D&D 5E Out of Combat Utility Analysis

[Quickleaf]

I support more out of combat utility for the fighter (and the rogue) because it is more fun.

I've seen lots of great role-players make their fighter PCs the lynchpin of adventuring parties in terms of group management, knowing D&D lore, having a grasp of faux medieval politics, and being good method-actors. They are a lot of fun to play with at the game table (then again awesome players are just awesome)
However, they accomplish all that out of combat utility in spite of the rules on their character sheet, not because of them. It's the Old School way. The way the Fighter class supports that kind of awesomeness in 5e is thru the selection of skills, and that's rather sad IMO.

I think what matters isn't a strict balancing act across exploration-social-combat, but rather class parity in the sense that no class totally dominates one of those pillars at the expense of others & other classes can't hope to compete. It's not exact balance, it's more "are they playing in the same ballpark?" The answer Basic D&D gives is "nope, they're not in the same ballpark, and that's ok."

Maybe there's more to come for the fighter (and the rogue) in PHB? The DMG? Who knows?

I would add the following features for the 5e fighter:

Grit (1st level): Apply your proficiency bonus to Constitution checks.
[sblock=Rationale]The fighter becomes really good at handling a forced march, holding their breath, , and a whole host of other genre-appropriate "tough guy" stuff. [/sblock]

Martial Archetype (3rd level): I think your choice of martial archetype should provide some sort of background-like feature tying your character to the campaign world more. For example, Champion might get the feature "Fighting School" which gives them an organization which might offer room & board, employment, rumors about other fighting schools or military organizations, etc.
[sblock=Rationale]More than any other class (with a possible exception of bards) the fighter seems to be the one who gets drawn in to the politics of game worlds. This also serves as a preview of the 9th level abilities I'm suggesting a fighter should get, reminiscent of older editions.[/sblock]

Lordship (9th level): Gain followers, a stronghold, and a fancy title to go with it. This would obviously need a module in the DMG supporting it.
[sblock=Rationale]It is an iconic feature of older editions of D&D for fighters to get something special at name level. It reinforces that the fighter is tied to the politics of the campaign world. It allows followers to be used in lots of out of combat ways. It also might allow for variants (more design space) such as a "knight errant" who forsakes their lands and title.[/sblock]

The higher level stuff I'd add for the fighter is more controversial, but that is the bare minimum I think this fighter class needs.

EDIT: I also would expand the fighter's in-combat utility by giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trying unusual stuff. "I want to man the ballista!" Uh, ok, no problem, you have that proficiency cause you're a fighter! "I hilt bash the skeleton with my axe!" But it says axes deal slashing damage and skeletons are...oh sure, go for it, but your damage die will be one less.

 

[Dausuul]

They do count a lot. As I illustrated, though, casters are broadly ALSO better at those, on the whole, than non-casters (Rogues not so much, but they're way worse at skills than in earlier playtests), because their stats synergise with more skills (including very powerful ones!), and they get just as many.

The existence of more Int/Wis skills doesn't mean Int and Wis are better stats. In many ways, it's the opposite.

Int skills in particular tend to be narrowly focused knowledge skills: Arcana, History, Nature, Religion. Each individual skill doesn't come up all that often, so the fact that there's a lot of them is a penalty for the wizard rather than an advantage, because your skill proficiencies don't go as far. The wizard would be much better off if they were replaced with a single "Lore" skill, where you could drop one proficiency and have it all.

Contrast Acrobatics and Stealth, both of which are broadly useful skills which you're going to be rolling all day long. Two skill proficiencies and you can get them both.

That said, I agree that Wisdom is a pretty beefy stat. But that isn't because it has more skills. It's because it has Perception, which is probably the single most-used skill in the game. Insight and Survival are just icing on the cake, and Animal Handling is the paper doily underneath.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

It's interesting that I strongly disagree with the OP about his conclusions, and still I don't know how to put this into a reasonable argument, because I don't see any problem in his math. He arrives at the conclusion that the rogue is twice and the wizard is nine times more useful than the fighter, and while I cannot criticize the methods he used to arrive at this conclusion, I just know, from my last seven months playing the game, that at least our reality couldn't be farther from that.

That said, I cannot see how one would be able to solve his problem without realizing that the problem is not the fighter or the rogue. You could give those two classes access to all the skills in the rules and they wouldn't be as versatile as spellcasters, because of how magic works in D&D, by creating small pockets of exception-based design. Well, you could have more exception-based design pockets for other classes, surely, but you'll eventually stumble at the fact that their abilities cannot be explained through magic. Suddenly, you have fighters screaming "come and get it!" and warlords offering martial healing to unconscious allies, but also thousand of fans migrating to Pathfinder... :/

Honestly, I don't expect anything in the PHB (or the DMG) to change that. We'll get options for non-magical characters, but we'll also get new spells that make wizards and clerics even more versatile. I don't know if this is fair (it seems it's not fair at all), but D&D played this way for the last 40 years, and I don't see how that would change without changing the core of the game, which 4E did with a degree of success that is arguable at least.

