D&D 5E Spellcasters and Balance in 5e: A Poll

[Flamestrike]

For example, the weapons table has differing sized damage dice. Is a dagger markedly less effective at damaging an ogre's luck than a greatsword?

RAW yes.

Or to put it another way, you need a lot more [luck, resolve, fighting skill and the will to live] to survive combat with a Frost Giants armed with a 20 foot long axe that weighs as much as a car, that you do a weak and untrained dude with knife.

HP are not meat. They have not been meat since 1E.

You people are always so caught up on RAW, how about reading it. They're an abstraction. Your ability to turn a killing blow into a glancing hit, a near miss, parry, last minute dodge or lucky deflection.

 

[Flamestrike]

A real fighter with a decent weapon should always be threatening an ogre's life

In the in-game-world reality, they are.

To in game observers of the battle, the two square off, and within seconds the Ogre is run through by the Fighter, on the first meaningful thrust, with no hits exchanged in return.

 

[ECMO3]

Not in this case. Most of the Champion's abilities are static. You make the choice and you're done. There's no additional choice with extra attack, most fighting styles, ability score improvements, improved critical, remarkable athlete, superior critical, or survivor. Literally everything a Champion gets is one and done as far as choice goes, EXCEPT if the Champion chooses BM Maneuvers, which doesn't do much at all for complexity.

They are not static. You can change fighting styles every four levels and there are 33 different options you can take for fighting style using only official WOTC material.

That said, sure choices are limited but there is a crapload of stuff he gets and unlike spells it is not a consistent theme or similar mechanic for all of them. It is "complex" to play.

You cannot make a Champion more complex than ANY wizard. Even the simplest wizard is more complex than a Drow Champion with BM maneuvers and feats.

That is not true. Make a champion like I described and write all his crap on your character sheet and you will have stuff all over the place with tons of different "slots" for different abilities with the different numbers that recharge some on long rests and some on short rests.

It might not be more complex to build, but it is certainly more complex to play and a more complex character in general.

We're comparing classes, not what tables do. Some tables allow Gestalt characters. Are we now going to add a second class to the Champion to figure out complexity? No. You go by RAW when comparing classes. What tables do is irrelevant.

Feats are in RAW. Optional does not mean defaulted to no.

If we are debating how to make the most complex character possible, then yes multiclasses would be appropriate, but that is not the discussion. The discussion is about the most complex single class fighter with the champion subclass. That precludes subclass from the discussion.

A single class champion fighter must have a race, it must have a background and it must take either ASIs or feats, so yes all of those things contribute to the potential complexity of a single class champion fighter made under the RAW.

I am not talking about going out of the bounds of the rules as written. That said I will freely admit if your table does not allow feats then the variation you can build into your characters is far more narrow in scope and there is much less variety.

Illusionists are one of the most complex Wizards out there. With illusion magic the sky is the limit with what you can come up with and do.

This is true for any caster who casts SOME illusions but the features associated with the school of illusion are relatively simple and largely separate from this point regarding illusion spells (which is itself valid for some spells). For spells like minor image, silent image, phantasmal force this is a legitimate point for any caster, but for many (most?) illusions it is not. Shadow Blade, Blur, Mirror image, invisibility .... there is little variability for those illusions or many others.

Also FWIW the Champion character I gave as an example had two illusion spells (out of 6 spells total), one of them would have likely fell into this bin.

 

[Undrave]

This is just such pointless complaint. If you don't agree with the GM about what the game should be like, you're not gonna have fun no matter what. The books can't force that. Find a GM that has similar(ish) preferences than you.

Putting that aside... is there any other class in the game with a class feature marked as 'optional' like feats are??

Luke Skywalker is a farm boy who picks up an X-Wing and becomes one of the best pilots in the rebellion.

Are the stats of a fighter meant to be modelling training, or representing/producing a character with a certain sort of capability?

Luke Skywalker is not a Fighter.

The answer can't be because that would be unbalanced - game balance is a thing that matters in the real world, but it's not a part of the fiction.

It's still a GAME. Sometimes, you just gotta put up with some nonsense for the game to work properly. It's either you let minions in (to represent enemies that are so below your fighter that they can run them through in one shot) or you ignore the terminology of 'hits' and stuff when it comes to HP and accept it's not meat. It's gonna be gamey, one way or the other.

That is not true. He is not automatically more complex.

The champion has built-in limited use abilities to keep track of such as action surge, 2nd wind and indomitable. Add other things like racial spells, battle master maneuvers from his fighting style or luck dice and spells from feats and it is quite possible to build a very complex champion. Also if you build a champion like that it can be all over the map with different abilities going into different feats and spells and short rest vs long rest mechanics making it more difficult to track than a simply built wizard.

At 12th level dwarf illusionist that has taken 3 ASIs has 16 spell slots to keep track of and they are all based on intelligence, he has to keep track of arcane recovery and illusury self as once a day uses too.

