D&D 5E D&D needs to let go of the 'all classes are equal' concept

[amethal]

Of course, but this sub-forum is about the betterment of the hobby. Not every GM will have access to gamers of the quality I have assembled after decades of vetting.

I'm not sure I'd fancy undergoing a decades-long vetting process. Is it inspired by the Catholic Church procedure for admission to sainthood?

"My gaming group has two members, plus a couple of other people who haven't officially joined yet as they are only fourteen years into their probation period …"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

While I do like the fact that 5e has done well in achieving balance between warriors and spell-casters, I feel they have taken it too far. Not all classes need to bring the same firepower to bear, and the effort to instill 'combat balance' has dumbed down a lot of the class concepts.

By all means keep the fire-power-based classes, but things like bards/skalds should be focused more on roleplay, and not just as a support spellcaster. They should be lawyers, face men, PR specialists, and all the other roles that they actually filled.

D&D's glaring weakness is, IMO, that classes focus on combat capability, not role-play. I do not see why you cannot have a mix of both types available. If the GM doesn't want to run anything beyond a murder-hobo game, all be needs to do is to make sure his players are up to speed; after all, manmaging expectations is one of the most important duties of the GM.

Couldn't disagree more. Especially since there is no such thing as a class that doesn't have firepower. Even Bard. Why should there be classes that still have modest to good firepower, and also tons of other bells and whistles? It's a cooperative game. Everyone should get equal opportunity to contribute to the party's success. Offering classes that absolutely dominate in the roleplay sphere and yet still contribute in the not-strictly-roleplay sphere, while also offering classes that literally can't contribute anything to the roleplay sphere unless given it by overt DM intervention, isn't making a cooperative game--it's making an asymmetrical game. Which can be loads of fun...it's just not what D&D has been since at least 2e.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Couldn't disagree more. Especially since there is no such thing as a class that doesn't have firepower. Even Bard. Why should there be classes that still have modest to good firepower, and also tons of other bells and whistles? It's a cooperative game. Everyone should get equal opportunity to contribute to the party's success. Offering classes that absolutely dominate in the roleplay sphere and yet still contribute in the not-strictly-roleplay sphere, while also offering classes that literally can't contribute anything to the roleplay sphere unless given it by overt DM intervention, isn't making a cooperative game--it's making an asymmetrical game. Which can be loads of fun...it's just not what D&D has been since at least 2e.

What D&D has been is continually remade. Hence '5e'.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What D&D has been is continually remade. Hence '5e'.

Certainly. Have any of 2e, 3e, 4e, or 5e been non-cooperative games? Have any of them billed themselves as asymmetrical (by whatever terms)?

 

[Undrave]

I think the game would be more interesting if the way you fight didn't dictate the way you interact with the world outside of a fight.

Basically everybody would pick two classes, one that gave them combat abilities, and another that gave them various quantities of social and/or exploration skill. Everything in various ratio of mundane and supernatural.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Certainly. Have any of 2e, 3e, 4e, or 5e been non-cooperative games? Have any of them billed themselves as asymmetrical (by whatever terms)?

Your definitions are unlikely at best.

 

[Haffrung]

Every character should have combat ability. They should also have role play options too. I dont understand how the one or the other determined by class is an original idea or good planning for design.

The AD&D Thief was not good at combat. He had bad armour, bad to hit tables, bad weapons, and his backstab wasn’t great and it was hard to pull off. His main role was scouting, sneaking, and trap disarming - basically stuff in the exploration mode.

And yet we never had any shortage of Thieves in our parties. People knew when they were taking a Thief that they would take a back seat in combat to other classes. They didn’t mind, because their PC shone in other situations.

 

[tetrasodium]

Couldn't disagree more. Especially since there is no such thing as a class that doesn't have firepower. Even Bard. Why should there be classes that still have modest to good firepower, and also tons of other bells and whistles? It's a cooperative game. Everyone should get equal opportunity to contribute to the party's success. Offering classes that absolutely dominate in the roleplay sphere and yet still contribute in the not-strictly-roleplay sphere, while also offering classes that literally can't contribute anything to the roleplay sphere unless given it by overt DM intervention, isn't making a cooperative game--it's making an asymmetrical game. Which can be loads of fun...it's just not what D&D has been since at least 2e.

