D&D (2024) D&D 6th edition - What do you want to see?

[Sacrosanct]

How? On what basis? What do I choose? How do I justify the choice? I play an RPG instead of doing freeform makebelieve so that there's structure. Taking away the structure means it's no longer a game. I don't want to be a game designer but 5e makes me one.

Hmmm....I think if you did design a game, then you’d realize just how complex that effort is, and how silly this statement sounds. I’ve designed games. I know. Asking you to occasionally come up with a ruling that isn’t spelled out for you isn’t game design.

This is the crux of my issue. I play 3.x every week and love it. When I compare the 3.x games I'm in to the 5e game I'm trying to run, the 5e game feels like a collapsing scaffold of toothpicks compared to the impregnable stone fortress of 3.x. It's not even that the foundation is bad; there is no foundation. I want consistency, I want predictability, and 5e doesn't offer it. As I said above, 5e makes the DM into a game designer and I desperately don't want to be one, because I'm bad at it and I know it.
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I guess this is where difference of preference comes in. What you call a scaffold of toothpicks, I call tools, supplies, and an instruction manual—items provided that give me the ability to be involved in the vision I want. What you call an impregnable fortress, I call shackles and a prison—things that prevent me from doing what I want.

Needless to say, I disagree that there is no foundation in 5e. There are hundreds of rules in the books that give you that foundation. You’re saying there is no foundation because the entire house isn’t built and decorated for you. That’s not what foundation means.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The Beastmaster math is right for what the designers intended to do with it: their mistake was not testing the Beastmaster adequately to find out that there was a mismatch between their intentions and what people wanted a beast pal to do. They've paid relatively harshly for that particular mistake.

Given that the Beastmaster is balanced properly as is, to get a meatier Beast requires something else to give in the Ranger's power economy: the Revised Ranger does a couple of things to help it, such as give it the power from an extra attack action, but that cure proved worse than the disease. The trade-off of spells allows the pet to get all of the oomph of the half-caster spell slots (which are the hidden point buy currency of 5E), which results in a serious contribute that scales over time.

The Variant Class features approach has promise, but honestly I don't see them really being able to "fix" the Ranger for player satisfaction until an honest to God ground up redesign in a 6E situation.

No, they didn’t get the balance right. They are wrong about that. If it can’t stay alive to do it’s job, it is underpowered. It’s that simple.

The revised ranger base class beefed it in some fairly minors ways blown out of proportion on forums, but the BM conclave is fine. The only issue with it is that extra attack should stay with the ranger. The beast gets a whole turn, that’s all it needs.

As for fixing the ranger, you keep saying things like that, but I don’t see any evidence to support it.

Edit: The goal of the pet was to be a pet that could help in exploration and survive in combat, and be helpful sometimes. It doesn’t do that in the phb. It does not work as a creature that can survive incidental damage from area of effect spells. It cannot survive adventuring with a level 12 party. It’s broken.

 

[Parmandur]

No, they didn’t get the balance right. They are wrong about that. If it can’t stay alive to do it’s job, it is underpowered. It’s that simple.

The revised ranger base class beefed it in some fairly minors ways blown out of proportion on forums, but the BM conclave is fine. The only issue with it is that extra attack should stay with the ranger. The beast gets a whole turn, that’s all it needs.

As for fixing the ranger, you keep saying things like that, but I don’t see any evidence to support it.

Edit: The goal of the pet was to be a pet that could help in exploration and survive in combat, and be helpful sometimes. It doesn’t do that in the phb. It does not work as a creature that can survive incidental damage from area of effect spells. It cannot survive adventuring with a level 12 party. It’s broken.

The beast does help help with exploration, and a little with combat (primarily through conferrinf Advantage) If it dies, it can be replaced with another. Which isn't a great fit for what people wanted out of the Subclass. But the numbers work for what they gave it. Giving it an extra action without changing the balance elsewhere is a dog that don't hunt.

They don't, really, have to fix the Ranger: it works as is. In the event of a 6E, they will want to change it to be satisfactory, which will require radical action.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Would you mind a Starter Set that only has a subset of classes, to keep choices (and options to be understood) for new players to a more focused amount, and then the primary PHB has everything?

Trying to balance more starting options (which I want) with new player friendly (which I also want).

That would have been nice to include in the Starter Set, along with the 5 stock characters.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The beast does help help with exploration, and a little with combat (primarily through conferrinf Advantage) If it dies, it can be replaced with another. Which isn't a great fit for what people wanted out of the Subclass. But the numbers work for what they gave it. Giving it an extra action without changing the balance elsewhere is a dog that don't hunt.

They don't, really, have to fix the Ranger: it works as is. In the event of a 6E, they will want to change it to be satisfactory, which will require radical action.

Lol okay I’m not gonna go in circles over and over with you on this.

