Wizards are too stronk! Plz nerf!

[Schwann145]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwXlqkV7PRs

I think I might bookmark this video for all the future "complain about spells" threads that inevitably pop up. :smalltongue:

[Amnestic]

Would you care to summarise for someone (me) who doesn't want to watch a 9 minute video?

[Unoriginal]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwXlqkV7PRs

I think I might bookmark this video for all the future "complain about spells" threads that inevitably pop up. :smalltongue:

Would you mind writing a summary?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Here's the thing. The existence of "bad" spells is only an issue because it's a waste of book space. Nothing else. Because those bad spells? Just get ignored unless someone intentionally chooses them. The only spells that matter for balance are the strongest ones in any given comparable group. And the strongest spells are way out of bounds.

This is different from class features, because those you don't have a choice.

Effectively, D&D spellcasting is broken by design. And I don't mean "broken" as in "OP." I mean "broken as in non-functional from a system design perspective. Impossible to balance."

[ZRN]

Here's the thing. The existence of "bad" spells is only an issue because it's a waste of book space. Nothing else. Because those bad spells? Just get ignored unless someone intentionally chooses them. The only spells that matter for balance are the strongest ones in any given comparable group. And the strongest spells are way out of bounds.

This is different from class features, because those you don't have a choice.

Effectively, D&D spellcasting is broken by design. And I don't mean "broken" as in "OP." I mean "broken as in non-functional from a system design perspective. Impossible to balance."

Not impossible, just hard. They've had a decade to figure out which spells are a problem, and you could probably fix 90% of the issues before level 15 and maybe 50% of the problem from 16-20 by addressing a couple dozen specific spells (shield, forcecage, etc).

[Dr.Samurai]

Would you care to summarise for someone (me) who doesn't want to watch a 9 minute video?
I think it's a joke post, because the video is just a wizard that's not familiar with his spells solo'ing a troll and refusing to use Fireball.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Not impossible, just hard. They've had a decade to figure out which spells are a problem, and you could probably fix 90% of the issues before level 15 and maybe 50% of the problem from 16-20 by addressing a couple dozen specific spells (shield, forcecage, etc).

For now. But the underlying problem is that it's unstable under change. There are no limits to what a spell can do, only limits on what has been written.

[Schwann145]

Would you care to summarise for someone (me) who doesn't want to watch a 9 minute video?

In my own words:
"There is a reason that most casters all end up with near identical spell choices (prepared/known) and that's because the vast majority of spells are actually somewhere between 'outright bad' and 'mostly disappointing. Here is an example of how miserable the gameplay is of a Wizard who doesn't default to the small handful of proven good spells.'"

[PhoenixPhyre]

In my own words:
"There is a reason that most casters all end up with near identical spell choices (prepared/known) and that's because the vast majority of spells are actually somewhere between 'outright bad' and 'mostly disappointing. Here is an example of how miserable the gameplay is of a Wizard who doesn't default to the small handful of proven good spells.'"

And that's a problem. That doesn't justify them being strong--it gives impetus to fixing the whole thing so that doesn't happen! Mostly by actually giving them fixed, working class features and relegating spell choice to a much smaller, less all-important sphere. Because as long as spell choice is everything, this will happen and cannot be fixed or even ameliorated.

[Nagog]

To be entirely fair, the reasons spellcasters are ridiculously powerful (and most especially Wizards) is because their character creation is 95% clay: You can play the same subclass of Wizard a dozen different times and each time play it entirely differently because the spellbook is the majority of their actual character sheet. With that level of Free Reign, those who know the system well can make some crazy powerful stuff, while those less familiar with the system are typically less so.

Compare to Fighters, who are bricks. Base class is a brick, subclass is a brick, and feats are the little bits of clay between them. Skills are a smidge of clay as well, as is background, but even then, you can't make nearly as much with two bricks and a handful of clay as you can with three and a half handfuls of clay.

[Schwann145]

And that's a problem. That doesn't justify them being strong--it gives impetus to fixing the whole thing so that doesn't happen!

Totally, absolutely, agreed.
But we both know that will never happen. They tried in 4e and are still reeling from the backlash. :smalltongue:

[PhoenixPhyre]

Totally, absolutely, agreed.
But we both know that will never happen. They tried in 4e and are still reeling from the backlash. :smalltongue:

Absolutely. Because there is a subset (I'll not opine on how large, but they're influential or just noisy) of wizard players who think this is a feature and justify the high end for various reasons.

