D&D 5E (2014) Is Point Buy Balanced?

[ECMO3]

It’s subjective; if a player tells you a game is unbalanced they’re saying it feels unfair.

Ok. this is impossible to calculate, but you are probably correct. This gets to my point though, a game can feel very unfair or biased just based on the random dice rolls in play and equal abilities will not remedy this.

Go look at the BG3 forums on Steam and read about all the people complaining about the RNG. It is safe to say the game felt unfair (and unbalanced) to those people even though they were all playing with the same point buy system.

Just s guess but I’d suspect you’d get experienced players complaining at somewhere around 25% difference in overall output. (Assuming it wasn’t just a case of the d20’s being crazy) Probably more if the outputs aren’t directly comparable.

Well, whether it is correct or not that is a number we can work with. If we are using damage as a metric, and you are looking at 25% difference, the vast majority of sessions will be balanced even with characters in the 95th percentile and the 5th percentile.

This underscores my point. I can go into a game with my 14 Strength Barbarian and have another player at the table have a 20 Strength and the session will usually end up "balanced" by this definition.

 

[AlViking]

Ok. this is impossible to calculate, but you are probably correct. This gets to my point though, a game can feel very unfair or biased just based on the random dice rolls in play and equal abilities will not remedy this.

Go look at the BG3 forums on Steam and read about all the people complaining about the RNG. It is safe to say the game felt unfair (and unbalanced) to those people even though they were all playing with the same point buy system.

Just because there is not a single number does not mean that people don't recognize imbalance. It's the same with the experiment they did with capuchin monkeys - same task one got a cucumber (which is decent) and another got a grape (which is amazing). The one that got the cucumber refused to do the task because it wasn't fair. People aren't that much different.

Well, whether it is correct or not that is a number we can work with. If we are using damage as a metric, and you are looking at 25% difference, the vast majority of sessions will be balanced even with characters in the 95th percentile and the 5th percentile.

This underscores my point. I can go into a game with my 14 Strength Barbarian and have another player at the table have a 20 Strength and the session will usually end up "balanced" by this definition.

That 20 strength barbarian will be doing almost double damage on average because they hit more often and do more damage at level 5. It's not a minor difference.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We once, when we started D&D 3E, actually did the regular XP thing, and if you needed to reroll, you started at level 1. Quickly, we realized that this made you roll a new Level 1 character soon, the game isn't built for that. So we started the new guy 1 level lower than the rest of the party. Eventually, it was just the party level, because the adventures we were playing expected you to level and raised the challenge, and if you ended up behind, you'd just end with a TPK and can abandon the adventure path, especially those Paizo murder grinds. Not what we wanted to do ,we liked the story and the challenges.

You could get away with this a little bit back in the OD&D days becaue the semi-geometric levelling meant you'd probably mostly-catch up within a few games if you didn't lose the new character (and if you did--well, you often at the low end weren't that much worse than everyone else). In 3e or 4e it was pretty dumb, though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So one radomizer is ok but another one is not ok, even when that other one has a lower standard deviation and a smaller mathematical effect on success or failure?

When one is permanent in its effect, and one is transient, yes. Any other questions?

 

[Thomas Shey]

What is useless is expecting identical ability scores to cause balance in play.

As I said, a position I don't agree with the premise so I don't agree with the conclusion. Exact balance in every situation is missing the point, which is why I said what I said. If you don't get that by now, I don't think going around with you about it repeatedly is going to change anything.

 

[AlViking]

When it comes to XP, I've never had to dangle any additional carrots in front of the noses of players. They're playing a game after all - if they wanted to sit home and drink they didn't have to show up to the game. Meanwhile I want the players to do what they want their characters want to do, not what I'm going to bribe them to do.

 

[Maxperson]

Ok I will bite. What does it mean mathematically in play?

I am not talking about probabilities or averages; I am talking about results. If we are talking about damage, how far off can say total damage in a session be before the game is "unbalanced"?

Is a 10% difference in play unbalanced? What about a 20% difference? or a 50% difference?

Games are designed for balance to equal a range, not 1 exact number. You can use an irrelevant metric for balanced, but it's not going to mean much when everyone else is talking about the game's balance.

 

[Lanefan]

The fun is playing the game. It's not like it's a chore and I need to be bribed with XP. If I am only want to have my character sit at the bar, it's not like I need the XP for anything anyway, I don't really need a higher proficiency bonus, new spells or more hit dice.
But if you were deliberately doing that while the rest of the parties is having adventures it seems like a meta-problem, that you're not enjoying the campaign and we need to figure out something else.

My character is surviving at home and gaining xp while the others are dying off in the field and thus no longer gaining xp.

You can't tell me that ain't borked.

We once, when we started D&D 3E, actually did the regular XP thing, and if you needed to reroll, you started at level 1. Quickly, we realized that this made you roll a new Level 1 character soon, the game isn't built for that. So we started the new guy 1 level lower than the rest of the party. Eventually, it was just the party level, because the adventures we were playing expected you to level and raised the challenge, and if you ended up behind, you'd just end with a TPK and can abandon the adventure path, especially those Paizo murder grinds. Not what we wanted to do ,we liked the story and the challenges.

3e was awful at supporting variable levels within the same party, the far-too-steep power curve is one of 3e's greatest design failures. No wonder you came away with a negative opinion of such things if 3e is where you tried it.

There is already enough punishment in not keeping the character you wanted to play ,and losing all their connections to the plot. YOu can sure roll Bob Fighter II at low levels, but once you've been part of an ongoing campaign, Bob Fighter III will be a nobody, no shared story, no NPCs that could recognize you or you'd call on. If you want to keep that, you pay for those Raise Dead spells, which is also a mechanical punishment.

Death does come at a cost of some sort, that's why it's a known "loss condition" in the game.

 

[Lanefan]

What is useless is expecting identical ability scores to cause balance in play.

Identical ability scores might push a little bit toward balance in play but by no means will they or can they guarantee it, which has kind of been my point all along.

Hell, far greater (and harder to fix) imbalance at most tables is directly caused by differences in player ability-engagement-care, no matter what they happen to have for characters at the time.

 

[Lanefan]

As I said, a position I don't agree with the premise so I don't agree with the conclusion. Exact balance in every situation is missing the point, which is why I said what I said.

Problem is, achieving more or less exact balance in every situation seems to be the point for some here. And that just ain't gonna happen.