A 12th level drow champion CAN have 2 spells based on charisma, 2 more on intelligence and 2 more on wisdom while also having 3 luck dice and 2 battle master maneuver dice to use on 3 different battlemaster maneuvers. Then like every other fighter he has to keep track of action surge, indomitable and 2nd wind uses .... and that is off the top of my head, it may not be the most complex build possible.

This is naughty word. This is just ridiculous and honestly an INSULTING argument. A champion might have more features but NONE of them are in anyway, shape, or form more complex than a friggin' WIZARD!

And that's still part of dex in D&D. So? Yes, you could subdivide every attribute further, but it makes imminently more sense to group things that make you move you body rapidly and accurate together, instead of grouping some of them with your ability to do maths.

Reflexes should actually be part agile movement and part agile mental loop. The real problem is Reflex and precise minute movement (like used for picking locks, for exemple) really the best grouping as far as stats go? Or do we just acknowledge that D&D ability scores are only being kept out of tradition and could EASILY be completely reworked.

Where do you get 20 seconds a day?

A battlemaster can be a use a battlemaster maneuver for exactly 72 seconds a day at 3rd level, at 78 seconds a day at 7th level and 84 seconds a day at 15th level (assuming he gets short rests in accordance with the guidelines). Further with feat and fighting style choices he can add another 12 seconds a day to that number. At 15th level that is 96 seconds out of a total of roughly 120 seconds he should be fighting every day.

Any character with two feats or any player with a feat and a fighting style can be a battlemaster for 12 seconds a day if he wants to.

Oh sorry, 72 seconds. IF you get the mythical 2 short rest per day. That is SO much better 20 seconds oh yeah. a WHOLE Minute in a day! Wow...

I've taken piss longer than that for pete's sake! You're only a Battlemaster for less than 2 minutes a day and somehow you don't think that' a problem?! You think I should just be satisfied with that?

Yeah... nope.

They are not static. You can change fighting styles every four levels and there are 33 different options you can take for fighting style using only official WOTC material.

Oh wow, every four level! That is SO dynamic!

What the hell are you even on?! Honestly it sounds like you're arguing just for the sake of argueing at this point, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. A fighting style is static because (putting aisde the ones that give you spells or maneuvers) THEY DON'T INVOLVE ANY CHOICE PER ROUND. Your Archery style is ALWAYS going to give you +2 to your attack. That's it. That's what it means to be STATIC. There is no round per round tactical option to consider. You don't even need to give up your Archery Style to benefit from the Defense style +2 to AC (if you reached the ridiculously high level the Champion gets a second fighting style at). When conditions are met you get the bonus, that's it.

 

[Campbell]

I generally prefer more consistent uses of ability scores, but also a more even distribution of them ala PF2 or any game where there are exponential costs for specialization. Given how attainable a basic level of physical conditioning is the idea of the frail spellcaster is pretty much a D&D proud nail. Any wizard who spends a sizeable portion of their time adventuring should acquire basic physical competency pretty quickly just from all the backpacking they are doing. It's pretty much only a D&D thing. You don't see it in other games or fantasy fiction not directly inspired by D&D.

 

[Maxperson]

No Stephen Hawking wouldn't dodge well in 4e for the simple reason he isn't an adventurer. He isn't a D&D PC in any way, shape, or form. He's an NPC. And almost certainly as far as combat is concerned he's a minion..

I think the simple reason would be that he's dead. He isn't doing anything well right now.

 

[Maxperson]

They are not static. You can change fighting styles every four levels and there are 33 different options you can take for fighting style using only official WOTC material.

No you can't. You need to stop invoking the explicitly optional rules from Tasha's in these comparisons. Those don't apply by RAW as they will only be allowed at some tables and not others. Nothing from that book is anything other than an optional rule.

From Tasha's page 4.

"Everything in this book is optional. Each group, guided by the DM, decides which of these options, if any, to incorporate into a campaign."

That is not true. Make a champion like I described and write all his crap on your character sheet and you will have stuff all over the place with tons of different "slots" for different abilities with the different numbers that recharge some on long rests and some on short rests.

And you'll still fall many times short of even the simplest wizard.

It might not be more complex to build, but it is certainly more complex to play and a more complex character in general.

No. It's not even close.

Feats are in RAW. Optional does not mean defaulted to no.

Optional means you have to opt in, yes. That means that you cannot assume ANY optional rule in a valid class comparison. All of them have to be assumed as a no, since that's the RAW default.

 

[Gammadoodler]

RAW yes.

Or to put it another way, you need a lot more [luck, resolve, fighting skill and the will to live] to survive combat with a Frost Giants armed with a 20 foot long axe that weighs as much as a car, that you do a weak and untrained dude with knife.

HP are not meat. They have not been meat since 1E.

You people are always so caught up on RAW, how about reading it. They're an abstraction. Your ability to turn a killing blow into a glancing hit, a near miss, parry, last minute dodge or lucky deflection.

That isn't actually putting it any other way.. it's just adding a straw man comparison (in this case, almost literally..seriously..replace "weak and untrained" with "straw"..uncanny..)

