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

[Ahnehnois]

Well, they are powerful....but there are many other people out there nearly as powerful.
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We've always played that the PCs are exceptional. Their abilities are all but unknown except for the most powerful people in the world. There are powerful people, but most of them are just really, really good at fighting. Wizards and spell casters are 1 in 100 or less than that.

This seems contradictory to me. Are the PCs better than everyone else, or is there a significant group of powerful monsters and high-level NPCs that are better than them even when they become very powerful?

Just like the challenges they faced before that. And the challenges I faced the last time I played a game. Also the time before that. And every game since I started playing D&D 20 years ago. In fact, I can't think of a single time the enemies reacted to our abilities or attempted to preempt them.

If that's what you want to do, okay. But there's nothing in the rules that prevents the DM from having characters that are not you take actions that affect you without your knowledge. Especially if your characters are rich and famous.

I think of it the same way I think of the Forgotten Realms novels. In them, Bruenor Battlehammer is the king of Mithril Hall. He was listed as a 13th level fighter in the 3e FR books. He is likely much higher level by the time some of the later books happen. He has no idea how teleportation magic works. His kingdom isn't especially warded against anyone teleporting in. He has some Clerics in his Clan, but almost none of them are as powerful as he is. This is a major Dwarven kingdom, as well. Drizzt is equally high level and knows very little about magic.

When they fight Wizards, they do so by dodging out of the way of their spells and killing them with pure swordplay. There's no anticipating their abilities or preempting them.

They also fairly often stay in inns.

Well, novels are secondary to the game, and a bit of a sketchy area. Seems to me that Drizzt would have the same spell resistance as the rest of his race, though, right? Having not read them, I can't speak to the rest of this. However, if you are expecting the game to match the novels, but the players and DM are not taking any active steps to create that outcome, it seems unlikely to occur to me.

To be fair, it would likely be that easy in the Star Trek universe, what with the whole "Humans have evolved beyond crime" thing they have going on. No one would expect it or likely have any defense against it.

Still, there's a difference between technology and magic. In Star Trek, there are likely millions of engineers that are inventing things.
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In D&D, magic items are created by wizards who are a very small percentage of the population using an art steeped in mystery and obfuscation.

I don't buy that. Even using the very conservative DMG demographics, there are plenty of high-level spellcasters in the world of the common races, let alone all the powerful monsters, some of which also have spellcasting classes. Conversely, in Star Trek, it's abundantly clear that most people are civilians who have no idea how technology works, and that defenses and law and order are the responsibility of a small number of people with very (often conveniently) powerful technologies to stop nefarious acts. I don't think there's a huge difference.

These kinds of protections aren't the sort of thing that you'll find at every bank or every monster lair in the world. Even the powerful ones. Just because the book says there is a spell or magic item to protect against something, I don't immediately assume the bad guys have it. In fact, rather the opposite. I find the specific creation of counter measures against the PCs' abilities to be rather contrived and unlikely without a REALLY good reason. If the bad guys have a powerful wizard and I've decided he knows the spell that would counter the PCs and he has seen them use it before and they've given him reason to believe they'll be back AND they give him time to cast it...sure, they might be countered.

I see no reason why any character who lived in a world in which the entire D&D monster manual of creatures exists would feel particularly safe in his home without some pretty special defenses. If you're suggesting that that high-level characters can dominate inferior opposition, that's true, because D&D has a very sharp power curve. If you're suggesting that there is no such thing as non-inferior opposition, or that a DM using the rules to create challenges is inappropriate for some unstated reason, I don't buy that.

Oddly enough, I took the magazine at its word when it said "For adventurers level 15 to 19". I assumed they were publishing adventures that would work fine at that level. The DMG didn't tell me I needed to do anything special to run a game at 16th level vs 1st level. It said to pick monsters of the appropriate CRs and use the same combat rules I'd been using since the beginning.

D&D never told me there was some sort of special procedure I needed to go through to run a high level game. I figured that since the magazine was being published in concert with the people who created the game, they would know if published adventures were a bad idea and wouldn't publish them if that was the case.

I can only imagine what results that brings. One thing that I think is clear from the entire period since WotC started publishing D&D (I can't speak too much to before that) is that they do not understand their own game all that well. If you're saying that the original DMG really doesn't explain high level play well, or that their magazines published material that didn't use the rules competently, that's probably true. I'm not arguing that.

I also, as I'm guessing you're aware, have never had any faith in the ability of some anonymous far-off designer to craft challenges that work reliably for specific D&D groups, regardless of the rules.

I do not count either of these things as reflecting on the PHB rules for how characters are built.

The brute monsters worked just fine as monsters against the non-magic classes. It was only the casters that often made them useless.

Really? In my experience a so-called brute would have to be well-off the CR chart to present even a modest challenge to even a very one-dimensional martial PC.

I'm sure there ARE rules for creating ones that work better. However, I'd rather not limit myself to a small collection of monsters out of all of them that are available simply because spellcasters were created with poor balance in the game.

