D&D 5E What is Over-Powered?

[TarionzCousin]

What is overpowered?

Crush your BBEG's. See them cower before you. Hear the lamentations of their minions.

 

[SirAntoine]

I really don't understand why you're griping in the 5E thread then. I don't go off on rambling tangents in the Pathfinder section.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

 

[SirAntoine]

So, if I can simply swap out another character after the session, why wait? Why not let me play the character I want to play from the get go? What is the benefit here?

There are many benefits, Hussar. It's difficult to portray their relevance in the new edition, though. Without ability score requirements for any of the classes, or races, there is a different atmosphere, stemming from its own tradition going back to 3rd Edition.

Unless you get your DM and all the other players to agree to try out something like the suggestion I made to you earlier, you won't see the benefits.

 

[Hussar]

There are many benefits, Hussar. It's difficult to portray their relevance in the new edition, though. Without ability score requirements for any of the classes, or races, there is a different atmosphere, stemming from its own tradition going back to 3rd Edition.

Unless you get your DM and all the other players to agree to try out something like the suggestion I made to you earlier, you won't see the benefits.

Remind me again. What suggest was that?

Note, you'll have to back further than 3rd edition to talk about class restrictions. 3e lifted all AD&D restrictions, just as 2e lessened a number of them.

Hey, whatever floats your boat. I find that random character generation leads to bland, lifeless characters because the players have absolutely no investment in them because they are being forced to play a character they don't want to play. So, Sir Fytor falls on his sword, replaced by Father Generic who bravely sacrifices himself to those giant rats followed by Dave the Thief who manages to do pretty much nothing for three sessions.

Yeah, no thanks. Not to my taste. I mean 4d6 arrange to taste generally lets you play pretty much whatever you want, and by the time the first Unearthed Arcana came out with it's 9D6 stat generation method, the idea of playing what you rolled had pretty much fallen by the wayside in the game. Even Basic/Expert allowed you to swap stats 2 for 1 between Str, Int and Wis and raise Dex. Only Con and Cha were fixed. And since no B/E class actually NEEDED Cha, it wasn't much of an issue anyway.

 

[pemerton]

I once had a player in my AD&D campaign, who, having perused the 4th Edition PHB, asked me why in the 2nd Edition PHB fighters didn't have power entries equal in number to the spell entries for wizards. I wasn't sure what to say. I had never heard AD&D criticized that way. I answered him that the abilities of the fighter were all based on what people could really do, so they needed no special rules describing them. Magic, on the other hand, needed to be described like that, into broken down bits and pieces.

Realism and fantasy.

Both Moldvay Basic and 2nd ed AD&D call out Hercules as an example of a fighter. Hercules can do things that people could not really do.

I think anyone coming to the game wanting to play a Conan-esque character would also be likely to choose a fighter, and Conan can do things that people could not really do, such as survive crucifixion in a desert.

That's not to say that you need a power system to give effect to the heroic and preternatural abilities of fantasy heroes, but it's one way of doing it. (Nor do you need AD&D-style spell lists to give effect to magic, even though it is fantasy. Marvel Heroic RP, for instance, gives sorcerers and similar characters a rating in Sorcery or Weather Control or whatever the relative ability is, and then has a fairly generic half-page description of what can be accomplished at each of the 4 ratings.)

 

[Diamabel]

There are many benefits, Hussar. It's difficult to portray their relevance in the new edition, though. Without ability score requirements for any of the classes, or races, there is a different atmosphere, stemming from its own tradition going back to 3rd Edition.

Unless you get your DM and all the other players to agree to try out something like the suggestion I made to you earlier, you won't see the benefits.

Been there, done that. Didn't like it then, don't like it now.

 

[SirAntoine]

Remind me again. What suggest was that?

Note, you'll have to back further than 3rd edition to talk about class restrictions. 3e lifted all AD&D restrictions, just as 2e lessened a number of them.

Hey, whatever floats your boat. I find that random character generation leads to bland, lifeless characters because the players have absolutely no investment in them because they are being forced to play a character they don't want to play. So, Sir Fytor falls on his sword, replaced by Father Generic who bravely sacrifices himself to those giant rats followed by Dave the Thief who manages to do pretty much nothing for three sessions.

