D&D 5E it appears to be very easy to break the game

[MoonSong]

Hiya.

*shrug*

I think the 'borkeness' of things is starting to show up more and more because the designers of 5e have slowly (over the past 8 months to a year or so) drifted farther and farther from "Base game to add your own stuff to", and closer and closer to "Uber-kewl powerz and lazer-cats!...pew!...mew!...pew!".

What I mean by that, is simple; it's easier to give, than receive. If Multiclassing had one of the first sentences say something like "Multiclassing is an option that some DM's may want to make available in their game. Here are a list of typical multiclass combinations that work well together. [insert list of class-combo's]. Of course, a DM may wish to open all classes to all combinations, but this option can produce some odd, unusually powerful or unusually weak characters". Problem solved.

Its FAR easier for a DM to tell his group "Ok, I'm letting Barbarians multiclass now. You can substitute Fighter with Barbarian for any of the listed combos"...or even "Any class combo is fine for this game. It's wide open". But going the other way? Where players are *expecting* to be able to make whatever monstrosity they can dream up, and then be told "Uh, no", by the DM? Lets just say in the first scenario, everyone has smiles on their faces....whilst in the second one, everyone has frowns.

(would you rather win $1,000,000 and be told that after taxes and whatnot you get $100,000...or would your rather win $100,000 and be told it's all yours, free and clear? Same result, but different attitude).

^_^

Paul L. Ming

I say brokenness is relative, as such absolute limits enforced in order to prevent it from happening are absurd, poorly fit and a recipe for frustration. Instead I would rather have unlimited multiclassing as a baseline, with the caveat that "Your DM may restrict certain combos for thematic or balance reasons", then have enough advice on the DMG to tackle problematic situations, like "Rogue/Barbarian, Rogue/Monk and Ranger/Rogue are multiclass combos that can be problematic on certain cirmustances <explain here why munchkins shouldn't be allowed to have those combos, but how more reasonable players or those doing it explicitly for the themes and character growth are fine>".

 

[Mistwell]

As such, it appears that whomever wins initiative often has the opportunity to destroy the other side before the other side gets to do much. The most recent example of that which I remember is an encounter with some zombies during the past session. I believe they had an AC of 8; it was virtually impossible for the PCs to miss. It took the party two rounds to kill them all, but that's only because of how many there were.

This sounds like your DM did not read the Zombie entry in the Beastiary very well. Zombies get "Zombie fortitude", which means frequently when you do enough damage to take them to 0 hit points, they don't actually go to 0 hit points and stay at 1 hit point.

This particular problem doesn't come up a lot yet, but it comes up enough at levels 1-5 (which are the levels many of the playtests I've done have been at) that I somewhat assume the problem gets worse at higher levels (though admit I could be wrong about since I haven't tried higher levels yet.)

This sounds like two problems.

First, there is a known issue (that they are working on) in balancing the monsters. With each update they updated the classes, but not the Beastiary much (they did one minor update to it). So, they know some of those monsters are off, and said they are tweaking it.

But the other issue is the guidelines for easy, normal, and difficult encounter are a bit tricky to figure out, but in general you should be facing things that are a bit tougher than you are, or their quantity should be higher than expected.

I'll have to double check the packet concerning sneak attack. I had thought as long as on of my allies was threatening the same foe and take actions, I could sneak attack.

You can, but just one time per round. So one hit from your monk/rogue gets it, the others do not.

One of the other characters I noticed was a fighter/barbarian duel-wielding and using the two-weapon fighter style.

He dual wields with light weapons...was he using light weapons (both hands)?

 

[Mistwell]

Hiya.

*shrug*

I think the 'borkeness' of things is starting to show up more and more because the designers of 5e have slowly (over the past 8 months to a year or so) drifted farther and farther from "Base game to add your own stuff to", and closer and closer to "Uber-kewl powerz and lazer-cats!...pew!...mew!...pew!".

We've playtested extensively, and found the opposite. They definitely in my opinion have not done this. Feats went from mandatory to optional. Advantage went from frequent in infrequent. "Powers" went from ever-present at level 1 to spread out over a lot more levels. The entire design drift has been away from what you are saying, in my experience.

 

[Sage Genesis]

One off-hand example of a broken character is the Fighter9/Paladin6 who can literally not die due to hit point damage. (This relies on making the Defy Death saving throw impossible to fail.)

Since I already anticipate the responses, let me just add to this:
* Yes, this character can still be defeated through other means.
* Yes, I expect this will get fixed before release.
* Yes, if you're working on a fixed point-buy the character in question has relatively low Strength (14 or so), although with bounded accuracy it's not so much of a problem.
* Yes, the character in question is level 15, which is pretty high.

It's not Pun-Pun levels of broken by any means, but still... becoming nigh-immortal is not really a reasonable status for a level 15 D&D character.