[LudicSavant]

Would you care to summarise for someone (me) who doesn't want to watch a 9 minute video?

Would you mind writing a summary?

It's making fun of how criminally awful many D&D 5e spells are, such as Melf's Acid Arrow. The Wizard in the video, instead of using their go-to Fireball, tries out some other spells, and everyone (including the DM) has a bad time because the spells are bland, unimpactful, and just generally lame.

To put into perspective just how awful Melf's Acid Arrow is, imagine a world where we gave it severe buffs, such that it offered no saving throw, and did all of its damage immediately.

Even with such fat buffs, it... does about the same damage as a Magic Missile cast from the same slot. With less range, a worse damage type, and less flexibility. That is how bad Melf's Acid Arrow is.

There's really no excuse for it either. This isn't a spell where comparisons are hard to make, it's just a no-frills direct damage spell... that doesn't do damage worth a damn.

[KorvinStarmast]

Totally, absolutely, agreed. But we both know that will never happen. They tried in 4e and are still reeling from the backlash. :smalltongue: If 4e was indicative of their collective ability at good design, they missed a few tricks to say the least. And I think they are about to miss a few more with D&Done. :smallfrown:

[Snowbluff]

Totally, absolutely, agreed.
But we both know that will never happen. They tried in 4e and are still reeling from the backlash. :smalltongue:

I don't think people understand how this was a problem in 4e as well. Does anyone know an invoker who doesn't take Rain of Blood? Of you don't, because invoker's power selection was often dismal.

There's gonna be bad powers/spells/maneuvers regardless of what you name them.

[ZRN]

For now. But the underlying problem is that it's unstable under change. There are no limits to what a spell can do, only limits on what has been written.

Yeah, but frankly they're putting out like... one powerful spell every year or two? WOTC HQ will be underwater from climate change before it becomes an unmanageable issue. (I always giggle when people talk about "future-proofing" 5e for more classes and stuff when we've had a grand total of ONE official class added since 2014.)

[Dr.Samurai]

Folks... the "bad spells" in the video are Charm Person, Rope Trick, and Animate Dead. You can't charm a troll, he didn't have enough speed to climb the rope, and he's supposed to cast Animate Dead outside of combat.

This is just a bad wizard, that doesn't know his spells, locked in melee range, with a troll, by himself.

It's a joke. It's not a commentary on "the only spells worth taking are OP spells". It's just an example of a crap wizard in a crap situation.

You could put the wizard in an interrogation scenario where he needs to get some vital information out of a prisoner, and the wizard can say, in a funny voice, "I won't use my go-to spells this time, I'll use Fireball" and the DM will say "Oooookaaaay, you totally incinerate him and he dies, and now the information is lost".

Wizards will lose situations where they use the wrong spells for the wrong problem. Especially when they're alone and in melee range, as in the video.

[Skrum]

And that's a problem. That doesn't justify them being strong--it gives impetus to fixing the whole thing so that doesn't happen! Mostly by actually giving them fixed, working class features and relegating spell choice to a much smaller, less all-important sphere. Because as long as spell choice is everything, this will happen and cannot be fixed or even ameliorated.

I don't understand why school selection doesn't determine what spells a wizard ends up with. An abjurer should have abjuration spells. An evoker should have evocation spells. But instead every wizard just has their pick of the entire wizard list, and lo and behold, there's a top tier of spells that everyone picks.

Wizards wouldn't be broken if they couldn't take barbs AND shield AND misty step AND fireball AND hypnotic pattern AND banishment AND....

School choice should matter. Something like this can't be implemented without also changing the spells because their aren't enough spells to fill out each school to a playable level, but wizards should feel different from one another. And they don't, cause they all use them same spells regardless.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Folks... the "bad spells" in the video are Charm Person, Rope Trick, and Animate Dead. You can't charm a troll, he didn't have enough speed to climb the rope, and he's supposed to cast Animate Dead outside of combat.

This is just a bad wizard, that doesn't know his spells, locked in melee range, with a troll, by himself.

It's a joke. It's not a commentary on "the only spells worth taking are OP spells". It's just an example of a crap wizard in a crap situation.

