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

[Aldarc]

Yes. It was the irritating Essentials archer that because it was a "controller" didn't do enough damage and because controller was the least defined role was probably worse at being a controller than a classic rogue.

I'll admit that it a bit confusing to mix Core and Essentials classes in the mix as if they were on equal parity in terms of the design goals.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Ya know, I think all of these arguments on grid filler classes have really changed my mind.

While we're at it, there's too much fluff in 5e too:

Barbarian? That's just an angry fighter.
Bard? Just a Cha rogue (maybe multiclassing wizard).
Cleric can stay (though we could just make this a wizard that thinks their power comes from the heavens)
Druid? Clearly a nature cleric! I mean, there's already a nature cleric in the darn PHB! This class might be the worst offender of all!!!
Fighter can stay
Paladin? Just a fighter with cleric levels (though if we go the route of making clerics wizards, they'd be wizard levels, obviously)
Ranger? Just a fighter with nature cleric levels
Rogue can arguably stay, though there's a fair argument for just making a stealthy fighter instead
Sorcerer? Obviously just a wizard with fluff.
Warlock? Same as sorcerer
Wizard can stay

There we go. Stripped of all the filler fluff, the game is clearly better off using only the fighter and wizard classes. (I guess we can include the rogue and cleric if you really can't live without filler fluff, I guess.)

This actually feels pretty decent to me. If I wanted to build a D&D-like game from scratch, I'd probably have just four classes, Warrior, Mage, Priest and Rogue, and everything else would be subclasses and multiclass combinations of them. But that sounds like a lot of work, so I'm not gonna do it. (I've written some games for my own use in the past though, so who knows...)

 

[Cadence]

Holmes not a wizard or rogue. Leonardo would not be a artificer.

This came up in a thread about some caster types, but does every type of person in the world need a class that would be something effective as an adventurer? Or are some of them just people that would stay home or hire the professional adventurers to take them where they need to go?

"College Professor" might be a thing in the world but almost all of us would be pretty useless on a typical DnD adventure. Are things like that generally modeled by the 3.5 expert class. Indiana Jones might be a college professor, but is he also a Rogue with back stab replaced by feats or by Bardic knowledge? How far off is that for Holmes? Are there people who have just chosen not to be useful in a DnD party sense - Belles's father in Beauty and the Beast, Alfred or Jarvis the butler, Florence Nightingale or Hawkeye Pierce, real world safe crackers, with all due respect to his vital place in the story but gardeners who can cook, etc...?

The alchemist is an example of a person I picture as being a non-adventurer. To get them to be one PF gave them Jekkyl and Hyde formulas and bomb throwing. That's cool, but is it a classic alchemist anymore, or have they evolved one by asking what it takes to be an adventurer. Is whatever you do to evolve Da Vinci to be an adventurer also making it not really Da Vinci anymore?

 

[Aldarc]

This actually feels pretty decent to me. If I wanted to build a D&D-like game from scratch, I'd probably have just four classes, Warrior, Mage, Priest and Rogue, and everything else would be subclasses and multiclass combinations of them. But that sounds like a lot of work, so I'm not gonna do it. (I've written some games for my own use in the past though, so who knows...)

Maybe you should play Shadow of the Demon Lord or Tales of the Weird Wizard.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Right, and that's another issue with these roles. If the class is labelled to be a certain thing, you expect it to be roughly equally good at it than other classes labelled as the same thing.

Nope. I expect them to be effective at them. But no one in their senses thought that the warlord was as good at healing as the cleric. The warlord however was labelled as having a secondary role as striker - while the cleric's secondary role was also leader thanks to the divine power source.

4e does exactly what you are suggesting it should and did right from the PHB.

But perhaps it conceptually just doesn't make sense for them to be? Why cant they be a hybrid? A bit of controller a bit of striker, not quite as good at either than a pure build, but can do both OK?

Are you talking about secondary roles which were in the PHB or are you talking about hybrid classes; I'm right now playing a Berserker who's an explicit hybrid of defender and striker and able to switch between the two roles.

Once more 4e does exactly what you claim to want and the way you claim you want it.

And this of course should be solved by introducing hybrid roles for all the possible combinations and continue the grid filling as that would lead to insane amount of new classes.

Four roles primary, four roles secondary. To fill in the grid so every possible primary and secondary role combination is covered including doubling down would take ... 16 classes. Given that the 5e PHB has IIRC 11 classes I don't think an extra five would be "an insane amount".

OK. Let's take it a step deeper and imagine we want to throw in the grid for not just primary and secondary roles but for tertiary as well. We do this not through new classes, but through subclasses. We can, for example, call the striker subclass of the rogue that gets extra damage on their sneak attack something like the Brutal Scoundrel - and the controller subclass that provides debuffs with most of their attacks something like the Ruthless Ruffian. Which means that if we want the entire grid filled in three levels deep we just need four subclasses per class. Most 5e classes have more than that.

Not only does 4e do what you say is insane, 5e is pretty close to insane by your metrics here.

These roles can and are things characters may specialise at, but that should not be basis of class design, it is far too limiting for that. Having 'a defender build' is fine, having a defender class is not.

Yay! Let's remove the rogue from the game given that they are an extreme burst damage class and therefore a striker. Or possibly we should give it back its flexibility; the 4e rogue could be more of a controller or leader than any 5e rogue I have ever seen could.

