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

[Umbran]

Balance does not automatically equal fun, 4th edition is a testament to that.

That last, is of course, true. Balance does not equal fun. And I already said that the issues lack of balance creates can often be handled by the GM.

But, this admits that the issues *exist*, and are not a figment of the forum's imagination. And fixing this way requires the GM be aware of the potential issues, and how to fix them. Dealing well doesn't happen automatically. So, as a designer, it usually behooves you to at least make some nods to minimizing the problem, so your GMs don't have to have so much expertise up-front.

A well designed game is purely subjective. There is no science to it like there is with say a car's engine.

Yes... and no.

If you're making a game for yourself, or for your particular group, you can say things are totally subjective, yes.

But, the larger the market you're going with, the more statistics becomes relevant. There are points of design that become good or bad, based on how well they work for how many people. And not all of that is merely fashion - there's some pretty well established factors of human interaction that we can say are broadly applicable, and should be taken into consideration. If you fail to do so, you'll have what is, for the intent and purpose of selling D&D, a bad design. If you take them into consideration properly, you're more likely to have what your market will consider a good design.

As an example - I am highly educated in mathematics. You could produce a game that requires players to solve differential equations, and I might have fun with it. But really, for anyone who doesn't have college-level mathematics education, it would be phenomenally bad design. The number of people such a design would be good for is so small, that it should be disregarded, and we should just call that a bad design, and be done with it.

Moreover, we also ought to admit that not all of our problems with a game have to do with the game design.

 

[Shemeska]

I'm talking about the myth that a lot of people somehow want all classes to be balanced when it comes to combat and damage.

I suspect that you're correct by and large.

Most people I've played with seem to pick a character's class not based on any in-depth examination of DPR, optimization guides, or anything remotely similar. They tend to play a rogue, or a bard, or a paladin, or a sorcerer because it seems cool, they haven't played one before/in a while, and they've come up with a character concept/history that works well with one or another class.

I generally play in long-term campaigns, and I pick a character based on a personality and history, and if they're interesting to me to play through their eyes for a long time. Last character I played was in a 3.5 game, she was a half-faerie-dragon wizard/sorcerer/ultimate magus. Special snowflake character to the extreme, and utterly totally godawfuly underpowered for the period when the campaign was active (before Google stole our GM by offering him a job in California). Yet I had a -blast- playing her, for reasons almost totally divorced from her class abilities. I also plucked her character concept for a minor NPC in the planar Pathfinder game I'm now running.

I suspect but of course can't prove, that it's a bit of an ideological divide here between people focused on the mechanical portion of a character and those focused on the less able to be defined 'does the concept sound cool to me' portion of a character.

 

[ImperatorK]

The possibility of say "Pun Pun" for instance, doesn't bother me because I know no DM worth his hat would allow something like that.

It doesn't take a Pun Pun to make the game unfun for a player.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I want to focus on this. Anytime I was in a game where this came up, the DM simply said "sorry, that's not going to be used in my games".

The possibility of say "Pun Pun" for instance, doesn't bother me because I know no DM worth his hat would allow something like that.

I don't want excessive amounts of time spent on trying to balance everything when a simple "no" from a DM will suffice. I also don't want creative and still balance rules to be eliminated just because when paired with another set of options could lead to a possibility of something being overpowered.

Usually I am the DM and usually I say no. things like pun pun won´t ever happen in my game, and insisting, that damage on a miss will allow a great sword fighter to always hit anything too... its not what what I mean.

The problem is there, if a class totally faills at what it should be good at. I had new players being very frustrated when they never were able to contribute meaningful, because someone did obscure multiclass combos etc...

I really would not like an overfokus on balance to prevent absurd scenarios, like some people proposed in 4e (missing on purpose to get bigger effects than when they hit, paladins hiding to make combat challenge autokilling a dragon), but I also don´t want people to feel that their character is so weak, that they should not bother drawing their sword...

 

[GMforPowergamers]

How do you tell a player no? especially when they didn't cheat to do it?

2 examples, both real world things that happened.


