D&D General Do you care how about "PC balance"?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Balance is definitely important in my games. My players tend to get upset if they don't accomplish anything in combat, all of them wanting the spotlight sometime in combat. If a Barbarian and Rogue are both killing 1-3 creatures every round each, and the Monk struggles to kill a single creature, that's a problem. My players will notice this. A Wizard who instantly kills 10+ enemies with a massive fireball will get more attention from the fellow players than a bard whose purpose is mainly healing those who are knocked out, and casting Vicious Mockery on enemies.

 

[Asisreo]

These discussions usually go into the philosophy of system design in games, which is extremely interesting.

What a system provides for its players depends on the intentions of the designers.

It should be noted that while a system needs something to provide, it is not obligated to provide any single design philosophy. There have been several design philosophies discussed in this thread, and while alot of them are valiant and deserves some attention in games, these design philosophies may not be what the designers agree with.

I've seen "uniqueness" to be something some people care alot for. An ability that no other character shares. Others want equality. Others want a very tight sense of balance while others would prefer balance to be loose.

The thing about these philosophies is that approaching all of them is a fool's errand. It's possible, but we aren't talking about checking them off, we're talking about doing all of them so well that nobody is going to complain. And that's not even something I can imagine happening.

So what is there for a designer to do? It's like a car manufacturer getting a request from a buyer. They want the fastest car, and it has to be the toughest, and it has to be the best looking, and it has to be efficient, and it has to be cheap.

Well, that is the ideal car, isn't it? Unfortunately, all of these cannot exist altogether. It can exist in the fictional world of theoreticals and imagination, but here, in the real world, if a car is built with the toughest material it won't be lightweight enough to be fast. If we find a material that can be both toughest and lightweight, it probably looks ugly. If we make it attractive and efficient, it definitely will not be cheap.

So a car manufacturer has to ask what's the most important aspect of a car and they rank the design based on the customers wants.

Likewise, WOTC had to listen to what other people wanted from D&D and rank what was most important. It appears that simplicity was the design choice, but I think it might have been it's more attractive younger brother–Accessibility. What people want from D&D the most, it would seem, is to be able to play it with friends. But people have low attention spans because they work a minimum of 9-5 jobs and they have kids and they have spouses, etc. They don't have time to flip through pages upon pages of instructions to have fun playing a game. The market is competing against better storytellers than DM's in movies and books, videogames, and other sources of media. If people don't have time to invest in D&D, it may as well have not existed. It's why pathfinder is harder to get people along. It's not that hard, but it's alot harder to pick up and play, and almost impossible to go in blind with a few optimizing friends and feel as powerful as them.

But what about players that want alot of balance and uniqueness in their games above accessibility? Well, why re-invent a wheel catered to these people? It isn't about gatekeeping or kicking people out of 5e, it's about the fact that revamping a system that is already out wouldn't be as lucrative as making a new system where both types of players have something to play. 3.5e didn't disappear from your book collection, you still have their DMG, PHB, and MM.

But if you want to find joy in 5e, that's a fair request. It's impossible to please everyone, though. Sometimes, you're just unlucky enough to not be the type of player catered to by the system.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I scanned a few replies, and I'm seeing a lot of mention of spotlight balance and niche protection as if it's somehow clearly distinct from PC balance in general. I'm not really sure that's the case. Anything you excel at is likely to get you the spotlight, so I don't really know what the difference is. Perhaps people are talking about combat balance? If that's the case then outside of 4e, classes aren't designed to all be balanced on the combat tier. They are all designed to be able to meaningfully contribute in it, but some are explicitly supposed to be be better at combat in general, and better at certain elements of it in general.

As a DM, I care very much that the there is an overall balance between the PCs--which means that some will be have a stronger contribution in combat than others, and that they will hopefully also play differently.