You could put the wizard in an interrogation scenario where he needs to get some vital information out of a prisoner, and the wizard can say, in a funny voice, "I won't use my go-to spells this time, I'll use Fireball" and the DM will say "Oooookaaaay, you totally incinerate him and he dies, and now the information is lost".

Wizards will lose situations where they use the wrong spells for the wrong problem. Especially when they're alone and in melee range, as in the video.

Yeah, he mentions Misty Step. That + a fire cantrip + moving away is a winning round. Not too tough.

[Schwann145]

I don't understand why school selection doesn't determine what spells a wizard ends up with. An abjurer should have abjuration spells. An evoker should have evocation spells. But instead every wizard just has their pick of the entire wizard list, and lo and behold, there's a top tier of spells that everyone picks.

Wizards wouldn't be broken if they couldn't take barbs AND shield AND misty step AND fireball AND hypnotic pattern AND banishment AND....

School choice should matter. Something like this can't be implemented without also changing the spells because their aren't enough spells to fill out each school to a playable level, but wizards should feel different from one another. And they don't, cause they all use them same spells regardless.

Hard agree. Opposition Schools should make a comeback in a big way, 2e style.

[RandomPeasant]

For now. But the underlying problem is that it's unstable under change. There are no limits to what a spell can do, only limits on what has been written.

Yes that is how writing things works. You can write a feat or a class feature or a skill or a racial ability or a magical item or an entirely new category of thing that does whatever arbitrarily broken thing you want it to do. This is not some unique problem of spells, this is simply the challenge you face writing content for a system.


And that's a problem. That doesn't justify them being strong--it gives impetus to fixing the whole thing so that doesn't happen! Mostly by actually giving them fixed, working class features and relegating spell choice to a much smaller, less all-important sphere. Because as long as spell choice is everything, this will happen and cannot be fixed or even ameliorated.

The ability to choose spells does not increase the range of options characters can have. It increases the number of combinations of options you can build an individual character with, but this is generally not really the thing that causes problems. I am not as familiar with the char-op tricks of 5e, but in 3e the broken stuff for Wizards is pretty much that there is a list of stuff that is broken on its own terms and you take it and it makes you broken. The problem has never really been the terrible power of, like, "you could know fireball and haste or stinking cloud and magic circle" but "you could know simulacrum at all".


I don't understand why school selection doesn't determine what spells a wizard ends up with.

Because people would like to be able to make a character that has damaging spells and also spells that create illusions and it is not inherently broken to do that. Also because not all of the schools support an entire character ("Diviner" tends to be a concept that lacks any legs in combat), and even for the ones that can making each specialist an entire character means effectively writing seven extra classes that are just Wizard in different hats.


School choice should matter. Something like this can't be implemented without also changing the spells because their aren't enough spells to fill out each school to a playable level, but wizards should feel different from one another. And they don't, cause they all use them same spells regardless.

This, and Phoenix's suggestion, is just moving the problem you have decided is intractable (providing people with a balanced range of choices) and moving it up a level in hopes that will somehow make it tractable. Suppose you clump up the schools and make it so that people pick just one to learn from. You know what that did in 3e? It made two classes that were basically as broken as the Wizard (the Beguiler and the Dread Necromancer) and one that you would never take if you were motivated by power level considerations (the Warmage). Knowing a wide range of spells is not inherently broken. You can write stuff that is balanced against knowing a wide range of spells. The thing that's broken is broken spells. The problem has always been a combination of the designers being really bad at identifying and avoiding broken and being unwilling to write a version of "Fighter" that is as a good as getting to have a variety of magic.

[kazaryu]

Effectively, D&D spellcasting is broken by design. snip. Impossible to balance."

this is wrong. its close to being correct. but its wrong.

spellcasting is not broken by design. even the most OP of spells, summoning spells. (yeah yeah but magic jar shennanigans, but what about simulacrum stuff...or...or planar binding. no. those are entirely on the DM to allow you to get away with stupid stuff. yeah the spell designs are exploitable in a vacuum if you don't have a DM.). summoning spells are really strong due to not only the action economy they provide, but also the non-save based battlefield control they can provide. But even they have their limitations. most of them are concentration, for example. and they cost spell slots.

