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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8125878" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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"?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.)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.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."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!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.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?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...?Completely agreed. Just wanted to highlight it specifically.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?</blockquote>

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