I've been playing warrior-type characters for the last twenty years, and about half of them were fighters. I'll keep playing them for the time to come even without the same level of versatility of my buddies playing the cleric and the wizard. As long as I get to do my thing, which is basically killing stuff and using the NWPs from my kit (or skills from my background, as kids call them these days), I'll be fine with the game. If making my fighter more special implies in making magic less special, I'll be fine not being very special.

 

[Manbearcat]

Exhaustion checks seems extremely unlikely to come up in normal D&D play. Even less likely at high levels.

Only a strange sort of "badly-planned, low-on-magic, wilderness excursion" game do they seem likely to be a regular thing, like, even every other session. I'd love to hear you explain how they'd come up regularly or how DMs could "make heavy use of them" without a lot of bizarre situations.

Possibly. Much of that depends on just how much scene transitioning/reframing capacity high level spellcasters possess. If its anything in the same stratosphere as 3.x, then yes, you are 100 % correct. If they don't possess it, then I could see something more wobbly (due to lack of discrete conflict resolution mechanics and PC build components that play into it) but akin to the 4e:

- "find and rescue the villagers who were captured by the Werewolves of the Forest of Endless Fog for their holiday of The Great Hunt"

>

- "navigate the trackless swamp to find the medicine man with the cure for the plague that rots the kingdom"

>

- "track through the frozen tundra of the Feywild to melt the frozen heart of the Prince of Frost who has the world in his icy grip"

As I said, it would be more wobbly than 4e (which is built for it), but some of the component parts are there to facilitate it. If those tropes are constantly subordinated by LOLSCREWTHATNOISE > DIVINATION > TELEPORT combos, then of course it wouldn't manifest in play.

That paradigm ceased to persist in 4e and my games sustained exploration heavy skill challenges from Heroic tier through Paragon and all the way up through the Feywild and Abyss in Epic tier. There are all manner of exploration challenges and genre tropes available to pressure PCs who can't Leomunds > 15 minute workday > Divination > Teleport > Protection from every element/exposure possible.

Fort defense (for Hazard and Disease/Condition defense), Endurance training and Con (for singular checks, group checks, and dealing with the Disease/Condition track) were always at a premium in my 4e games, through every tier. The characters that didn't possess them suffered for it.

Further, being the one guy who isn't affected doesn't help the group in a proactive way, just means you're slightly less screwed.

Well, group checks help everyone as its one for all and all for one, binary. If half pass then you're good. Having someone to anchor that math with an auto-success is no small thing if you're in the midst of a punitive exploration challenge and/or you're expecting lethal pushback immediately after or during.

Further, Fighters don't really have that many more HP than anyone else, unless we're getting in to some kind of abuse of Second Wind.

True, but I was thinking of the combination of the few extra HP they get (2 per level really) and d10 Hit Die for reserves. Those combined and you're looking at 2ish realized HP differential and 2ish latent. The latent ones will help in exploration challenges.

In other news, I'm on the defense (I guess kinda...) of 5e versus a fellow 4e advocate and 5e pseudo-detractor! I hope people are bearing witness!

I think I get the gist, but what is a thread coat-rack? I haven't seen the term before.

Its when you make a nominal effort to pretend at engaging an issue but your real purpose is to subtly introduce a pet-topic either to just push your opinion or to initiate an outright threadjack.

 

[TwoSix]

In other news, I'm on the defense (I guess kinda...) of 5e versus a fellow 4e advocate and 5e pseudo-detractor! I hope people are bearing witness!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ZOKDmorj0

 

[Tony Vargas]

The balance you seek with your numbers, suggests you might need to limit the spells a caster gains, perhaps even remove some of the more contentious ones (invisibility, fly...etc) and then see about curbing some other special features until your numbers are in harmony with what feels right for you and your group

What really inflates the casters' numbers is the number of known spells and the ease of preparing different ones.

If you eliminate prep in favor of a small number of spells known, like the 3e sorcerer, and limit the number of slots greatly (envision a progression where instead of lower-level slots accumulate, the slots just sort of march across the table, without the total number of slots increasing much), you could eliminate a lot of that 'excess' flexibility/power, and, as a bonus, make each individual caster more distinct from his fellows.

That would also reduce the flexibility granted by spontaneous casting, but, if it still weren't enough, you could /also/ go back to prepping slots.

 

[Dausuul]

As to the original post's analysis, while I agree with the OP's premise, those numbers seem somewhat arbitrarily inflated (in the favor of his premise) and pretty wobbly under scrutiny. False precision.

"Somewhat" is putting it mildly.

