D&D 5E The tyranny of small numbers

[Charlaquin]

Well, sure, and at the same time the high DEX guy has "amazing riposte" or something that does a slightly different but pretty much equally useful effect.

Is having all PCs be equally useful not the ideal?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Is having all PCs be equally useful not the ideal?

In general yes, but of course there's nothing wrong with saying "and in this specific situation your DEX fighter really got to shine with that move." So, GOOD spotlighting IMHO involves a fairly short time in the spotlight and shining it around on everyone reasonably often and in roughly equal measure. BAD spotlighting is that thing where one character is indispensible for the entirety of three whole sessions because "undead" or something, while another one or two are pretty much boned.

The nice thing about having a useful power or 'skill' as the differentiator is it should be fairly easy to let it shine sometimes, and then the rest of the time the character can be ordinarily effective at the same baseline as the others, as the post I was responding to seems to suggest. It is probably best if its more of a situational kind of thing vs "you are always good against monsters with this specific tag" sort of thing. I mean, 'Turn Undead', while logical, was not a great game design choice back in classic D&D, but the 4e version of it is better, as you can only use it 2x/day IIRC.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In general yes, but of course there's nothing wrong with saying "and in this specific situation your DEX fighter really got to shine with that move." So, GOOD spotlighting IMHO involves a fairly short time in the spotlight and shining it around on everyone reasonably often and in roughly equal measure. BAD spotlighting is that thing where one character is indispensible for the entirety of three whole sessions because "undead" or something, while another one or two are pretty much boned.

Firstly: I see what you did there. (Bolded for emphasis.)

Secondly: it is incredibly refreshing to have someone, ANYONE, try to debunk the idea that spotlight balance is the end-all, be-all, cure-all technique. Or even admit that it could ever be faulty. I've had so many discussions where folks will just refuse to engage AT ALL "because spotlight balance."

 

[UngeheuerLich]

"Optimizing the fun out of the game" is not what's going on here.

The principle driving this is a thing called Loss Aversion Bias: People hate a loss about twice as much as they like a win. Meaning you have to win (in this case land a hit) about 67% of the time to feel like you are actually winning. And lo and behold, the 5e devs thought of this, if you dig into the DMG tables, a character with a starting 16 who pumps the main stat with ASIs will hit a generic monster 65% of the time, close enough to "feel right", even more so when you consider situational bonuses.

While you might not think a mere 5% loss in accuracy that stems from starting with a 14 instead of a 16 would matter, it is enough to change that 65% into a 60%, going from skirting the "this feels good" squarely into the "this feels bad" side of the equation.

And yes, obviously not all people are as susceptible to Loss Aversion as others, which is why that 60% feels fine for them.

Never heard that. But it makes sense.
I also do like optimization. I also do deviate from ot often enough. And if I do I carefully weight advantages and disadvantages of my decision.

But I did see people optimize the fun out of a game. I think it happened a lot more in 3.5 than 5e.
Characters didn't hit the succeed 67% mark, but 95% mark. Which in turn srole the fun for the DM. And when youbtargeted their neglected parts, they cried foul.
I can also say that I have been there too. And nowadays I try to achieve the 67% mark and try to spread optimization around a bit.

 

[Maxperson]

Is having all PCs be equally useful not the ideal?

Sure, but absolutely not equally useful in all things. That's just boring.

 

[Charlaquin]

Sure, but absolutely not equally useful in all things. That's just boring.

No, of course you want strengths and weaknesses between various characters; ideally everyone would contribute equally but in different ways. You know, like if they all had some sort of… ability… and each character has a different one of these “abilities” that they focused on… primarily. Perhaps influenced by their class. In this hypothetical scenario, I would imagine you’d want everyone in the party to be similarly competent in the whatever ability their class primarily focused on, but generally be less competent in the abilities the other characters’ classes focused on.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No, of course you want strengths and weaknesses between various characters; ideally everyone would contribute equally but in different ways. You know, like if they all had some sort of… ability… and each character has a different one of these “abilities” that they focused on… primarily. Perhaps influenced by their class. In this hypothetical scenario, I would imagine you’d want everyone in the party to be similarly competent in the whatever ability their class primarily focused on, but generally be less competent in the abilities the other characters’ classes focused on.

Going a step further, it'd be pretty cool if we had some way of quantifying what a particular character is contributing. Not in a prescriptive, restrictive kind of way--purely descriptive, like how one can say that any version of Barbarian you play, you're meant to be pretty durable, due to high HP and Rage giving resistance to physical forms of damage (and then certain Totem Barbs are even moreso, having resistance to nearly all forms of damage.) Some kind of label or term that could quickly and concisely indicate "I can consistently contribute X." Just seems like it would be really useful.

That way, you'd know for sure that each person has something to contribute, even if it isn't always the most useful thing, and (going off what you'd said) you'd have as much confidence as you could that, when that thing comes up, a given character will be about as good at doing it as some other character is at doing what they would do.

 

[Gimby]

I wouldn't. Nobody can really cover the 3. It's true that if someone else is with me, they might see something that I do not with my 3 wisdom and crappy perception, but it's inevitable that there will be many instances where I'm the only one who might notice something, but my 3 kills me. Or falling into a pit or other trap and the 3 dex kills me. Or where I'm the one conscious and have to drag my companion, but nope, because 3 strength. Or...

That 3 is going to hurt you much more than the 18 will help.

Amusingly, I rolled something very similar to this for a currently running game and am playing a 4 STR fairy wizard. It's not been too much of a handicap so far and has been a source of a lot of amusement, but I really wouldn't want to try it on a non-full caster.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

A +1 modifier may not be all that noticeable in play, but +2 definitely is, and +1 is halfway to +2.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I find that maxing out the stat really depends on what the character is designed to do -

For one character I played recently, a Battlemaster Artificer, I wanted to max out his Intelligence because it improved both his spells and his weapon attacks (due to a class feature, he used Int as his weapon attack stat most of the time), and because the concept for him was that he was the smartest guy in the room.

For a dwarf rogue I'm playing right now, the GM wanted rolled stats, so I didn't really get to choose to max out (or even have his highest stat in) his dexterity. Careful choices, however, gave me a stat array of 16, 15, 15, 15, 10, 7. Having only a +2 in his attack stat doesn't stop him from being an excellent skill monkey.

Is 16 your Str score?
Then how is your attack stat +2?