D&D General Chris just said why I hate wizard/fighter dynamic

[Vaalingrade]

We can still criticize 5e for its perceived mistakes, right?

Not being able to was basically the first three years of 5e.

 

[Jaeger]

No at this point you're just gaslighting.

Now you are confusing who is trying to gaslight who...

Nice try, not buying it.

If you count Pathfinder as D&D then D&D has always been and continues to be the best selling TTRPG for the past half century.

Yes.

And Yes even if you don't count the clone, because its day in the sun was brief compared to D&D's decades of dominance.

You don't maintain that kind of longevity with bad game core concepts, even if they have evolved over time.

No one said D&D's core concepts were bad. I certainly didn't.

A system being Good Enough does not = without flaw. But by definition Good Enough means that it cannot be outright bad.

And by any measure 5e's system is Good Enough.

While I may disagree with how WotC chooses to implement a specific aspect of the system (Magic in this case) As far as WotC and the D&D devs are concerned: my opinion just doesn't matter.

My views of 5e/D&D's magic system are that of largely an outsider looking in. But for the core D&D player base - the current magic system is what they are used to! The majority of D&D players are certainly not inundating WotC survey's with complaints about the magic systems power levels. To the majority of player, the things I critique are just their standard mode of play.

So long as the game system as a whole is Good Enough at serving its players what they want to get out of the game - complaints from some rando on the internet about its magic system are irrelevant to WotC.

 

[Lanefan]

I wish people would heed your advice rather than trying to get further barbs in.

At first I misread the very last "b" in that sentence as a "d"...

 

[Minigiant]

I have never said 5E was beyond criticism. But there's a difference between dismissing people liking it and claiming it's only popular because of tradition.

As far as complaints, people will always find fault. Nothing is perfect. But millions of people aren't happily playing a game that is broken.

I'm not saying you are claiming D&D is beyond criticism.I was merely quoting your port to stay on topic.

However I think many fans fans downplay the impacts of tradition, oldness, and firstness in design.

D&D has many aspects where Mechanic X is a major contributor of Situation Y. And when complaint threads on Y and comments complaining the complaints of Y appear, if you mention that X supports Y there is a huge backlash. And that backlash is almost always defended with appeals to tradition and now displays on 5e's success.

D&D is more or less proof that if you get enough right it can hide major flaws and be successful.

The reason why you keep this discussion over and over and over and over is the fans enjoy 2 things that aren't compatible in you don't zoom in on it with a scalpel.

1. A fighter with simple games mechanics, easy math, and numbers that go up in a mostly linear curve
2. A wizard that is mechanically complex, haves complicated math, and a spell system not beholding to being aetheticallyy easy to look and not remember.

There's a reason why 5e could copy a lot of 3e's skeleton system but remove CODzilla so easily that no one even mentions it.

 

[ECMO3]

High level spellcasters have TOO MANY ups over high level martial characters. Heck middle level (7-10) full casters have more game changing abilities then most epic level martial characters. and WotC just admitted it.

This is why bladesingers rule, they can out martial most martials while bringing a crap ton of crowd pleaser nuclear weapon type spells.

I love the fact that casters are so much better than martials and I see no reason to give martials more power. Everyone can choose what to play, if a player wants to play a weaker class they should be allowed to. If they don't then they can play a wizard and tailor it to whatever they want to do, but we should not give the weak classes a leg up with some sort of affirmative action program to level the playing field for fighters and barbarians. Those classes are just inferior and there is nothing wrong with that because playing one of them is a choice.

It is a fantasy game, spell casters SHOULD be more powerful than those that can't cast spells. That is the whole idea.

 

[Aldarc]

However I think many fans fans downplay the impacts of tradition, oldness, and firstness in design.

Or alternatively mistake the game's popularity for its design quality.

For those sensitive to this sort of critique, this again is not to say that 5e D&D or D&D is a badly designed game or that its popularity is somehow wrong. Instead, it falls within the scope of what @Jaeger rightly points out as "good enough." A similar "good enough" design argument was made by Snarf Zagyg as well, namely his "Cheesecake Factory" piece. Places like Waffle House in the U.S. South or McDonalds worldwide are incredibly popular, but I don't think anyone would dare claim that they have "good quality" food, and for those eager to gaslight me by claiming that I am somehow being an elitist snob against the plebs, I say this as someone who enjoys both eating establishments.

D&D has many aspects where Mechanic X is a major contributor of Situation Y. And when complaint threads on Y and comments complaining the complaints of Y appear, if you mention that X supports Y there is a huge backlash. And that backlash is almost always defended with appeals to tradition and now displays on 5e's success.

5e's success has been used as a shield by some against making any changes to the game's shortcomings, weaknesses, or sore spots.

 

[Oofta]

Or alternatively mistake the game's popularity for its design quality.

For those sensitive to this sort of critique, this again is not to say that 5e D&D or D&D is a badly designed game or that its popularity is somehow wrong. Instead, it falls within the scope of what @Jaeger rightly points out as "good enough." A similar "good enough" design argument was made by Snarf Zagyg as well, namely his "Cheesecake Factory" piece. Places like Waffle House in the U.S. South or McDonalds worldwide are incredibly popular, but I don't think anyone would dare claim that they have "good quality" food, and for those eager to gaslight me by claiming that I am somehow being an elitist snob against the plebs, I say this as someone who enjoys both eating establishments.


