D&D 5E The Fighter/Martial Problem (In Depth Ponderings)

[ECMO3]

If it is a fact that balance does nothing for the game

I never said that is a fact. If I had evidence that showed it was, I would provide it. No such evidence exists to my knowledge.

Hold yourself to the same standard you hold others.

I do hold myself to the same standard. That is why don't go around saying balance is a bad thing. I offer it as an opinion, not as a truth and I don't tell people things like "do some research" when they disagree with me.

No, it hasn't. Crawford himself explicitly said that in an interview. He explicitly said that the Warlock was falling behind other classes because people weren't taking enough short rests.

So Crawford explicitly said Warlock was falling behind .... so he explicitly said 5E is not balanced .... which is what I said!

And 5E did greatly exceeded expectations.

I also think this was specifically pact magic he was talking about and they tried to make Warlock a half caster to "fix" this and then undid those fixes in playtest 7.

That is, by the designer's own explicit words, failing to meet the goals for which it was designed.

And yet they changed it back to the old unbalanced pact magic design in playtest 7!

They changed it to better balance it and yet they still purposely later chose to undo those mechanics because they were unpopular.

Sales figures are not design goals, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.

I would argue that, but regardles popularity and growing the player base are certainly design goals and 5E exceeded those goals by a lot.

What do you think the design goals of 5E are if not popularity?

Sometimes it will be mistaken beliefs; that's what caused the problems with Warlocks.

You mean the "problem" that they purposely decided not to fix after saying it was a problem?

Sometimes, it will be a lack of testing: that's what caused the "ghoul surprise," and made them hastily scramble to try to fix saving throws. Sometimes, it will be love of an idea that makes them overlook the faults (Mearls, for example, loves throwing fistfuls of dice, so he preserved fistful-of-dice mechanics long after they had proven unpopular and problematic.)

I don't think these have been proven unpopular and to the contrary some of the changes in the early ONE playtest regarding smites and sneak attacks indicate that players like fistfuls of dice (or at least they tell WOTC they do).

Sometimes, it will be running out of time. That's what screwed over the Sorcerer (and also Warlock);

Are we saying the Sorcerer is weak and underpowered now? Sorcerer is widely regarded as the second most powerful class after Wizard.

The designers of 3e, 5e, PF1e, and PF2e have all explicitly stated that making a balanced game is something they desire and seek out.

Yet neither 3E or 5E are close to being balanced. So again, they can say this but they either don't know how to balance the game or they are being untruthful.

For my part I think I could balance fighters with Wizards in an afternoon with no playtesting. It isn't rocket science.

They have responded--sometimes explicitly!--to player feedback saying that a subclass feature is unbalanced, and have removed that feature. (In this case, it was giving extra spells to new Sorcerer subclasses. Sadly, they took the wrong lesson; what people were saying was, "It sucks that the old Sorcerer has so few spells, if you're going to give this to new ones, give us errata so older subclasses also get spells!" What they took from that was, "oh, we shouldn't give these new Sorcerers bonus spells? Gotcha.")

Sorcerers having too few spells is not a balance issue at all and giving them more spells unbalances the game more than it was before as they were already a very powerful class before they had more spells.

This underscores my whole point - if you think the Sorcerer is better with more spells, then you think the game is better with the balance between the Sorcerer and most classes being made worse than it was before they made this change.

To be clear, that doesn't prove that imbalance is good, but it does prove that things that unbalance the game can also make it better and by extension means that fixes to better balance the game will not necessarily make it better.

The designers of both 5e and PF2e have expressly said, both in their own personal statements and in the books they've published, that different player classes are meant to be team players, not casters and caddies.

But they can be team players without being balanced. Heck they are team players without being balanced.

Monks contribute heavily in the games I play, often more heavily than Wizards even though as a class they are not as powerful.

 

[Zardnaar]

Got confused today with NPC fighter. Level 2. Had it using the 1E cleave ability.

It was clearing out about half of the encounters by itself with 2 or 3 attacks and had a +5 to hit vs a more typical +2 or 3.

Beast mode. Merged the C&C fighter plus 1E. Weapon specialization +1 to hit and damage, 1E cleave ability.

