, interesting mechanical structures, and a setting that fires the imagination. You could wind up with a 4e-ified 5e Pathfinder situation. After all, that is a big part of how Pathfinder managed to splinter people off in the 3e/4e changeover. They built their setting, Golarion, to be a lot more evocative and a lot less generic than 4e's structure and capitalized on the identity of their product through artwork and visual design to capture fans.
But that IF is carrying mountains on its tiny shoulders.
You'd need to develop something that uses the OGL and 5e SRD as a base while building mechanical identity off of it, create a setting to hold that in, and probably provide a large-scale adventure or adventure-path to build off it all so that people have something to -do- with those new character classes and encounter powers.
Bottom Line.
This would not be something to undertake lightly. You'd probably need a consistent income source, like a Patreon account, where you dole out some of the material as you go and work on building up artwork and identity with the community. Somewhere you'd need to put out material on a weekly basis to maintain engagement and keep people subscribing and putting some cash into your bank in order to compile all the material into a future work. A place where people who are interested can work with you to playtest new concepts and ideas with maybe a Discord Server that also gets updated with all the information so people can access real time conversations about it with other Patreon followers.
On top of that you'd be spending money out of the Patreon on artwork commissions, commercial ones, so that you could sell the concept to people. Whether new patreon followers, angel investors, kickstarter backers, or otherwise.
What do you think?
Do you think someone could pull that concept off? I happen to have a bunch of classes in my back pocket that could be lightly redesigned to function in that way if I got a wild hair up my backside about it... but I don't have Paizo's resources or connections so it probably wouldn't go nearly as well for me as it would for, say, LaserLlama or KibblesTasty if either of them decided to do something ridiculous like this. And it wouldn't go for them nearly as well as it would a connected publisher snagging talent for some big push like Paizo did.
Do you think, in the current climate, someone could create a 'more balanced' version of 5e through system and setting design?
And there's really two reasons the game plays like that:
1) Spreadsheet Play.
Over the past 20 years or so, with the rise and fall of the MMORPG and online forum involvement in maximizing gains to minimal effort, 'Solving' gameplay has become more of a thing than it has been in the history of the world. D&D is 'Solved' by using a handful of extremely strong combinations of class features, spells, or creative interpretations to hit an 'I Win' button at the start of a fight. Then you take a long rest and do it again. Unless your build includes Warlock, then it's a Short Rest.
2) Long Rest/Short Rest Structure
Because the mechanical recharge of player power is tied to a 'no-risk' purely narrative mechanic, you quickly get the 5 minute adventuring day. Which the game, hilariously, wasn't designed for.
How do we address the problem?
So. How do we fix this without creating a new edition of D&D, which WotC has shown incredible reticence toward due to 5e's immense (Covid and Crit Role) popularity? Easy... you don't. At least WotC doesn't. But you might be able to wend your way in that direction with a 'new' system hidden in a setting.
For this to work you'd need to create replacement classes for all the base classes. These wouldn't be a 'New Warlock' where it fulfills the same niche, perfectly, while using a more constrained structure. Otherwise people would just play the original, alpha-capable, version of the class.
Rather than a Warlock, specifically, you'd need to play with the warlock concept and apply it to a new structure. Like maybe "People whose parents sold their firstborn child to warlock patrons for power" and then you still get power from the patron as they use you as a pawn in the world... but the relationship is different and more hostile than the typical warlock-patron relationship... Or more maternal, as your Hag or Fey 'Stepmother' raised you with love or whatever.
Thus you retain much of the narrative identity but get to slap a whole different mechanical structure underneath it, like making them a core "Magical Rogue" character class.
Then it's a matter of simply saying "These are the classes of this specific setting, which we are packaging them with, and the traditional core classes do not exist in this setting"
Is it perfect? No, obviously not. You're still going to get people on forums, like this one, min-maxing the classes. Especially by trying various combinations of the classes you create with the baseline game classes. Or having DMs be like "I don't want to disappoint my players, so they can play whatever at my table" which is also going to happen a lot. And that's fine. That's going to happen. We can't actually stop them from doing that...
But we can explain -why- these classes are designed to be standalone within the new book/setting as part of the Classes chapter introduction, and the initial introduction of the book. Etc. And then hope some of those DMs and Forumites will be dissuaded from that course of action.
But how do you do the actual balance itself, I hear you ask. Well...
4e got it mostly right.
... for those of you that know me, you recognize how difficult that was for me to say. 4e, mechanically, was significantly more balanced than 5e has been. Especially for extending the adventuring day across multiple fights to better represent pacing in dungeons and large-scale encounters or encounter-series. And, truly, it doth burn me to admit this. My tongue shall be swollen a month and a day from this blasphemy...
Okay, yeah, so it's not -that- bad I'm just being playfully dramatic.
Specifically: Encounter Powers.
The ability to always have access to several options with a limited use is a great concept. The problems I always had with the implementation of that design, however, were:
1) Writing Structure
Encounter Powers were, largely, expressed as the same ability over and over and over throughout 30 levels with some slight changes at different level breaks to make it keep up with the level progression. This was TEDIOUS and boring, and made trying to build new classes a massive exercise in frustration as you slowly, incrementally, increased the W modifier or added on the occasional ribbon to try and make it feel 'different' while still fulfilling the same function. Daggerheart took some of that to heart with their card-based character classes but tried to make it less overt.
2) Repetition
Not only was the mechanical description repetitive, so was the gameplay. You had access to a handful of encounter powers and once a given power was used up you couldn't use it, again. So actual combats often felt fairly samey as you specifically took the exact same encounter actions over and over with the occasional Daily power to alpha-strike or At-Will power as filler.
