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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Timespike" data-source="post: 8428551" data-attributes="member: 29665">Playtesting every possible combination would be impossible, even for a titan of a company like WotC. You would need—no joke, no hyperbole—the kind of resources that a company like Disney can throw at a project to even get close. That said, Level Up was playtested a LOT. Way, WAY more than is even normal for a project like this, I gathered. Just not in every conceivable combination. Because you're probably talking billions or trillions of combos there, at least.That said, fortunately, it's not really necessary to manually account for everything. Fifth edition in general is a much tighter and more difficult to completely break than (for example) third edition was. Bounded accuracy and the proficiency system make it pretty forgiving to design for as long as you understand some key principles such as "this is not an edition that runs on static bonuses." There's this notion out there that game balance is this incredibly fragile thing and it's very easy to utterly destroy it without realizing it. That's much more true for some systems than others, and once a system is mature (like 5E is) there's usually a pretty good sense of how much of a problem that is. Fortunately, as I indicated above, the answer for 5E is "it's actually pretty solid." Now, is there utterly broken stuff out there on D&Dwiki, etc? Absolutely! But reputable RPG companies and even a lot of small-time individual designers, have done a pretty good job of not making broken nonsense.Third edition had Pun-Pun. Fifth Edition had the coffeelock, which, while still a headache, is orders of magnitude less severe. Pun-Pun was a 5th-level Kobold that could literally rewrite a setting it was so powerful. The coffeelock just gets way more spell slots than it's supposed to.If you want to ensure that you don't get broken combos in 5E, you need to basically keep classes from getting way more of some critical resource than they're supposed to (sorcadin, coffeelock, and the infamous Vengeance paladin/Hexblade combo) or breaking the action economy (various Action Surge cheese). Those fixes alone cut off the vast majority of exploits.From what I gathered, the tricky part wasn't so much in correcting the broken combos, it came from making sure that there wasn't an over-correction in the other direction (for example, the new way Divine Smite works originally required a bonus action in addition to the other changes, which was something that got corrected based on playtest feedback - moderately hard) and that the new versions of the classes still felt right (MUCH harder, and why you want a skilled design team!). I imagine the folks working on the maneuver system had to do some pretty significant work to make sure that didn't break anything, though!The one thing that you SHOULD NOT allow, though, is multiclassing between an O5E class and the corresponding one from A5E. So fighter/fighter, herald/paladin, etc.</blockquote>

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