Food for thought.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I never said that is a fact. If I had evidence that showed it was, I would provide it. No such evidence exists to my knowledge.

Oh?

You claim it is, but there is no evidence at all that this is true. NONE!

Right here. You are stating that it has no value. That's the only possible meaning this can have.

So Crawford explicitly said Warlock was falling behind .... so he explicitly said 5E is not balanced .... which is what I said!

And he said that that IS A BAD THING WHICH MUST BE FIXED.

That it was a MISTAKE. An ERROR. Something that should never have been allowed to happen. That's why they need to, y'know, write NEW rules for Warlocks that will work better. That's literally one of the justifications they gave for the horrifically-named "One D&D" playtest.

And 5E did greatly exceeded expectations.

It sold well. It did not meet the mechanical goals for which it was designed. Those two things are completely different. The former is not, and cannot be, a design goal, any more than a car can have such a design, or a building, or any other designed thing. A design goal is something a product does. Sales are not something a product does. They represent something customers have done. Obviously, when you make a product you want it to sell, and you select design goals with the hope that fulfilling those goals will result in sales. That is not, AT ALL, the same thing as saying, "And this is where we create a mechanic which causes high sales." The very idea is ludicrous. You cannot design sales. Sales are a hoped-for result once design is done.

I also think this was specifically pact magic he was talking about and they tried to make Warlock a half caster to "fix" this and then undid those fixes in playtest 7.

Nope! They've given the Warlock several power-ups, including a once-a-day refresh of their abilities. The 5.5e Warlock is significantly juiced up compared to its current equivalent. The two are "backwards-compatible" in name only. No one should play the original version when they can play the new one--and that's a good thing, because the original one was flawed and needed replacement.

And yet they changed it back to the old unbalanced pact magic design in playtest 7!

Nnnnope! See above.

I would argue that, but regardles but popularity and growing the player base is certainly a design goal and 5E exceeded those goals by a lot.

What do you think the design goals of 5E are if not popularity?

Design goals are things like bounded accuracy, or reducing the caster/martial imbalance through mechanics like Concentration and reducing the power of spells (e.g., compared to 3e, because non-cantrip spells do not have inherent power growth from "caster level" anymore, you must actually spend higher spell slots.) "Modularity" was a touted design goal that was slowly abandoned over time. The "Tactical Combat Module" was supposed to fulfill numerous design goals, including appealing to 4e fans (e.g. Mearls' inane excitement about "facing rules," when those weren't even a thing in 4e so it's not clear why he loved announcing them so much.) "Feel" is often so poorly defined that it barely qualifies as a design goal, but technically it is one. Etc.

Design goals are goals for what the game can contain. You cannot have a game contain high sales. Sales are fundamentally distinct from that. They may be influenced by design goals, and most folks certainly hope that their design goals will influence sales in a positive way. But design goals logically cannot ever include sales.

You mean the "problem" that they purposely decided not to fix after saying it was a problem?

No. The problem they're still working on fixing. Because they are. You just keep ignoring the changes. One of the other changes, for example, was making Pacts into special invocations--which means you can have multiple. Magical Cunning also gives you back half your spell slots now. (It should be all your spell slots...but that's a separate matter.) These are concrete steps taken specifically to address the problem of Warlocks being completely dependent on short rests. You're right that their first effort was to destroy what made Warlocks unique--an example of the trivial and often crappy form of balance, uniformity--but their second attempt is clearly to actually fix the problem, not just wish the problem away.

I don't think these have been proven unpopular and to the contrary some of the changes in the early ONE playtest regarding smites and sneak attacks indicate that players like fistfuls of dice (or at least they tell WOTC they do).

All I can tell you is what happened with the (also stupidly-named) "D&D Next" playtest. Players adamantly did not like the "proficiency dice" system, and almost everyone preferred the system we have now, it just took them like three or four packets before they finally admitted defeat and made proficiency just a flat bonus. (This, incidentally, is part of why Proficiency starts at +2. It was originally +1d4, then +1d6, etc. There are also other reasons, but this is not the place to go into the weeds on this subject.) IIRC, the dice version still exists as an optional rule in the DMG, but nobody talks about it because it was that unpopular.