as far as impossible to balance..thats...just so close. you are correct that they're impossible to balance....for the designers. but thats a function of TTRPG gaming mixed with asymmetric game design. because classes and abilities are designed in different ways that affect varying aspects of the game. what that means is that different abilities are going to be more or less powerful based on the game they're being used in. I said that summoning spells are the strongest spells? not in a game where combat is low stakes. where combat may happen...but its almost never what decides the course of major game events. they're also not as strong in games where combat tends to take place in fairly tight quarters, where the summoned creature end up impeding the PC's as much as their enemies. Or in games where magic is ubiquitous enough that people tend to know to target summoners to kill their concentration. or in games where medium damage AoE is common. magic jar? cool spell...lots of potential....except in intrigue games where basically all the people you meet are just..other humans. then its really only a mind control spell with some specific weaknesses. still powerful, but you're not going to...for example, steal a mareliths body to get that fat multiattack alongside your hex/hunter's mark.

and this is a problem that can occur in literally any TTRPG that uses asymmetric design....which is most of them. Now it is possible that 5e missed the mark in its design in terms of matching it up to the majority playstyle. i haven't seen any hard evidence of that, but its possible. But to say that its impossible to balance is obviously true...Asymmetric design necessitates that you can't design a game that perfectly fits every game style. However, it seems from your statement that you're somehow blaming it on 5e's specific design...when in reality its just the nature of TTRPG's. You can't appease everyone.

[Skrum]

I remember most people saying the DN and Beguiler were quite well designed - powerful, but no where near the game-breaking insanity of the t1's and 2's. They also had a ton of actual class features that made them far more their own thing.

Would making 8 different schools worth of spells than are each good and useful in their own way be challenging? Of course. But the game would be better for it, and I really don't see how it's actually any different than making a large spell list that isn't dominated by a handful of obviously better options.

I think what it really comes down to is that any change that could possibly be made could be ruined by poor implementation. And no idea is immune to that.

[RandomPeasant]

But to say that its impossible to balance is obviously true...Asymmetric design necessitates that you can't design a game that perfectly fits every game style.

This is true, but only in a pretty trivial sense. You can make games that are balanced across a reasonably wide range of play styles. You just have to do it by avoiding situations where people face tradeoffs between things that might be emphasized differently in different campaigns. If you can pick an awesome combat option or an awesome exploration option, that is going to make characters that pick the "wrong" way for the amount of combat or exploration their game has underpowered (and/or characters that pick the "right" way overpowered). The answer isn't to throw your hands up in the air and say "well, it can't be balanced", it's to make it so that exploration options mostly trade off with exploration options and combat options mostly trade off with combat options, and provide DMs with explicit (and accurate) guidance about what assumptions the system is balanced for and what happens when you change those assumptions.


I remember most people saying the DN and Beguiler were quite well designed - powerful, but no where near the game-breaking insanity of the t1's and 2's. They also had a ton of actual class features that made them far more their own thing.

Eh, not really, on both counts. The idea that the Dread Necromancer and Beguiler were "nowhere near" the power level of the Wizard is just not true. It is true that as a Dread Necromancer, you cannot break the game by casting shapechange or ice assassin or dominate person or wall of salt. But you can break the game by casting planar binding or magic jar, and that renders the game equally broken. The classes are worse, but by a relatively small margin, especially since for the purposes of this sort of analysis you'd presumably want to ignore that they have delayed casting progression relative to the Wizard, which is a non-trivial part of the power gap.

As far as the class features go, the Dread Necromancer has quite a few, but in practice it only means that you take 8 levels and then bail rather than taking 5 levels of Wizard before bailing. The Beguiler's class features, however, were pretty nonexistent. You got this weird thing that encourages you to feint people (this requires you to be in melee and you have a d6 hit die and light armor), and you get less bonus feats than a Wizard, and you get Advanced Learning which is really just a part of your spellcasting that's phrased in a way that makes you benefit less from PrCs. The net result was that you PrC'd out as soon as you could. There was basically one full caster in 3e that had enough class features that you kept taking it as long as you could, and it was the Druid.


Would making 8 different schools worth of spells than are each good and useful in their own way be challenging? Of course. But the game would be better for it, and I really don't see how it's actually any different than making a large spell list that isn't dominated by a handful of obviously better options.