• He measures wizard and cleric utility at 20th level only. This is ridiculous. Very few groups play at 20th level or anything close to it. Typically, you're going to be in the level 5-10 range, which means you don't have 25 prepared spells, you have 9-15.
• He assumes that the wizard and cleric devote their entire list of prepared spells to utility magic, and none at all to combat. This is not even close to accurate. In my experience, a wizard's prepared spell list is typically 30-50% combat spells. Mage armor, magic missile, and fireball are the Indispensable Trio; personal survival, targeted damage, and blast damage. Then you're going to want one or two save-or-suck spells, a bit of battlefield control... it adds up fast. So, now you're looking at 4-10 utility spells.
• He drastically undervalues the impact of limited spell slots, which bite far harder in 5E than they ever did in 3E. I played a wizard in the public playtest, and believe me, I hoarded those spell slots. Using a 3rd-level spell slot for comprehend languages? Don't be absurd. No wizard would ever do that except in the most dire circumstances. 3rd-level slots are far too precious to be squandered that way. You may think it's the last encounter of the day, but you can't know that for sure. The DM is a tricksy beast.

So, adjusting the numbers for the wizard... 4-10 utility spells is an average of 7. I think limited spell slots balances out the greater utility of wizard spells over skills, so cut that 6 points to 4. What's the wizard's "utility value" now? 51, pretty close to the rogue.

Of course, all this really proves is that you can manipulate these numbers to say any-darned-thing you please. Until I see a rogue and a wizard side by side at the table (my playtest party didn't have any rogues), I don't think I can judge their relative utility. I don't think anyone else can, either. In theory, the goal is for the rogue to be the go-to skills expert, while the wizard reluctantly taps her limited store of magic to deal with problems outside the rogue's expertise. We'll have to see how it goes in practice.

Where I do agree is that Basic fighters have very limited options out of combat. They don't have no options, just limited ones. That is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a place for a class whose raison d'etre is "Killing stuff." Many players are just in it for blood and glory, and aren't much interested in the other two pillars. That does mean the fighter needs to be better at combat than everybody else; not three times better (it doesn't work that way!), but significantly better. Again, we'll have to see how this plays out at the table, but on paper, at least, the fighter looks like a very nasty customer. Lots of hit points, excellent AC, and fearsome damage output.

When the PHB comes out, we'll have a better idea what options are available for fighters who want more versatility.

 

[TwoSix]

Where I do agree is that Basic fighters have very limited options out of combat. They don't have no options, just limited ones. That is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a place for a class whose raison d'etre is "Killing stuff." Many players are just in it for blood and glory, and aren't much interested in the other two pillars. That does mean the fighter needs to be better at combat than everybody else; not three times better (it doesn't work that way!), but significantly better. Again, we'll have to see how this plays out at the table, but on paper, at least, the fighter looks like a very nasty customer. Lots of hit points, excellent AC, and fearsome damage output.

Not to mention the fighter will be the priority target for most of those Concentration-limited offensive buffs.

Plus, so much of what made the 3e caster so powerful outside of combat was his ability to dictate pace and reframe the encounter. Without the ability to store utility spells in scrolls and wands, that's mostly gone.
No more flying the party over the cliff until at least 11th or so, depending on party composition. Teleport has been moved from mid-game to end-game, and scry and die is no longer a viable tactic. Encounter defining crowd controls like black tentacles are gone (although Wall of Stone is still there, albeit requiring Concentration). No more of the defensive trifecta of fly, mirror image, and invisibility.

I'm not saying that they aren't more useful than a fighter, overall, but it's no longer the case that any class you pick you would be better off saying "I'll play a cleric or a wizard" instead.

 

[keterys]

People keep mentioning the fighter as indispensable in 5E for combat, as if that somehow makes up for its dearth in the other tiers. Is he really?

I mean, the old adage to just take another cleric still seems to apply. Fighters get more hp? Hah. Try a character with a whole pyramid of healing abilities, a "Second Wind" (Turn ability) that's more helpful for the party, and only a little bit less effective offensive abilities. If you ignore their offense spells. Entirely.

Oh, and they're more useful in every other instance except straight up damage, if you do ignore them for that one limited comparison.

 

[TwoSix]

People keep mentioning the fighter as indispensable in 5E for combat, as if that somehow makes up for its dearth in the other tiers. Is he really?

I mean, the old adage to just take another cleric still seems to apply. Fighters get more hp? Hah. Try a character with a whole pyramid of healing abilities, a "Second Wind" (Turn ability) that's more helpful for the party, and only a little bit less effective offensive abilities. If you ignore their offense spells. Entirely.

Oh, and they're more useful in every other instance except straight up damage, if you do ignore them for that one limited comparison.

That's a pretty solid point, actually. Especially if you don't prioritize Wisdom and put your high score in Strength.