D&D 5E Is the stat system biased against front-liners?

[Quartz]

It seems to me that the stat system is actively biased against the front line combat types.

A fighter-type has to concentrate on Str, Dex, and Con to perform well in the combat pillar of the game. Paladins also need Cha. This leaves little space, especially in a point-buy campaign, for decent stats in the social pillar of the game. Rear-rankers need only one good stat - Int for Wizards, Wis for clerics, Cha for Sorcerors and warlocks, etc - to excel at the combat pillar and these are coincidentally the prime stats for the social and investigative pillars of the game. Sure you can take feats or put ASIs into bad stats, but that doesn't actually solve the problem.

I mean, how often do we see Int 8-10, Wis 8-10 Paladins? How often do we see a fighter with Int 14? It seems to me that to be a good fighter it's very difficult to be good at the social pillar.

Or am I missing something?

 

[Sacrosanct]

I always allocated my stats based on what type of PC that I wanted to make, with little regard to min/maxing. I.e., if I wanted to play an intelligent fighter, then I put one of my higher scores in INT. There seems to be this myth that you can't be good at something unless you have a really high score in it. I can be a perfectly good fighter with a STR of 14. There are a lot of other things that go into making me an effective front line warrior, like high HP, best armor, great weapons, class abilities, etc. Heck, even if you don't allocate your stats that way, you can still choose to select your proficiencies in what you want. A prof bonus is pretty significant.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

First of all, you don't need Dex to be a fighter-type. The benefit of heavy armor is that you have the best AC regardless of your Dex. To contrast, wizards and sorcerers and warlocks need good Dex in order to have decent (not great, but not terrible) AC. Everyone needs Con about the same, so that's a non-factor in discussing system bias.

In general, a point-buy system is going to punish you for putting points into anything that doesn't help your primary role, and the primary role of a fighter type doesn't involve being smart. That's an issue with point-buy systems, though, and not necessarily the fault of the stats themselves.

It's possible that your games feature more investigation and less exploration, but the latter is supposedly one of the pillars of the game, where the former is not. Strong fighters are good at climbing, swimming, and knocking things down. Dexterous "fighters" are good at picking locks and squeezing through tight spaces. If your front-line types aren't getting a chance to shine there, then that could be down to your specific group or the campaign at hand, but it's not necessarily the system at fault here.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

A fighter-type has to concentrate on Str, Dex, and Con to perform well in the combat pillar of the game.

This is a case of your definition of "perform well" requiring a much higher benchmark than the game's definition of "perform well". A character could have all 3 of those scores no higher than 14 and, with a class designed for front-line combat, perform perfectly well within the expectations of the game itself.

 

[Uchawi]

Yes. There is more synergy with casters and one stat, because spells can fill the gaps to a certain extent. Martial characters on the other hand need to be better rounded, unless the DM is generous with magic items.

 

[Quartz]

First of all, you don't need Dex to be a fighter-type. The benefit of heavy armor is that you have the best AC regardless of your Dex... Everyone needs Con about the same, so that's a non-factor in discussing system bias.

I disagree with both those statements. Dex still affects initiative order, saving throws, etc, and front line types do need higher Con as they're more likely to take damage and thus need HP.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it's less a matter of being biased against "front-liners" as it is being biased toward caster-types--that may be me splitting hairs, but I really do mean that. That is, I think the balancing act forced by having to consider three physical stats for different purposes is probably a good thing in the long run, and that it is the SAD-ness of pure-caster classes that makes them a problem.

4e "solved" this problem (for a given definition of "solved," anyway) with two or perhaps three things. The first: rejiggering stat priorities as a class subclass* feature. Dragon Sorcerers get, as a feature, +Str to AC--which keeps them on par with Chaos and Storm Sorcerers, who rely on Dex as their secondary stat (all of them rely on Charisma as their primary stat). Second: Once the designers realized that "A-shaped" classes (one core stat which could choose one of two, or more, secondary stats) were a better design choice than "V-shaped" classes (choice of two core stats, a single secondary stat for everyone), they worked to make sure that every class worked that way--by the end, Wizards could use anything but Strength as a secondary stat IIRC (and Staff Wizards, who used Con, were beefy and Defender-like!), while Fighters could use anything but Int or Cha. The possible third that I'm unsure about: the switch from saves to defenses and, thus, the possibility of varied/mixed attack stats. Unlike a magic-uses-saves system, where inherently one stat boosts (nearly) all combat spell effectiveness, everything-is-attacks means that you cannot do well with every spell you could pick up; you can't mix and match the very best options because you aren't guaranteed that you're equally proficient with them. (Build-specific power features, e.g. "Power X: Effect Y. If you're a Staff Wizard, add/substitute improved effect Z," also contribute to this: subclass features like this meant you could choose anything, but had an incentive not to "play against type" as it were.)

