D&D 5E (2024) How I Would Do 5.75

[Zardnaar]

in regards to exploration, part of the ranger's problem is that wilderness survival is kind of their thing, and a couple first level spells shouldn't replace them. If you, as DM don't want to focus on wilderness survival, then you can give them magic items to solve the issue. this puts it into the dm's hands.

As for languages, say you find an ancient tablet that they need to understand. you could come up with a puzzle, give your pcs a kind of "rosetta stone" to decode the language, or they could find an npc who can help them. with comprehend languages, the answer is 24 hours away, at most.

Exploration pillar doesn't really work on 5E. Its why I dont rate wizards that high. Or rangers.

Even without those spells you dont need term for the most part. Its mostly DM narrative to make it work imho.

 

[Silam]

Wizards like a shotgun ahell. Load up and fire. Once you've loaded it you just fire it.

Monks ha e to consider est option to use and when to weigh up conditions, forced movements, prone etc.

Wizard can be simple. Monks easy to screw up along with warlock and sorcerer.

We are starting to beat dead horses, so I don’t think we’ll end up convincing one another either way… but I am surprised to read these posts (not just from you, others as well). It’s as if we’re not reading from the same rules book…

The Monk and the Wizard classes, in a few numbers…

- Core class: 3 full pages each (including the table) for the base features/mechanics, so that takes up the same amount of text. But… the Wizard’s core also includes 4 full pages of spell list. These are not spell descriptions, it’s basically a table of content (except WotC didn’t even have the courtesy of appending page numbers … you have to flip through and find the spells). So, 3 versus 7 for the core.

- Subclasses are 4 x half-page in both cases. Equal.

- Expendable resources quantity: Wizards from levels 1 to 20 have 2 to 22 slots per day (few more with Arcane Recovery), while Monks from levels 1 to 20 have 0 to 20 focus points. So that's a comparable amount of expendable resources, if we consider a single big fight per day. But at most/many tables there will be short rests, which means the Monk regains those resources much more easily, and need not be very frugal with them (at least compared to a Wizard). As I've been trying to explain, that's very forgiving from a learning curve standpoint. It's easy to experiment and worse case you've made a bad decision that affects you until the next short rest only, not the whole day.

- Diversity of options: I think this is where the crux of the "Monks are complex" argument comes from... what can you do with these slots and these focus points? From levels 2 to 18, the core Monk classes gains a total of 7 different ways to spend focus points. The Monk subclasses give a few more ways, but not many (maybe 50% more options in some cases). Whereas the Wizard, from levels 1 to 20, has 4 to 25 prepared spells. Many of the spells can be upcast (which has no analogy on the Monk-side, AFAICT), and some spells have multiple effects to choose from (e.g., which energy to protect against, etc) so even the 4-25 number is a bit of an understatement, since many of the spells can be used in more than one way. The core Monk has one debuff option (Stunning Strike), how many debuff options does the Wizard have? The Monk has two ways of using their Bonus Action to improve mobility, how many mobility buff options does the Wizard have?

- Build-wise, I've already talked about it at length... there are so many more options for the Wizard, both in terms of level up complexity and how the character can be changed from day-to-day due to spells preparation. I won't repeat it here. I'll just say that even if we completely ignore build complexity (which is fine if you want to do that) the above points all stand regardless..

I really don't get how the Monk is more complicated. Unless, like I said earlier, if the argument is that Monks are in general a weaker class and therefore it's "complex" to keep up with peers at a high-powered table, then yeah sure, I can see that argument. But that to me seems like a very narrow definition of complexity.

Anyway, we can agree to disagree. Though I don't mean to shut down the conversation. If anyone still has steam, please feel free to explain your perspective further. Either quantitatively (as I've tried to do in this post) or based on your own experience (as I've also tried to do in an earlier post about the difficulty of onboarding new players who never played D&D before) or in any other way you think is relevant.