Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9650202" data-attributes="member: 6790260">No. The designers' intent is that the spellcasters will act as team players and make the martial characters more effective, or take actions which contribute to the martial characters succeeding more. That's not what "the meta" means. "The meta" is what actual gamers have discovered as "these paths lead to great power", more or less; it is the in-practice stuff, not the theoretical ideal the designers are hoping for.The problem, as with 3rd edition, is that the actual mathematical incentives, the things the game actually rewards with greater performance, do not actually jive with this "teamwork with the martials" description. Or, in simpler terms, the practical players looking at what the game itself actually rewards aren't going to just go along with doing what the designers intended. Some may, out of reasons other than (gameplay) practicality--but it's kinda bad to be, in effect, punishing those who put the joy and participation of their friends ahead of their own personal ability to contribute to the team's success.Now, I will absolutely, 100% agree that the incentive structure is better than 3rd edition's incentive structure. But that's damning with faint praise, because 3rd edition's incentive structure was so utterly, horrifically, monstrously broken, it required either willful defiance on the casters' part (actively and intentionally choosing to be significantly less helpful than you could be to the team's collective efforts), or utter ignorance of the system itself and what its math does.5e is not that bad. It doesn't require ignorance, whether blind or willful. But it doesn't take a lot of examination to see that spellcasting is significantly more optimal in a large number of situations, outside of relatively canned examples like a large, dispersed enemy force on a flat plane (meaning, AoE spells are ineffective). Save-or-suck is a lot weaker in 5e than it was in 3e, and save-or-die is quite rare now for both PCs and NPCs alike, but that hasn't totally removed spellcasting's significant edge, it's just not the literally nigh-infinite power that you could pull off in 3e anymore. But "not so bad that some classes can become nigh-infinitely powerful" is, again, damning with faint praise. It's not enough to merely be, to some degree, better than the supremely awful balance of 3e. A dish someone justifies its cooking quality (or lack thereof) by saying "it's better than starving to death" may be accurately described, and still have some pretty serious issues!</blockquote>

Verification