D&D 5E (2014) Spellcasters and Balance in 5e: A Poll
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Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
8 is below average, but not "suck." 10 is by definition not "suck," because it's average.
The only way you can do that is if you personally are a genius. I've played with some very smart people over the decades, but none of them were geniuses.
No. The math is based around 14 or 16. They don't assume everyone is going to hit 20. If you hit 18-20, you're ahead of the game. My Wizard started with a 17 Int. He's level 9 now with a 19 Int, and the only reason it's not still 18 is that I wanted a feat and it happened to give me a +1. I haven't even noticed that I'm not at 20, and I'd be doing great if I was still at 17.
People love bonuses and rush for max, but you just don't need it. It's nice if you have that 20, but so are feats.
The vast majority of DCs in the game will be in the 10-15 range. Some will be 20. You don't need to be running around with +10s and +11s just to get by. With +4 proficiency and +3 from main stat, you have +7 which will plenty good for those DCs. The rare super hard 25's and 30's are supposed to be super hard.
There is nothing saying you need a high STR, Dex or con with a fighter. RAW you can build a fighter with an 8 in all three if you want. If you want to multiclass you need a 13 in either strength or dex.
As for constitution, it isn't a prime ability and in point buy I always dump constitution to 10 on every single fighter I play. The only time I am running a fighter with higher than a 10 constitution is if I am rolling. I always have at least a 14 in ONLY one of strength or dex and more often than not a 16.
Logically with point buy a fighter that is built to be good at combat and good at social skills you should have a 10 constitution, an 16 Str or Dex an an 8 in the one you don't have a 16 in. That is the most complete fighter build you can make and it is the one I routinely make. Sometimes I have 14 in all of I/W/Ch, sometimes I have a 16 in one and 12s in the other two. Like I said that is for a good all around fighter and such a fighter still outrun most Rogues in combat while being good in social situations. If you want to min max instead of being all around then to optimize combat stats then dump the social skills, if you want to optimize social skills then dump the combat stats. It is a pretty simple concept. The same concept is true for a Rogue. If you want a combat focused Rogue you should take a 14 dexterity and a 16 strength and a 14 or 16 constitution and dump the social skills. Such a Rogue will be far more effective in combat than a "traditional" Rogue but will not be as good out of combat.
For some reason people in this board refuse to do these things though and then wonder why their fighters that has a 16 str and 16 con and 8 charisma sucks in social situations. It is because they chose that build!
The skills take care of the social aspects, the story part is either from your background or how you play your character and for the most part the actual class is irrelevant to that unless your theme is a caster.
People talk about "always on" abilities. Fighters right from level 1 can choose many always on fighting styles and they are the only class that can do that at level 1. They also have an always on heavy armor from 1st level, one of two classes that can do this (some subclasses can to). Those things are very significant features.
Bottom line: If you need to be "dominant" in combat you won't be dominant or even good out of combat. If you are ok with being just good in combat then you can be both good in combat and good out of combat.
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EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
You touch on this a bit in a later post, but it's worth calling out here: What counts as "similar mechanics"? Because I find that, much of the time, "similar mechanics" is so incredibly broad that it starts to sound like code for "mechanics that actually work and achieve things."
I don't think you are personally committing this error, given the quotes around "magic," but I really, really, really, really wish the D&D community as a whole would stop conflating ANYTHING "supernatural" with "magic." Not even 3e did that! 3e explicitly says that "Extraordinary" abilities are NOT magical, but CAN break the laws of physics. (It's really unfortunate, TBH, that they used the term "supernatural" for effects that ARE magical but aren't specifically spells. Because "magic" is NOT the end-all, be-all of supernatural phenomena!)
Fighters ARE supernatural. Period. They exceed what is physically possible, sometimes impressively so. They should be allowed to do things that are by 3e's terms "Extraordinary"--non-magical but potentially physics-defying. If people could just let that ONE thing go, this whole problem could be solved. But caster fans want to completely and totally own ANYTHING supernatural, and that permanently ghettoizes anyone who isn't a caster.