Rather than have a fairly large number of options with limited uses, 4e went with you getting between 2 and 5 encounter powers at a time and each one had a single use. I think this was a mistake as compared to having between 5 and 10 -choices- and 2-3 encounter power uses per fight. That would allow for a player to engage in a lot more variety, fight to fight, on what they want to do while still keeping the number of encounter powers at a reasonable level.
So building classes around the idea of limited use encounter-powers would really help to sell the core identity of a game where you go through multiple encounters over the course of the day. And giving them Dailies, perhaps with a 'one daily per encounter' general rule and only a handful of daily slots in general, could keep the Alpha Strike and 5-minute workday to a minimum.
But why a setting, though?
I'm getting good at boiling these things down to two reasons so let's see if I can do it, again!
1) Class Specificity.
Because core 5e basically locked in on the 'generic classes' as hard as it could to be as flexible across settings as possible, you really need to make the classes you create, here, specific to a specific setting and/or structure. Well. Within Reason. You're still going to want the classes to be as broad as you can make them for narrative purposes, it's just not going to be as broad as "Fighter" or "Rogue".
2) Class Connection
By giving the classes a specific place in the world, with organizations, identities, and structures, you create elements that DMs and Designers can lift out, whole cloth or piecemeal, to drop into their own homebrew games. This is something most of us are 'guilty' of to various degrees, but who cares? If you design the connection to feel natural enough, or tropey enough, it'll fit in anywhere.
3) Conveying Class Identity
By introducing a bunch of new classes with somewhat more narrow identities than "Wizard" you need to develop a method of showing, not telling, what they're narratively 'about'. How their mechanics impact the world and the social differences in structure that go with that are super important. So having a setting where you can show their impact, their connections, and their identity is super useful.
Ah, damn it. And I was doing so well! Anyway.
By using a setting you provide a contained example of what the classes are, how they interact with one another, how they interact with the setting, and how they function on their own. You can create example characters fulfilling class roles within the setting itself, provide character arcs and connections, and use the setting as a testing ground and playground for the classes for new DMs and Players trying them out.
Would people buy it?
I mean... you tell me.
Settings are among the worst-selling books there is for a TTRPG because people tend to create their own. Back in the 90s, setting-spread nearly killed D&D for good and pushed the value of the brand and material so low that WotC was able to buy it for a song and wound up having to get rid of massive quantities of unsold stock because of how narrowly designed a lot of it was for specific settings and their identities. Sure, Dark Sun and Ravenloft, but also the lesser used settings like Thunder Rift or Red Steel. I'd be more surprised by people recognizing those names than not. Red Steel, in particular, sold about 17,000 copies, total, before it was discontinued.
You'd also have the issue that you'd be undercutting your own audience if you worked on both 'versions' of the game by expanding materials designed for the setting in particular. Players and DMs who don't like "Those Classes" just won't buy "Those Books" no matter how nicely you package them or how heavily you market them.
However...
What's the best case scenario?
If you can get the big, initial, buy-in and you manage to capitalize on it with further releases, you could effectively splinter off a portion of the 5e fanbase through more evocative class identities, interesting mechanical structures, and a setting that fires the imagination. You could wind up with a 4e-ified 5e Pathfinder situation. After all, that is a big part of how Pathfinder managed to splinter people off in the 3e/4e changeover. They built their setting, Golarion, to be a lot more evocative and a lot less generic than 4e's structure and capitalized on the identity of their product through artwork and visual design to capture fans.
To better express that idea for the folks who don't know the history: Paizo had been doing Dragon Magazine for years before WotC unveiled their plans for 4e, and had created the Shackled City adventure path for Dungeon magazine. They were working on a "Pathfinder" adventure path for Dungeon that relied on the 3.5e ruleset as a stepping stone for campaigns to transition from 3.5e to 4e which would've culminated in a 'world changing' event where you start your 4e character. But the GSL was -so- restrictive they ultimately decided to scrap the adventure path and turn the material they designed for that into the Golarion setting, and then built the Pathfinder classes and RPG around the idea of making sure people went from 1-20 in one class instead of constantly multiclassing to min-max.
Whether they succeeded in the multiclass avoidance is up to interpretation!
Whether they succeeded in the multiclass avoidance is up to interpretation!
But that IF is carrying mountains on its tiny shoulders.
You'd need to develop something that uses the OGL and 5e SRD as a base while building mechanical identity off of it, create a setting to hold that in, and probably provide a large-scale adventure or adventure-path to build off it all so that people have something to -do- with those new character classes and encounter powers.
Bottom Line.
This would not be something to undertake lightly. You'd probably need a consistent income source, like a Patreon account, where you dole out some of the material as you go and work on building up artwork and identity with the community. Somewhere you'd need to put out material on a weekly basis to maintain engagement and keep people subscribing and putting some cash into your bank in order to compile all the material into a future work. A place where people who are interested can work with you to playtest new concepts and ideas with maybe a Discord Server that also gets updated with all the information so people can access real time conversations about it with other Patreon followers.
On top of that you'd be spending money out of the Patreon on artwork commissions, commercial ones, so that you could sell the concept to people. Whether new patreon followers, angel investors, kickstarter backers, or otherwise.
What do you think?
Do you think someone could pull that concept off? I happen to have a bunch of classes in my back pocket that could be lightly redesigned to function in that way if I got a wild hair up my backside about it... but I don't have Paizo's resources or connections so it probably wouldn't go nearly as well for me as it would for, say, LaserLlama or KibblesTasty if either of them decided to do something ridiculous like this. And it wouldn't go for them nearly as well as it would a connected publisher snagging talent for some big push like Paizo did.
Do you think, in the current climate, someone could create a 'more balanced' version of 5e through system and setting design?
