Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8626538" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Is there a difference, when players demonstrably fail to conform to the designer's intent? Seriously. If you get caught up on designing a game for a behavior pattern that simply doesn't occur often enough to be relevant to the typical group, it seems to me you have fallen into a trap of thinking people should behave in ways that they simply do not.It isn't just "what the most vocals are asking for." They've conducted their tests and realized that the expected balance point and player/DM behavior, in general, does not match the actual player/DM behavior. It is, effectively, exactly the same error they committed back in 3e, just to a (much) less egregious degree. They designed a game expecting people would play it the way it was playtested, rather than designing the game based around how people actually choose to play.If you do, in fact, get approximately 8 combat encounters a day, then even the Champion rises up to the point of being maybe-kinda-sorta on par. And if you do, in fact, get 2-3 short rests every day (leaning toward 3 but not always 3), then Warlocks can keep up with other spellcasters (e.g. at 5th level, fresh day + 3 short rests gives you 2*4 = 8 spells that are always upcast to 3rd if that makes any difference; whereas a Wizard has four 1st, three 2nd, and two 3rd, plus three restorable spell levels via Arcane Recovery, meaning the Wizard has more spells but the Warlock has, in theory, stronger spells.) The problem is, many groups simply don't do that. From all data that has been available to me--and, based on Crawford's direct statements, this is at least loosely like what WotC's much more official data shows--most groups are closer to 3-5 encounters a day favoring the low end. Further, they get 1-2 short rests per day, again favoring the low end (to the point of sometimes getting no short rests at all before a long rest.) Hence why they're shifting things. Players simply don't play the game the way the designers expected them to, and as a result, things are skewed to a point that the designers consider it a problem. Using my above example, the 5th level Warlock would typically get only four spells a day, whereas the Wizard still has all 9+ (anywhere between 10 and 12 total), and having a great cantrip option just doesn't quite compare to being able to drop two and a half times as many potentially combat-ending bombshells.Also? "I don't have problems" does not mean "nobody should have problems."</blockquote>

Verification