D&D 5E (2024) Do players really want balance?

[TiQuinn]

To be kind of brief, I think most people want “balanced enough” to avoid samey-sameness with the downside that there will always be builds that may break games in certain cases.

 

[Zardnaar]

Generally no. Most players don't care abd are hard pressed to even notice. Experienced players might be able to say "that archetype is better than this one".

. They might care of one player is drastically better than everyone else. Out of control power gamers are more likely to just get booted anyway. By that the ones who are trying to ruin the game or one up everyone else.

Gamers tend to be more casual. Most don't know about haste+ sneak attack combo.

In 2014 the -5/+10 feats were known about a bot more than most. The sword and board types got pleasant surprises when they picked shield master or sentinel.

Out of the 10-12 players I have 1 knows the power combos, 1 knows about some of the more obvious ones the rest are new, casual, don't care or don't know.

They occasionally ask what's better or advice on what to pick. Usually it's along the lines of "I want to hit hard" or whatever.

 

[Scribe]

There is not, and should not be, a single answer.

Instead, we have a spectrum of answers with various pros and cons, and need to articulate why it would be beneficial to do one thing instead of another. There are some forms of balance that would be wonderful, but aren't something that can actually happen because it would be too expensive/time-consuming for the devs. There are other forms that are totally achievable, but utterly unacceptable to any reasonable gamer because they're simplified to the point of triviality. There are yet other forms that might solve problem A perfectly but leave problem B totally untouched, and thus might be inferior to something which only mostly solves problem A but also mostly solves problem B at the same time.

Sure, but we are talking a single rule set that has a desire to be all encompassing. You and I may agree, or be wildly apart, but in the end what 5.5 aims for in terms of balance is a single thing.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The DM though, also wants to share in the fun too, and if the players are curb-stomping or bypassing whatever they're throwing into the mix, that's not fun for them.

I personally lean into the DM role of entertainer and tend to let go of attachment to the encounters themselves. If my group of rolling over them and enjoying it, I can find fun in that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think players want balance so much as to be not overshadowed. People don't want to come to the game and watch an episode of "The Lee Show" because he's got enough power that everyone else is superfluous.

I have found that this is different from one player having a bit stronger character and then is the rock that holds off the tide.

The biggest issue on that front is when one character is clearly capable of outright replacing others. It can be great to be the "rock" everyone knows they can depend upon, but the line between enabling that sort of behavior, and just outright making one character fully capable of replacing another, can be slim at best.

Like, the 3e Druid was not made with the intent of producing something stupidly overpowered. They just wanted a class that could do a cool thing (shapeshift), and that had a worthwhile animal friend, and could do some reasonable nature magic on the side. It just happened that two of those things (the spells and the shapeshift) could be entire classes by themselves, and the animal companion, especially with some item investment, could literally be almost as good as having an actual Fighter played by a friend.

This is one reason, among several, why it is important to give folks more or less equitable mechanical opportunity to meaningfully affect the direction of play. If the players don't actually use the tools given to them, that's on them, of course. But when you furnish one player with a hundred awesome ways to change the world in addition to being able to negotiate (except better, because those tools now become new bargaining chips at the negotiation table!), and then tell another character that they'll get two fairly restrictive ways to influence the world and have to negotiate for absolutely everything else...

Yeah. It leads to issues.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure, but we are talking a single rule set that has a desire to be all encompassing. You and I may agree, or be wildly apart, but in the end what 5.5 aims for in terms of balance is a single thing.

You misunderstand my intent.

I am not saying that each table will come up with its own answer. I am saying that there is a field of answers to pick from, and the game ultimately will (and must!) pick one of them. It will never be perfect--nothing is--but it is still quite possible for one answer to be better than another, and for there to be at least a short list of much-better-than-the-rest answers.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Generally no. Most players don't care abd are hard pressed to even notice. Experienced players might be able to say "that archetype is better than this one".

. They might care of one player is drastically better than everyone else. Out of control power gamers are more likely to just get booted anyway. By that the ones who are trying to ruin the game or one up everyone else.

Gamers tend to be more casual. Most don't know about haste+ sneak attack combo.

In 2014 the -5/+10 feats were known about a bot more than most. The sword and board types got pleasant surprises when they picked shield master or sentinel.

Out of the 10-12 players I have 1 knows the power combos, 1 knows about some of the more obvious ones the rest are new, casual, don't care or don't know.

They occasionally ask what's better or advice on what to pick. Usually it's along the lines of "I want to hit hard" or whatever.

Being casual has nothing to do with whether or not the problem can occur. It just means that the casual players may not know why they aren't having the experience they would like to have, and can't articulate it better than something not being quite right.

 

[Lanefan]

I personally lean into the DM role of entertainer and tend to let go of attachment to the encounters themselves. If my group of rolling over them and enjoying it, I can find fun in that.

This neatly serves to point out that there's different types of balance:

--- balance between characters in here-and-now play situations (as in, how equal can everyone's contribution be in this combat or that social encounter or some other exploration piece)
--- balance between characters on a here-and-now mechanical level (as in, if you had the charactes all throw down against each other, would each one have a roughly equal chance of winning or would one of them win every time)
--- ongoing balance between the characters/party and the game world (is the party stomping everything it meets, or are they constantly getting stomped, or...)
--- medium-term balance between characters (i.e. are there certain types of adventures or opponents that put some classes at a big advantage or disadvantage in dealing with them and does the campaign give each character a chance to shine)
--- long-term balance between characters (as in the 1e Magic User, where you suck now in order to potentially dominate later, or the 1e Ranger where you dominate early but (IME anyway) really run out of steam as the levels go by)

There's probably a few other balance types I'm missing here.

Some editions really lean into one type of balance over another. 1e was all about medium- and long-term balance and the here-and-now was largely left to its own devices. 4e was all about here-and-now mechanical balance (3e tried but didn't do it very well) and hoped the long-term stuff would take care of itself. 5e seems to be more about here-and-now balance in play but IMO really misses on the balance between the party and the game world: the game is too easy.

And so the question becomes, which type of balance - if any - matters most? I say this because I think trying to achiee every type of balance all at once is a fool's errand, unless you want every character to be the same (or mighty close) as every other character.

Players are most often likely to focus on the here-and-now balance types largely because that's what they deal with every week*, while DMs perhaps pay more attention to the medium- and long-term types along with the balance vs the game world. This will always be a low-grade tension between them, which I'm fine with.

* - that said, IME players are far more likely to meaningfully consider medium- and long-term balance when talking over rule changes between campaigns.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I personally lean into the DM role of entertainer and tend to let go of attachment to the encounters themselves. If my group of rolling over them and enjoying it, I can find fun in that.

This exactly. I often explain to my friends that the job of the DM is to be the villain much like in a WWE wrestling match. The DM is comically villainous to help the players bond together to oppose him. I love taunting them as I drop big-ass damage spells on them, knowing full well that 1) they can take it 2) the battle is rigged, they'll win the fight in the end.

 

[Shiroiken]

If players were really that invested in balance, 4E would have been the most successful edition of all time. Instead, players care about how things feel; they want a lot of variety of experiences. This means that some things are going to be more powerful than others at certain times, because they want to feel rewarded for having the best option when it comes up. The counter to this is that some things are generally going to be more powerful than others most of the time, but 5E has done a good job of limiting the overall power difference for most things (yes there are a few broken combos, but most players wouldn't ever choose to use them and most DMs would shut down anyone who tried). We'll have to see if this continues in the 2024 version.