Or, if you prefer a more pithy statement: People like electing to roll fistfuls of dice. They do not like being forced to do so every time they want to participate. Sneak Attack and Smite, both by design and by presentation, feel like opt-in bonuses. Proficiency dice feel like being punished by randomness. Whether this is logical is not particularly relevant; the fact is that proficiency dice were consistently unpopular but remained in the playtest for multiple packets.

Are we saying the Sorcerer is weak and underpowered now? Sorcerer is widely regarded as the second most powerful class after Wizard.

Uh...no, it's not. Sorcerer is widely regarded as the second-weakest "full spellcaster." Warlock, of course, being the weakest. (This, of course, is speaking only of mono-class power. Multiclass dips that blend Cha-based classes--such as Sorcerer/Warlock aka "coffeelock," or Warlock/Paladin--are quite a bit stronger.) Sorcerers are burdened with a tiny list of known spells that they must heavily optimize in order to actually get good results from.

Have you frequented optimization discussions of spellcasters in 5e? Wizard is of course the strongest, but Druid is a close second, and now with the stuff from Tasha's, Cleric is a close third. Metamagic isn't enough to save the Sorcerer; it merely gives some gimmicks.

Yet neither 3E or 5E are close to being balanced. So again, they can say this but they either don't know how to balance the game or they are being untruthful.

The former is what I have claimed all along. Mostly because this sort of thing is in fact difficult to predict, and many designers are absolutely laden with preconceived notions, emotional attachment to specific solutions even if they are flawed or outright unworkable (see: Mearls' love of rolling moar dice whenever possible, even when the playtesters consistently opposed it), and incorrect thinking born out of the fact that statistics are hard and most humans are really quite bad at stats even when specifically trained to be good.

It is extremely easy to create perverse incentives. It's sometimes called the "cobra effect." There's an entire subfield of economics about studying this sort of thing, about how policy and (a certain narrow definition of) "rational agents" making "rational choices" can interact to produce effects that are exactly the opposite of what the policy-makers intended. E.g., you would think making a policy that rewards killing cobras would reduce the number of cobras, and thus the number of bites; but the actual effect of the specific details of the policy was that people started preserving or even fostering cobra nests so they would have more bodies to turn in and thus more to collect bounties from--and of course many of these cobras actually escaped into dense, urban population centers, causing cobra bites to increase significantly.

It is very easy to make mistakes that cannot be seen without testing. The designers themselves demonstrated this quite handily with the "ghoul surprise," where they decided to run a game meant to demonstrate 5e gameplay, and went up against a group of ghouls. The ghouls absolutely shredded them because saving throws were badly designed for the intended goals, and no one had caught it because they hadn't done meaningful testing of it. Such surprises are quite typical when designs go untested. This is why testing is so important--and why it was so frustrating that the designers of 5e had such a blithe attitude about doing it.

For my part I think I could balance fighters with Wizards in an afternoon with no playtesting. It isn't rocket science.

Perhaps. I think you will find that actually good, well-made game design is quite a bit harder than you think. Hence why it requires so much testing.

Sorcerers having too few spells is not a balance issue at all

Yes, it is. There is nothing to be gained from discussing it any further if you think that this is not true. This is a well-understood fact in most circles. Even the folks who were ardent haters of Spell Versatility (an optional feature in UA specifically designed to improve the Sorcerer's balance by letting them change one spell known, once per day) recognized that Sorcerers have too limited access to known spells (not slots, just known spells) and that their metamagic points, the only other real feature of the class, do not compensate for this.

But they can be team players without being balanced. Heck they are team players without being balanced.

No, they are not. They deign to allow the caddies to do some stuff, in ways that actually hurt the party's success chances. That's the whole point. The non-casters are simply irrelevant at high levels, and at low levels, the 5MWD problem--which the designers explicitly recognize is a problem that they want to fix--

Monks contribute heavily in the games I play, often more heavily than Wizards even though as a class they are not as powerful.