13th Age, a similar but definitely different game, goes in a very different direction. While some things are still based on one stat, e.g. Con for HP and Dex for Init, most of your important derived stats (AC, Phys Defense, Mental Defense--PD/MD are 13A's equivalent of 4e's Defenses) depend on the middle (technically median) of three stats. For AC, Con/Dex/Wis; PD is Str/Con/Dex; MD is Int/Wis/Cha. If two are the same, one of them . This rule acts as a counterbalance to the "pump your core stat as high as possible" ethos: sure, you can have sky-high Str as a Fighter or Int as a Wizard, and you'll hit more and do noticeably more damage, especially once the tier multipliers come into play. You'll also have substantially lower defenses than a more well-rounded character, and get (slightly) less benefit out of the Escalation Die (which only boosts attack, not damage or defense). There's also the 13A Background system, which is explicitly as flexible as the most flexible version of 5e skills: any Background can apply to any ability check if it makes sense--e.g. "Retired Legionnaire" can be used for Cha to persuade a fellow former soldier, or Int to deduce the goals of a confusing set of enemy marching orders. This still means high Charisma is worthwhile if you want to do persuasive things (etc. for the other stats), but you can easily get almost as good a benefit just from having a solid background--and not being able to apply your background can hurt more than a good stat helps.

So I think the problem for 5e is just that it has allowed too much to remain single-attribute-dependent for casters specifically. Probably the only way to "keep it D&D" while fixing this would be to fork apart certain elements of the casting paradigm and make them universal across all casting classes. E.g. Intelligence is always the stat for getting bonus prepared spells, because Intelligence is the stat that covers memory and reasoning; Charisma is always the stat for save DCs because it judges how strong your force of personality is for making your magic "stick" to someone. Not sure what you'd do with Wisdom though; a few options come to mind but none are quite as...clear and compelling as those first two: Wis as the magic-detection stat; Wis to defend against having your concentration broken; Wis as a bonus of some kind to buffing spells. Something like that could easily work. Then every full caster is facing a similar division of choices to the melee guys: sure, you can be a Wizard with sky-high Int, and that will be great for knowledge skills, but your save DCs will suck and you won't have whatever Wis offers. Of course, such moves would simply put classes like the Paladin even deeper into MADness...so perhaps some mixture of the solutions used in 4e and 13A would be needed.

Regardless: I think it's a matter of giving, not denying, perks. Melee guys are fine on this particular axis; it's the casters that are out of whack. Calling it a bias against melee chars implies that the casters' situation is the "default" or "proper" way to do things, and I think it's the other way around.

*The 4e term "build" is effectively equivalent to the 5e term "subclass" for nearly all classes--especially since Essentials brought in specific, slightly-more-divergent builds explicitly called Subclasses. The "original" Paladin is one of the few exceptions, not having any build-specific features, but even that is nuanced because the Paladin was also IIRC the only "V-shaped" class in PHB1, giving an effective subclass choice (do you rely on might or fervor?), which aligns with the suggested option packages--aka "builds."

 

[hejtmane]

It seems to me that the stat system is actively biased against the front line combat types.

A fighter-type has to concentrate on Str, Dex, and Con to perform well in the combat pillar of the game. Paladins also need Cha. This leaves little space, especially in a point-buy campaign, for decent stats in the social pillar of the game. Rear-rankers need only one good stat - Int for Wizards, Wis for clerics, Cha for Sorcerors and warlocks, etc - to excel at the combat pillar and these are coincidentally the prime stats for the social and investigative pillars of the game. Sure you can take feats or put ASIs into bad stats, but that doesn't actually solve the problem.

I mean, how often do we see Int 8-10, Wis 8-10 Paladins? How often do we see a fighter with Int 14? It seems to me that to be a good fighter it's very difficult to be good at the social pillar.

Or am I missing something?

If you are making a fighter you could go dex based build and then all you need is dex, con and then you have a stat to play with in the social pillar. You AC is close or even depending on feats can be even.

Dex studded + max dex =17ac vs Plate is 18ac dex the only thing you lose out on is access to 2h weapons but damage wise you have access to 1d8 weapon higher initiative you take a hit on strength saving throws but there is always a trade off for something. The other options is quit playing in point by systems me I do not use standard point buy but I am old school 4d6 drop lowest dice as my favorite way of doing stats

 

[DEFCON 1]

It doesn't matter if its biased or not, because rear-rankers need their frontline brethren in the game regardless.

If it really mattered all that much... then every player would want to play a rear-ranker. But if that was the case, then every rear-ranker would get attacked all the time because no one was up front to draw the attacks and they'd always get killed. Since we usually don't see those parties existing, it means then that some players want to play in the front line just to be able to take those attacks and it then no longer matters if those classes aren't "better" that the rear line.

A player might say to themselves "Wow, look at all the stuff I get to do as a rear-ranker both in and out of combat! I'm going to be one of those!". And then when every other member of the group decides on the same exact thing, and the party then gets TPK'd their first or second time out... the player realizes that "getting to do all that stuff" means nothing if you're dead. And perhaps they find that not being dead with a frontline PC with "less stuff" is actually more fun than a rear-ranker with a lot of "stuff" they can't use because they are.

 

[abirdcall]

Initiative is highly overrated.

Being up close allows for opportunity attacks and more maneuvers than being at range.

A prone enemy for example gives disadvantage to ranged attacks but advantage for melee.