I am not convinced you can get to eight schools of magic in a way that makes them meaningfully "schools of magic" and not just "this character is a Fire Mage, they have the abilities of a Fire Mage". For something to be a "school of magic", I think it needs to do multiple things that are conceptually related. So you can have a school of Conjuration, because that does "teleporting stuff" and "summoning creatures" and "summoning matter" and those all produce different effects that scale throughout the game. Similarly, you can have a school of Necromancy (undead minions, horrible curses, magical terror) and a school of Transmutation (making people better, making stuff into other stuff, making people into stuff in deleterious ways).

But past that the pickings get slim pretty fast. You can probably stretch Evocation into a school, though frankly a class where all the abilities are "you deal <element> damage in a <shape>" seems incredibly boring. But what the hell is a Diviner going to do that is A) sufficient to support a full class and B) meaningfully related to what Divination is now? Your 3rd level spells are clairvoyance and tongues. Your 9th level spell is foresight. Are those bad effects? No. But if that's all you get you have a class that is maybe the worst a class has been in the history of D&D. Abjuration is a bit better, inasmuch as you might reasonably cast counterspell or dispel magic in a fight, but you're still pretty hard-up for anything that wins that fight.

I think, if you wanted to, you could do some division along the lines of splitting Wizards into Wizard (blasting, BFC, summoning, divinations), Necromancers (basically a Dread Necromancer), Illusionists (basically a Beguiler), and then one or two Transmutation-centric classes ("various elemental effects" and "various buffs" seem like the obvious focus areas). Then you shove the rest into the Warlocks and Paladins and Clerics of the world.

But, of course, that gets you to the other problem, which is that there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting a character that does divination and necromancy or illusion and fireballs or whatever other combination of spells strikes your fancy. In the long run, you can fix that to a pretty large extent by writing more classes, but telling people "sorry you can't do Abjuration and Transmuation on the same character that's coming in the setting book for Lost Caverns of Ixalan" is just not going to work. So you are left with powerful design incentives pointing you towards something that is going to look a lot like a Wizard. Better to make your peace with that, even if you do end up also writing specialized classes (you are not wrong to point out that the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer were well-liked, it's just that it was because people really want specialized classes, not particularly for balance reasons).

[Rukelnikov]

this is wrong. its close to being correct. but its wrong.

spellcasting is not broken by design. even the most OP of spells, summoning spells. (yeah yeah but magic jar shennanigans, but what about simulacrum stuff...or...or planar binding. no. those are entirely on the DM to allow you to get away with stupid stuff. yeah the spell designs are exploitable in a vacuum if you don't have a DM.). summoning spells are really strong due to not only the action economy they provide, but also the non-save based battlefield control they can provide. But even they have their limitations. most of them are concentration, for example. and they cost spell slots.

as far as impossible to balance..thats...just so close. you are correct that they're impossible to balance....for the designers. but thats a function of TTRPG gaming mixed with asymmetric game design. because classes and abilities are designed in different ways that affect varying aspects of the game. what that means is that different abilities are going to be more or less powerful based on the game they're being used in. I said that summoning spells are the strongest spells? not in a game where combat is low stakes. where combat may happen...but its almost never what decides the course of major game events. they're also not as strong in games where combat tends to take place in fairly tight quarters, where the summoned creature end up impeding the PC's as much as their enemies. Or in games where magic is ubiquitous enough that people tend to know to target summoners to kill their concentration. or in games where medium damage AoE is common. magic jar? cool spell...lots of potential....except in intrigue games where basically all the people you meet are just..other humans. then its really only a mind control spell with some specific weaknesses. still powerful, but you're not going to...for example, steal a mareliths body to get that fat multiattack alongside your hex/hunter's mark.

and this is a problem that can occur in literally any TTRPG that uses asymmetric design....which is most of them. Now it is possible that 5e missed the mark in its design in terms of matching it up to the majority playstyle. i haven't seen any hard evidence of that, but its possible. But to say that its impossible to balance is obviously true...Asymmetric design necessitates that you can't design a game that perfectly fits every game style. However, it seems from your statement that you're somehow blaming it on 5e's specific design...when in reality its just the nature of TTRPG's. You can't appease everyone.

Good post. And I'll add, there's another dimension to balancing.

When people talk about "balance" they usually mean "X skill which is focused on damage and Y skill which is also focused on damage should do comparable damage", and are called "balanced" if they are within some arbitrary (but often reasonable) threshold, and two skilled focused on mobility will be balanced if they provide a comparable (harder to agree upon than in damage) mobility, and so for cc's and battlefield control (even harder to agree upon what "balanced" means).