There' a problem with that though. The bard has a niche (a couple good ones actually), it just fills them badly in 5e because it would be overpowered if those niche roles were powerful enough to be called out rather than glossed over as mere "bells & whistles" alongside "modest to good firepower", "modest to good" defense, & "modest to good" HP The same applies to most of the thirteen classes in fact. 5e said "screw that" and declared that only very specific niches were valid so that every class needs to be "modest to good" at worst in them & as a result any other niche they had needed to be dialed back from great towards "modest" because "good" would be too powerful with "modest to good" everything else.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The AD&D Thief was not good at combat. He had bad armour, bad to hit tables, bad weapons, and his backstab wasn’t great and it was hard to pull off. His main role was scouting, sneaking, and trap disarming - basically stuff in the exploration mode.

And yet we never had any shortage of Thieves in our parties. People knew when they were taking a Thief that they would take a back seat in combat to other classes. They didn’t mind, because their PC shone in other situations.

I know it largely comes down to personal preference, but I like some niche protection. Especially when you have a good DM who incorporates all three pillars so each character has an opportunity to shine. Yeah, thieves were weaker in hand to hand combat in 1e, but they were still decent (especially if you could pull of a backstab). With the lower HP totals of monsters in 1e, even that 1d6+x damage was important.

But to your point, in a game like 1e, where you got XP for treasure and not monster kills, the thief was extremely valuable for their out of combat abilities.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There' a problem with that though. The bard has a niche (a couple good ones actually), it just fills them badly in 5e because it would be overpowered if those niche roles were powerful enough to be called out rather than glossed over as mere "bells & whistles" alongside "modest to good firepower", "modest to good" defense, & "modest to good" HP The same applies to most of the thirteen classes in fact. 5e said "screw that" and declared that only very specific niches were valid so that every class needs to be "modest to good" at worst in them & as a result any other niche they had needed to be dialed back from great towards "modest" because "good" would be too powerful with "modest to good" everything else.

Every class should be able to meaningfully contribute to every aspect of the game that is considered a vital part of play. In 5e, this has been helpfully defined for us: the three "pillars," combat, exploration, and socialization. These are the things the game designers have explicitly called out as what D&D 5e is "for" in some sense. Classes not designed to meaningfully contribute to any one or more of these pillars should not exist. Period. If the designers wish to make a game that is about other things, that's totally fine--but they should then discuss what this new game is itself about, so that we can know what its player options should do.

Your definitions are unlikely at best.

... I'm sorry, what? I'm literally using the words in their common meanings. A cooperative game is one where multiple players coordinate with one another in order to succeed (whatever the metric of success is for a given game). An asymmetrical game is one where different players have genuinely different resources and contributions, such that it is not possible for player A to contribute the way player B does (and, usually, vice-versa; it's generally unwise to make an asymmetrical game where one player can do everything another can and also more things too, not ALWAYS unwise but generally.) Baseball, for example, is cooperative (within a team), competitive (between teams), and partially asymmetrical (different players have completely different and distinct roles while playing "defense," such as pitcher or outfielder, but just one role while playing "offense," batter). D&D has a referee, the DM, who is not "playing" the game in the usual sense (hence why her characters are non-player characters), just as baseball has an umpire who is not "playing" either. So if we focus on just the "player characters," the game is symmetrical: each player is offered an identical selection of options for approaching the game, which the text of the game treats as neither stronger nor weaker, just different; and each player is responsible for the same thing in terms of the success metric, rolling high numbers on dice (or obviating the need for dice) in each of three important areas, explicitly called "exploration," "socialization," and "combat." This has been the case (other than the official and explicit callout of the three "pillars") in, as far as I'm aware, every edition since at the very least 3rd, and possibly much earlier (I have not read the 2e nor 1e PHBs in full like I have the 3e, 4e, or 5e ones so I hesitate to make sweeping statements about their contents.)

What version of D&D, at least since 3e, and (unless I'm mistaken!) possibly 2e, tells the players, "This class is just better than that class"? Which version of D&D tells its players that it is not a cooperative game?