In fact, for the current long running campaign I recently eviewed some stats I had projected on DPR between the 5 members of the party to see how it looks now that they are 5th level. The reason for that is to see how they were stacking up in that one particular category of contribution, so I could see if it looks like it's in the ballpark it should be in. I was glad to see the numbers came out looking really good. The (not terribly optimized) Battle Master Fighter wins for DPR, followed by the Swashbuckler Rogue. Next up is the Pact of the Blade Warlock with Polearm Master. My home brew Warrior-Mage class comes in fourth, with the Lore Bard who isn't built for combat coming in last. Based on the other ways the characters have of contributing, this seems about right. The lower the DPR ranking, the more special features (like spellcasting) the characters have. The Bard actually has a Fochlucan Bandore, Wand of Magic Missiles and Circlet of Blasting (none of which were included in the DPR calculations), so he has a lot of extra spell power to bring in addition to his general 5e bard coolness.

As a player, I would also care about it, because like most people when I create a character I'm choosing to excel in whatever it is that character is supposed to be good at. If someone else is better than me in "my thing" then I'm not happy. At the same time, if I'm better than someone else in "their thing" I'd be uncomfortable. It's not about competition, it's about each player on the team being the best in the party at doing whatever it is they do. And unless what you do isn't relevant to D&D adventuring, that's generally going to mean (at least in 5e) that the party ends up with a pretty good overall balance between all the PCs.

 

[Asisreo]

Heh, we had a player who massively min-maxed, didn't care about anything else, completely lose his naughty word when the big bad fight turned into a ranged, running combat and his great axe wielding maniac was pretty much riding the pines. Explaining that it was his own fault for creating a one trick pony character did not help the conversation. He actually left the group over it.

This is an example of someone who minmaxes builds and has no clue how to use them. Even if you're a strength build barbarian with a 0 in dex, heck, with a -1 in dex, you should have some form of ranged weapon on you. Not just throwing, but a longbow and a heavy crossbow as well. If your normal attacks can't reach your target and you need damage on the board, you pull out your bow. It doesn't matter if doing so would be half of your regular damage, doing half your regular damage is leagues above doing none of your regular damage.

Alot of minmaxers fall into this trap because they were never creative. They looked for the biggest numbers and didn't think beyond that.

 

[Tonguez]

I scanned a few replies, and I'm seeing a lot of mention of spotlight balance and niche protection as if it's somehow clearly distinct from PC balance in general. I'm not really sure that's the case. Anything you excel at is likely to get you the spotlight, so I don't really know what the difference is. Perhaps people are talking about combat balance? If that's the case then outside of 4e, classes aren't designed to all be balanced on the combat tier. They are all designed to be able to meaningfully contribute in it, but some are explicitly supposed to be be better at combat in general, and better at certain elements of it in general.

As a DM, I care very much that the there is an overall balance between the PCs--which means that some will be have a stronger contribution in combat than others, and that they will hopefully also play differently.

In fact, for the current long running campaign I recently eviewed some stats I had projected on DPR between the 5 members of the party to see how it looks now that they are 5th level. The reason for that is to see how they were stacking up in that one particular category of contribution, so I could see if it looks like it's in the ballpark it should be in. I was glad to see the numbers came out looking really good. The (not terribly optimized) Battle Master Fighter wins for DPR, followed by the Swashbuckler Rogue. Next up is the Pact of the Blade Warlock with Polearm Master. My home brew Warrior-Mage class comes in fourth, with the Lore Bard who isn't built for combat coming in last. Based on the other ways the characters have of contributing, this seems about right. The lower the DPR ranking, the more special features (like spellcasting) the characters have. The Bard actually has a Fochlucan Bandore, Wand of Magic Missiles and Circlet of Blasting (none of which were included in the DPR calculations), so he has a lot of extra spell power to bring in addition to his general 5e bard coolness.

As a player, I would also care about it, because like most people when I create a character I'm choosing to excel in whatever it is that character is supposed to be good at. If someone else is better than me in "my thing" then I'm not happy. At the same time, if I'm better than someone else in "their thing" I'd be uncomfortable. It's not about competition, it's about each player on the team being the best in the party at doing whatever it is they do. And unless what you do isn't relevant to D&D adventuring, that's generally going to mean (at least in 5e) that the party ends up with a pretty good overall balance between all the PCs.

no for me it usually comes down to too much magic

especially utility spells like Knock which makes rogues picking locks a bit naff. Then there’s things like invisibility trumping stealth etc etc.
There should be ways for purely Skills-based characters (Rogue) to go Stand with Magic users and Combat classes and all of them be awesome in their respective areas of expertise

 

[humble minion]

I've found my PC being made irrelevant by others before.

