D&D 5E The mathematics of D&D–Damage and HP

[fearsomepirate]

It also amazes me we haven't talked about the most broken caster combos. Like the ones where you trap an enemy in a wall of force or forcecage and have 1 other caster use a spell that deals ongoing damage. I'm really glad it takes more than 1 caster to pull crap like that off.

Most broken caster combo: a caster who prepares/knows only elemental damage spells and pretty much the entire campaign is against demons. Wait, did you mean broken in a good way?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We had a party where 4 of 5 were primarily melee attack based. We had a battlemaster/monk/grease spell for proning. Chewed through enemies so fast.

Yeah that sort of nice obvious synergy is pretty commonly used (if rarely actively built for). Players relatively easily notice and understand Prone, or Stun, or certain other conditions. What they don't notice is subtle stuff or inverse reasoning like fearsome was mentioning. I mean, he's absolutely correct unless you have people who do big single-attack damage, Haste isn't going to be worth it in most cases, if you math it out. But most players do not. What they see is "YAY EXTRA ATTACK!" (and double move, and +2AC and so on). That to them is a pure upgrade. They aren't going to be back-comparing it with Fireball and going "Oh hmmmm actually we'd have done 100% more damage and finished the attack an entire round earlier if we used a Fireball instead..." I mean, we're talking about players who, with the best will in the world, will do stuff like cast Haste two rounds into combat...

 

[fearsomepirate]

You expressed a more extreme position previously. Most campaigns don't reach 14th level so that seems like a red herring.

The context of this discussion was fighting a Marilith, a CR 16 enemy, and what is good to use, so the implicit assumption here is that a party is high enough level to fight it, which is ~14th level, and is actually trying to choose good spells, i.e. isn't just farting out Lightning Bolt at enemies that resist lightning damage and have advantage to save.

The first party I DMed for had transitioned from 4e, where synergy makes or breaks a party, so they were very conscious of things like "Haste the guy who hits the hardest," i.e., the Paladin, not the Rogue. OTOH, I now have players who keep hitting fiends with fire damage and keep getting disappointed and literally never learn.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The first party I DMed for had transitioned from 4e, where synergy makes or breaks a party, so they were very conscious of things like "Haste the guy who hits the hardest," i.e., the Paladin, not the Rogue. OTOH, I now have players who keep hitting fiends with fire damage and keep getting disappointed and literally never learn.

Yeah I feel you on the latter lol. We have a bit of a split. What's weird is 4E totally elevated them all tactically. Something about how it was presented and so on suddenly made everyone very concerned with synergy and working together even the people who weren't normally like that. But as soon as we switched to 5E that sort of fell away again.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I think this goes a long way toward making full casters not feel like much compared to martials. You can be pretty brain-dead and play a martial well, and even then, I regularly see high-level rogues doing things like forgetting to hide, or Ready for when an ally gets in melee range, and doing a paltry 1d6+6 damage to a CR 13 enemy with a bucket of hit points. Despite the major simplifications since 3.x/AD&D, casters still have a much steeper learning curve to play well.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Despite the major simplifications since 3.x/AD&D, casters still have a much steeper learning curve to play well.

Define "well" though. I feel like what you're hinting at is more like "extremely well" or "optimally" rather than a mere "well".

Your example seems to show the precise opposite to what you're stating. One simple error from a Rogue is nerfing their damage into the floor for a round, for example. Just being slightly forgetful can completely ruin you.

Whereas with a caster, that's unlikely to happen. A caster probably doesn't forget to cast a spell. Further, positioning matters vastly less to casters. AoOs are much less likely to impact them, and so on. They have to worry about a lot less in most cases in a moment-to-moment sense.

So I think it's actually a lot more complicated than you're describing. IMHO, It's more like it's easier to be "okay" or "extremely good" as a martial, i.e. like 5/10 or 10/10 than it is with a caster, but with a caster it's a lot easier to be like 7/10 or 8/10.

On top of that it depends on the campaign heavily. You seem to be whiteroomassuming that it's 6-8 encounters/day 2 short rests perfection. If it's more like 1-3 encounters/day (which IRL, a lot of campaigns are), esp. with 1 or 0 short rests, then playing a caster becomes drastically easier, because you can pretty much spam actual levelled spells every single round. Which doesn't require much talent or effort. I suspect we would agree that being a 9/10 or 10/10 caster requires a ton of thinking/mental investment, moreso than a martial, but I think you're severely underestimating what is involved in playing a martial, especially as they often have to be more creative.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah that sort of nice obvious synergy is pretty commonly used (if rarely actively built for). Players relatively easily notice and understand Prone, or Stun, or certain other conditions. What they don't notice is subtle stuff or inverse reasoning like fearsome was mentioning. I mean, he's absolutely correct unless you have people who do big single-attack damage, Haste isn't going to be worth it in most cases, if you math it out. But most players do not. What they see is "YAY EXTRA ATTACK!" (and double move, and +2AC and so on). That to them is a pure upgrade. They aren't going to be back-comparing it with Fireball and going "Oh hmmmm actually we'd have done 100% more damage and finished the attack an entire round earlier if we used a Fireball instead..." I mean, we're talking about players who, with the best will in the world, will do stuff like cast Haste two rounds into combat...

