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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9820948" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I think you’re right on the money. If we’re talking about pure combat balance, 2024 5e has reached a pretty good spot. Casters, for the most part, are capable of dealing reasonable damage per round, but are less efficient at it than martials, except in cases where they are able to use AoE damage against a very large number of weaker targets. Control spells are more efficient for dealing with individual targets, but are mainly enablers for the primary damage dealers (the martials) to finish off the controlled target more quickly and safely. And healing is very valuable now, with monster damage output and healing spell power both having increased without PCs’ base hit point totals having increased at all. That means an optimal party will involve a combination of martial damage dealers, AoE and Control focused casters, and healing focused casters. Which is a pretty good place to be in, combat-balance wise. Everyone contributes something different and valuable.What the martial vs. caster debate is really about is not combat balance, but narrative authority. Casters can use spells to simply make a thing happen, whereas martials can really only rely on skills, filtered through DM adjudication, to make things happen. At low levels, this means the martials have to play the “mother, may I?” game with the DM to solve problems that don’t involve reducing a pool of hit points to zero, while casters have access to a toolbox of ready-made solutions. See arguments about stealth and thieves’ tools vs. Invisibility and Knock. At high levels, this means casters get access to things like teleportation, telepathy, flight, and of course eventually Wish, while martials are stuck doing the same things they’ve been doing since first level but with higher numbers.And that’s why this debate will never be resolved. Even if martials were mathematically provably better at combat than casters in all scenarios, it would not resolve the core underlying issue that casters have abilities that grant (temporary, limited) narrative authority, and martials don’t. And it’s likely they never will in D&D, because the one edition where this balance was directly addressed, performed commercially poorly. This is a stark thematic divide within the D&D fandom, of people who want non-spellcasting characters to be capable of superhuman feats (and not just in combat), and people who want all superhuman feats to be acts of magic, which D&D ties inextricably to spellcasting.</blockquote>

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