D&D 5E Which classes have the least identity?

[Clint_L]

But we weren't really discussing viability, we were discussing your "4 points per class, putting 3 in combat, 1 in exploration, 0 in interaction" analogy.

You said you wouldn't design a game with classes that are 3-1-0, so I'm assuming you would always do some sort of 2-1-1 or 1-2-1 arrangement.

The pushback here is "Why NOT 3-1-0? Or 4-0-0 or 0-1-3?" Why not have a class that's situationally powerful with the trade-off of sometimes being not useful?

Personally, I don't think "Everyone gets to contribute all the time in roughly equivalent ways" is as valuable as is frequently claimed, especially in larger groups (5+ players). Sometimes it's nice for players to be able to have a big impact, and then float around of the fringes of play for a bit. I know quite a few players who prefer that playstyle.

I don't think it is possible to make a "4-0-0" character in 5e. I've never seen one. One of the underlying principles of 5e is to allow each class to be effective on its own, and because of bounded accuracy it doesn't take that much to at least be decent at most things, and you can rarely be THAT incredible in any of them.

Edit: in general, 5e has a much more compressed range than any previous edition. On most tasks, a character might range from "poor/mediocre" to "pretty good." Especially in the first two tiers of play, but even at high levels when compared to other editions.

 

[tetrasodium]

It felt like the point was that one of them wasn't as good as any of the others overall - it was uglier, slower, smaller, and less economical.

Uglier slower and smaller interior?... Like a not even street legal Terrex Titan? sometimes a thing has a use case that makes problems like a 5GPM* fuel economy a non-issue.

D&d is mainly a game about combat, as a result it's not generally a big loss if a PC is mainly about combat because the player chose to only take combat relevant skills like grapple and athletics instead of history and insight or whatever. Some of the scenarios of totally useless unitasking PCs being described lately really only happen in horrifically built point buy PCs

* That 5 gallon per mile is not a typo. almost as cool to see one moving in person as the crawler at NASA

 

[TwoSix]

I don't think it is possible to make a "4-0-0" character in 5e. I've never seen one. One of the underlying principles of 5e is to allow each class to be effective on its own, and because of bounded accuracy it doesn't take that much to at least be decent at most things, and you can rarely be THAT incredible in any of them.

Edit: in general, 5e has a much more compressed range than any previous edition. On most tasks, a character might range from "poor/mediocre" to "pretty good." Especially in the first two tiers of play, but even at high levels when compared to other editions.

You could certainly design a non-combat class for 5e if that was desired. d6 HD, no weapon or armor proficiencies, no offensive spells. or combat buffs of any kind.

Like a peace cleric on quaaludes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But we weren't really discussing viability, we were discussing your "4 points per class, putting 3 in combat, 1 in exploration, 0 in interaction" analogy.

You said you wouldn't design a game with classes that are 3-1-0, so I'm assuming you would always do some sort of 2-1-1 or 1-2-1 arrangement.

The pushback here is "Why NOT 3-1-0? Or 4-0-0 or 0-1-3?" Why not have a class that's situationally powerful with the trade-off of sometimes being not useful?

Personally, I don't think "Everyone gets to contribute all the time in roughly equivalent ways" is as valuable as is frequently claimed, especially in larger groups (5+ players). Sometimes it's nice for players to be able to have a big impact, and then float around of the fringes of play for a bit. I know quite a few players who prefer that playstyle.

It also happens to tend toward the more realistic, a big plus in my book.

 

[Cadence]

I think the 2-1-1 arrangement is probably the best balance here. It gives classes an area of specialty, without making them useless in others.

That's one of the things that's always kind of boggled me in D&D. The wizards in some editions seems like sending along a pure lab scientist into Jurassic park who has never held a gun or been out in the woods. The fighter in some editions seems like sending a person with no jungle experience or secondary skill off in predator - are they going to be good in the woods or if they need help with medical or communications things? Should everyone going off have at least a little combat ability and a little bit of skill? (So the Arcane folks should be either a fighter-wizard or a thief-wizard, the cleric is probably ok [but why isn't there a less combat cleric back home with the temples]). Or does the Presto type from the D&D cartoon have an important purpose to fulfill?

(Was everyone in A-team ok in a fist fight? Did all of them have at least two important skills?)

 

[James Gasik]

(Was everyone in A-team ok in a fist fight? Did all of them have at least two important skills?)

Yes, though Templeton usually hurt his hand punching people, and being punched typically meant he had to get new crowns put on his teeth.

You can certainly point towards each member of the A-Team having their own specialties, and times when one was obviously better (B.A. was hands down the best in a physical brawl), but the analogy breaks down a little (though it's probably better than my car analogy, lol) when you remember the A-Team is a TV show, not a game.

