Class Balance - why?

[Elf Witch]

Yeah, it grants you a save. If you fail it, you have to make a DC 20 Strength check as a full round action to be able to move at all. Either way you're suffering entangled penalties. Even if you make the save, you have to make a Strength check of at least DC 15 to move 1 square as a full round action.

At 3rd level, when a wizard can first cast Web, creatures are hardly guaranteed to be able to make that check at all. Even if they make their save, and their check, it's a DC 30 check to exit the web in one round if you're caught at the center. More than likely, a creature will spend 4 or 5 rounds doing nothing but trying to escape the web.

Spell resistance doesn't help either, nor does magic immunity. Even at high levels, against creatures with enormous strength who are guaranteed to make their save, the creatures have to spend a full round extracting themselves, which is almost as good as an AoE stun, at the paltry price of a level 2 spell slot.

At that point, they're easy pickins for even a lowly wizard with a crossbow, let alone a fighter or the rogue. Sure, the rest of the party contributes, but only by mopping up after the wizard has won the fight for them. Web is one of the best spells to trivialize a fight. In fact, I can't think of a single time that Web was cast that it didn't trivialize combat (and I've seen a lot of Web spells cast).



Not every game jumps nonstop from adventure to adventure at breakneck speed. I don't think the game should break just because the DM decides that going from level 1 to 20 is more reasonable over a span of 20 years of game time, as opposed to two months.



I don't think balance should require someone to be a team player. There is plenty of basis in fantasy for the loner who grudgingly tags along with the party, but isn't a team player. The game shouldn't break just because Joe decides he wants to play a Raistlin-esque wizard instead of a member of the Scooby-gang.

That's why balance is important.

It is your opinion that web trivializes fights, my groups opinion is that web can make a combat more manageable and I am often asked my other members of the group to cast it and I have asked wizards to cast it when I am the fighter. It can be a very effective tactic to help the entire party deal with a lot of numbers of enemy combatants.

If your group does not like it then simply don't use it ask the wizard not to cast it. DMs can take out any spell they want which I prefer far more than what they did in 4E which gave people who don't agree that they want magic to mirror the way it is to either accept , do major house rules to fix it or the easier thing stay with 3.5 or go to another system that works the way we prefer our magic.

I said before that I think the item creation is to easy in 3E and needs to be reined in. I think the fact that you can so easily make items that get you around the limitations imposed on casters is the reason that some people find 3E magic to be over powered. Take those away and you will find a lot less issue with it.

Most of the DMs I game with have house rules for handling this.

There is a big difference in playing a loner type character who tags along with the party and taking spells just to screw over another player's character. One is role playing the other is being a jerk.

 

[Elf Witch]

First, I would like to say that no player should ever be a jerk. And games don't need to go out of their way to prevent jerks from happening. You can't prevent that, and it's better handled outside of the game rules.

But with that said, here's a thought:
If using a spell to hijack the rogue's role is being a jerk... then why is that spell there to begin with?

It's all good to say that you "shouldn't step all over the toes" of the rogue, but then why are there spells with practically no other function than to do that? In what way is it good game design to provide 10 spells to the wizard as options, but if he chooses any of those four he's a jerk? How would a new player even tell the difference?

The spell is not there to allow someone to be a jerk it is there to allow a party to function without a rogue. And as I keep saying in 30 years of playing the game I have never played in where someone was memorizing knock just to screw with the rogue.

Getting rid of a spell that can aide a party because it might be used by a jerk is ludicrous to me. The rules don't protect you from jerks what protects you from jerks is kicking them out of your game.

Now if you want to make it work worse then what a rogue does fine but it should be in reason ten minutes in my book is way to long so much can happen in that time period. I kind of like the idea that it makes the sound of a knock.

That way it is not better then the rogue who can do it silently and is halfway there between the rogue making no noise and the fighter breaking the door down with a weapon.

 

[Elf Witch]

But why do you need to play with a rogue? Or a wizard? Or a fighter? Or a cleric?