5e's success has been used as a shield by some against making any changes to the game's shortcomings, weaknesses, or sore spots.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. WOTC's goal with the game's is to sell to make money by selling to a broad audience with the hopes to leverage broad popularity into movies and media. It does the former, we'll see about the latter. Not sure what else people expect.

 

[Oofta]

I'm not saying you are claiming D&D is beyond criticism.I was merely quoting your port to stay on topic.

However I think many fans fans downplay the impacts of tradition, oldness, and firstness in design.

D&D has many aspects where Mechanic X is a major contributor of Situation Y. And when complaint threads on Y and comments complaining the complaints of Y appear, if you mention that X supports Y there is a huge backlash. And that backlash is almost always defended with appeals to tradition and now displays on 5e's success.

D&D is more or less proof that if you get enough right it can hide major flaws and be successful.

The reason why you keep this discussion over and over and over and over is the fans enjoy 2 things that aren't compatible in you don't zoom in on it with a scalpel.

1. A fighter with simple games mechanics, easy math, and numbers that go up in a mostly linear curve
2. A wizard that is mechanically complex, haves complicated math, and a spell system not beholding to being aetheticallyy easy to look and not remember.

There's a reason why 5e could copy a lot of 3e's skeleton system but remove CODzilla so easily that no one even mentions it.

The bolded is where we disagree. I don't think the system has "major flaws". I keep disagreeing not because I refuse to acknowledge any issues, it's that I've never seen them be an issue in this edition. I have a half dozen house rules for some of the rough spots, but I assume most people are going to have at least a few eventually. I played 3E and at around 15th level, anyone other than the optimized caster was pointless. I don't see that issue any more. Then we get the alternatives suggested to fix things. This varies from "just give me a 4E fighter" to "they should be able to do superhuman feats like jump double the world record long jump" to "they should be mythic heroes that can redirect a river". It's kind of all over the board. Is it combat effectiveness? Out of combat options? Depends on who's answering.

If you want a more simplified wizard, I'm not sure what that would look like ... isn't that the role of the sorcerer? Alternatively use the sidekick wizard? Don't play a wizard if they're too complex? I don't think there's an answer to this one, wizards, especially high level ones, are always going to be complex. That's why we have simple alternative classes like fighters and rogues.

Fighters and wizards have different roles to play. But I'm also a realist. D&D 5E is the best selling version ever, they aren't going to do a major redesign. As a software developer we have a saying. Don't let perfection get in the way of good enough. Pick just about any topic on how to improve the game and you'll get completely different suggestions time and time again.

Getting the balance right is incredibly difficult from a game that is supposed to span dungeon crawls where you bust in and crack heads over the course of a day to urban mysteries that span a few days to overland hex crawls that can span weeks or months. I think they leaned too much into the dungeon crawl as the baseline assumption, but I counter that by spreading my adventuring "day" across several days using the gritty rest rules.

I don't think there's a single fix for accommodating every campaign style. Perhaps an extended set of rules on alternative rest options? Different ways of recovering spell slots using a mechanism similar to arcane recovery? But when the thread title is as provocative as "Chris just said why I hate wizard/fighter dynamic" you're going to get pushback. No link to the source was provided so we don't know the context. We don't know what example, if any, was given. All we know is that the OP hates a major aspect of the game that millions of people enjoy.

So, sorry I'm not sorry. I'm going to continue saying that while the game has minor flaws it doesn't have major flaws. I've found workarounds for some of the issues I encountered. I'm not using the game's success as a shield against making change, just acknowledging that it works for millions of people so I'm hardly in the minority.

 

[Aldarc]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. WOTC's goal with the game's is to sell to make money by selling to a broad audience with the hopes to leverage broad popularity into movies and media. It does the former, we'll see about the latter. Not sure what else people expect.

It sells to a broad audience but the goal for any business is to expand their market and improve the experience of existing customers. Most proposed changes deal with the latter goal.

 

[Umbran]

5e's success has been used as a shield by some against making any changes to the game's shortcomings, weaknesses, or sore spots.

You say this as if there's general agreement on what its shortcomings, weakness, or sore spots are. The thing you see as a weakness or shortcoming might well be someone else's happy spot.

This is an aspect of being a broadly popular game - suggested changes have a tendency of serving narrow purposes and preferences, rather than the broad audience. A broadly popular game is, by its nature, going to include a large number of compromises, rather than clear optimal choices. A person with specific preferences is apt to find some of those compromises to be weaknesses, and want them "fixed", when really they serve a purpose in a broader context.

A variation of, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," is, "Don't make perfect the enemy of good." In our context, given how well D&D is doing, that probably means not worrying so much about whether the core product gets what you see as weaknesses fixed, but allowing house rules or third party publishers handle that. Let WotC optimize for broad popularity, proven empirically, and leave others to do the experimenting.