D&D General Why Unbalanced Combat Encounters Can Enhance Your Dungeons & Dragons Experience

[James Gasik]

Even if you hadn't been able to pump saving throw DCs 3.5 spells would still have been broken because there were enough spells that you could always prepare to go in aimed at a low saving throw. (And don't get me started on the 3.0 -> 3.5 changes that made almost all conjuration spells ignore spell resistance while mostly already being good, making SR and even spell immunity very weak).

It's more functional than you think if you play it the way the 3.0 designers imagined. Such as clerics spend most of their spells on healing (and no one makes wands of cure light wounds) and wizards theirs on direct damage evocations.

Of course, continuing this aside, it was ridiculous that they thought not only would everyone play that way, that nobody would ever think of a more efficient way to play. Or, as someone else summed up: “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Of course, continuing this aside, it was ridiculous that they thought not only would everyone play that way, that nobody would ever think of a more efficient way to play. Or, as someone else summed up: “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”.

It was not as ridiculous as it seems now; they did playtest it with veteran 2e players. And that sort of play was good 2e strategy because of the way 2e saving throws worked. If you approached 3.0 as if it was 2e it worked. (There's no excuse for 3.5).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's reasonable to start with aggressive same game testing of your monsters,

This implies you have not actually published the system yet. You obviously should do intensive testing while the system is still being developed. I was responding specifically to the question of how to rework an existing system that is not well-structured in order to make its difficulty measure (CR, XP budget, whatever it is called) actually effective.

Going through and comprehensively retesting the entire catalogue of 5e monsters NOW, after 9 years of updates, is not going to be remotely easy, let alone practical, especially if you aren't allowed to make major changes to the rules. That's why I was underselling the benefits of the second approach.

If we were only considering doing things from the very beginning, the best choice is technically the first: do it right the first time by building a ruleset that is self-consistent and functional. Normal everyday playtesting will then serve you quite well, no need to do anything specially intensive.

 

[James Gasik]

It was not as ridiculous as it seems now; they did playtest it with veteran 2e players. And that sort of play was good 2e strategy because of the way 2e saving throws worked. If you approached 3.0 as if it was 2e it worked. (There's no excuse for 3.5).

I mean, I guess, but it didn't take very long for people to figure out the better options. Though, I suppose, in fairness, the internet was the big factor there.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Even if you hadn't been able to pump saving throw DCs 3.5 spells would still have been broken because there were enough spells that you could always prepare to go in aimed at a low saving throw. (And don't get me started on the 3.0 -> 3.5 changes that made almost all conjuration spells ignore spell resistance while mostly already being good, making SR and even spell immunity very weak).

It's more functional than you think if you play it the way the 3.0 designers imagined. Such as clerics spend most of their spells on healing (and no one makes wands of cure light wounds) and wizards theirs on direct damage evocations.

Oh, sure, but I am a strong believer in playing a game for what it is, not what others think it should have been at some point.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean, I guess, but it didn't take very long for people to figure out the better options. Though, I suppose, in fairness, the internet was the big factor there.

It is worth noting that even the Internet didn't suss out 3e's problems right away. Monks were expected to be brokenly powerful because the poor interaction with the full attack action wasn't clear, and the in-practice minimal usefulness of many Monk features was not obvious.

Ironically, Monk is a solid gestalt option to add on top of some other class (especially full-casters, doubly so if you can base your Monk stuff on your casting stat if it isn't Wis), and it is so for most of the reasons people thought Monk would be good, lots of passive buffs and benefits. It's just not nearly good enough to stand on its own in most cases. I'm not even sure the "play it like it's 2e" principle is enough to really address that.

 

[James Gasik]

Oh, sure, but I am a strong believer in playing a game for what it is, not what others think it should have been at some point.

It's just to illustrate what went wrong with Challenge Rating; it worked for the way the game was assumed to be played, and WotC was, at the time, fairly open about their assumptions (Monte Cook's comments about "ivory tower" design notwithstanding).

Now that they mostly tried to patch the game behind the scenes to adjust for this new style of play, without being quite as transparent about it (and even when they were, with the polymorph nerf or the magic item overhaul, you had to buy a book!) is pretty reprehensible.

They came out and admit they made a math error in 4e...though the way they "fixed" the problem was ridiculous ("hey, you wanted less feats, right?").

