D&D 5E What does balance mean to you?

[Tony Vargas]

in AD&D, the Wizard really was a 'glass cannon' that had huge amounts of power that was significantly held back by long memorization times, finding spell components, ease of disruption of casting, scarcity of new spells, vulnerability to a Cleric flinging a 'Silence' sling bullet, etcetera. It was a wacky form of being completely imbalanced, but the game was an escort mission to protect this incredibly squishy person that, if every single person coordinated well, could turn the tide of combat. Usually.

3E dashed all of that. They eliminated all the flaws Wizards had because they were 'annoying'.

4E fixed it, with changes that worked wonderfully but changed the game too much for a big enough (and loud enough) portion of the user base.

5E tried to fix it in different ways that kept the old flavor, and largely succeeds, but still needs a meta game '6-8 encounters per day' to work or else casters run away with it again. It still breaks at high levels, just like AD&D always did, but it breaks late enough that most players never get the worst of it.

That's a fair characterization, but from a slightly different angle I see a smoother evolution: Each edition has removed restrictions & limitations from casters, relative to the prior edition.

AD&D, of course, was painfully, if haphazardly/inconsistently, limiting to casters. Not every DM used every restriction on casting, and some added their own, but overall, it was pretty severe.
3e reduced those restrictions. Instead of being unable to cast in armor, you had % chance of failure. Instead of losing concentration of a spell if you were hit while casting it, you made a concentration check. Instead of getting hit while casting being a matter of initiative that round, it required a ready or an AoO, and you could make a concentration check or take a 5' step to avoid the latter. Instead of two hands to cast, you needed only one. Instead of an inventory of wierd little material components, you just had a 'spell component pouch.' You got to pick the spells you learned, learn more of them, with no 'know spell %,' and 'prepare' (rather than memorize) them faster and cast more of them per day. And that's just a selection.

4e did not reverse any of that, it continued the trend. Instead of all spells provoking, only range/area spells provoked, and if the AoO hit, the spell still worked fine, no concentration check required. Some spells became 1/encounter or at-will, instead of 1/day. Others, 'Rituals' had no such limitations. Material components for combat spells were just gone, replaced by implements. Material components for rituals were mere gp accounting. 4e was only different in that it reigned in the power of spells to an unprecedented degree, /and/ introduce radically more powerful/versatile maneuvers for non-casters that were close to balanced with them. But as far as limitations on casting, 4e removed yet more of them relative to 3e.

5e didn't have much left to remove, but it still did so. It removed the action cost from 'sustain' spells, making them 'concentration' spells. It remove AoOs for casting, entirely. It retained at-will cantrips and rituals, yet it also gave casters many more daily slots, and, in the big one, made all casters spontaneous, like 3.x sorcerers! And, even while it removed restrictions, it restored much of the power of spells that 4e had reduced so dramatically.

I think the "problem" with the combat feats not necessarily all being "balanced" is that such imbalance may be obvious to optimization-minded players, which means there are clearly superior choices for such players.

That's where it's less of a problem, if anything. If you have a group with comparable system-mastery chops, they'll gravitate towards the viable - and optimal - feats, and all be reasonably 'balanced' with eachother. They may or may not have much variety left in the builds they settle on, and the DM may have to ratchet up challenges, but everyone knows where they stand.

But for more casual players, they see something like Grappler and they're like "I like that, I'm gonna take it" and they don't care that it would be "smarter" to take Great Weapon Master or whatever. They have a concept for their character and the feat supports that concept and that's all they're worried about. So for those people, the feat works.

Until someone else takes one of the optimal feats for similar reasons, and inadvertently overshadows them, sure. Or, in worse cases, where they take the obviously-fits-the-concept feat (or other option), and it does nothing to support the concept, in practice.

So, the problem is an assumption on the part of the optimization minded players that the rules were written only for them. Because the rules were not.

5e rules certainly were not written with optimization-minded players in mind, neither in the sense of catering to them with intentional rewards for system mastery like 3.x/PF, nor of keeping them somewhat in check with more robust balance and frequent errata, like 4e, very briefly, pre-Essentials.

 

[schnee]

I'd like to see more specifics, because nothing I've seen will break any game I've ever run. From what you've listed, there are plenty of assumptions there that the wizard will always have access to whatever spell is perfect for the solution on hand, and no game I've ever been in has that been the case.

Strike 1: The plural of anecdotes is not data.

And, I think you're making a lot of assumptions too - like your table is completely representative of what's possible with the game, your characters played the most optimal, and nobody else could *possibly* make a build you can't imagine.

Most gamers play in a level range between 3-12. So give me a 9th level wizard that will break the game. Specifically. What spells would you have prepared? I can assure you that nothing there would break the game, and I feel confident in explaining why.

Strike 2: More assumptions. Why level 9? I didn't mention a level. Why will that prove your point? And, like I said, our table was pretty sane, none of us were optimizers; it was another player that came in and broke it, and that game was 13th-14th level.

And, I see no reason why I specifically have to write the character to prove your point, when hundreds upon thousands of words have been written about the 'Tier' system in 3E. I would rather suggest that instead of asking a single person to set up a straw man for you to 'disprove', you go do your research with the crowd-sourced wisdom of those other gamers.

The fact that the mechanical changes in 5E are so pointedly aimed at nerfing caster power in every way - from Concentration t limited spell durations to 'Save every round to end Save or Suck' to elimination of extra spells via high INT (and on and on) point to the problem. If it wasn't broken, why was it fixed? How about you go through every mechanical change that was made with the Wizard between 3.5 and 5 and you prove to me that the overall power level has stayed the same or increased?