Or is that not what you actually want?

 

[FrogReaver]

Ya know, I think all of these arguments on grid filler classes have really changed my mind.

While we're at it, there's too much fluff in 5e too:

Barbarian? That's just an angry fighter.
Bard? Just a Cha rogue (maybe multiclassing wizard).
Cleric can stay (though we could just make this a wizard that thinks their power comes from the heavens)
Druid? Clearly a nature cleric! I mean, there's already a nature cleric in the darn PHB! This class might be the worst offender of all!!!
Fighter can stay
Paladin? Just a fighter with cleric levels (though if we go the route of making clerics wizards, they'd be wizard levels, obviously)
Ranger? Just a fighter with nature cleric levels
Rogue can arguably stay, though there's a fair argument for just making a stealthy fighter instead
Sorcerer? Obviously just a wizard with fluff.
Warlock? Same as sorcerer
Wizard can stay

There we go. Stripped of all the filler fluff, the game is clearly better off using only the fighter and wizard classes. (I guess we can include the rogue and cleric if you really can't live without filler fluff, I guess.)

This always boils down to - if 5e was different then an Expert class or Warlord class could fit nicely in - and IMO that's a weak point to make.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

OK:

• The Avenger was a striker ninja paladin with two handed weapons. It does not exist in 5e.
• It's possible to play something like an Invoker in 5e. But not very well. Your closest would be whatever the divine sorcerer calls itself.
• The slayer was a matter of having a new class to cut down the complexity. The point about the slayer is that some people like to play the simple hitty fighter - and compared to a slayer even a Champion is fiddly. This was a crunch implementation not a fluff thing.
• Warden was not necessary - but neither is playing D&D. The Oath of Ancients paladin is a watered down warden; once more you are pointing to something 5e can't do at all well even if it can do them at all.
• Psionics aren't IMO necessary (which isn't the same as aren't desirable). But you can't play a battlemind or an ardent in 5e if you assume there's value to psionics being different - and most psion fans react with horror to the idea that an Aberrant Soul covers almost everything they say they want out of a psion.

So. You are pointing to a list of things that 5e either does very badly or can't do at all. Somehow you are using this to claim that 4e is less customisable than 5e????

Meanwhile where's my bully fighter that routinely pushes people around the battlefield and cuts through into the heart of them to attack everyone around him? Where's my brawler fighter who grabs people with opportunity attacks?

5e in terms of customisability vs overhead is excellent. In terms of total customisability it's sitting certainly behind 4e and 3.5 and probably even behind 3.0. Mostly because we've only had two major splatbooks for 5e. In terms of customisability within the class then 4e let you set things like how you move and you could show in ways you simply can't in 5e.

Meanwhile in 5e you simply can't fulfil that role without the relevant feat regardless of class. And I've off-tanked enough in 4e to know you can hold the line and make enemies focus on you even if you can't go full lockdown in a way that's impossible in 5e.

Or it makes them think that they are outsmarting the designers and having fun with the system. YMMV

And in 4e you could and did.

I'm not gonna do a point to point reply, but from this I get the same impression than a lot of warlord wishlistings. Yes, you could do a lot of mechanical things in 4e that you cannot in 5e, but that is because 5e is mechanically a different game! 4e was far more tactically involved, far more board gamey and had all sort of mechanical widgets related to that. 5e doesn't do things like that so much, and that's intentional. You can't just port those 4e-isms into 5e. It's not even right or wrong, they're games with different design goals, but like I said previously: if you like 4e so much, play 4e instead of wishing that they turn 5e into 4e.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Maybe you should play Shadow of the Demon Lord or Tales of the Weird Wizard.

Maybe I should!

I don't know these specific games, but I've found that a lot of games that do this sort of simplified class design also come with a lot of OSR-baggage that I really don't like.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'll admit that it a bit confusing to mix Core and Essentials classes in the mix as if they were on equal parity in terms of the design goals.

Possibly.

The thing here, of course, is that if we don't include the Hunter then Crimson Longinus' claims about the grid requiring classes collapse like a cheap tent. Because the grid wasn't actually filled in; if they couldn't think of something decent and interesting to put there they didn't bother to put anything. The grid was something used for inspiration and to show where gaps were rather than something that was slavishly filled in.

 

[Cadence]

Four roles primary, four roles secondary. To fill in the grid so every possible primary and secondary role combination is covered including doubling down would take ... 16 classes.

I like the idea of roles as a way to help think about game design and what niches are left. But I think putting it front and center and using it to check boxes and fill in a grid leads to what some describe as making things not feel like not DnD and being too much of a straight jacket. Can there be a divine caster and arcane caster and martial character class that all full the same role? Are there some role combinations that a "power type" doesn't fit? Are there some role combinations that are awkward? Does each class need exactly one primary and one secondary, or are some class ideas naturally flexible enough that they could choose from among several things as to what they were best and second best at, or maybe have a primary and the two in third place with no second place? Do folks talking about power sources fall in to similar traps where they need to pigeonhole things and make it hard to get a Witch or Bard that crosses the now rigidly imposed spell list lines? If a Gish is the mythically exact 50/50 between classes, is there an exact 50/50 between roles, or is primary/secondary role an immutable classification system?