You don't have other classes can fill in for the missing one and you need a good DM who recognizes that different party make ups have different levels of ability when it comes to over coming challenges.


You can have a bard or a druid instead of a cleric. You can have a bard and magic user with the right spells to take the up the slack from not having a rogue. A cleric, barbarian, paladin , druid , ranger can all make front line
fighters.

 

[Elf Witch]

Why is it considered reasonable for the wizard to replace any other class, but not the other way around?

The bard has traditionally been a versatile class, but he pays for that flexibility by being arguably less powerful than other classes. I've certainly never heard of a bard being accused of being a power house, and it's one of my favorite classes.

If the wizard is the ultimate skeleton key class, he should have less power. Pre-4e, casters were both more powerful and more flexible. Something's gotta give.

Just because the wizard can use knock to replace the rogue does not mean it can do everything a rogue can do as effectively. They can't find traps so the party cleric has to take the job on of course he can't disable it unless he has used his meager skill points to put them in a cross class skill.

Neither the wizard nor the cleric can do sneak attack damage nor or they the best ones to gather information.

Wizards can't take the place of clerics they can't heal nor do they make good front line fighters. So they are not the skeleton keys you are imagining.

And my memorizing knock they are giving up another spell so if the memorize a bunch of knocks they are going to have less spells to use later.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I think a lot of the issues with wizards being more powerful than the rest of the party is because the DM sometimes doesn't know how to properly challenge a powerful wizard, whereas you can just throw more & bigger monsters at the party fighter and/or paladin in order to challenge them more. (not always, but sometimes)

I finished up a long running 3.5E campaign a few years back now (geez, was it really two years ago now?) that went from level 1 to 18. It was a huge party of PCs: human cleric, human wizard, halfling psion for "magic" support and also a dwarf fighter, an elf paladin of freedom, a human rogue/spellthief, human fighter and a goliath barbarian. Plus, they had a very effective human cleric/paladin NPC as an ally, as well as an elf scout NPC who was a follower of the cleric.

In no way did the cleric or wizard outshine the party. There were a few areas in the mid level range where the psion was a bit overpowered (Dispel Magic/Psionics), but that ended up smoothing out later on in the campaign. There were a few instances where the wizard or cleric had shining moments (the first time the cleric cast Firestorm almost single-handedly won an encounter I had planned on the PCs losing), but the other PCs had their shining moments as well: the goliath barbarian getting a 4x crit on a major baddie and doing like 130 points of damage (or, the time she got out of a Maze spell by rolling a natural 20 on her INT check)... the dwarf fighter getting a full attack on a balor and landing 5 hits on it, critting it twice, and doing over 200 points of damage and killing it, etc, etc.

That said, I know older editions had more balance issues that were sometimes offset by the different XP curves, but not always. And, once you got up to name level, the DM would have to go out of his or her way to challenge a party wizard as opposed to the others in the party.

I guess I should qualify my earlier statement as well. Sometimes a DM does not know how to challenge all of the party, but it can also be more difficult to challenge a wizard than it is to challenge a fighter (as I said, just send bigger & badder monsters after the fighter).

 

[Fanaelialae]

I guess I should qualify my earlier statement as well. Sometimes a DM does not know how to challenge all of the party, but it can also be more difficult to challenge a wizard than it is to challenge a fighter (as I said, just send bigger & badder monsters after the fighter).

It's okay by me if the fighter is challenged by artillery (who are skilled at staying out of reach), while the wizard is challenged by skirmishers (who are good at getting in his face).

I don't think it's reasonable, however, if it is "more difficult to challenge a wizard than it is to challenge a fighter". Once you're reached that point, I think it's indicative that something is broken.

I wouldn't ever want to have to tell a player that he can't player a wizard because I don't have the time to prepare challenges especially for him.

 

[Aldarc]

There are certain things a party is expected to be able to do. Opening locked stuff is one. For most of those it's nice to have options, like a rogue, knock and a hammer, for example.

What would your fix be? Remove locks from the game? Give everyone the chance to open them? In either case aren't you robbing the rogue something?

