D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[GMforPowergamers]

Yes,and it hashed out. That's what balance is.

it showed that the fighter does NOT dominate the damage dealing even when the other class can choose a dozen NOT DAMAGE ways to contribute... and not even jsut "I can reprep" I only used 1/2 the preped spells

 

[UngeheuerLich]

this is one of the reasons I am mad about the 5e we got. A fixed updated 4e is so badly needed. It had so much promise and too many where thrown out instead of fixed for 5e

I am genuinely sorry for you.
But what we needed was 5e. And if 4e did not fail to attrackt an aidience, we would have salvaged more of its good imorovements more openly. I hope the 24 edition can be a bit more open in including 4e elements.

 

[Oofta]

Commercial projects typically have finite investment. At the same time, the cost of settling high-level play is exponentially greater than low-level (due to the vastly greater number of permutations). The success of the edition is a testimony to the design director making the right call... i.e. focusing on the first few tiers.


You always need another year

Don't let pursuit of a perfect product stop you from delivering a good product.

For me, the real error in 5e's design direction for high-level play was that they continued the ideological commitment D&D seems to have to a demigod tier. I think they should have looked at E6 and tailed off the absolute power ramp (e.g. capped ability scores at 18, capped HP growth) and focused on judicious breadthening of viable strategies. That's where I would fault the high-level game design. What they attempted (for high-level play) wasn't doable to a high enough standard without vastly greater investment.

I think it's a chicken-and-the-egg issue. Previous editions had major issues at high levels*. In 3.x you had linear fighters, quadratic wizards. In 4E you had rounds that could take an hour or more along with a dozen statuses and ongoing effects. So of course a lot of people didn't play high level. It was painful.

I've played in and run 5E campaigns to 20th level (my current home game is 16). It can be gonzo, combats can take a bit longer than I'd like. But it's fun. I can't say that about the previous two editions. The problems with modules is twofold. First, you have to know your group. Differences in skill, abilities, amount of magic, DM style make a difference. They all accumulate and become bigger differentiators in my experience. It's harder to write a generic module for every group. Second, too many low(er) level modules focus on things that should in my opinion be reserved for high level play. The world ending? A thunder of dragons collaborating to wreak havoc? Those are high level campaigns. When you have RoT and 15th level PCs fighting a dragon god, where do you go from there?

So while I think high level can be a lot of fun and it's always my goal to get there, I understand why we don't see more of it.

*We never got to high levels before 3 because we didn't use GP for XP.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Sorry if I'm being slow, but I don't get what you mean. No skill is unique to any class. Arcana isn't just for wizards, and even Stealth and Thieves' Tools aren't just for rogues. So what's different about fighters?

but casters in general (but bards especially and for a reason) get spells that can counter or just auto do skills. So a caster can choose to 'do climb but better' but a non caster can't make that choice... but if the caster DOESN'T choose 'climb but better' nothing stops them from having the same skill and same use the non caster has...

take 1 player in 2 different campaigns (my Saturday night crew runs 2 weeks of 1 game then 2 weeks of another then back and forth so I see this all the time... and in our case 1 DM is 99% the DM of 1 of the 2 and the other 3 of us alternate the other game campagin to campaign and we have done this dating back to 3.5) in campaign 1 the player is a Fighter... he is really good at RP and is creative and uses his skills to his upmost. He is lets say a Purple Dragon Knight (about lv 9 but real close to 10, since this example will be loosely based on Kurt from a few years ago)... in campagin 2 he is a multi classed Bard/Hexblade (lv 2 warlock lv 5 bard) he is no less creative, and no less likely to RP well, and no less likely to use skills in creative ways... BUT in game 1 his options are MUCH more limited then in game 2. In game 2 not only can he get creative with his skills but he has 2 or 3 invocations and a bunch of spells and class features that change the game much more... and when he is just RPing with skills some of his skills are just better (Expertise so higher numbers) in fact his lower level lower str bard (neither are str builds) is BETTER at atheltics then the fighter with the better str.

str 15 fighter str 13 bard/warlock... BUT the bard has expertise

And by the way, what fighters get for skills is great! Perception is the best skill in 5e, and I'd probably nominate Insight as next-best.

yeah I think Perception is the #1 skill used with persuasion and insight coming in 2nd but I would guess the social and mental skills are goup dependent

Most characters need either Athletics or Acrobatics.

why? what skill checks are you making with those regularly? as I said before you can have features/spells that make them useless.

Fighters have access to all four of those skills, plus a great social skill (Intimidate), a great knowledge skill (History), and a great exploration skill (Survival).

so do bards...and rouges and paladins and 2 out of three of those get spells (1 a full caster) and 2 of them get expertise...

and no class has special access really, I can make a wizard (soldier) or a fighter (sage) or a barbarian (soldier) or barbarian (sage) the backgrounds really do skills more, some clases get 1 free skill but Bard and ROgue get more and expertise... warlocks (like say a hexblade) can at level 2 pick a single class based mini feat called an invocation and train in all the social skills

What's to complain about there? Fighters can be as good as anyone else outside of combat, and the player has a lot of choice about exactly in what way they're good.

no they aren't. FIghters have the same (in some cases less) skills anyone else does... but not 1 feature, not 1 ability of the fighter class improves them. You can't even say "Well if you choose this special feature over that special feature"

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I disagree. The survey had them keep restarting design over and over and over so they never got to fully test Tier 3 and Tier 4 because they keep changing Tier 1 & 2.