How about limiting yourself to a large collection? There are a boatload of well-designed monsters, and ample guidelines for monster advancement using class-based and non-class-based methods. All told, there aren't many things in the MM that can't be made into a legitimate high-level challenge.

However, putting custom-designed high-level PCs against generic monsters straight out of the book is an inherently unfair matchup, and often won't work. Given that the challenges are optimized to a similar extent that the PCs are, or even to some significant but lesser extent, they will be a lot more challenging.

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But even all of that dodges the bigger issue: walk into a 20' by 20' room and smash the monster who is sitting there doing nothing is not really an appropriate challenge for a high-level character, regardless of what capacities said monster has. I would argue it isn't really appropriate for any character, but especially at high levels, dungeoncrawling breaks down. As well it should.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

This thread is broken!!! We are so busy Argueing about why the system does or doesn't work we forgot we are all looking for better.

Any system works with enough effort why is it wrong to ask for it to work with less effort and bra bit more balanced the 3e was?

 

[billd91]

This thread is broken!!! We are so busy Argueing about why the system does or doesn't work we forgot we are all looking for better.

Any system works with enough effort why is it wrong to ask for it to work with less effort and bra bit more balanced the 3e was?

As with anything, the question is "At what cost?" It doesn't matter if the math or balance has been perfected (for someone's definition of perfect) if the game doesn't feel like D&D (or Traveller, or Call of Cthulhu) any more. By whose definition is that a better game or, more specifically, a better Traveller, a better D&D, a better Call of Cthulhu? It could be a better game for some but a worse example of a specific game to another - heck, it could actually be both for the same person. And that's because we're not all looking for the same things in our games nor in our specific games.

So, though many of us really are looking for a "better" D&D, we're not going to necessarily agree on what that is.

 

[Jacob Marley]

This thread is broken!!! We are so busy Argueing about why the system does or doesn't work we forgot we are all looking for better.

Any system works with enough effort why is it wrong to ask for it to work with less effort and bra bit more balanced the 3e was?

Even if two people agree that a system doesn't work, they may still disagree about why that system doesn't work; and thus how to go about fixing it (i.e. making it 'better').

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Even if two people agree that a system doesn't work, they may still disagree about why that system doesn't work; and thus how to go about fixing it (i.e. making it 'better').

but in this case we aren't even talking about the same game, we are so far apart with experiences that even 2 GMs with 15+ years of running the game and years of running not just for there own group but at Cons have almost opposite experiences...

how do we discuse a base line when there are atleast 5 different sets of experences talking past each other?

 

[Ahnehnois]

how do we discuse a base line when there are atleast 5 different sets of experences talking past each other?

Perhaps by ignoring those experiences and sticking to more abstract ideas?

That was the thesis for this thread, wasn't it? Something as minute as the relative competence of two classes in addressing a specific game scenario varies so much from table to table, and the expectations for what those relative competencies will be vary so much from table to table, that it is completely pointless to write game rules with the end goal of providing one particular game experience that holds true for all of those tables.

That is to say, our differing experiences (i.e. I find the martial classes as good or better in most cases, you find the opposite) don't prove anything about the rules so much as they prove that the balance you're talking about is not a property of those rules but of our individual gaming tables.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That is to say, our differing experiences (i.e. I find the martial classes as good or better in most cases, you find the opposite) don't prove anything about the rules so much as they prove that the balance you're talking about is not a property of those rules but of our individual gaming tables.

So you think anyone who has a problem you do not should be ignored?

There still has to be a better way...

This is not just an Internet problem for a not insignfacant amount of us how do we fix it with out stepping on others tows?

 

[Ahnehnois]

So you think anyone who has a problem you do not should be ignored?

No. Anyone who has a problem that can't be solved through the rules of the game should be ignored in discussions of said rules, regardless of whether I do or do not experience said issue.

This is not just an Internet problem for a not insignfacant amount of us how do we fix it with out stepping on others tows?

My theory on these things is much like this. If you watch a movie, and you start complaining about plot holes and implausibilities, the problem is not so much the plot holes as it is that the movie failed to capture your imagination. Similarly, if you're playing an rpg, and you experience some failure in gameplay, the problem isn't that this part of the rules is broken, it's that the game failed to capture your imagination.

To me, that capturing the imagination stuff is between the DM and the players and the best thing the rules can do is stay out of the way of good gaming. So my fix is minimalism. Vague, abstract abilities. Simple, unrestricted character creation. Clear resolution mechanics. That is, the ideals of what the d20 mechanic by itself, without all those pesky legacy elements, brings to the table.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

No. Anyone who has a problem that can't be solved through the rules of the game should be ignored in discussions of said rules, regardless of whether I do or do not experience said issue.

perfect... since 4e solved a lot of the balance problem by changing mechanics it proves that it CAN be solved through rules... so since we both agree we can discuses things that can be changed by rules we can discuses balancing classes...

I was so glade you wrote this it is the closest I've come to someone in this thread seeing my point...

 

[Ahnehnois]

perfect... since 4e solved a lot of the balance problem

At your table maybe. Not at mine.