Not at all. It shouldn't be a case of Problem X that requires Skill Y is easily solvable by Spell Z. Why is the existence of Knock necessary? Others say because there's no rogue, but Knock perfectly performs the function of a rogue. Why can't the wizard use one of their other damage spells to simply "hammer" the lock/door like the fighter would? In both of these cases, it's not as if they are outperforming the rogue because they are essentially using their mismatched abilities for "hammering in screws," which may work, but it is not as elegant as someone equipped with a screwdriver. But there should be no corresponding spell that perfectly mimics the ability, though there should be creative ways around the problem.

But the bold is the problem. Work on removing certain assumptions that are laced regarding party composition. For example, there is the assumption that parties must have healers (or at least access to a lot of healing potions/wands). But such assumptions lead to the idea of "there must always be a class to fill the role of the X." The idea of the "balanced party" needs to die.

As long as you have abilities restricted by class, you're gonna need a certain combination of classes or builds of classes in order to have access to all those abilities.

But why is it assumed that you need access to all of those abilities? See the problem yet?

And I think that Rodney Thompson touched upon this idea in his Rule-of-Three article last week:

The reduction of a need for a cleric is one of the things I enjoy most about 4th Edition, not because I don't like clerics (actually, I love clerics) but rather because it gives the party a lot more flexibility in building their characters. The advent of the leader role allowed players to fulfill the function of the healer without requiring them to adhere to the story elements that come with being a cleric. Furthermore, when working on Dark Sun the advantages became even clearer, as we could cut out the divine power source without worrying about creating a bad play experience. As a designer, that's very liberating; as a player, a large amount of social and game pressure falls away when no one class is "required" for success.

That said, it raises some interesting questions about the concept of healers, and roles in general. Should the game even ask you to have a leader or healer? For that matter, a defender? A controller? Should any role be necessary, given how liberating the step from cleric to leader felt?

I don't think "requiring someone to be a healer" is a sacred cow, but having healers in the game is. I wouldn't want to see D&D do away with healing, but I don't think there's anything keeping us from exploring a version of D&D where players can simply play anything they want, ignoring concepts like role and function when putting together their party. To do so, we would need to take a serious look at the way player resources are allocated in D&D, and make some adjustments to the assumptions behind the design of everything from adventures to encounters to monsters.​

 

[Number48]

TL;DR

I got through page 4 and never saw what I was thinking expressed:

#1) Before we can discuss balance, we must first decide what IS balance. To decided what balance is we must discuss what D&D is. I think the best description for D&D that would suit most people is that it is a story and a game at the same time. However, when we compare a D&D game to works of fiction, there is a critical difference. Nearly all fiction has a single protagonist, or rotates narration of protagonists. In D&D, all the characters are equally-important protagonists. Would you play in a game if you had to play Pippin? It's great to be the main guy, but can you convince people to come every week to play somebody useless. So, the characters must all be equivalent in terms of importance of the story. We'll come back to the story later.

#2) We discussed story, but it's also a game. This is pretty easy. If the horse in monopoly was better than the shoe, then the choice between them is not a choice at all. Likewise D&D. Do all the pieces of the game have to work exactly the same? No. Do they have to be able to do the as other pieces? No. If each person plays a single piece in a game, each piece has to be equivalent in the mechanics of the game. More on that later as well.

#3) Let's talk about the rules and marry together what we discussed about story and game. If the game has problems, the DM has the capability of addressing them, whether these are global or campaign-specific problems. The real question is, is it worth it? There is an arbitrary line where a DM will give up wrestling with the rules and play a different game instead. This addresses the need for at least a starting point for balance. So what comprises a D&D game? I think that the broad definition would be that most reasonable people run a D&D game as a combination of mostly-story events combined with the mostly-mechanical combats. Too far one way, and you are just imrov acting. Too far the other way and it's a boardgame.

