D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Micah Sweet]

And were explicitly the sort of edition warring jackasses who thought that "shouting hands back on" was a fair characterisation of the warlord.

Very silly. You can't lose your hand in 4e or 5e.

 

[Oofta]

Do you agree with Mearls because you also think the archetype was covered fairly, or because you also don't like warlords?

Because it's mostly covered. You can't just take the 4E warlord and plunk it down in 5E so I'm not super exactly what it would be.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Very silly. You can't lose your hand in 4e or 5e.

In 5e, what if your opponent has a sword of sharpness?

 

[Micah Sweet]

In 5e, what if your opponent has a sword of sharpness?

Good point. Exceptions should always be made for awesome magic gear. Personally though, I'd rather just use a system that does allow for injuries of that sort.

 

[James Gasik]

People have magic items in 5e games? I sometimes wonder!

 

[Minigiant]

Do you have any evidence they were "very popular"? I don't think it matters much, they weren't carried over because the developers felt their archetype was already covered. You disagreeing with them (personally I agree with Mearls on this) doesn't change anything.

But I ran or helped run a couple game days in a major metro area and I only remember seeing a warlord once or twice out of literally dozens of players. As far as I could tell they weren't particularly popular.

Ummm..

That is incorrect.

Warlords aren't in 5e because WOTC took a stance that new classes would only be created if the setting demands it.
They attempted to fold it into the fighter, hoping 4e fans would be happy. But like I said way in the beginning, there wasn''t enough design space in the battlemaster to please anyone.

That's why only artificers are official. Psions was coming with Dark Sun but WOTC dropped Dark Sun so they stopped with the difficult development of it.

That's what I said.

 

[Micah Sweet]

People have magic items in 5e games? I sometimes wonder!

They do in mine. Magic items are cool. Why wouldn't they?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Good point. Exceptions should always be made for awesome magic gear. Personally though, I'd rather just use a system that does allow for injuries of that sort.

Well, I personally prefer playing 5e with more "gritty realism" when it comes to healing.

That said, if I want to really play a game that has injuries like that on the reg, I'd play a different game (I used to play WFRP at times in the 80s, which was much more vicious in combat). Like Winston Churchill said, when it comes to D&D, hit points are the worst for abstracting out combat, except for all the alternatives.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, I personally prefer playing 5e with more "gritty realism" when it comes to healing.

That said, if I want to really play a game that has injuries like that on the reg, I'd play a different game (I used to play WFRP at times in the 80s, which was much more vicious in combat). Like Winston Churchill said, when it comes to D&D, hit points are the worst for abstracting out combat, except for all the alternatives.

Healing is a problem. I prefer slow natural healing, and magical healing being expressed as a specific portion of the target's maximum hp rather than a set numerical range, with that portion getting bigger with more powerful healing.

In my preferred system, when you go to zero in combat your ultimate fate is determined when someone checks on you and tries to help. You roll on a table, with modifiers based on stuff like how long you've been down, how far negative you were, what means is being used to help (skill, herbs, magic) and the result can be anything from awake with 1 hit point, to very, very dead, and everything in between. Until someone checks on you and the roll is made, you are Schrodinger's PC.

Its not perfect, but its the best way to use the hp system for me.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I thought about making this a separate thread, and maybe I will at some point, but instead will make the following two points quickly-

1. Revealed preferences. As I have noted repeatedly, Fighters are the most popular class. That means that despite what people keep saying, they are always the single most chosen class. So when people sit down and decide what they want to play, out of all the classes, they choose fighters. Now, you might say to yourself, "Well, if we had better fighters, then maybe they'd be ever more popular!" Okay. But that would be a problem. As it is, Fighters are too over-represented. Imagine if they went up to, say, 20% of all the classes picked. That would be more of a design issue that what they have now.

2. Fallacy, revisited. The issue with the crab bucket "fallacy" is, as noted previously, with the premises. In other words, at any given point, it demands balance (without defining what that is), assumes that everyone agrees with the unstated assumptions (that martials are all "underpowered" and that spellcasters are all "overpowered"), and finalizes that by assuming the comparative set (we must compare martials to spellcaster, because that's the accurate comparison, not martials to martials).

In all three aspects, there isn't agreement.

A. People don't agree on what balance is, and how it's defined, at any given point.
B. People don't agree that martials underpowered, and spellcasters are overpowered.
C. People don't agree that unlike things must be compared. In other words, saying that martials must be compared to spellcasters is not the same as saying that a given first level wizard spell must be compared to a given first level wizard spell; instead, it's saying that a given third level wizard spell, cast by a specialist wizard, must be compared to a similar third level cleric spell, in terms of damage. So a person says, "Well, the cleric doesn't get fireball, so ..."

Just imagine running the comparison backwards. "My wizard doesn't get your hit points, or armor choices, or weapon choices. I can't do any of the athletic feats you do. If I wanted to, I'd have to blow all sorts of backgrounds and feats and do all these other things to make my character less cool. Why don't I have exactly what you have?"

TLDR; more often that not, it seems like the majority of these threads are just a backdoor way of arguing about the warlord. Which, okay? I hope people get a class they like, or use homebrew, or use a 3PP. But just because you want something, doesn't mean that other people have (to quote the OP in a later post) "invalid opinions." We all have valid opinions, just some of those valid opinions happen to be enabled in 5e right now, and some aren't. Most of my valid opinions aren't in 5e, which sucks, but I deal with it.