I'm also leery of the 2nd level Mage ability "aura of antipathy". On a low-HD cloth caster it's a pretty potent layer of defense, but with a bit of multiclassing you can quite cheaply put it on your dreadnaught warrior.

Besides the multiclassing issues I'm also worried by the fact that the game has no real stacking rules. If you cast both Haste and Longstrider on an otherwise normal human, I have no idea whether his speed is now...
* 60 (30 doubled by Haste, decided that Longstrider doesn't stack)
* 70 (30 doubled by Haste, decided that Longstrider does stack and adds +10 after the doubling)
* 80 (30 + 10, decided that Longstrider does stack and adds +10 before the doubling)

Although this particular example isn't really broken it does show that WotC doesn't really seem to bother about building in such clarifications. Because stacking rules to handle questions like these can be made in five minutes or less. They've had like years now to do so. Without decent stacking rules it's hard to determine just what is "broken" in the first place. Arguably an elven monk with the mobility feat could reach a speed of 150 with these spells and the most generous interpretation of stacking. Is this intended? Does WotC expect me to feel rewarded for making a speed-specialist and pulling it off, or is this unintended and should the DM exercise a "common sense" ruling and put a stop to it? And if we don't know the answer either way, just how is the DM supposed to come to a good "common sense" ruling anyway? Why do we even ask the DM to make this ruling in the first place when it was really easy to handle this during the playtest a year ago?

Again, nothing here is horrid in terms of being broken, but it all culminates to an atmosphere of potential abuses and landmines all over the place. I simply don't trust WotC's current design ethos to turn out an un-broken game. (Inasmuch as any game can be un-broken, we're not talking about some Platonic ideal of perfection here.)

 

[billd91]

Sorry, all I remember is that it was in an early article about magical items, and that it killed my interest in 5e.

See, that increases my interest.

Absolutely true; brokenness is a time-honored rpg tradition that D&D began.

RPGs are, after all, about the story and not the math.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

RPGs are, after all, about the story and not the math.

To me, this is like an airplane engineer saying "It's about the ride, not the engineering." For the passengers, it is in a way about the ride; but that doesn't make the engineering any less important.

I understand that not every gamer thinks that math is important. But when I hear a game dev say "It's about the story, not the math!", it's as much a red flag as if I were to hear an airplane engineer say "It's about the ride, not the engineering!"

 

[billd91]

I understand that not every gamer thinks that math is important. But when I hear a game dev say "It's about the story, not the math!", it's as much a red flag as if I were to hear an airplane engineer say "It's about the ride, not the engineering!"

The red flag for me is when they say things like "We fixed the math" as if that's a major selling point of a game. I'm not in it for precise mathematics. I play because we're having adventures and doing things we can't normally do in real life and having a good time with that. Fuzzy math is perfectly acceptable.
Furthermore, I simply cannot see the math in a role playing game anywhere near as big a red flag as the engineering on an airplane. That sounds to me more like an exercise in hyperbole. Nobody's going to die if the RPG math isn't perfect. There won't be tons of machinery falling out of the air.

 

[Mistwell]

Furthermore, I simply cannot see the math in a role playing game anywhere near as big a red flag as the engineering on an airplane. That sounds to me more like an exercise in hyperbole. Nobody's going to die if the RPG math isn't perfect. There won't be tons of machinery falling out of the air.

Yet another example of arguments here breaking down because someone opted to use an analogy when one was not helpful.

Analogies are good when the topic is obscure, and people are having trouble understanding what your saying so you have to resort to some similar situation that people do understand.

But, that wasn't present in this case. Instead, analogy was used the way it usually is used around here, to exaggerate something to the extreme, to make it seem like the people differing with you are themselves more extreme.

So, D&D rules become "airplane engineering" instead of what we all understand them to be, which is D&D rules. Everybody in this forum knows what D&D rules are, how they are used, what sorts of things can go wrong with them and the consequences of it. Nobody needed an analogy to understand them better.

 

[Dausuul]

The dual-wielding barbarian is fine. In the first couple of levels, it has about a 20% damage advantage while raging (remember you only get 2-3 a day at those levels), but as soon as you hit 5th level that edge shrinks to almost nothing thanks to Extra Attack, and when you get Unchecked Fury it completely evaporates. Both Extra Attack and Unchecked Fury favor the great weapon wielder over the dual wielder.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yet another example of arguments here breaking down because someone opted to use an analogy when one was not helpful.

.

Analogies definitely do seem to be a trigger for confusion in these discussions. Everyone jnows a plane requires good design or people die. Without good design, the plane won't fly with disasterous consequences. D&D doesn't even require good design to be playable. You can have a half made,mbroken system, and still get mileage out of it. And best of all, nobody dies (except perhaps a few PCs and goblins).