Cynically: You bet your britches they'd complain. And they'd keep complaining until the mechanic has been nerfed so hard, it's no longer effective. Because "similar mechanic" sounds more and more like "effective mechanic" every single day.
Optimistically: If it's explained and grounded, and the playerbase is encouraged to accept Extraordinary things (in 3e terms) from non-caster characters, then it might be workable.
Sounds like a starting point. The devil, as always, will be in the details. Feats were supposed to be bespoke packages of useful effects, and hey, Fighters got zillions of them! Look how that turned out.
I have become deeply disillusioned by how much the latter group outweighs the former in terms of influence how D&D gets designed. They may only be a subset, but they control the narrative in many ways--sometimes literally. Remember, after all, that Heinsoo explicitly said that he had to keep removing small but consistent efforts from the design team to make the Wizard the best class in the PHB. (Have to use an archive link because WotC deleted the original in one of the two or three website purges they've gone through.) He admitted he'd probably overcorrected slightly, but that it was necessary to make sure non-Wizards were actually on par.Not "fans", just "Wizard Fans"
Well, see, that's what I'm asking. It sounds very much to me like spellcaster fans would not accept there being Pyromancer and Illusionist as classes (or as Wizard subclasses, or whatever) who aren't able to nick the powerful spells from one another. So...if we cannot meet the requirement you've presented, does that make this design problem impossible to solve?
Good luck getting Wizard fans to let go of being able to cast both invisibility and fireball.
So, as I said above, this is kind of a problem. Because it means that "similar mechanic" doesn't actually have anything to do with the resource schedule (despite people claiming this back in the 4e days). It doesn't have anything to do with the specific consequences of the mechanic (because, for example, 4e didn't let Fighters have fire-keyword powers, but it was still a problem). And it doesn't have anything to do with the resolution procedure, because 5e offers Fighters abilities that induce saves and Wizards spells that use attack rolls, and that's gone over with hardly a ripple.
At this point, it really, truly seems like the only thing about these mechanics that is "similar" is that Wizard mechanics achieve a function, so Fighter mechanics can't be allowed to do that. But that's precisely equivalent to saying that Fighters aren't allowed to play the same game as Wizards, because Wizards will always be able to roll skill checks and do all the other things that don't automatically achieve some function.
Wizards can make things happen. Both Fighters and Wizards can try to make something happen. Wizards are, therefore, more powerful than Fighters. QED.
Unless you have a proposal for how to address this fundamental problem?
This is absolutely a problem, yes. Skills aren't just "you can try it," they're also "first you must sell me on it." Two chances to have your efforts negated.
How many casters would just accept it if a DM simply said, "No, sorry, you can't cast that spell right now. It's not an antimagic field or anything. It just doesn't make sense to me that you'd be able to cast that spell right now, so you can't." They'd throw a fit!
People keep saying this. I have yet to see a game where it actually works. So, if that's what you'd like? Gimme structures. Examples. Do the work to show that you can have "I'm allowed to just declare this happens" for spells only, while ANYONE, spellcaster or not, has access to things that are "flexible and always available."
Unless you're proposing to deny spellcasters access to that? That could be interesting. My disillusionment with the opinions of caster fans tells me that they'd never accept it, but it would at least be a different direction than most people who propose "but martials can just have always-available things!"
And for Goodness' sake, please tell me you'd at least allow reliable, purely non-magical healing, so that the spellcasters don't have the team by the short and curlies when it comes to deciding when people rest. Because that's literally letting the fox decide who gets to enter the henhouse, and is a BIG part of the problem with nearly every "casters are AWESOME, but only in bursts, while non-casters are ordinary but reliable." Being reliable doesn't matter when the person who decides whether you bleed out on the floor or not is also the person deciding how much time you're permitted to spend being reliable.
Or, to turn that around the other way: How do you stop the spellcasters from setting the pace of the game, and thus being BOTH awesome AND reliable? Because that's where this design has always ended up. It happened in 3e, and it's currently an ongoing design issue in 5e, as admitted by Crawford back in that interview regarding the "Feature Variants" UA (that became official rules in Tasha's).