Irrelevant. Like...seriously. It is irrelevant that one person can get the necessary favoritism or exhibit extraordinary effort in order to contribute far above and beyond what their class features provide.

If the same player were playing a Wizard rather than a Monk, they would be able to do far more. Period. That is why it is imbalanced. The same player, working just as hard, with an equally supportive DM, will achieve significantly more--will have a far greater positive impact--than if they had played a Monk. That is directly counter to the cooperative teamwork design D&D has explicitly said that it offers since at least 2nd edition. And that, too, is a design goal--that no class can do everything alone, that you actually need others, not simply because they're pieces on the gameboard, but because they genuinely can do some stuff you can't, and you genuinely can do some stuff they can't.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Sometimes we have preferences we are shocked to learn others don’t share. “You don’t like pizza?!” Sometimes we are shocked to learn others like what we don’t. “Black licorice?! Dude you are eating….poison!”

But this thread has gone so way beyond in its statements of taste as facts. It’s kind of bonkers.

1. First, no one hates balance. What people may not like is what they believe they would give up for things to be balanced in terms of theme and imagery. If folks don’t think balance and theme ever are at odds in a game with archetypes, I disagree. And at that point how far you move toward or away from one or the other is…taste. Not moral imperative.

2. Or the age old “you are just stuck on what people can do as athletes” is not a reasonable criticism. Many are fine with monks or others surpassing modern reality based limits.

Secondly, the hard limits are not what they are made out to be. “My class cannot jump to the moon?! Fighters can’t have nice things! Just because modern athletes can only lift that you are….” No, people are not limiting characters to what people can do. They already exceed us. But some bounds or limit to preserve theme is a preference. I don’t care if a fighter can break modern records! I do care if they can hulk jump to the moon like an anime character. (Was watching with my kid recently…good bonding). It’s my preference that they don’t because it breaks my immersion in the fantasy settings we play in.

3. Given above, I think it’s on a continuum and it’s a preference. How hard do you push for balance with a wizard in still preserving some theme of a warrior who is perhaps heroic but not anime move capable? It’s a preference.

And if we polled folks I would guess that those who want a bigger dose of balance are more into the sorts of fiction that do not hew very close to classic fantasy fiction. I would guess those that want to preserve theme over balance are more invested into the classic things in the genre’s fiction and otherwise.

4. The perceived gulf in balance is also not a “fact” but a judgment. Some see a lot and some see a little and some not enough to feel compelled to change. My take is that it’s negligible before level 10. Another opinion or judgement call.

5. Some people are FINE with asymmetrical offerings. How many wargames have a likely winning side? How many of us played thieves because of challenge and theme in 1e? I play blade pact warlocks and not the hexblade kind and have a blast and shape the game as much as anyone. 5e is a cooperative game that seems to me to be on relatively easy mode at baseline.

People can all like what the hell they like. But let’s not get nutty and act like these things are hard facts universally held.

 

[FrogReaver]

Uh...no, it's not. Sorcerer is widely regarded as the second-weakest "full spellcaster." Warlock, of course, being the weakest. (This, of course, is speaking only of mono-class power. Multiclass dips that blend Cha-based classes--such as Sorcerer/Warlock aka "coffeelock," or Warlock/Paladin--are quite a bit stronger.) Sorcerers are burdened with a tiny list of known spells that they must heavily optimize in order to actually get good results from.

Have you frequented optimization discussions of spellcasters in 5e? Wizard is of course the strongest, but Druid is a close second, and now with the stuff from Tasha's, Cleric is a close third. Metamagic isn't enough to save the Sorcerer; it merely gives some gimmicks.

Meh. Druids are mostly one trick ponies. Their only claim to fame for a higher level campaign is conjure animals and conjure fey and both are spells that in practice has a raw interpretation that nerfs it hard (dm chooses what you summon).

I mean druids are still full casters with usually decent but not great subclass features. But nearly their total power comes from 1-2 spells.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sometimes we have preferences we are shocked to learn others don’t share. “You don’t like pizza?!” Sometimes we are shocked to learn others like what we don’t. “Black licorice?! Dude you are eating….poison!”

You know something that lets players with somewhat different preferences use and enjoy the same game? Balance.

