D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[GMforPowergamers]

Lets also take a look at 4e PHB p23:

Evil and Chaotic Evil Deities
Your character can worship an evil or a chaotic evil
deity without being of the same alignment, but that’s
walking a fine line. The commandments of these
deities exhort their followers to pursue evil ends or
commit destructive deeds.

So worship of those deities is not against the rules either.

PHB p62

You must choose a deity compatible with your alignment:
Good clerics serve good deities, lawful good
clerics serve lawful good deities, and so on. If a deity
is unaligned, your alignment doesn’t matter, so a deity
such as Melora has good, lawful good, evil, chaotic evil,
and unaligned clerics in her service. Similarly, if you’re
unaligned, you can serve any god. For example, Pelor is
served by both good clerics and unaligned clerics, but
never by evil, chaotic evil, or lawful good clerics.
For most games, you should choose a good, lawful
good, or unaligned deity for your cleric. Ask your
Dungeon Master before you select an evil or chaotic
evil deity.

Not against the rules for clerics either, just the caveat that you ask your DM first.

One of my first PCs was an Unaligned CLeric of Bane who multi classed warlord... I also in 3.5 played a mystic theurge who was a priest of vecna... I would call both heroes... In 3e I played an elf cleric of corlloan who was a prejudice dick

 

[Hussar]

1E is more brutal, but even in 2E mages and thieves are quite weak at first level. I thini zero to hero applies to second and third edition. Now characters are special, they are a step up from the common man, but they are still quite vulnerable (running the mordenheim mansion adventure in book of crypts witnessed our mage die from a splinter which i think did like 1d2 damage).

Yup, mages are weak. Then again, my specialist wizard gets 2 spells per day at 1st level, and sleep is still largely an autowin spell for a single encounter.

Thieves? Oh, yeah, thieves suck. Then again, everyone knew thieves sucked, so they played multiclass fighter/thief or wizard/thief or cleric/thief on the realization that the level limits would almost never come up in game and the xp difference was so small that you essentially weren't giving up anything by adding a thief class onto your character.

But, again, this gets to my point about balance. Unbalance means that a given option is clearly better than other options. Single classed thief was pretty clearly less strong than multiclass thief and you gave up nothing. Longswords were by and far the best single handed weapon.

So, everyone who could used a longsword. I rarely if ever saw single classed thieves. Same goes for two weapon fighting.

When something is unbalanced, it leads to cookie cutter characters.

Which is why I don't worry too much about unbalance in 3e because we rarely played at the levels where it mattered. If you only play to, say, 9th or 10th level in 3e, almost all the balance issues go away. Fighters and rogues are perfectly viable up to those levels. The casters aren't really ruling anything until the very end. E6 is 6 levels for a reason.

I saw far, far more variety in character concepts in 3e than I ever saw in 2e. And I mainly attribute that to the fact that 3e is much more mechanically balanced (at least in the single digit levels) than 2e is. Again, in 3e, nobody bitches about a 5th level wizard. It's not a problem. I do believe that most 3e campaigns rarely saw double digit levels. There were far, far more single digit level games out there. Same for 2e.

Only thing is, in 2e, you could unbalance the game right out of the chute.

But,

using a super maxed out fighter.

What super maxed out? I have an 18 str fighter. That's pretty much par for the course. I took weapon specs (again, standard for any fighter) and two weapon fighting (which reduces the penalties for twf - again, pretty standard choices). What super maxing out have I done here? Placing my highest roll in strength? Making perfectly reasonable choices in chargen? (I'm a fighter, shouldn't I be taking stuff that helps me fight? What else are weapon proficiencies for?)

It's not like I've cross referenced three different splats and taken some weird off race from Dragon magazine. I'm using the PHB and a single splat that most people agree is perfectly fine for the game.

You want super maxed out? Let me break out my Faiths and Avatars or Dieties and Demigods and I'll really go to town. This? This is a bog standard fighter in 2e.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It is optimized because you are using ambidextrrity from complete fighter, two weapon fighting, and specialization which is optional. Your also assuming and 18 STR. Ambidextrrity was highly controversial because it potentially got around the stiff two weapon fighting penalties that are only supposed to be diminished by your dex bonus. Lots of GMs didn't allow it for that reason, there were also lots of different interpretations of it as well (since the text in the complete book was a bit unclear). An optimized character is fine, that is what this discussion is talking about, but that is an optimized fighter.

Now I am not going to try to convince 2e was balanced and I never said it didn't have broken bits. But even the issue with two weapon fighting was do easy to deal with compared to the balance issues I ran into in 3E. Obviously you and i disagree very strongly on these issues. I just found on the whole running second edition things tended to be balanced on the whole (over the campaign) and any imbalance issues you could see coming and prevent if need be. In third, the imbalance was almost always a surprise.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Thieves? Oh, yeah, thieves suck. Then again, everyone knew thieves sucked, so they played multiclass fighter/thief or wizard/thief or cleric/thief on the realization that the level limits would almost never come up in game and the xp difference was so small that you essentially weren't giving up anything by adding a thief class onto your character.


n. This? This is a bog standard fighter in 2e.

Thieves rocked in 2E in my opinion. Probably my favorite incarnation of that class. Multiclass had issues but it took a while to advance since your xp got split between the classes. Whereas a straight thief was rapid advancement on the xp chart.