1)New player at your table at a LGS, you don't really know him but he seems cool, and has gotten along fine with everyone although a bit shy. You role played him meeting the party in town, and he joins you going to the dungeon, and the 1st combat starts. He rolls init, and the fight starts. Your orc awesome bad guy goes to charge, and he says "Attack of op, my chain gives me reach." then trips with such a high plus that even though he rolled a 6 and you rolled a 19 he still won... wow everyone laughs, then the second orc moves in and he says "Combat reflexes attack of op," so of the 5 orcs 4 of them are on there backs... then when they go to stand he trips them again... second fight is against this awesome black guard oger you built... he trips him even with the size difference, and the oger is out of range to attack, and has to move to get up and gets triped again...
This is his tactic, control the battle field. You decide that his tactic doesn't work well against range attacks so you quickly make a tribe of gnoll archers and have them attack at the dungeon door, but he charges into the ranks of them, and owns them. now what? he isn't a good friend, but by using rules you didn't see comeing (feats from5 books and a magic item from a 6th plus a combo of 4 classes on his 5th level character)

[sblock=what happen] I was playing a ninja in this game, and that player didn't understand why we wanted him to tone down the character he thought we were 'picking on him' becse he was new. ['sblock]

2) You have two good friends who roll almost the exact same stats and decide they are playing brothers... this was not planed. one is a paliden who's back story is he is one of the best swordsmen in the land, he is a fighter 2/Paliden 4 the other one is his younger near do well brother who mostly did some shady things with the local thieves guild then got himself in trouble with a dark fey lord.. he is a swordsage 1/ Warlock 5. In game the first fight we learn that the younger brother has a higher AC, no big deal really... except most of his attacks are touch attacks, and he can add his eldritch blast to sword damage. The paliden player feels upset, he is the swordsman that needs higher numbers on his D20 to hit, and even on a smite crit does what the other player does on average for damage.

[Sblock=what I did] in retrospect I made a mistake, I was DMing here, I put a +4 Holy Avenger in game that had 5 spell like abilities on it, and I made rings of phantom armor that my main bad guys had that made there armor count vs touch AC... game didn't last long anyway [/sblock]


[sblock=a success story] in 4e we had a ranger that was ending fights multi in a row. He had this combo where when he crit he got a action point he could spend without it counting against his action point for the fight, and he had an armor that he could spend action points to regain dailies. The first time he killed a quarried target in a fight he got an action point too. He had a maxed out dex and wis and a super bow and I don't know what.
he almost always went 1st due to high intuitive (no other PC ever came close) when he action pointed the tac lord gave bonuses that normally meant he hit on 5's and he got 4 or 5 attacks

When I asked him to tone it down he did... he still did more damage then the rest of the party on average (theif/tac lord/wizard/swordmage) but it wasn't killing 4 or 5 targets in the opening round.
[/sblock]

 

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

I suspect but of course can't prove, that it's a bit of an ideological divide here between people focused on the mechanical portion of a character and those focused on the less able to be defined 'does the concept sound cool to me' portion of a character.

What if my concept is I'm the warrior queen who has trained to be one of the best warriors in the land? what class do I pick to match my concep

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Balance is an old concern, and pre-dates forums. How classes were balanced has changed, and finding it can be elusive...but there is nothing new here.

One possible reason: players don't like characters that feel conspicuously underpowered. I have never met one, across many personality types and editions. Very few of those players ever spent any time on forums like this one.

I've had a similar experience: Pretty much everyone cares about balance to some degree or another. I've only known one player in all my years of gaming who seemed to sacrifice everything for character concept. And I think it's interesting to note, though, that he was not a D&Der; his game of choice was a hard scifi rpg, which he would have undoubtedly played every day instead of D&D if he could find a group really interested in that rpg. I’ve known him to actually sigh and roll his eyes at D&Disms of every edition, which makes sense to me because D&D has always been pretty gamey.

From my own experience, the balance issue is not an actual issue at all. I'm sure your miles may vary, and it may be an issue for you but it's not for me and the many people that I deal with.

I've had a different experience. Pretty much everyone cares about encounter balance; some more, some less. New players may not be familiar with terms like DPR, and most of them don’t regularly compare damage totals to find out who can do the most. But they’re not stupid; they know when one character is conspicuously under- or over-powered, as TerraDave says. And with a single exception, I’ve never met a player who’s 100% hunky-dorey with certain characters consistently contributing more or less to the game than others, and to combat in particular. Nobody (with one exception) ever felt 100% okay after realizing that “Gee, my character sucks because I wanted to play [cool-looking concept that actually sucks in play]!”


Oh, and very few of the gamers I’ve known post on D&D forums, ever.


So naturally, when some ‘net poster claims to have never met anyone who cares about balance in 27 years of gaming, I can’t help but suspect that there’s more to the situation than meets the eye. Even if you’re not consciously doing so, you’re probably selecting people to game with who’re likely to care less about balance via your choice of edition/clone, and via personal relationships. There are also probably players who gamed with you for a short while, and then left for unspecified or misleading reasons rather than telling you “I want a more balanced game!" Then of course there’s confirmation bias, and probably a certain degree of innocent forgetfulness when it comes to the occasional instance where game imbalance causes a player at your table to frown or have a poor game night.


