D&D 5E Why Balance is Bad

[Minigiant]

I think WotC has a reasonable handle on what a good chunk of their potential market wants, and is building a system to deliver that. I would describe it as "concept first, PC build mechanics second". It therefore appears to rely heavily on the GM to modulate or override the resolution mechanics in order to make sure that the outcomes in play correspond, at least roughly, to the concepts that the PC builds were meant to express.

They do now. Mostly. They "paid good money" for that inf. and to know which types of balance we mostly approve of.

 

[pemerton]

They do now. Mostly. They "paid good money" for that inf. and to know which types of balance we mostly approve of.

Am I right in thinking that you're talking about the playtest?

Also, I'm curious whether you think I'm at all accurate in my description of what they learned and what they are giving us.

 

[Guest 85555]

I have been pretty vocal about 4E, in my opinion, going too far int he direction of balance and parity, but I don't think one can say balance on it's own is bad. First it varies from game to game and audience to audience. Second it is a spectrum. Third, balance isn't bad but like anything else in game design it affects other parts of the system, it is a trade off. I have found, just from my own efforts at game design that a certain amount of balance is desireable. A game with no balance will run into issues i don't want to deal with at the table. However the close I get to a platonic ideal of balance (particularly when it comes to things like powers and spells in a game) the more the flavor of the game tends to even out and become less distinct to me. That isn't automatically bad though, it just means i find the game less interesting if my choices are too even. I've learned i need some rough edges, un-anticipated results and a certain degree of broken-ness for a game to excite me and for its magic or power system to intrigue me. This is especially the case for me with powers/spells that may be uber in some circumstances but much less so in others. It is also true when it comes to creative use of powers.

So I think there is a huge excluded middle here, where most players probably expect some amount of balance. They just don't want it to diminish other aspects of the game. And at the end of the day, it is a preference. Some folks will legitimately prefer a more balanced game with parity across the character cchoices. There isn't anything wrong with that.

With D&D this has been a source of contention for a while, and they probably want to strike a god middle ground.

 

[Mistwell]

No I can still post at WoTC boards I just don't as most of the old crowd bailed a long time ago and most of the forums there are now dead as FR posters left in droves and the 4E board gets a handful of posts per day.

Zardnaar, I was referring to the even-newer guy (named XunValdorl_of_Kilsek) not you. You have no issues at all with, and enjoy your posts plenty (even if we disagree sometimes).

 

[ExploderWizard]

For me, the problem with balance is that too much pursuit of it leads to an unbalanced role playing game. A role playing game should, in my opinion, balance the focus on both gamism and simulationism - not focusing not the gamist aspects at the expense of the game's ability to simulate its genre. Gamist structures are there primarily to make the simulation playable, but not necessarily strictly equitable. This is why it's not only common to see wizards and priests with reality warping powers in fantasy games while martial characters lack them, I think it's appropriate. Giving such powers, in considerable numbers without some kind of equipment (which is certainly possible to do), to martial focused characters places the gamism above the simulationism and, I think, throws the balance between the two issues out the window.

For some genres, a more strictly similar result between "magical" and "martial" characters can be appropriate. Take any of your typical superhero RPGs for example. There's no real prejudice between what a swordsman and wizard can achieve in terms of mechanics. But then, that's the superhero genre. It's not really the fantasy genre, though, either with pulp swords and sorcery or with a higher Tolkienesque fantasy or even with D&D-influenced Steven Brustian fantasy.

4E has felt way more superheroic in genre than traditional fantasy. The fantasy elements serve more as trappings than as meaningful factors impacting how the world works and feels. This overall feel was generated largely by the need to balance all classes around their combat contributions. When balance reaches that granular a level, things tend to get silly. The world must bend to the balance conventions so that everyone can feel special all the time.

If the game world has to contort itself into matrix-like reality generated for the sole purpose of making sure everyone gets to be equally awesome all the time, how is being impressive that big of a deal?

Want to talk about "expected mechanical effectiveness" ? 4E has that in spades. It is staring me in the face every time I play my bugbear fighter and there is a situation that requires ranged combat. The competency gap between a character designed for such activity and one who is not is staggering. My contributions in such situations compared to the ranger is like a school kid with a spitball involved in a military firefight. If the system is balanced then surely the situation is reversed in melee right? Nope. In melee the ranger still kicks ass while the humble fighter approaches basic competency. In what fantasy source fiction do we find the warrior archetype that specializes in taking beatings to a degree that greatly exceeds their ability to give them? MMOs are about all I can think of.

I hope bounded accuracy will fix this in Next. I think balance can be better served by narrowing the competency gap. If the difference between a specialist and a generalist never goes beyond a +1 or +2 then they can both contribute usefully in areas outside their respective areas of focus.

 

[Hussar]

Really? As far as I'm concerned, an obsession with trying to make every class useful in combat was a big problem with 3e. Sure, the supposed steps towards "balance" in 4e were step in the wrong direction, but as in most cases, everything that's wrong with 4e came from 3e.

I also don't remember anyone complaining about games not being balanced enough until 4e came along.

Well considering you started playing about a year before 3e came out, how much did you hear about anything?

 

[Sage Genesis]

I hope bounded accuracy will fix this in Next. I think balance can be better served by narrowing the competency gap. If the difference between a specialist and a generalist never goes beyond a +1 or +2 then they can both contribute usefully in areas outside their respective areas of focus.

I hate to burst your bubble, but this is really not what Next is doing (thus far).