The thing is that in the pursuit of the "mechanical balance", one of the sacrifices that tends to be made is a further removal of the mechanics from the narrative, so while you may be achieving a greater parity in the mechanics of the game, you may be further disrupting the balance between narrative and mechanics*, and this can have serious immersion killing effects.

*Which I think is the underlying premise of the "why is everything spectral?" thread.


I remember most people saying the DN and Beguiler were quite well designed - powerful, but no where near the game-breaking insanity of the t1's and 2's. They also had a ton of actual class features that made them far more their own thing.

Never cared much for Beguiler, but I really liked DN, I think it was strong but ok, high T3 probably.


Would making 8 different schools worth of spells than are each good and useful in their own way be challenging? Of course. But the game would be better for it, and I really don't see how it's actually any different than making a large spell list that isn't dominated by a handful of obviously better options.

I do think the spell list should be addressed, but having effectively 8 different classes that only share a feature at levels 1, 18, and 20, is worse than just having 8 different classes, and also doesn't address the non specialist subclasses.


I think what it really comes down to is that any change that could possibly be made could be ruined by poor implementation. And no idea is immune to that.

Agreed.


The ability to choose spells does not increase the range of options characters can have. It increases the number of combinations of options you can build an individual character with, but this is generally not really the thing that causes problems. I am not as familiar with the char-op tricks of 5e, but in 3e the broken stuff for Wizards is pretty much that there is a list of stuff that is broken on its own terms and you take it and it makes you broken. The problem has never really been the terrible power of, like, "you could know fireball and haste or stinking cloud and magic circle" but "you could know simulacrum at all".

The ability to majorly change the capabilities of your character at each long rest is very significant, but I agree the real imbalance is not there, its in the inherently broken stuff.


Because people would like to be able to make a character that has damaging spells and also spells that create illusions and it is not inherently broken to do that. Also because not all of the schools support an entire character ("Diviner" tends to be a concept that lacks any legs in combat), and even for the ones that can making each specialist an entire character means effectively writing seven extra classes that are just Wizard in different hats.

Limiting the Wizard's list to only their specialization school also has the immediate problem of the non-specialist subclasses.

In 2e and 3e specialization locked off a couple schools from you, in 2e Player's Options Wizard had 40 points and each school costed 5 points, so access to every school of magic costed all your wizard creation points available. 5e could try to do something similar like every wizard chooses 3 schools at chargen and learn new schools as they reach certain levels, showcasing the growth of the wizard in a scholarly fashion who is now versed in a new subject.

The point is, limitations could be applied without having to turn the Wizard into effectively 8 different classes (which I think would make no sense, just write 8 different classes instead)


This, and Phoenix's suggestion, is just moving the problem you have decided is intractable (providing people with a balanced range of choices) and moving it up a level in hopes that will somehow make it tractable. Suppose you clump up the schools and make it so that people pick just one to learn from. You know what that did in 3e? It made two classes that were basically as broken as the Wizard (the Beguiler and the Dread Necromancer) and one that you would never take if you were motivated by power level considerations (the Warmage). Knowing a wide range of spells is not inherently broken. You can write stuff that is balanced against knowing a wide range of spells. The thing that's broken is broken spells. The problem has always been a combination of the designers being really bad at identifying and avoiding broken and being unwilling to write a version of "Fighter" that is as a good as getting to have a variety of magic.

I agree with the general idea. However, to be fair to the design team, during the playtest for 5e they printed the Fighter having maneuvers and martial dice that recharged every turn, they attempted to give the fighter more versatility*, but they must not have gotten good feedback about it, because they ended up turning that into the Battlemaster. So, I'm not sure the problem is their unwillingness to write versatile fighters.

*It still wouldn't be as versatile as a Wizard but its a step in that direction.

