Allow me to clarify what I mean by "balance." Ultimately, the game is not about mechanical balance, but about the endless amount of player choices.<snip>However, there is another type of balance which is distinctly non-mechanical called inter-player balance which ensures each player will not feel as if their decisions matter less than another player's.<snip>In this way, I believe 5e is balanced. Its balanced with inter-player dynamics in mind rather than by a mechanical, structured adventure. This balance can't be given as a ruleset because it would have to predict when the cleric can heal and when the wizard can teleport. This ruins the whole point of the game, Player Choice.
1: Mechanical balance enables your "inter-player" balance by ensuring that, when the rules ARE quantifiable, those quantities are (statistically) close enough to comparable that what matters is
what the player values, not
whether the player chose the powerful option.
2: 5e is emphatically not balanced this way. There are enormously more tools available to the Cleric, Druid, Wizard, or Bard than to the Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, or Rogue. The first group can
tell reality how to behave, in various ways. The second group either rarely or never does that. How is that "inter-player balance"?
It's also unnecessary. The DMG says 6-8 encounters of medium difficulty. It has started driving me batty when people start quoting "6-8" like it's holy writ, when that just plain is not what the book says anywhere, and anyone could look it up for themselves.
See, I'm not even considering
difficulty at all when I talk about that. I considered
number of attacks made, because that's where you can actually evaluate the benefit of the Champion's "crit-chance-only" damage boost vs. BM maneuvers or Paladin smites. In order to hit the necessary average number of attacks made, you need a certain minimum number of combat rounds. Since 5e combats very rarely last more than 4-5 rounds (and, as I have been
assured by people in this very thread such as Mr. Alhazred, usually a 4-round combat is
long for 5e), there's only a limited number of attacks that a Fighter at various levels can potentially make. The numbers work out pretty well (centers
and standard deviations actually line up) when it's just over 7 combats a day at around 3-4 rounds per combat. I'd have to crunch all the numbers again to get you something more precise than that, but it DID work out.
So: the numbers aren't at all wedded to the
difficulty level. They're wedded to the
combat length, which (in theory) should be more than capable of subsuming the varying difficulty amounts. If anything, the difficulty numbers
favor (long-rest) spellcasters! (Low-difficulty combats mean spells can be banked for later; high-difficulty combats will involve higher ACs in general, but saving throws are far more constrained than AC/HP.)
My actual play experience at a tabletop (rather than forums) says that you can get away with as few as two--the only real no-no is letting the PC's go into a big climactic encounter with their alpha strike potential fully loaded. Even then, a "single" encounter can become two through having enemies show up in waves, or having a monster that transforms into a scarier form when the first stage is "killed".
Does this actually mean a Champion Fighter's crit chance matters enough to keep up with a Battlemaster blowing all their stuff each combat? Because at (say) level 12, a BM is theoretically getting 5d10 bonus damage to each of those combats. That's going to be only slightly worse than getting a crit with a d12 heavy weapon (the strongest option for Champions); 10% of the Champion's attacks at this level will be crits, so that means we need (say) 4 crits over the course of each combat at a rate of 0.1 crits per attack, for a rough average of 4/.1 = 40 attacks rolled per combat. You have three attack rolls per Attack action, plus an additional three per combat with Action Surge, so we want 40/(3N+3)<1 in order to get the Champion at least in the ballpark of the right numbers. That works out to (just over) 12 rounds per combat. Somehow, I don't
quite think you're going to be hitting 12 rounds for each of these combats...admittedly, I ballparked these numbers, but even if I've over-estimated by a
lot, you're still looking at 10+ rounds
per combat to get the Champion to the same place as the Battlemaster.
Players really don't care about "how many spell slots were expended by this character than mine" or "how much damage this character does than mine." They really care about how many highlight moments this character gets rather than them.
So a DM's job is to balance the highlights between each player's moments, not to balance with a measured mechanism.
I agree that the specifics of who spent what resources aren't something that prominently stands out in a player's mind. But, again, how does the Fighter--who
cannot even in principle do something like "force a locked door open" or "fly over the Pit of Despair" or "force an enemy to speak the truth"--get access to the same number
or quality of "highlight moments" as the Wizard? The Wizard can always roleplay for highlight moments just as much as the Fighter can, so unless the Wizard
chooses not to roleplay for them (which is not something I would ever expect of any player), the game's design appears to
get in the way of your "inter-player" balance.
It NEVER ceases to amaze me how all this fiddling and faddling goes on, but the results are always inevitably just a covert return to something closer to A/E/D/U.
"The mind knows not what the tongue wants," as Dr. Moskowitz puts it. Aesthetic, or rather meta-aesthetic, concerns put before at-play experience. And people accuse 4e fans of being "white room" types!
Well, of course they want players to see the game as better than it actually is. That doesn't cost them anything.
Okay, but you had specifically said, "D&D 5E is a poorly-designed game, which tries to hide its bad design through poorly-designed optional rules." Now you're saying that there's a lot more than just the optional rules--there's a whole layer of obfuscation (intentional or not) from its designers as well.
People complained about the universal resource mechanic feeling too same-y, but the real issue was always with giving Encounter and Daily abilities to martial classes. That's the part which "didn't feel like D&D anymore" and should have been fixed.
Okay. How can it be "fixed" while ensuring that you're not just resurrecting the exact problem that E/D martial powers were meant to solve, namely, giving equal mechanical support for "highlight moments" as compared to non-martial classes?
Try asking your DM to let your Action Surge last a number of rounds equal to your Proficiency Bonus. And change your manoeuvres if they're not working for you.
Errr...so...give an enormous house-rule boost? Isn't this
admitting that there is a problem to be fixed if you're asking for a huge no-cost powerup for your class...?
If you have a big button that says "Be awesome", then you want to press it. If you never get to press it, it loses its lustre. You have to balance awesomeness vs frequency. That, at the heart of it, is where the balance point really is.
Completely agreed. Just wanted to highlight it specifically.
Not just once or twice, but have classes that rely on short rests consistently afflicted your games?
Well, I've only played in...I believe four 5e campaigns. Every single one of them had at least one session negatively impacted by the long-rest-based classes overperforming and then wanting to rest sooner, while the short-rest-based (or non-rest-based, that is, Rogue) would have preferred to continue going and have some time to shine. Does that count?