This was our first 3e campaign, all the way to level 20, but the GM was still learning how the game worked and gave out a few overbalanced homebrew items etc. The result was that the monk PC was ludicrously powerful, with the wizard a decent second, while the cleric and my shadowdancer trailed way, way behind. I was the stealthiest stealther that ever stealthed, but that's of limited utility unless you're going solo a lot - less so when you've got a party of others running around with you. We mostly made it work, but the rest of the party were clearly overshadowed by the monk. In the final battle of the campaign, the GM had brewed up a bad guy especially to challenge the monk's AC and damage output, and I tried to help the monk out by flanking, and the NPC casually one-shot me in less than a round and then turned back to the main event. It was pretty anticlimactic and disappointing really. While the game in the high levels was very obviously 'the adventures of monk and friends', I very rarely felt my PC was actually genuinely useless with no way to contribute meaningfully, but that encounter and character death certainly did it.

(The other time, ironically, was in the same campaign when the GM gave me a powerful magic weapon to help try to equalise the power curve a bit. One of its effects was to allow me to move in perfect silence. But I'd been sinking loads of skill points into Move Silently since first level - and to have all those just casually obsoleted by a fancy sword? Aaaargh!)

 

[Micah Sweet]

The Angry GM just posted an extremely relevant article about PC balance. 3rd question in the mailbag.

Ask Angry July Mailbag

Time to open up the ole mailbag again. This time, I’m talking about how to let your players play two parties, expounding on game balance, telling people how to help their depressed GMs, and e…

theangrygm.com

 

[auburn2]

Fairly regularly, threads appear that are mostly interested in examining character options -- classes, mostly -- relative to how competent or powerful they are relative to other character classes, etc... The most common is martials versus casters, but there are lots of variations. The thing is, outside of message boards, I have never encountered a player that actually cares about these things relative to other PCs. I have encountered many players who are concerned about how they stack up to the adventure or the world, but that makes a lot of sense since (to use video game parlance) D&D is essentially a PvE experience.

So, do you, as a player, actually worry about how your character stacks up to other players' characters? If so, in what ways? What about it is important to you? By what metric do you judge? What do you do if you feel your choices aren't as good or your character isn't as competent?

Thanks.

The only real metric I use is how fun it is to play the character. The only time we think about"balance" it at our table is when a player brings little value to the party and usually that is because said player is not powerful in battle and does not offer much in other aspects. If you have a cleric ..... oops I mean a player, who's character is not of much help in battle or out then it is like "what is your job"

 

[jmartkdr2]

I scanned a few replies, and I'm seeing a lot of mention of spotlight balance and niche protection as if it's somehow clearly distinct from PC balance in general. I'm not really sure that's the case. Anything you excel at is likely to get you the spotlight, so I don't really know what the difference is. Perhaps people are talking about combat balance? If that's the case then outside of 4e, classes aren't designed to all be balanced on the combat tier. They are all designed to be able to meaningfully contribute in it, but some are explicitly supposed to be be better at combat in general, and better at certain elements of it in general.

I think the original question was asking about class balance - ie "Is the scout rogue just better than the ranger?" But the most common answer to the original question is: that's not actually important, what's important is... what you said.

There is some value in looking at things like class balance, but it's the same kind of fun as theorycrafting - it's fun provided by the game, but not all that related to the concept of fun at the table.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think the original question was asking about class balance - ie "Is the scout rogue just better than the ranger?" But the most common answer to the original question is: that's not actually important, what's important is... what you said.

There is some value in looking at things like class balance, but it's the same kind of fun as theorycrafting - it's fun provided by the game, but not all that related to the concept of fun at the table.

That depends entirely on how much weight you put on mechanical effectiveness at the table, relative to other PCs. People like to feel like they're pulling their weight in situations (combat or otherwise) involving the dice, and class balance is part of it.