D&D 5E What is squishy, really?

[Warpiglet]

Epic

 

[Charlaquin]

I think when people call a class squishy nowadays, they’re really referring to the general idea of the class, not so much anything as specific as their AC or their hit dice. Rogues (for example) are “squishy” not because they can survive meaningfully fewer attacks than fighters (though that is technically true), but because they’re the teammate you don’t want to put on the front lines. They’re at their most effective when they’re skulking around, taking opportunistic strikes, and are at a disadvantage when forced to be in the thick of things. I don’t think a lot of people are really running the math, they’re just going by general feel, which is heavily informed by biases and preconceptions. The squishy rogue is a trope, so it’s what people expect out of the rogue, so it’s what they get out of the rogue.

 

[Warpiglet]

I have to show this to my kid. She does that to our dog too. She calls him a cobra

 

[Warpiglet]

I think when people call a class squishy nowadays, they’re really referring to the general idea of the class, not so much anything as specific as their AC or their hit dice. Rogues (for example) are “squishy” not because they can survive meaningfully fewer attacks than fighters (though that is technically true), but because they’re the teammate you don’t want to put on the front lines. They’re at their most effective when they’re skulking around, taking opportunistic strikes, and are at a disadvantage when forced to be in the thick of things. I don’t think a lot of people are really running the math, they’re just going by general feel, which is heavily informed by biases and preconceptions. The squishy rogue is a trope, so it’s what people expect out of the rogue, so it’s what they get out of the rogue.

I think you are spot on. If I have a bard with moderately armored and a con bonus I don’t really feel squishy personally but guarantee someone would label it that way

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Poo. Poo is squishy.

 

[Fenris-77]

Yeah, 5e doesn't have squishy if your frame of reference includes some previous editions. Full Casters with no armour and a lack of defensive spells to make up for it are the closest thing I guess. If you didn't take Shield and Mage Armour I don't really know what to tell you though, and I'll probably just hand you 4d6 sooner rather than later.

 

[Esker]

I proposed a metric awhile back that I called RTU, for "Rounds 'Til Unconsciousness", which was a first-approximation of the number of rounds you can expect to take attacks before going down. There are a lot of things it doesn't account for, and it was really only good up to a constant of proportionality, so more of a relative measure to compare builds than an absolute one, but it was a way to combine AC and HP into a single value that was adjusted for level (by using a typical enemy attack bonus for that level).