[kazaryu]

This is true, but only in a pretty trivial sense. You can make games that are balanced across a reasonably wide range of play styles. You just have to do it by avoiding situations where people face tradeoffs between things that might be emphasized differently in different campaigns. If you can pick an awesome combat option or an awesome exploration option, that is going to make characters that pick the "wrong" way for the amount of combat or exploration their game has underpowered (and/or characters that pick the "right" way overpowered). The answer isn't to throw your hands up in the air and say "well, it can't be balanced", it's to make it so that exploration options mostly trade off with exploration options and combat options mostly trade off with combat options, and provide DMs with explicit (and accurate) guidance about what assumptions the system is balanced for and what happens when you change those assumptions.
.

i think characterizing is as trivial misses the point i was trying to make.

in the first place...i don't think its trivial. even with a game as you described you'd still see imbalance and thats because pillars like 'explorations' 'social' and 'combat' are all in and of themselves broad sweeping pillars that include their own playstyles. So like, even in a game where "exploration" is emphasized, there are going to be certain aspects of exploration that are emphasized by the various groups. for example one group might not really care much about....say inventory management. which would fall under the exploration pillar. Thus, any abilities related to inventory management are going to feel lack luster, because its not something that is emphasized. meanwhile abilities that boost perception or cartography might be relatively stronger, because thats what is being emphasized at the play table.

to bring this back to 5e specifically, the big things people complain about are explicitly trade offs within the same pillars. martials are often viewed as suboptimal, particularly at higher levels because high level spell casting can do their job in combat. thats trading combat abilities for combat abilities. and yet if you start to really put the pinch on the party, things can begin to swing. that level 10 evoker thats used to overchanelling fireball to do BIG DAMAGE may start to feel like his fireball spells aren't that good because they end up being inefficient over multiple encounters, or encounters with multiple people spread out. So they switch to more spell slot efficient control spells...oh, but then you start squeezing them, sending smaller agile enemies, or enemies with ranged attacks that can harry them and threaten their concentration. so they invest in concentration checks but damn...50 damage is 50 damage. thats hard to pass even with proficiency and advantage....and there's still the risk of spells like dispel magic or anything that inflict the incapacitated condition...like being unconscious. etc... now im not saying that 5e doesn't still have a problem with high level casters having too many slots. maybe it does. but the gap still gets significantly smaller when you start to really put the squeeze on the casters.

this is an everpresent feature of asymmetric design. its fine for video games because...well generally speaking you control how the player plays. you know what options they have, so you can try to balance around what they're going to be limited to doing. But when its done in TTRPG's then...well, those limitations cease. thats not to say you don't have a bad idea, but it doesn't trivialize this aspect of asymmetric design. about the only thing designers can do is try to balance it around what they expect the most tables to play. but even that may not be great if its not a majority...if its 'balanced' for 20% of the player base then its going to be unbalanced for 80%.

the second point i'd make is...i actually think that 5e's handling of exploration/social is fine. i mean i lament the relatively sparse rules sometimes but...i mean generally I like the flexibility the ability check system provides. i think that alot of people treat like...explicit class features and feats as the only 'support' for those styles, and some fixate on exploration or social specific features as "the only" support for that aspect. to the point that they'll say things like "most martial character don't get anything to help exploration/social. and i think thats because rather than treating like...proficiency as a baseline, they focus only on the features that specifically modify social/exploration stuff explicitly. and they undervalue to ability checks. And while i think WoTC could have done a better job in communicating the system in place. i don't think its fair to claim that, for example, a fighter can't do anything for the social/exploration pillar. although this is also on DM's for not really letting ability checks be cool.

[Foolwise]

I am not convinced you can get to eight schools of magic in a way that makes them meaningfully "schools of magic" and not just "this character is a Fire Mage, they have the abilities of a Fire Mage". For something to be a "school of magic", I think it needs to do multiple things that are conceptually related. So you can have a school of Conjuration, because that does "teleporting stuff" and "summoning creatures" and "summoning matter" and those all produce different effects that scale throughout the game. Similarly, you can have a school of Necromancy (undead minions, horrible curses, magical terror) and a school of Transmutation (making people better, making stuff into other stuff, making people into stuff in deleterious ways).


There’s a tough way and an easy way to do this imo.

The tough way is to take staple spells and try to squeeze them into every school. My mind immediately went to Shield. Abjuration, but can easily be refitted for Conjuration (Conjure Shield), Evocation (Wind Shield/Deflection), Transmutation (would require a worn item to transmute via reaction). Other schools aren’t as easy. Necromancy may have to wait until they get Undead Thralls to use Meat Shield. Illusion can’t really increase AC, but perhaps a toned down Mirror Image (Double Image) to give an attack disadvantage via reaction. Divination could do something like (Heightened Senses) which increases the wizard’s awareness effectively raising their AC. No magical shield but same mechanical result. As for Enchantment, I am drawing a blank on that school. Like I said, it’s the tough way.

