D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[EzekielRaiden]

The game is better for having a fairly low amount of variant rules that replace major rules systems.

So much for the "modularity" they sold us on...

 

[M_Natas]

It seems to me that the 5 minute adventure day came from players doing their darnedest to optimize fun into the game - for them. It's less fun for DMs, but more fun for most players - the exceptions being the players of fighter types who get left behind in the "more able to do more fun stuff each encounter" race.

IME, players don't much like per-day limits, and have been grumbling about Vancian magic since the earliest days. Naturally they want to work around the fun-draining effects of this (fun draining for them - it's loads of fun for DMs). The 5 minute day is an effective method of doing so.

More generally, there's the issue of what's fun for DMs is very often not so fun for players, and vice versa. Fora like this highlight the issue because they have more DMs as active participants and so skew things toward the DMs point of view.

(And yes, I'm almost always a DM/GM too. But my touchstone for running a good game is "How does this look from the players' point of view? Would I really want to be a player in a game run like this?")

I'm not sure the 5 minute work day is fun in the long run. In the short run, yes, you feel awesome, but in the long run winning every encounter easily gets boring, because the challenge aspect of the game gets trivilaized.
One of the most common complaints I hear is, that 5e is too easy.
Like, people love Dark Souls because it is hard. Winning an extremely diffifficult encounter while being already low on ressource feels extra satisfying.
Of course everybody has a different threshold for how challenging they like their game, but I doubt a game were every encounter is trivial will make fun in the long run.
But of course, in a game, the moment you find the optimal strategy, many players can't help themselves and need to use them. Like in Baldurs Gate 3, I find myself long resting more often than I would in a Table game, because (so far) taking as many long rests as I want doesn't seem to have a negative impact. But it also takes challenge out of the game and leaves only one challenge - 2x deadly encounters. Either I'm able to win that encounter with 100% ressources or not.

 

[overgeeked]

I'm not sure the 5 minute work day is fun in the long run. In the short run, yes, you feel awesome, but in the long run winning every encounter easily gets boring, because the challenge aspect of the game gets trivilaized.
One of the most common complaints I hear is, that 5e is too easy.
Like, people love Dark Souls because it is hard. Winning an extremely diffifficult encounter while being already low on ressource feels extra satisfying.
Of course everybody has a different threshold for how challenging they like their game, but I doubt a game were every encounter is trivial will make fun in the long run.
But of course, in a game, the moment you find the optimal strategy, many players can't help themselves and need to use them. Like in Baldurs Gate 3, I find myself long resting more often than I would in a Table game, because (so far) taking as many long rests as I want doesn't seem to have a negative impact. But it also takes challenge out of the game and leaves only one challenge - 2x deadly encounters. Either I'm able to win that encounter with 100% ressources or not.

That's what gamers do. Optimize the fun out of games. It's a thing video game designers account for in their designs.

 

[Oofta]

I'm not sure the 5 minute work day is fun in the long run. In the short run, yes, you feel awesome, but in the long run winning every encounter easily gets boring, because the challenge aspect of the game gets trivilaized.
One of the most common complaints I hear is, that 5e is too easy.
Like, people love Dark Souls because it is hard. Winning an extremely diffifficult encounter while being already low on ressource feels extra satisfying.
Of course everybody has a different threshold for how challenging they like their game, but I doubt a game were every encounter is trivial will make fun in the long run.
But of course, in a game, the moment you find the optimal strategy, many players can't help themselves and need to use them. Like in Baldurs Gate 3, I find myself long resting more often than I would in a Table game, because (so far) taking as many long rests as I want doesn't seem to have a negative impact. But it also takes challenge out of the game and leaves only one challenge - 2x deadly encounters. Either I'm able to win that encounter with 100% ressources or not.

Preventing the 5MWD is easy to do as a DM, especially if you use the gritty rest rules. But I agree with the BG3 thing, in the few cases where there's a time constraint they make it obvious. Pretty much always been an issue with D&D videogames.

 

[payn]

They designed 5e around one base.

That ended up not being the most popular base

The miscalculated who would be main game buyers

Everything points to quite the opposite, except of course, your own personal sensibilities.

 

[Minigiant]

Everything points to quite the opposite, except of course, your own personal sensibilities.

The opposite.
The whole 2024 playtest process confirms everything I've said.

The first 7 UA were full of changes the designers have been sitting on for years that they wanted to try because the community doesn't play like they expected in 2014.

Like Jeremy Crawford litterally said the 2014 ranger was a highly played class that had very low satisfaction when surveyed and the druid was a high satisfaction class that no one plays.

They litterally built a game not for its current audience which was balled out by 5e's ease to adjust the "mismatched" rules of ruleset.

 

[FrogReaver]

So much for the "modularity" they sold us on...

IMO. Modularity would have made things worse not better. Like it sounds really good, but it's exponentially harder to make right/balanced/well-designed, which means its usually just rules that all fit badly together.

 

[payn]

The opposite.
The whole 2024 playtest process confirms everything I've said.