I appreciate that Sly Flourish notes, here, how much WotC has misused the Advantage mechanic (which...is literally exactly what I predicted during the playtest, and no, I will never stop criticizing WotC for this because it was so easily visible all the way back then.)
As with most things of this nature, I only really have three problems with this:
(1) I find that the vast majority of DMs, even friendly ones, are uncomfortable setting DCs that players will actually think are worth pursuing. Whatever the reason, despite many many many DMs claiming that they want their players to try stunts and do awesome moves and such, when it comes to actually supporting those things with rules....they almost always tend to rule so deeply conservatively that players quickly learn not to bother.
(2) It's a check to make a check to see if something happens. That's...not great. Like, I get that the whole point here is to spice up the action, rather than using something relatively dull. But "a chance to have a chance to do something" is bad, generally speaking. "A chance to have a chance to do something, OR to suffer a bad consequence" is even worse. The intent is to support cool choices with a meaningful benefit, but even with an actually-in-practice favorable DM who WANTS to see these things succeed, the actual positive impact is thinned purely because of iterative probability.
(3) Anyone can do it. You're not fixing the problem, because casters can do stunts just as easily as non-casters. Heck, they may do them more easily, because (only considering 5e here, not your proposed new system stuff) spellcasters can give themselves advantage on checks (enhance ability) and other buffs that make this sort of thing much easier. Without doing something to at least limit caster entry into this kind of rule, you haven't addressed the disparity; you've pushed the Fighter up, but you've pushed the Wizard up by just as much.
yeah....again, as with the above, I just have become disillusioned with DMs' actual ability to do this. Oh, almost all of them will TALK about it. And they'll talk about how their Fighters don't seem to be unhappy etc. etc. But when I get real hard data, I still see the pattern. I still see the casters having that leg up.
IMO, it's not that Fighter fans are happy with their lot. It's that they've grown so used to it, they only complain when things get horrendously out of hand.
Yeah, that's...pretty much where I'm at too, and it makes me extremely, extremely sad.
God I hope so, but it's a pretty thin hope. Strixhaven is super cool thematically though (even though I'd have to be an exchange student between Lorehold, Silverquill, and Quandrix. I'm a physicist and philosopher by training, albeit nowhere near as experienced as several active members of this forum!)
He has spoken for himself, so I don't mean to put words in his mouth. But my general experience from DMs who speak of "requiring people to play their skills" is that it means the player must intentionally do specifically dangerous things (low Wis), must be unable to meaningfully reason or remember (low Int), or must be not merely unconvincing but generate active hostility with their behavior (low Cha).
It's usually used by people who think that having a -1 Wisdom modifier means being suicidally impulsive and having a -1 Int modifier means the character should have a diagnosable mental disability.
As someone who is generally fairly smart, but often plays characters who value stats other than Intelligence? Yes, it's extremely frustrating to be told "you can't suggest that idea to the group out-of-character, because your character wouldn't be able to come up with it."
"Low intelligence" of the kind described is actually extremely common, though. Remember that IQ scores are normed to 100 with a standard deviation of 15. This means that approximately one in six people is at least a full standard deviation below the mean--or, in other words, you've got a pretty good chance of at least one of the people at any given D&D table being there.
You can quite easily have someone who can come up with a good plan, but has minimal formal education and a terrible memory. Consider people like Michael Faraday, who dropped out of the equivalent of primary school, but was one of the foremost experimental physicists of his day. Highly, highly intelligent man--but in D&D terms he might not even have cracked +1 modifier.
This is why it frustrates me as much as it does when a DM tells me my character couldn't possibly have come up with an idea, because he's too dumb. If we can roleplay it out, why couldn't I? It's a load of hooey and if it happens too much, I am willing to walk away from the table over it.