This confirms my suspicions of your bias. It had nothing to do with people being loud. The only thing that mattered was sales #s.

Strike #3: Accusations of bias before a single back-and-forth.

I don't have time for this. Looking at your post history has shown me that's a typical MO.

I made a mistake getting in to this thread, and another engaging with you. I won't do either of those again. Toodles!

 

[hawkeyefan]

That's where it's less of a problem, if anything. If you have a group with comparable system-mastery chops, they'll gravitate towards the viable - and optimal - feats, and all be reasonably 'balanced' with eachother. They may or may not have much variety left in the builds they settle on, and the DM may have to ratchet up challenges, but everyone knows where they stand.

Perhaps. But then you're talking about balance among the party members after character creation, rather than balance of the options presented during character creation. You're balancing the characters, not the options. And that's not a bad thing, but my point was about the options themselves.

Until someone else takes one of the optimal feats for similar reasons, and inadvertently overshadows them, sure. Or, in worse cases, where they take the obviously-fits-the-concept feat (or other option), and it does nothing to support the concept, in practice.

That depends. Overshadowed in what way? DPR? Some other metric?

I had a player create a character that was a drunken brawler. He was great. Did the two weapon fighter and the paladin do more damage than him in general? Yes. But the drunken brawler was far more memorable, and probably more fun.

This kind of plays to my point. It depends on how the game plays out. Is an option that leads to a player having a lot of fun not balanced against an option that leads another player to being able to deal lots of damage per round? How can you quantify such things? (Hence my earlier comments about balance meaning different things....not an attempt to shut down the discussion so much as to show how many different ways of looking at it there are, and how hard they will be to compare.)

5e rules certainly were not written with optimization-minded players in mind, neither in the sense of catering to them with intentional rewards for system mastery like 3.x/PF, nor of keeping them somewhat in check with more robust balance and frequent errata, like 4e, very briefly, pre-Essentials.

In a way, I think they did design it with optimization in mind....but more as a cautionary consideration.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

That's a fair characterization, .

Quite possibly, but its not mine.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Perhaps. But then you're talking about balance among the party members after character creation, rather than balance of the options presented during character creation. You're balancing the characters, not the options.

Sorta, yeah. When 'trap' options are recognized as such, they fall off the menu, and the game becomes essentially as balanced as a game that simply didn't offer those options in the first place, just with a system-mastery bar to clear to get there.

There's really not much of a distinction, in that context, between a game with few options, all of which are balanced, and a game with the same balanced options, plus many more that are meaningless and/or non-viable.
Both offer the same choices to a savvy player.

The distinction matters when the player can't tease the viable from the non-viable choices.

That depends. Overshadowed in what way? DPR? Some other metric?

Play experience. They hypothetical 'casual' group wouldn't use a quantitative metric to detect a balance issue ahead of play, so they'd experience the consequences in play. A player makes choices that seem to fit his character concept, but the character doesn't live up to the concept, and he's frustrated. Another character with a different concept might step in to help when the first character fails at his thing, and do it better, because his choices, though made for different reasons, coincidentally fill out that first concept better than the choices that seemed more appropriate for it. They might laugh it off. The second player might never make such an attempt again, the DM might give the first character a boost - there are lots of ways of dealing with such issues (including identifying and fixing the underlying balance problem, up-front, though, when you think about it, trying to do that for everything, rather than just the specific things applicable to the concepts your players want would be quite the undertaking).

In a way, I think they did design it with optimization in mind....but more as a cautionary consideration.

Keeping optimization in mind as a cautionary consideration, in system design, would mean prioritizing balance more highly than 5e seems to have done. But, emphasizing DM Empowerment means that same caution can be passed from a design consideration to campaign consideration, so in that sense, sure.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Quite possibly, but its not mine.

I blame multi-quote.

Fixed. I hope.

 

[shoak1]

This confirms my suspicions of your bias. It had nothing to do with people being loud. The only thing that mattered was sales #s.

I made a mistake getting in to this thread, and another engaging with you. I won't do either of those again. Toodles!

Sacrosanct, are you still sure that I am the guy with the attitude? You do seem to be upsetting a lot of people. And it all revolves around being defensive of the game system and shutting peoples' grievances down....

 

[Yunru]

Sacrosanct, are you still sure that I am the guy with the attitude? You do seem to be upsetting a lot of people. And it all revolves around being defensive of the game system and shutting peoples' grievances down....

No, and yes.
It's very much the both of you.

 

[Tony Vargas]

No, and yes.
It's very much the both of you.

Actually, it's just like balance, it's the fault of the observer. So when you see two forumites going at it, you're actually the one being rude, not either of them.

;P

 

[Hussar]

A grappler cannot use a bow, /snip

Why can't a grappler use a bow? Sure, he can't use one while grappling, true, but, he's got hands free.

A shield user cannot use a bow, ever. Well, not without giving up actions to do so.

That's my point about people being too laser focused on their analysis. Ignoring the larger picture in favor of a slice of the game that proves their point. The fact that the shield master is pretty much forced to single handed weapons, due to losing actions for trying to switch, is completely ignored. The opportunity cost of Shield Master during character generation as well - you're limited to Defense or Protection style fighter types.

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As far as the AD&D thing goes, well, if casters were so balanced, why does every single high level module for 1e go out of its way to shaft them? Queen of the Demonweb Pits limited the recovery of spells for clerics to 2nd level. The wizard verboten list is about a page long.

Not really a strong argument for the balance of high level casters in 1e.