But with 5e, not only have they never been really clear about what the baseline assumptions were (other than, "we balance around hit points and damage"*), they continued to make some of the same old mistakes, and, again, when they do figure out what the baseline is, they didn't come out and say what their assumptions were- they just adjusted them for new products they could sell us.

*I could rant about this one point for hours. So don't balance for super high AC's. Or strange accuracy boosting. Or hard control effects. Nope! Can some imaginary party we made up in our heads take X damage and deal Y damage back? Great!

And what does that party consist of, at this point? Are we assuming that everyone has switched to playing Tasha's subclasses? Is the Twilight Cleric the benchmark for design now? What happens to people who are still playing older subclasses? Are they considered subpar?

Or if you make a weak subclass, are you saying that the older ones are too good? Like, say every Barbarian subclass is weaker than Totem Warrior (this is an example, if you don't believe this, I'm not trying to start a fight over it. I've never played a Barbarian in 5e, and I've only ever DM'd for one of them, and he was a Totem Warrior, so I have no basis of comparison). It Totem Warrior OP? Does it need to be nerfed?

Are they just expecting the DM's and player base to figure that out on their own?

 

[James Gasik]

It is worth noting that even the Internet didn't suss out 3e's problems right away. Monks were expected to be brokenly powerful because the poor interaction with the full attack action wasn't clear, and the in-practice minimal usefulness of many Monk features was not obvious.

Ironically, Monk is a solid gestalt option to add on top of some other class (especially full-casters, doubly so if you can base your Monk stuff on your casting stat if it isn't Wis), and it is so for most of the reasons people thought Monk would be good, lots of passive buffs and benefits. It's just not nearly good enough to stand on its own in most cases. I'm not even sure the "play it like it's 2e" principle is enough to really address that.

The 3e Monk has been analyzed to death, and like every iteration of the class, is hotly contested to this very day. I remember BESM 3.5, when trying to analyze the power level of each class to gauge how strong their new classes should be, rated the Monk as the most powerful by a staggering degree because they got new abilities at each level. And even if some of those abilities weren't very strong, you still earned more than other classes.

What they missed, obviously, was how those abilities would be used in play. I've had long arguments with people who honestly believed Monk was some kind of OP, caster killer class that dominated in their games. How? I have no idea. Was the campaign magic rich? Magic poor? Did the Monk get good support? What Feats did they take? Did they roll stats? Custom races? Did they misunderstand the rules? Are their players super lucky or cheating cheaters?

No clue. It quickly became one of those dreaded arguments, on the level of politics or religion, where it wasn't about facts, it was about how people felt about the class. This persists to this day with 5e Monks.

You can bring out math and a power point presentation, but if someone feels a Monk is good, nothing will change that opinion.

This Monk rant has been brought to you by the letter J.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Are they just expecting the DM's and player base to figure that out on their own?

Yes. This is one of my greatest problems with 5e. It is, very literally, the "[shrug] eh, figure it out yourself" edition. It barely lifts a finger to help or guide DMs, offers weak or even bad tools to support them, and expects groups to resolve every design problem on their own, regardless of whether that is reasonable or even doable.

There is a very real (and very not good) reason why so many threads out there of 5e DMs asking for advice or assistance got met, usually within the first handful of replies, with some variation of "you're the DM! You figure it out!" As though it were unthinkable that a DM might want someone else's suggestions in order to come to a decision!

 

[James Gasik]

Yes. This is one of my greatest problems with 5e. It is, very literally, the "[shrug] eh, figure it out yourself" edition. It barely lifts a finger to help or guide DMs, offers weak or even bad tools to support them, and expects groups to resolve every design problem on their own, regardless of whether that is reasonable or even doable.

There is a very real (and very not good) reason why so many threads out there of 5e DMs asking for advice or assistance got met, usually within the first handful of replies, with some variation of "you're the DM! You figure it out!" As though it were unthinkable that a DM might want someone else's suggestions in order to come to a decision!

I've seen a lot of those threads, and I never understood it. Unfortunately it's not unique to this edition; I remember people asking for help in 3.5, and almost inevitably someone would say "follow wealth by level and you won't have any problems!".

Followed by the inevitable "well I've been playing and/or running this game for X years and I've never seen this problem you are talking about" (left unsaid, but heavily implied: "so it cannot exist").