That said, I hope that 5e throws balance out the window. That way I won’t even be tempted to waste money on it.

 

[Shemeska]

What if my concept is I'm the warrior queen who has trained to be one of the best warriors in the land? what class do I pick to match my concep

What concept you begin with of course has to be constrained by does it fit within the campaign setting, what level is everyone starting with, etc. These are all things I find best discussed with the DM when everyone is coming up with what they want to play. Not everything will work, some will need to be adjusted to fit, etc.

 

[billd91]

How do you tell a player no? especially when they didn't cheat to do it?

2 examples, both real world things that happened.


1)New player at your table at a LGS, you don't really know him but he seems cool, and has gotten along fine with everyone although a bit shy. You role played him meeting the party in town, and he joins you going to the dungeon, and the 1st combat starts. He rolls init, and the fight starts. Your orc awesome bad guy goes to charge, and he says "Attack of op, my chain gives me reach." then trips with such a high plus that even though he rolled a 6 and you rolled a 19 he still won... wow everyone laughs, then the second orc moves in and he says "Combat reflexes attack of op," so of the 5 orcs 4 of them are on there backs... then when they go to stand he trips them again... second fight is against this awesome black guard oger you built... he trips him even with the size difference, and the oger is out of range to attack, and has to move to get up and gets triped again...
This is his tactic, control the battle field. You decide that his tactic doesn't work well against range attacks so you quickly make a tribe of gnoll archers and have them attack at the dungeon door, but he charges into the ranks of them, and owns them. now what? he isn't a good friend, but by using rules you didn't see comeing (feats from5 books and a magic item from a 6th plus a combo of 4 classes on his 5th level character)


2) You have two good friends who roll almost the exact same stats and decide they are playing brothers... this was not planed. one is a paliden who's back story is he is one of the best swordsmen in the land, he is a fighter 2/Paliden 4 the other one is his younger near do well brother who mostly did some shady things with the local thieves guild then got himself in trouble with a dark fey lord.. he is a swordsage 1/ Warlock 5. In game the first fight we learn that the younger brother has a higher AC, no big deal really... except most of his attacks are touch attacks, and he can add his eldritch blast to sword damage. The paliden player feels upset, he is the swordsman that needs higher numbers on his D20 to hit, and even on a smite crit does what the other player does on average for damage.

How do you tell a player no? You say "We're not using that for this campaign." It's not that hard. I'd say that about the warlock, a class that's been problematic when I've run game with them because they don't fit D&D's resource-tracking structures. On the players making comparisons, I discourage it. The snapshot may indicate there are inequalities, but there are things that don't appear in the numbers - like how the PCs are viewed by the locals - and the numbers change over time. It's not a game about snapshot comparisons, but about how the story develops over time.

As far as the issue with the tripping chain-wielder, why are the orcs rushing in like Keystone Cops? Once the first, maybe the second is tripped, why aren't the others advancing more carefully and denying the AoO? Why is the ogre, who also has reach, out of range but within the chain-wielder's reach? And if he's cherry picking the heck out of classes (4 in 5 levels, really?!?), why aren't you saying no or approving his character's build? Doing that with a bunch of spell casters may gimp him pretty badly, but anything else sounds like a quest for exploitive combos.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

Singling out one element out of 4th edition and saying that edition's failure is due to it is a fallacious argument. Otherwise, you could single out any other element unique to 4th and attribute its failure to it.

Now, if your argument is "Combat balance shouldn't be the be-all, end-all objective of D&D Next", then I am right there with you. But if you're saying that combat balance would doom Next because it has doomed 4th ed before, well count me out.

Combat balance IS important IMO, but it's not the only important thing.
And at the risk of being controversial, I'll even go as far as saying that combat balance is MORE important in D&D than in a lot of other RPGs because combat is such an important part of the system, no matter what edition you're playing.

For me, there are a lot of reasons why 4th edition failed me as a player but balance was not one of them. One of the results came from the almost anal approach to balance. A lot of avenues for me were closed off and I didn't feel free like I do when playing older editions.

The rogue, or barbarian, or even fighter don't necessarily have to be balanced with each other. These classes don't have to mechanically work as a single unit. The fighter may do more damage during combat but the rogue saved our ass by negotiating with the king using his silver tongue to get us out of a jam. The problem is trying to measure contribution.