In general, 4e could be fairly forgiving, but you usually had to work for it, and there were always tradeoffs. E.g., I tend to play Dragonborn Paladins, who don't get much out of Intelligence or Dexterity. While most suggest dumping Int and having a low but positive Dex mod, I usually did the reverse. I would also take advantage of Backgrounds, Themes, feats, and my racial +2 to History to get a respectably high total History skill, despite being "only slightly above average" intelligence. But because of this, my characters tended to be really really bad at Dexterity skills--heavy armor, negative Dex modifier, and no training meant if I had to roll Stealth or Acrobatics, I might have a -5 modifier (not counting the half-level bonus that applies to almost all D20 rolls), more or less equivalent to bumping up "easy" difficulty to "hard," and "moderate" difficulty to "nigh impossible."
So...yeah. 4e was forgiving in one sense, and not forgiving in another. It absolutely supported investing into being good at some specific thing, even if your ability scores didn't. But doing so usually meant sacrifices elsewhere, often significant ones.
Don Durito
Legend
You are confusing theory with reality. 10 is not average except by some theoretical standard where everyone were to roll 3d6 in order (even then it is slightly below average). A 10 ability score is most definitely welcome to sucktown population you. It might be average if we all rolled 3d6 and played through a game where everyone was studying for their high school exams, but we're not doing that. If you're the one making the Investigation checks for the party, well, we're going to hope the GM is wise enough not to gate any important clues or magic items behind those checks.
And really the point of comparison is not with the DCs, it's with the game as a whole, including what other characters can do and what it costs you to not take certain choices.
But look the Saving Throw DC for a CR 13 Rakshasa is 18. If you have an ability score of 16 and your proficiency bonus is +4 at level 13 then you succeed 45% of the time. If it's 20 you succeed 55% of the time. The DC is 18 because the Rakshasha has a Charisma of 20. That's what you're being opposed to here at this level.
If you're a Fighter and your Strength is 14 when you get to level 11, then you're missing out on 9 damage a round (18 when you action surge), plus whatever you're reduced hit chance cost you as well. Now if you spent some of those ASIs on feats, then you're not that badly off, but then Feats are supposed to be good enough to trade for an ASI (In theory - if you spent all your ASIs on feats by level 11 you will be hitting diminishing returns). If you spent them on increasing your Intelligence or Charisma - well, you will be noticing that something's not right by that point.
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That is just such BS.
I am playing a Monk with a 16 int at 1st level right now. I will admit I have never played a Paladin or Ranger with a score that high using point buy but that doesn't mean I wouldn'tgt if it was the character I wanted to play.
Don Durito
Legend
Then your Monk is significantly weaker than baseline for very little mechanical gain.
You are paying an effectiveness tax for playing that character.
It is less than that in actuality when not every attack hits, it is more like 7 points per round you are missing out on. In any case if you are a fighter that wants to optimize melee damage in combat you would not have a 14 strength.
I think a fighter who takes Fey touched, shadow touched, skill expert and magic initiate as feats through level 8 will be a better overall character than a character who takes all ASIs. Note those feats do include +3 total on abilities but at least 2 of those points need to go on I/W/Ch. If this fighter is by chance an Eldritch Knight I think he would be as powerful as a fighter who took all ASIs as well, but even if he isn't an EK he now has a ton of different things he can do and is still pretty good in combat.
Don Durito
Legend
One of the things that's a point of division is this:
It's fundamentally a difference in outlook: from one point of view the mechanical aspect of the character is what the character sheet says, and from the other the character is what the mechanics realise in play.
- Some people are happy if they can write 16 Int on their character and say "I have a smart Fighter". They want to role-play a smart Fighter so they just distribute the points to reflect a mental image.
- Some of us are perhaps more jaded and notice that if we make the trade offs to get the Fighter whose character sheet says that he is smart, he actually doesn't really play significantly differently than the dumb Fighter - where is the mechanical realisation of the mechanics? If there was no Intelligence ability score, then how would I roleplay the character differently?
It's fundamentally a difference in outlook: from one point of view the mechanical aspect of the character is what the character sheet says, and from the other the character is what the mechanics realise in play.
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