Yeah, no thanks. Not to my taste. I mean 4d6 arrange to taste generally lets you play pretty much whatever you want, and by the time the first Unearthed Arcana came out with it's 9D6 stat generation method, the idea of playing what you rolled had pretty much fallen by the wayside in the game. Even Basic/Expert allowed you to swap stats 2 for 1 between Str, Int and Wis and raise Dex. Only Con and Cha were fixed. And since no B/E class actually NEEDED Cha, it wasn't much of an issue anyway.

My suggestion was let no one start with a score higher than 7, provided you want to play with no ability score requirements and also with the rate of ability score increases in the core 5th Edition rules.

AD&D 2nd Edition did loosen some class restrictions, but 3rd Edition actually removed the ability score requirements.

I know my suggestion is only academic, but the notion that low scores makes playing that character a waste isn't true for everyone. The low scores raised the significance of exceptional characters, helped you to role play, kept every new character different from the last so the game was never the same, and served verisimilitude.

One other benefit is it helps you to break the math in the game for what your party is expected to do.

 

[SirAntoine]

Both Moldvay Basic and 2nd ed AD&D call out Hercules as an example of a fighter. Hercules can do things that people could not really do.

I think anyone coming to the game wanting to play a Conan-esque character would also be likely to choose a fighter, and Conan can do things that people could not really do, such as survive crucifixion in a desert.

That's not to say that you need a power system to give effect to the heroic and preternatural abilities of fantasy heroes, but it's one way of doing it. (Nor do you need AD&D-style spell lists to give effect to magic, even though it is fantasy. Marvel Heroic RP, for instance, gives sorcerers and similar characters a rating in Sorcery or Weather Control or whatever the relative ability is, and then has a fairly generic half-page description of what can be accomplished at each of the 4 ratings.)

Outliers, all. The AD&D structure was just genius.

 

[SirAntoine]

AD&D was fantastic...for its time. I started with the original blue box Basic Set, then moved on to AD&D which I played for many years (still have all my books, modules, Dragon magazines, Judges Guild supplements, etc.) Starting with 2e, I thought the game got more and more bogged down in min-maxing characters. There were improvements with each subsequent release, but all in all I thought the feel of the original game was lost along the way. 5e is the first edition that, to me (and my group) feels like AD&D but with better overall rules. No more THACO hit charts, magic users can wear armor (well, multiclassed demi-humans in AD&D could wear armor...), and the list goes on. I loved playing AD&D, but there's no denying its many flaws.

5e has its issues, too, but overall it's a very good release. D&D is fun again.

I wouldn't call it like AD&D, 1st or 2nd Edition. It is a different animal altogether, and it's all about min/maxing isn't it? Everything seems focused on having better ability score bonuses, on squeezing out every +1 you can from anywhere, and how much damage output each class can do.

 

[pemerton]

the solution would be to weaken dragons so multiple dragons could, once again, be beaten in a straight up fight.

Characters are a big share of the game, and rules that help bring them to life are much more important than rules that only help reduce the challenge.

I don't fully understand how these various comments fit together.

Isn't weakening dragons "reducing the challenge"? In which case, you don't seem to have a problem with that.

But in any event, what counts as a challenge is mechanics-relative. In AD&D, for instance, a starting 1st level, fighter can expect to be hit by 1 in 4 or even fewer attacks (say, AC 3 vs THACO of 19 or 20, requiring a 16 or 17 to hit). In 4e the starting fighter is likely to have AC in the neighbourhood of 18 and be attacked by creatures with a +6 or more to hit, meaning that nearly half of the attacks made against him/her will hit. And the damage in AD&D is likely to be 1d6, whereas in 4e it will be more like 1d8+4.

The 5e maths are closer to 4e than AD&D: a starting AC of 16 or 18 (depending on shield use) against enemies who have +4 or so to hit and hit for 5 or more points of damage. How has the challenge been reduced?

And what exactly does any of this have to do with bringing characters to life? In that respect the strongest part of 5e seems to be its Background system.