 

[Derren]

Since about 2e, PC's have always been Heroes (with a capital H), capable of feats no normal human could reproduce (AD&D fighters are the only ones who can gain percentile strength forex). The idea that you were some turnip farmer was never true in D&D.

Actually that only started in 4E as in previous editions every NPC could have the same abilities as the PCs at first level.

 

[Hussar]

Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a for...

Actually that only started in 4E as in previous editions every NPC could have the same abilities as the PCs at first level.

Can you show me where in 4e NPC's can't have standard classes.

 

[Bluenose]

Actually that only started in 4E as in previous editions every NPC could have the same abilities as the PCs at first level.

Or they might be made as 0HD/1HD creatures. In so far as any edition is an aberration in this respect, it's 3e.

 

[Hussar]

Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a for...

Thieves rocked in 2E in my opinion. Probably my favorite incarnation of that class. Multiclass had issues but it took a while to advance since your xp got split between the classes. Whereas a straight thief was rapid advancement on the xp chart.

Meh. At absolute worst you might be one level behind. Hrmmmm. Give up one level of thief and gain X levels of another class. Like I said, the balance issues in Second are pretty glaring.

 

[pemerton]

it would really suck <snip> to have a DM who didn't even let you use the specialization (its only optional in the PhB).

This made me go and check my 2nd ed PHB.

The fighter description presents Wp Spec as a special thing that only fighters (not paladins and rangers) can get, and says its the player's choice.

Then the proficiency chapter says (i) that it's like wizard specialisation (which is presented as a player choice) and that it's an optional rule (maybe even expressly meaning - I didn't look at that aspect) implying that it's the GM's choice.

In other words, I think it's a bit confused in the presentation.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Thieves? Oh, yeah, thieves suck. Then again, everyone knew thieves sucked, so they played multiclass fighter/thief or wizard/thief or cleric/thief on the realization that the level limits would almost never come up in game and the xp difference was so small that you essentially weren't giving up anything by adding a thief class onto your character.

when we started playing we saw a lot of single class fighters and single class thief characters, by the time WotC bought the game in 98 we would not see either... we still had a few fighter/thief characters but even then if we were planning on it lasting any time, we saw Fighter/Mage and Mage/thief and Fighter/Mage/thief for most of our characters...

when 3e came out all those bonus feats were supposed to make fighter feel more fun to play, and it took oly 2 campaigns for us to once again never see a straight non multi classed non caster...

But, again, this gets to my point about balance. Unbalance means that a given option is clearly better than other options. Single classed thief was pretty clearly less strong than multiclass thief and you gave up nothing. Longswords were by and far the best single handed weapon.

yup everyone had longswords in 2e...

Which is why I don't worry too much about unbalance in 3e because we rarely played at the levels where it mattered. If you only play to, say, 9th or 10th level in 3e, almost all the balance issues go away. Fighters and rogues are perfectly viable up to those levels. The casters aren't really ruling anything until the very end. E6 is 6 levels for a reason.

I agree 100% the perfect zone is level 3-9 in 3e and 3.5 there are still imbalances, but you can go years without noticing.

I saw far, far more variety in character concepts in 3e than I ever saw in 2e. And I mainly attribute that to the fact that 3e is much more mechanically balanced (at least in the single digit levels) than 2e is. Again, in 3e, nobody bitches about a 5th level wizard. It's not a problem. I do believe that most 3e campaigns rarely saw double digit levels. There were far, far more single digit level games out there. Same for 2e.

I have played/ran 3 2e games that went above 21, and 4 more that made it to level 15+. In 3e/3.5 I played/ran only 5 total games over level 12, and only 2 of them over 21.

What super maxed out? I have an 18 str fighter. That's pretty much par for the course.

you know everytime I see this my jaw drops. how is an 18 anything not super maxed out? you say it is par for the course, but even making characters 4d6 drop the lowest and reroll 1's doesn't guarantee an 18... and that is the most favorable system I have seen.

we alternated between 3 methods of stats in both 2e and 3e 1) 3d6 roll 12 numbers take 6 best put them where you want... almost never had an 18 with that. 2) 4d6 drop the lowest roll in order but then 2-1 trade lowering one stat to raise another (ex. take -2 int to get +1 str) or 3) 4d6 drop the lowest roll 7 numbers drop lowest place any order...

my 'god'(3.0 adding the divine rank 0) game we used roll 3 columns of roll 4d6 re roll 1's and 2's drop lowest 7 numbers per column... and I still had to add "If you don't have an 18 your highest roll becomes an 18" because of the 7 players (yes big group) we had 2 PCs with no 18's....

I've in almost 20 years only seen 2 18/00 strs, and one we know for sure cheated... (he rolled then begged to be allowed to have the 00 because had never gotten an 18 str fighter and since up to that point we had never seen an 18 str fighter the DM said 'go for it')

I took weapon specs (again, standard for any fighter)

I can't remember a single fighter who didn't have it by 3rd level (and I would say most had it at first)

and two weapon fighting (which reduces the penalties for twf - again, pretty standard choices).

well I wouldn't say standard, I did see a lot of them.

You want super maxed out? Let me break out my Faiths and Avatars or Dieties and Demigods and I'll really go to town. This? This is a bog standard fighter in 2e.

I don't remember them having anything for fighters... was it a kit or something that was broken?