There is no need for a radical change, and a pet that can’t survive any degree of danger and can’t be replaced without taking a bunch of time away from the adventure isn’t accomplishing its goals. The revised BM works absolutely fine, with the simple change of switching the level 5 back to normal extra attack, or letting the ranger pick between the two features at level 5. The PHB pet is underpowered. The only reason they won’t fix it via replacement is to avoid replacing a significant element of the PHB. That’s it.

 

[Parmandur]

Lol okay I’m not gonna go in circles over and over with you on this.

There is no need for a radical change, and a pet that can’t survive any degree of danger and can’t be replaced without taking a bunch of time away from the adventure isn’t accomplishing its goals. The revised BM works absolutely fine, with the simple change of switching the level 5 back to normal extra attack, or letting the ranger pick between the two features at level 5. The PHB pet is underpowered. The only reason they won’t fix it via replacement is to avoid replacing a significant element of the PHB. That’s it.

It's a Subclass that is fiddley and rewards careful work on the build, but conceptually appeals to people who might not like that. It's a mismatch conceptually, but the Subclass itself is not underpowered: it's unsatisfactory for a significant portion of it's intended audience, which is probably worse.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's a Subclass that is fiddley and rewards careful work on the build, but conceptually appeals to people who might not like that. It's a mismatch conceptually, but the Subclass itself is not underpowered: it's unsatisfactory for a significant portion of it's intended audience, which is probably worse.

The pet cannot survive exploration without the DM going out of their way, past about level 10.

It is underpowered.

And if they didn’t intend for it to be a combat pet, they’d have indicated that in a way that you don’t have to study the system math or lose a few pets to figure out. They knew that it would be taken into combat, and failed to make it able to survive that.

Even if we accept that a beast companion that can’t contribute significantly to damage is doing its job by providing advantage, like a strictly worse [on every axis] familiar, it has to either survive being in a combat zone, or be easy to get back, to do that job.

Literally all it absolutely needs is better HP scaling to not be strictly underpowered, but it can get its own attack and absolutely not be overpowered.

Edit: and even if we accept your position that the real problem is that they designed it with a different goal than what fans of the concept want out of it, that doesn’t indicate in any way that a total rewrite is needed to fix that problem. It can be more powerful without being overpowered. Balance in 5e isn’t a finely tuned matter of slim margins. It’s pretty robust.

And even then, they could fix the subclass without errata by simply introducing new spells, and maybe a feat that strengthens familiars, beast companions, and conjured creatures.

More likely than your “total rewrite with no BM archetype” theory in a hypothetical 5e would be a BM that uses mechanics more similar to the Battlesmiths iron defender, or a spell that the archetype gets for free and gets a boosted version of, like the chain warlock, but for “Find Animal Companion”.

 

[Maxperson]

How? On what basis? What do I choose? How do I justify the choice? I play an RPG instead of doing freeform makebelieve so that there's structure. Taking away the structure means it's no longer a game. I don't want to be a game designer but 5e makes me one.

That's easy. You justify it and base it on fairness. If you are doing your best to be fair with your rulings, the players are generally going to be okay with what you decide.

As for taking away structure meaning it's no longer a game. That's false. Unless you have absolutely no rules/structure at all, it's still a game. As an example, Chess is a highly structured game. Chaos Chess adds cards that get dealt to the players that they can use to alter how pieces move. The game suddenly becomes far less predictable and structured, but is still very much a game.

 

[Ragmon]

Soo many things....the lack of depth in character customization.

But hey, PF2 is looking really good to me (I might not even want 6e).

 

[Parmandur]

The pet cannot survive exploration without the DM going out of their way, past about level 10.

It is underpowered.

And if they didn’t intend for it to be a combat pet, they’d have indicated that in a way that you don’t have to study the system math or lose a few pets to figure out. They knew that it would be taken into combat, and failed to make it able to survive that.

Even if we accept that a beast companion that can’t contribute significantly to damage is doing its job by providing advantage, like a strictly worse [on every axis] familiar, it has to either survive being in a combat zone, or be easy to get back, to do that job.

Literally all it absolutely needs is better HP scaling to not be strictly underpowered, but it can get its own attack and absolutely not be overpowered.

Edit: and even if we accept your position that the real problem is that they designed it with a different goal than what fans of the concept want out of it, that doesn’t indicate in any way that a total rewrite is needed to fix that problem. It can be more powerful without being overpowered. Balance in 5e isn’t a finely tuned matter of slim margins. It’s pretty robust.

And even then, they could fix the subclass without errata by simply introducing new spells, and maybe a feat that strengthens familiars, beast companions, and conjured creatures.

More likely than your “total rewrite with no BM archetype” theory in a hypothetical 5e would be a BM that uses mechanics more similar to the Battlesmiths iron defender, or a spell that the archetype gets for free and gets a boosted version of, like the chain warlock, but for “Find Animal Companion”.

It isn't that it isn't meant to be combat effective, which it is if used properly, it just isn't doing what people want. Dan Dillon,now a full Designer for WotC, has done good work breaking this down.