There is no need to give up theme or imagery for balance. The opposite is true: a better balanced game can deliver more choices that remain viable, so they can actually see use in play, and meaningful, so they can support theme & imagery.

How do non-viable choices provide imagery or support theme? How do meaningless choices? Why would a game need to punish players who fall for trap choices, to support a theme? Is the theme just "lol, sucks to be you?"

And if we polled folks I would guess that those who want a bigger dose of balance are more into the sorts of fiction that do not hew very close to classic fantasy fiction. I would guess those that want to preserve theme over balance are more invested into the classic things in the genre’s fiction and otherwise.

I think your guesses would be wrong. D&D is pretty terrible at emulating classic fantasy fiction, precisely because it gives it's magic users far too much and underrates heroism.
Defenders of the D&D status quo tend to resort to claiming that D&D has forged a genre of it's own, which is not an unfair claim, really, it's persistently failed to emulate the fantasy genres that preceded it, and has, mainly through being adapted to far more popular video games, influenced current fantasy sub-genres - ironically, most dramatically in anime based on video games.

Not that a faithful representation of classic fantasy - with an heroic-warrior Main Character, and other archetypes more likely in supporting roles - would work that well in a TTRPG, as it would also be imbalanced!
Something Gygax realized when he chose the 'relatively short spoken spell' he attributed to Vance, as the model for D&D magic, so magic-users could keep up with fighting men.
Turned out he overcompensated.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

You know something that lets players with somewhat different preferences use and enjoy the same game? Balance.

There is no need to give up theme or imagery for balance. The opposite is true: a better balanced game can deliver more choices that remain viable, so they can actually see use in play, and meaningful, so they can support theme & imagery.

How do non-viable choices provide imagery or support theme? How do meaningless choices? Why would a game need to punish players who fall for trap choices, to support a theme? Is the theme just "lol, sucks to be you?"

I think your guesses would be wrong. D&D is pretty terrible at emulating classic fantasy fiction, precisely because it gives it's magic users far too much and underrates heroism.
Defenders of the D&D status quo tend to resort to claiming that D&D has forged a genre of it's own, which is not an unfair claim, really, it's persistently failed to emulate the fantasy genres that preceded it, and has, mainly through being adapted to far more popular video games, influenced current fantasy sub-genres - ironically, most dramatically in anime based on video games.

Not that a faithful representation of classic fantasy - with an heroic-warrior Main Character, and other archetypes more likely in supporting roles - would work that well in a TTRPG, as it would also be imbalanced!
Something Gygax realized when he chose the 'relatively short spoken spell' he attributed to Vance, as the model for D&D magic, so magic-users could keep up with fighting men.
Turned out he overcompensated.

I appreciate your thoughtful questions but there is some loaded language in there. First viability and judgments about it are viable.

On the other point, you are technically right. We are not recreating Howard or moorcock very faithfully. At this point their shadows of a fantasy yesteryear are again filtered in lot D&D.

Truly D&D has become its own thing. Over focus on balance tears it’s unique archetypes down and I don’t suspect that is what a
Majority want to see.

 

[Pedantic]

You know something that lets players with somewhat different preferences use and enjoy the same game? Balance.

There is no need to give up theme or imagery for balance. The opposite is true: a better balanced game can deliver more choices that remain viable, so they can actually see use in play, and meaningful, so they can support theme & imagery.

How do non-viable choices provide imagery or support theme? How do meaningless choices? Why would a game need to punish players who fall for trap choices, to support a theme? Is the theme just "lol, sucks to be you?"

This is the "4e is balance" error from earlier in reverse. Of course insisting on balanced choices is a constraint on design; if you place "all players must contribute equally" over "all archetypes must have unique mechanical expressions" or the strict requirements of the mundane aesthetic I've been trying to elucidate in all the other fighter threads, you will end up with a different game. I generally posit doing all of those at once will leave you unable to design an appropriate fighter for traditional "high level play" and/or will require you to set careful rules around which other archetypes you include in the first place.