The first 7 UA were full of changes the designers have been sitting on for years that they wanted to try because the community doesn't play like they expected in 2014.

Like Jeremy Crawford litterally said the 2014 ranger was a highly played class that had very low satisfaction when surveyed and the druid was a high satisfaction class that no one plays.

They litterally built a game not for its current audience which was balled out by 5e's ease to adjust the "mismatched" rules of ruleset.

I think your taking these comments and findings to the extreme to fit your position. Everyone knows it, well, except you.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Sure, and as shown in the amth in the OP when Wizards are outperforming, the game offers tools to fix that (push their resources harder).

Sure…I’m not sure how that relates to what I said but yeah, you can always increase the incentive to use resources. You don’t even need to add more encounters, most of the time. Adding some enemies to an encounter, and then using exploration challenges that can be solved with spells (and others that can’t, obviously), can also do the job.

But again. Who said that?

Make default Action Surge 1/SR. Variant Action Surge is 3/LR. Call it Action Points

So at the table where they only have 1 big fight per day, the fighter has 3 Action Points to Nova just like the Wizard can vomit all their spell slots.

That's how I run urban adventure where after every fight the group go back home to sleep.

So…what I said is a bad idea to do too much of, that you then said “who said that?”. Got it.

There are two ways to accomplish what you describe, and one involves a Time Machine and I have no reason to think it would have caused the 5e core books to sell more copies. The other, is putting them in splat books, over time, which I have reason to think would cause the bloat problems that lead to edition changes vastly quicker than the current “wait a decade and then don’t even do a new dnd style Ed, just a general publishing one that is just a revision and continuation of the same version of the game”.

Even if we pretend that we can put this stuff in the core books, even if we had that Time Machine, having drastically different major systems in the core books means supporting drastically different major systems in secondary books, which leads to the same problem as above.

Can you build a game to work like that without those problems? Absolutely! I am striving to do so right now as I revise my game into alpha version 5ish based on a year or so of playing version 4ish.

But it looks very different from a recognizable D&D.

What’s more, making every class have specific class feature based need (not general healing need) of both types of rests is a better solution that can be easily applied in the revised core books, and it fixes the problem for large swathes of those who experience it, because “we don’t really get short rests” either goes away or sucks for every PC.

I mean, my ideal rest and recovery system is

• short rest: a quick breather at the end of a scene that gets you a few resources back and you can spend one resource to get back a more urgent resource (treating injury or stress, which makes them go down a track a little and makes it less expensive to recover from them with a long rest), which takes a few minutes*
• long rest: a rest of several hours with a limited ability to make it a 2-3 hours, and you get back roughly twice what a short rest does, but it still isn’t everything and you still have to spend resources at the end of the rest to get more benefit of resting where it’s more urgent (spending attribute points to recover from injury and stress, for instance)
  • You cannot shorten a long rest to the same degree again until you complete an extended rest, so basically the minimum time to rest gets longer as you are out where you can’t take an extended rest
• Full or Extended Rest: downtime which is spent partially in recovey so that when you are done you are fully restored, barring permanent Scars (lasting injuries that impart new vulnerabilities), with field treatment helping to shorten how much of your downtime is spent in recovery and help your chance of avoiding a permanent scar
  • Even here there are ways you might decide to spend attribute points, which are always spent at the end of the rest, to like force a downtime endeavor to succeed or repair a relationship you failed to repair in the field, or to train a new ability without spending the normal requisite time, etc,
  • Extended rest has to be in a safe haven where you can fully let your guard down (even if you don’t, it matters that you could) and must be at least 1 week, but endeavors all have time they take so you can’t always do everything you need to do, and might need to use resources like favors or calling on a contact to get some of it done

*I’ve considered having each short rest before a long rest take longer, but it’s too much book keeping and just isn’t fun, so it’s always just a few minutes.

So much for the "modularity" they sold us on...

Okay? Did they advertise the 5e PHB on that idea?

I don’t care that an idea they had a decade ago at the beginning of a playtest didn’t survive the playtest and make it into the game, and instead they put some additive variants rules systems in the DMG and then expand on them in adventures and setting books, without ever going further afield than some rest and recovery variants and some options to make horror or honor or reputation or piety have mechanical weight in a campaign.

 

[Minigiant]

IMO. Modularity would have made things worse not better. Like it sounds really good, but it's exponentially harder to make right/balanced/well-designed, which means its usually just rules that all fit badly together.

Why?
WOTC has the formulas they designed the game around. It's just math.

5 times per short rest with an assumption of 2 short rests per long rest is 15 times per long rests.

So…what I said is a bad idea to do too much of, that you then said “who said that?”. Got it.

No I said that the DMG was rushed and focused on old school, dungeon heavy gamers, they missed their chance to add rules for not-old-school-dungeon-only-gamers. And old school, dungeon heavy gamers ended up not being the majority of the audience.

However like you said. It's a bad to do it afterwards.

The window was the DMG.

Thus they wisely did nothing and are waiting until their 2024 DMG to produce variants and guidance for their actual audience. Or in the case of the PHB adjusting base resources to match their audience.