I think your 100% on the mark about why I panned haste. As a single target concentration spell that prevents the use of any other concentration spell it needs to seriously deliver when you run the math & as a GM I can't simply declare that concentration is gone for all spells or even a wide array of spells that don't deserve it with heavy duty theory crafting & consideration because there are probably spells that deserve concentration.

Wotc so consistently creates spells that pulls so many punches on top of concentration the resistance/immune divide magic/legendary resist & so on I didn't bother mathing things out & just took queues from the HC adventure design that has lots of awesome martial gear & rarely if at all even bothers with some casterific trinkets in my campaigns. After all, LFQW must be a serious risk if wotc is pulling out so many stops to thwart it preemptively.....

Then I ran a HC adventure for AL that if described for white room theory crafting would be laughed off as an unbelievably contrived situation that just wasn't a credible concern. Prior to DiA nobody would believe that a sane GM would devise a campaign where nearly every creature had a slew of energy resist/immune on top of magic & legendary resistance on generally lowish AC monsters & shower incredible martial focused gear with almost nothing to be found for casters. Then I played it & it was even worse than it looked from the GM side.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Your example seems to show the precise opposite to what you're stating. One simple error from a Rogue is nerfing their damage into the floor for a round, for example. Just being slightly forgetful can completely ruin you.

I feel like "attack whomever your clanky pal is attacking" is so basic to playing a rogue effectively that if you're still failing to do this at high level, only God can help you.

On top of that it depends on the campaign heavily. You seem to be whiteroomassuming that it's 6-8 encounters/day 2 short rests perfection. If it's more like 1-3 encounters/day (which IRL, a lot of campaigns are), esp. with 1 or 0 short rests, then playing a caster becomes drastically easier, because you can pretty much spam actual levelled spells every single round. Which doesn't require much talent or effort. I suspect we would agree that being a 9/10 or 10/10 caster requires a ton of thinking/mental investment, moreso than a martial, but I think you're severely underestimating what is involved in playing a martial, especially as they often have to be more creative.

I'm going mainly off observation. Outside of the aforementioned rogue, most martial players have One Cool Thing, and they do that cool thing a lot, and they make things die. Everyone at my table gets jealous of the Barbarian or the Ranger. By contrast, it seems casters naturally gravitate toward damage spells, and single-target damage just isn't all that great. It's okay. But if that's what you do, you're exactly what has been criticized earlier: you're a low-hp, low-AC character that does medium-to-low damage. If what you want to do is mainly blast enemies with the occasional AoE, Warlock is a far better choice than Wizard, Sorcerer, or Bard.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I feel like "attack whomever your clanky pal is attacking" is so basic to playing a rogue effectively that if you're still failing to do this at high level, only God can help you.

I don't think Rogues are a good yardstick and I think if you're playing a rogue solely as an "assist" to another melee you're playing a 5/10 Rogue so it doesn't really count as playing it "well" (which would be at least 7/10). That's what I'm saying.

I'm going mainly off observation. Outside of the aforementioned rogue, most martial players have One Cool Thing, and they do that cool thing a lot, and they make things die. Everyone at my table gets jealous of the Barbarian or the Ranger. By contrast, it seems casters naturally gravitate toward damage spells, and single-target damage just isn't all that great. It's okay. But if that's what you do, you're exactly what has been criticized earlier: you're a low-hp, low-AC character that does medium-to-low damage. If what you want to do is mainly blast enemies with the occasional AoE, Warlock is a far better choice than Wizard, Sorcerer, or Bard.

I don't find my 5E or 3E experience reflects this at all. I don't see casters gravitating to single-target damage spells at all. On the contrary, I see casters avoiding single-target damage spells except spammable cantrips. I mean, maybe all the casters I play with are playing "well", but given one of them willingly uses Snilloc's Snowball Swarm I'm going to go to say "probably not". For single-target stuff though it's all CC and similar debilitations (some of which also do damage but not as their primary goal), or spamming cantrips. And when they can they open up with tons of AoE spells which they're pretty strong at.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I don't think Rogues are a good yardstick and I think if you're playing a rogue solely as an "assist" to another melee you're playing a 5/10 Rogue so it doesn't really count as playing it "well" (which would be at least 7/10). That's what I'm saying.

All I'm saying is that getting your Sneak Attack is easy, and a player who regularly fails to do this is simply not grasping fundamentals.

I don't find my 5E or 3E experience reflects this at all. I don't see casters gravitating to single-target damage spells at all. On the contrary, I see casters avoiding single-target damage spells except spammable cantrips. I mean, maybe all the casters I play with are playing "well", but given one of them willingly uses Snilloc's Snowball Swarm I'm going to go to say "probably not". For single-target stuff though it's all CC and similar debilitations (some of which also do damage but not as their primary goal), or spamming cantrips. And when they can they open up with tons of AoE spells which they're pretty strong at.

Just goes to show how non-representative any one experience is. Most of the casters I've had looooooove damage and practically have to be tortured to drop a buff or debuff.