#4) A small conversation about characters being equivalent. Say I cut 2 pieces of a cake and 2 people get to choose them. The optimum solution is when they both think they got the better piece of cake. This is possible because there is no single way to objectively quantify which piece is better if they start out similarly. The way that both people can think they got the better piece is that the pieces are initially similar but each offer a slight difference more appealing to one of the choosers. I choose the one with more frosting, you want the one with more candy bits. This is what needs to be strived for. The fallacy of 4E is that the designers determined to make all pieces equal to all people always. What they got was a limited, kinda boring game. Instead, we need to have a game that starts us all in a similar position but with many nuances that make each character seem the best to the person playing it.

So, the challenge. 5E should be a game that lets every player participate in way that makes them FEEL an equal member in both story and combat, no matter if the game is 80/20 or 20/80 balance. It needs to avoid the pitfalls of designing in an intended limiting factor that an average group will not do, even though it would be the correct choice from a story-enjoyment point of view. The case in point would be a 3E wizard. The idea being that the wizard would have to carefully balance using the best spells with using less-useful spells in order to complete out the dungeon with the party, and thus achieve balance over the course of the adventure rather than per-encounter. What actually happened is that, if the DM didn't contrive limiting factors, is the party would walk in, shoot all the biggest guns then go rest, come back and shoot all their biggest guns again. Even if wizards cannot rest more than once a day, the party will often choose to simply waste the time because it makes mathematical sense to them. You cannot expect the group to have the forethought to do what best pleases everybody in the long-run. Each person will only play his own character. Limitations for balance that are easily sidestepped are not limitations at all.

So, it all comes to marrying game theory with a little behavioral psychology.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Just because the wizard can use knock to replace the rogue does not mean it can do everything a rogue can do as effectively. They can't find traps so the party cleric has to take the job on of course he can't disable it unless he has used his meager skill points to put them in a cross class skill.

Neither the wizard nor the cleric can do sneak attack damage nor or they the best ones to gather information.

Wizards can't take the place of clerics they can't heal nor do they make good front line fighters. So they are not the skeleton keys you are imagining.

And my memorizing knock they are giving up another spell so if the memorize a bunch of knocks they are going to have less spells to use later.

Casters, wizards in particular, are amazing skeleton keys. Non-casters, not so much (unless you make them pseudo-casters using UMD).

A wizard has tenser's transformation, polymorph, stoneskin, and iron body to be a better fighter than the fighter

A wizard has improved invisibility, disintegrate (which makes sneak attack look meaningless by comparison), and knock to be a better rogue than the rogue. He doesn't need Disable Device for most traps when a simple Unseen Servant can set them off, or they can be bypassed with Levitation / Flight.

A wizard can't out-cleric the cleric, because the cleric is a caster too.

The cleric is arguably better than the wizard at out-fightering the fighter, with spells like Divine Power and Righteous Might, but casters can dominate.

Invisibility should not be a better stealth option than the rogue has at 3rd level. Knock should not be an automatic one round effect when the rogue can potentially fail while trying the same thing. And no caster should be able to stack buffs so as to out fight the fighter.

No one's saying the wizard shouldn't have a niche. That niche, however, should never include even potentially doing the job of another class as well or better than that class. Worse may be acceptable, but under no circumstances better.

It's nice that you have a gentleman's agreement at your table. I don't think anyone should need to be hobbled by such an agreement in order to play the game. Sure, the game should encourage people to play cooperatively (while still allowing for playstyles outside that norm). However, if folks aren't complaining about the fighter's ability to step on the wizard's toes, the wizard shouldn't possess the capability to step on the fighter's toes either.

 

[nightwyrm]

But why is it assumed that you need access to all of those abilities? See the problem yet?

Honestly? It's so you can deal with whatever the DM throws at you. Sure, some DMs would look at your party and avoid throwing stuff at you that your party can't deal with, but some DMs won't. Now, you might go about solving some of those problems with "creative" solutions that doesn't rely on hardcoded game rules, but then you're hoping your DM would share your vision of how your creative solution would work and now you're back to the old school method of bargaining and arguing with the DM.

Using an example of wizards fireballing a door to open it. Maybe your DM just doesn't think that's a viable way of opening the door and now you're boned.