First, the despite all the claims of "bounded accuracy", there is no actual hard cap on anything. The difference between bonuses can go quite a bit further than just a +1 or +2. Skill expertise alone can give a +5 straight off the bat, for example. The bounded accuracy design really just means that ability scores can't exceed 20 (except when they do, such as with a belt of giant strength) and that bonuses are capped at +6 (except when they're not). There's still a lot of bonuses around to snatch up if you know where to look.

Second, people think that "bounded accuracy" is intended to reduce flat bonuses. But that is only half the story. It does want to increase competency, but it does so through other means such as making more attacks, more damage, (dis)advantage, more actions, or other effects that bypass a straight + to a d20 roll.

These two factors have combined to make specialists more powerful than ever. Because on the one hand, the bonuses aren't really capped that much, and on the other hand they can get new strange benefits on top.

Let me give you an example.

It's entirely possible to make a Fighter 9/Paladin 6 who can't die due to hp damage. True, this is a level 15 character and that's pretty high level, but you couldn't do that in 3e or 4e to the best of my knowledge. And I don't mean "is kind of difficult to hurt", I mean "literally cannot die". Bounded accuracy is an experiment that will lead to some rather... interesting... places. (All based on the latest version of the rules as we know them, of course.)

 

[Dausuul]

I want to play a very classic white mage, someone who hasn't invested a single resource into becoming good at fighting and instead invested it all on becoming a superb healer and whose basic offensive capabilites are below average. But if all characters have to conform to a limited range for combat capability, my character's combat abilites will be far better than they should be, and cannot be a lot better at healing than other clerics that didn't focuss on healing...

Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but "white mage" is a perfectly good combat archetype. Instead of dealing damage directly, you buff and heal everyone else. If you're in a party of four, and you boost everyone else's combat capability by one-third, you're pulling your weight in battle, even if you yourself never lay a finger on a monster.

But in the main, you are right that 5E out of the box is not likely to support hyperspecialization. You can, to a certain extent, trade off combat capability for noncombat utility or vice versa; but you can only take it so far. You can't be more combat-specialized than the fighter, and you can't be more utility-specialized than the rogue. (And rogues do trade off combat utility. Sneak attack allows them to be useful in combat, but the fighter still deals more damage, and on defense there's no comparison.)

I don't really see this as a problem. Core D&D has never had much support for noncombatant PCs. Pre-3E thieves were about as close as it got, and they still had backstab. The general assumption of D&D is that most adventures will devote a fair bit of time to combat, and very few players will want to spend 50% or more of the average session twiddling their thumbs. "Very few" is not "none," but D&D can't be everything to everybody.

Want to talk about "expected mechanical effectiveness" ? 4E has that in spades. It is staring me in the face every time I play my bugbear fighter and there is a situation that requires ranged combat. The competency gap between a character designed for such activity and one who is not is staggering. My contributions in such situations compared to the ranger is like a school kid with a spitball involved in a military firefight. If the system is balanced then surely the situation is reversed in melee right? Nope. In melee the ranger still kicks ass while the humble fighter approaches basic competency. In what fantasy source fiction do we find the warrior archetype that specializes in taking beatings to a degree that greatly exceeds their ability to give them? MMOs are about all I can think of.

Yeah, it was kind of silly. Good thing they got rid of that in 5E. The 5E fighter can dish it out as well as take it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

An "unbalanced" party done by design happened often enough in the games I played. Just like the Fellowship of the Ring which was about the most unbalanced party ever setting out for adventure It all depends on the group and what you are aiming to create with the game.

The Fellowship of the Ring was two parties and a DMPC.

The DMPC: Gandalf. An angel, wearer of one of the Three Rings, and one of the most powerful wizards ever.

Party 1: The four hobbits. Pretty balanced up until Frodo got his Mithril coat.

Party 2: Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas, Gimli. Balanced again.

Time the two parties were together: Rivendell -> Moria. So even your limit case demonstrates some pretty well balanced parties.

Long story short, every single character concept that involves being bad at fighting or completely defenseless in combat while still extremely useful out of it cannot be properly played if everybody has to have the same mechanical effect in combat for balance sake. Under those circumstances balance cannot allow the character to be that good out of combat, because it isn't allowing to have a reduced combat capability to compensate for it. Let's place an example:

I just want to know what this example has to do with anything. It's very easy to make a character who is bad at fighting in 4e - you put an 8 in their primary stat. Then as a bonus give them a weapon they aren't proficient with and no armour. In fact the only games I can think of where you can't play someone who's bad at fighting are Mythender, Feng Shui, and Wushu. And that's because they are about playing badasses - you might as well play someone who can't drive in a racing game.

What balance provides is information. It means you can't accidentally create someone bad at fighting. Is there anything wrong with the idea you can't accidentally create someone bad at something they are supposed to be good at?

 

[Minigiant]

Am I right in thinking that you're talking about the playtest?

Also, I'm curious whether you think I'm at all accurate in my description of what they learned and what they are giving us.

Yeah the playtest. It displayed the first time of a halfway accurate analysis of the fanbase.

And by comparing what was said at the start of development and what is said now, they realized how much how it would be to create a system that could be modified for several types of balances from a core ruleset. So they shoved it to the DMs.

So you are pretty accurate. They went for concept first and hope groups could do some of the tweaking themselves. Although it is a bit more complex a system than I thought we'd get. But I see that as caused by negative responses to simple frameworks and having too much up to DMs to create and balance themselves.