There were still major revisions in the mechanics of Tier 1 & 2 back in late 2013 and those playtest versions don't look like the eventually published game.

one issue is (and this thread should prove it) that there are vocal passionate voices that are completely at odds on what they want... so they spend so much time trying to find a middle ground trying to find something that works without alienating that they never GET ti high level

 

[Parmandur]

See above. I find this "working as designed" cashes out as "skills can't really do very much, and if you try, DMs will just ensure that you fail by always giving stupidly high DCs."

Skills can do a tremendous amount, and that's on the DM, not the rules.

 

[Imaro]

No. It is not. And how would you solve the fighter vs wizard problem*?

*If you feel this is actually a problem. Many people are content to be the fighter and let the wizard open the gate for them.

IME the answer to this always seems to be... give him magic but fictionally disguise it. IMO WotC solved this problem in the best way possible for their game in 5e... everyone has the option to choose magic. If you feel there is a giant discrepancy between magic wielders and non-magic wielders then good news... you can pick a subclass that uses magic for any class. If you don't (or don't care) it's a moot point and you can choose to forego it.

I think I prefer this method to the "magic as skills & abilities" method since I almost feel like that is it's own genre that isn't general D&D (though I'd have no problem with a campaign setting where it is the norm). That genre is exemplified by games like Exalted, Earthdawn, Godbound, Ninja Crusade, Legends of the Wulin and so on. Just my opinion though.

 

[Parmandur]

it showed that the fighter does NOT dominate the damage dealing even when the other class can choose a dozen NOT DAMAGE ways to contribute... and not even jsut "I can reprep" I only used 1/2 the preped spells

They came out in a wash, they do a similar range of DPR. Those extra things a spellcaster can do are not out of balance, they have specific DPR values.

 

[Parmandur]

IME the answer to this always seems to be... give him magic but fictionally disguise it. IMO WotC solved this problem in the best way possible for their game in 5e... everyone has the option to choose magic. If you feel there is a giant discrepancy between magic wielders and non-magic wielders then good news... you can pick a subclass that uses magic for any class. If you don't (or don't care) it's a moot point and you can choose to forego it.

I think I prefer this method to the "magic as skills & abilities" method since I almost feel like that is it's own genre that isn't general D&D (though I'd have no problem with a campaign setting where it is the norm). That genre is exemplified by games like Exalted, Earthdawn, Godbound, Ninja Crusade, Legends of the Wulin and so on. Just my opinion though.

They solved it with math: all Spells have a strict HP damage value,so a Champion is in balance with a Transmuter as far as game balance goes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

IMO WotC solved this problem in the best way possible for their game in 5e... everyone has the option to choose magic. If you feel there is a giant discrepancy between magic wielders and non-magic wielders then good news... you can pick a subclass that uses magic for any class.

I don't agree at all, in fact I think this point illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue on your part.

"Choosing magic" isn't a solution, especially when Eldritch Knights, for example, aren't even performing as well as say, Battlemasters on the LFQW front.

More importantly, that's like saying "If you don't like blue cars, well, you always have the option to spray-paint parts of your red car blue!".

Skills can do a tremendous amount, and that's on the DM, not the rules.

No, it's also on the rules and the advice about how to use the rules, and on the fact that D&D chooses to use a high-RNG method of determining success/failure, whilst consistently presenting skill usage as a binary pass/fail.

It would be on the DM if 5E:

A) Didn't present skill usage as a binary pass/fail, but as something more nuanced. This has been discussed at incredible length on these boards. There is no arguing that 5E does not present skill usage this way, only that maybe it shouldn't (or equally, that it's "fine").

B) The DMG gave really good advice on how to handle skill usage, with a lot of examples and guidance that make it abundantly clear that skills should be treated as extremely powerful and able to handle a lot of things.

It would also really help if 5E had a proper built-in skill-challenge mechanic - even the clumsy mechanic in 4E made a huge, huge difference. But it doesn't. It doesn't even have consistent rules about Tool usage and/or how that interacts with Skill usage (Xanathar's had to make some optional ones, which are decent but often ignored). Right now a DM can override the poor binary approach, and can let players use skills more powerfully than supported by how they're described in the PHB/DMG, but that's not something anyone is going to pick up from reading/following the rulebooks, and so that is on WotC.

The other problem is, for no sane reason, Fighters don't have good skills. That's purely bad design. Yes Battlemasters can, post-Tasha's, spec into doing better, and a handful of other subclasses have some minor help. But really it's absolutely bone-headed that Fighters don't get innate boosts to skills, and I suspect it'll be corrected next edition (though probably not in DND2024).