It's nonsense. But so are "meat hp". They both lead to silly results. It's just a matter of taste for which version of nonsense is more palatable to the table.

"We waved our chunks of metal around as a group for awhile, making the monster depressed, and irritable, and frustrated, until one of us was able to physically land a blow that killed it"

Vs.

"We physically struck the monster repeatedly with our chunks of metal without seriously injuring it until one of us landed a killing blow"

However... Allllll of that is beside the point. Which is that under either interpretation, the killing blow cannot happen as part of a single action, in the way that it could "in real life".

The only difference in your version, the fighter has to engage in the equivalent of a 6-18 second dance-off, instead of 6-18 seconds of glancing blows and grazing shots, before they land their mortal wound.

 

[Maxperson]

This is naughty word. This is just ridiculous and honestly an INSULTING argument. A champion might have more features but NONE of them are in anyway, shape, or form more complex than a friggin' WIZARD!

Oh wow, every four level! That is SO dynamic!

What the hell are you even on?! Honestly it sounds like you're arguing just for the sake of argueing at this point, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. A fighting style is static because (putting aisde the ones that give you spells or maneuvers) THEY DON'T INVOLVE ANY CHOICE PER ROUND. Your Archery style is ALWAYS going to give you +2 to your attack. That's it. That's what it means to be STATIC. There is no round per round tactical option to consider. You don't even need to give up your Archery Style to benefit from the Defense style +2 to AC (if you reached the ridiculously high level the Champion gets a second fighting style at). When conditions are met you get the bonus, that's it.

Wow. You're more heated than I am over this and you haven't even been arguing with him about it. Heck, I'm not even heated. I'm just kinda flabbergasted that he would think that it's the number of class features and not their complexity that determines class complexity. These two classes aren't even in the same complexity ballpark. Wizards are in the majors and Champions are in Little League.

 

[ECMO3]

This is naughty word. This is just ridiculous and honestly an INSULTING argument. A champion might have more features but NONE of them are in anyway, shape, or form more complex than a friggin' WIZARD!

Sorry you are insulted but you are wrong.

Nothing about a wizard makes it terribly complex to play. Characters of any type with a bunch of single cast spells using different casting abilities along with features and other abilities that use a mix of short rest and long rest mechanics are more difficult and complex to play.

That is just true even if it insults you.

Now you can build a wizard like that, and such a wizard will be more complex than a comparitavely built fighter.

Oh sorry, 72 seconds. IF you get the mythical 2 short rest per day. That is SO much better 20 seconds oh yeah. a WHOLE Minute in a day! Wow...

Sorry if you don't like math. It is over a minute a day and you should only be fighting 2 minutes a day.

If you play the game as it was designed to be played you will have 6 fights averaging 3.5 rounds each (21 seconds) and have 12 battlemaster maneuvers to do at 3rd level (72 seconds).

Now if you are not playing the game as it was designed to be played ..... well then you would have a point.

72 seconds out of about 126 seconds of combat in the entire day.

I've taken piss longer than that for pete's sake! You're only a Battlemaster for less than 2 minutes a day and somehow you don't think that' a problem?! You think I should just be satisfied with that?

The average piss takes the same amount of time as the average D&D battle (21 seconds - no kidding look it up). A fighter would get three and a half turns in the time it takes the average person to piss.

People urinate 8 times a day vs 6 fights a day in D&D. So using simple math you should actually spend more time peeing (168 seconds) then you spend fighting (126 seconds). Again just simple math whether you like it or not.

My point - if you are doing battlemaster maneuvers as much as you are peeing then you are doing it A LOT.

Note: I did not include the time for flushing wiping or pulling up your trousers in the amount of time it takes to pee. If you are counting those things you will spend even more time doing your business.

What the hell are you even on?! Honestly it sounds like you're arguing just for the sake of argueing at this point, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. A fighting style is static because (putting aisde the ones that give you spells or maneuvers) THEY DON'T INVOLVE ANY CHOICE PER ROUND. Your Archery style is ALWAYS going to give you +2 to your attack. That's it. That's what it means to be STATIC. There is no round per round tactical option to consider. You don't even need to give up your Archery Style to benefit from the Defense style +2 to AC (if you reached the ridiculously high level the Champion gets a second fighting style at). When conditions are met you get the bonus, that's it.

Please ensure something is actually true before you state it as fact. You might not like what I say, but at least I don't just say things that are objectively untrue.

To start with the different options you can take with superior technique account over half the fighting style variations available. That point aside, protection, interception and Great Weapon fighting are not static and unarmed fighting involves choices which change the damage between three values depending on what you are doing and how you are using it.

Out of 33 different options/variations a fighter can take with fighting style RAW, there are exactly FIVE that are static and I am being generous there because dueling actually changes depending on what you are holding in your hands.

FIVE out of 33 are static. And I am not counting the ones that give you spells in that 33 because those are not available to the fighter class without a feat.

Oh and defense style is +1 to AC if you are wearing armor. It is not +2.