As a DM, my first priority is to make sure everyone is having fun. People have fun in different ways, but if someone is lagging behind a bit behind the others in their contributions, I can tell they might get frustrated. When I ran 3.x and Pathfinder 1e, there were legitimately classes that did not perform as well as others most of the time, and their true moments to shine were less frequent.

I certainly tried to adjust my game to give everyone their moment, but it's hard, especially if what you're good at is, kind of boring. Take the archetypical dungeon crawling Rogue. Being good at finding/disabling traps is important, but there's not always a trap to find, and if there is, the whole process is reduced to "we move at half speed. Does the Rogue find the trap? Y? We take no damage. N? We take damage. Does the Rogue disable the trap? Y? We take no damage. N? We take damage."

Sure there are interesting traps that merely slow down the group or alert enemies, but you have to work to build a trap that is more than a binary state.

That's not enough of a specialty for a character to have to justify them being slightly worse at everything else in the game. I didn't think that when I played AD&D, and I don't think that now.

It's like the Ranger being the "wilderness guy". It's basically a bunch of ribbon features that pretty much say "yeah, I win exploration challenges". That's not enough to justify making the Ranger worse than other characters either.

Now, sure, a class shouldn't be able to do everything, and I wouldn't want it to be able to, but there's not a lot of upside in my opinion to saying "you're less good at combat", IF combat is a disproportionately large part of the game.

Sure, you could build classes that are behind the curve because they are meant to do other things, and maybe put warning labels on those classes, as I believe Micah was suggesting, but why? Why do we have to have these extra classes laying around, when it would be easier to give everyone a defined combat specialty first, and then give everyone a secondary role?

I mean, put another way, what is the weakness of the Paladin? They are just as good as the Fighter until level 11 in raw fighting ability. They have on-demand burst damage which can be pretty high, the utility of being a half-caster, grant one of the best party buffs in the game, and have additional healing resources, and a ribbon feature that makes them good at ferreting out undead and fiends, and all of this without even taking their subclass into account! Their focus on Charisma means most Paladins will be viable social characters (not saying other classes can't be, but it's a role the class can naturally fall into)- the Paladin may be the perfect class from a design standpoint.

Now some people don't like the class identity, or feel that Paladins have extra baggage, but the class itself is solid and no longer even has a built-in "and the Paladin falls mechanic"; the PHB offers no penalty to breaking one's oath, and the Oathbreaker is an option in the DMG (and isn't a downgrade to the Paladin in any respect).

And I realize some people take issue with this, but the point is, the class as presented works, and works well, and has it's own definable strengths, and never falls behind. The Fighter may at higher levels put out more reliable damage over the course of the day, but even without resources, the Paladin offers a lot to their party members.

 

[Shardstone]

Wizard has no identity beyond "Knows a lot of spells" yet outside of the class it has so much identity, even in NPC D&D wizards.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Wizard has no identity beyond "Knows a lot of spells" yet outside of the class it has so much identity, even in NPC D&D wizards.

It's how they know a lot of spells that covers their identity. Wizards are "the smart guy". No one else in the PH cares much about Int, but wizards are all about it, so much so that they can find new class abilities as treasure (in the form of spell scrolls) in a way even other spellcasters have a hard time doing plausibly.

 

[James Gasik]

The ability to find new spells as treasure is, unfortunately, undercut by the divine casters. Clerics and Druids have the ability to mold their spell lists at will, and depending on subclass, can even have spells normally only Wizards could cast.

Add to this the fact that consuming a scroll to add a spell to your book is actually reducing available party resources* (in addition to the time and gold spent), and it's not an especially fantastic ability. I used to not mind this so much, but the most recent D&D character I played was a Wizard, and trying to gather spells for all occasions proved to be less fun when the Cleric could avoid the extra steps, and I wasn't really using more spells than I naturally got from leveling up anyways, given the limits on what I could prepare.

It's better than being a Sorcerer, I'll give it that, but it's not great. Especially given that scrolls are found randomly and most spellcasting NPC's seem to use similar spell loadouts, so even capturing a spellbook can make you realize "oh, I already have all of these!".

*Since a scroll represents a spell that can be cast without using a spell slot.

 

[ECMO3]

Why on Earth would you want it any other way? Why tell a player, here are three cars. One is a gas guzzler that will be impractical for anything you would ever want it to do, one is fuel efficient but has no cargo space, and the third is super fast and reliable. Pick one!

I will point out that Americans regularly buy impractical gas-guzzling sports cars that are impractical for anything they do with them, and this is not that they are not informed as the fuel mileage is listed right there on the window sticker.