There's a whole set of high level problem solving tools, flight, teleportation, scrying, producing fortifications from nothing, and so on, that will inevitably outclass anything that can be done without violating the aesthetic constraints of mundanity. If nothing had to give, we wouldn't have to argue about the LFQW problem in the first place.

I think your guesses would be wrong. D&D is pretty terrible at emulating classic fantasy fiction, precisely because it gives it's magic users far too much and underrates heroism.
Defenders of the D&D status quo tend to resort to claiming that D&D has forged a genre of it's own, which is not an unfair claim, really, it's persistently failed to emulate the fantasy genres that preceded it, and has, mainly through being adapted to far more popular video games, influenced current fantasy sub-genres - ironically, most dramatically in anime based on video games.

Genre emulation tends to get conflated with narrative emulation. It's quite different to lift the motifs from traditional fantasy than to lift the plot points. Frankly, ensemble casts in fiction with equal narrative impact are a result of D&D, not its predecessor.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I appreciate your thoughtful questions but there is some loaded language in there. First viability and judgments about it are viable.

So, for context (apologies for those getting tired of seeing it), a definition of balance that I've encountered that has seemed helpful to me, goes
A game is better balanced the more choices it presents to the player that are both meaningful and viable.

Now, yes, meaningful can be quite subjective, and tolerating some added choices that seem meaningless but turn out to all get chosen with some enthusiasm, can be just fine.
Viable, OTOH, can be downright quantifiable, and speaks to the contribution the choice makes to completing the game successfully.

So, rhetorically, this time: How do non-viable choices provide imagery or support theme?

Well, they don't, quite the opposite, the non-viable choices will tend to exclude or marginalize some of that imagery and undermine the theme.

How do meaningless choices?

Possibly by having meaning specific to the theme (so not actually meaningless, once viewed from the proper context), or perhaps, by representing imagery that part of the theme, so even tho ultimately meaningless, it's familiarity and association with the theme helps to support it.

Why would a game need to punish players who fall for trap choices, to support a theme?

It wouldn't, doing so would undermine the theme in the long run as players learn to avoid those theme-supporting choices. If said choices are contrary to the theme in the first place, they should simply excluded or weighted differently, rather than being falsely resented as good, while actually failing to deliver.

Is the theme just "lol, sucks to be you?"

There's maybe a strain of that, like hazing the newbie. Fraternities perform hazing rituals for a reason, afterall.
Building in extra rewards for system mastery amplifies the distinction between new/casual and experienced/serious players. Thing is, complex games, like TTRPGs have a great deal of room for acquiring & displaying system mastery, even if very carefully balanced, as long as the game isn't over-simplified by paring away 'traps' until few choices remain (which is not actually improving balance, by the definition, above, but it can be thought of as 'fixing' imbalance - I'd say it's just being more honest about it).

On the other point, you are technically right. We are not recreating Howard or moorcock very faithfully. At this point their shadows of a fantasy yesteryear are again filtered in lot D&D.

So, when you said:

And if we polled folks I would guess that those who want a bigger dose of balance are more into the sorts of fiction that do not hew very close to classic fantasy fiction. I would guess those that want to preserve theme over balance are more invested into the classic things in the genre’s fiction and otherwise.

You meant the opposite, that opposing improved balance is about deviating from or subverting the classic fantasy genre, rather than preserving the themes & bits of that genre?

I mean, do you still think opposing balance is about sticking up for the theme's and imagery of classic fantasy?

Truly D&D has become its own thing. Over focus on balance tears it’s unique archetypes down and I don’t suspect that is what a
Majority want to see.

Standard-issue appeal to popularity aside, balance doesn't tear down unique archetypes, it just makes them all distinct & viable within the same game, assuring that they can each be chosen by players without undue negative consequences to the play experience.

That is, unless the defining quality of those archetypes is that some must be strictly inferior to others, in which case, we are back to simply hating balance.

 

[James Gasik]

While I agree that a better balanced game is a better game, and I do like players having varied and good choices to choose from, I have encountered plenty of players who suffer from decision paralysis if they have too many options. I know this line of thinking is why we have Champion Fighters, lol, so I know that there is a downside to limiting complexity, but there likely needs to be an option built into a game to regulate options from say, trickle to firehose as well.