EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
TBH, absolutely not a fan of this quote. It goes far too far in the other direction, asserting effectively that everyone human should be good at everything, which is impossible and unachievable. Specialization may be for insects, but such Renaissance man expectations are for fictions.This brings to mind Lazarus Long's quote: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
This is because the game does not reward team optimization. In fact, both 3e and 5e actually have design that (mostly passively) discourages team optimization. Conversely, 4e rewarded it...and guess what happened, people started caring a lot more about it as a result!D&D, like many games, has long rewarded specialization over diversification. You pile all your eggs in one basket, you get amazing returns.
That this leaves you with a crippling weakness when your strength is negated or irrelevant is not something the game usually protects against- 4e took a stab at it, but generally, if your class isn't good at a thing, it takes a lot of effort to shore up that weak point, effort that could be put to use making yourself better at your main thing.
And that's fine, if we look at D&D as a team-based game, where every character has a niche. Unfortunately, my experience is that party optimization is rarely a concern for players, beyond the basic "hey who is going to heal us?". Lopsided groups can and do exist, and the system nor the rulebooks really tell you what to do about it as a DM (beyond the old-school approach of, "when they die, they'll figure it out", lol).
Again, the problem of perverse incentives rears its ugly head. Well, that and the fact that 5e was written as a game that pervasively puts all labor on the DM's shoulders and then does jack-all to actually support them doing that labor. But that's a topic for several other threads.
Making it easier won't solve the problem. Rewarding it will. You must counter the existing incentives with new ones. Be careful, though, as you may stumble into all-new, unforeseen perverse incentives!The game could stand to make diversifying easier, since the amount of skills most characters are proficient can be pretty woeful when compared to we modern-day humans. And you can't even say "well, D&D worlds are more like Earth's past with worse education standards" when we have wizard and bard colleges in many settings! Even early D&D relied heavily on Sage NPC's who had vast knowledge when compared to PC's.
Indeed. In fact, it forces you to choose between "keep up with/get ahead of the power curve" (investing in your core stats) and making any kind of progress in anything else you find interesting, due to marrying stat increases to the feat system. Another perverse incentive.And sure, maybe a player wants to have a weakness. That's perfectly acceptable, but I think it's equally acceptable for someone to get tired of constantly falling down when trying to climb a tree, or always risking drowning when they come into contact with water like many video game protagonists! And the game isn't friendly to attempts to overcome such a weakness, beyond snickering at you for deciding that taking Animal Handling or Medicine over Athletics, no matter how well it suits you character concept.
Good luck. This sort of thing is not an easy task, not without causing unwanted side effects anyway.Just to reiterate, you options are all optional! Multiclassing, Feats, and Downtime aren't available by default, and I hear a lot of people like it that way!
And when you look at fictional examples of fantasy characters, the kinds of people you might want your character to emulate, you find many veritable polymaths and most likely multiclassed individuals roaming about- Conan, for example, speaks a dozen languages and has tried his hands at just as many professions, if not more!
I'm starting up a game of my own fairly soon, and I think I'll experiment with opportunities for characters to gain more proficiencies and see how that goes. Of course, at the same time, I'll also have to make skills matter more- in my 5e experience, there's several skills that seem to be rarely invoked, which is another problem entirely.