The easy way is to apply a tax. Wizards can cast any spell, but the effort to cast a spell outside their school of expertise requires extra effort (in the form of requiring a higher level spell slot). So a 1st requires a 2nd level slot, etc. Upcasting a 1st to 4th level would need a 5th level slot, and so on. The Wizard subclasses could then include a “Secondary School” at 6th level and “Tertiary School” at 14th level that lets the player eliminate the tax as the wizard becomes gains experience outside their main school of magic. Cantrips would be exempt from the tax.

[Waazraath]

Here's the thing. The existence of "bad" spells is only an issue because it's a waste of book space. Nothing else. Because those bad spells? Just get ignored unless someone intentionally chooses them. The only spells that matter for balance are the strongest ones in any given comparable group. And the strongest spells are way out of bounds.

This is different from class features, because those you don't have a choice.

Effectively, D&D spellcasting is broken by design. And I don't mean "broken" as in "OP." I mean "broken as in non-functional from a system design perspective. Impossible to balance."

Partly agree, but my solution would be 1) give more classes features where they can choose stuff 2) balance those (not 100's of spells and a handfull of choices for e.g. the elemental monk) and 3) playtest the damn thing and errata when somehow something slips through that is too powerful or too weak.


I don't understand why school selection doesn't determine what spells a wizard ends up with. An abjurer should have abjuration spells. An evoker should have evocation spells. But instead every wizard just has their pick of the entire wizard list, and lo and behold, there's a top tier of spells that everyone picks.


Amen. And, taking the risk of repeating myself, it's not like the designers of 5e didn't have any good examples of how this can be done in a nice way in older editions. They didn't used any though and messed this up I'm afraid. Edit: yes, like the beguiler or dread necro that you mention in a later post, but also 2e priest spheres, and the 3.5 psion.

[LudicSavant]

The thing is that in the pursuit of the "mechanical balance", one of the sacrifices that tends to be made is a further removal of the mechanics from the narrative, so while you may be achieving a greater parity in the mechanics of the game, you may be further disrupting the balance between narrative and mechanics*, and this can have serious immersion killing effects.

*Which I think is the underlying premise of the "why is everything spectral?" thread.

If push comes to shove, I'll generally pick a little bit of interesting gameplay or ludonarrative design over a little bit of balance. But often that sacrifice doesn't need to be made; it's possible to make a meaningfully better-balanced game than 5th edition D&D while simultaneously increasing the narrative, immersion, and general interactivity with the world. And I think that should be the goal.

For example, some weaker spells like Melf's Acid Arrow, Ice Knife, and Chromatic Orb in BG3 got buffed in a way that makes them more interactive with the world (Ice Knife for example makes an ice surface). In D&D, spells like Melf's Acid Arrow are just plain... mathematically bad, despite largely being no-frills direct damage spells that should be low-hanging fruit on the balance tree. Melf's is worse than Magic Missile in basically every regard (DPR, range, damage type, slot versatility, reliability, time, target versatility, you name it).

By a similar note, Animate Dead in 5e actually got more troublesome than it was in prior editions, despite them cutting off an awful lot of its narrative oomph (limiting it to just making medium humanoid skeletons and zombies), because they let it hedge slots and more or less directly convert downtime to minions without any of the safeguards that previously existed (and let's not even talk about what happens when you get it on a short rest recharge). Worst of both worlds. They didn't have to limit it to medium humanoids, and indeed, this matters less for balance than the things that they overlooked that wouldn't have negatively impacted the spell's narrative potency.

There's low hanging fruit here that just hasn't been touched.

[Unoriginal]

By a similar note, Animate Dead in 5e actually got considerably more troublesome than it was in prior editions, despite them cutting off an awful lot of its narrative oomph (limiting it to just making medium humanoid skeletons and zombies), because they let it hedge slots and more or less directly convert downtime to minions without any of the safeguards that previously existed (and let's not even talk about what happens when you get it on a short rest recharge). Worst of both worlds. They didn't have to limit it to medium humanoids, and indeed, this matters less for balance than the things that they overlooked that wouldn't have negatively impacted the spell's narrative potency.

I would argue it is more because there was many more spells that let you get tons of minions, or fewer but powerful minions, in 3.X, and Animate Dead is one of the few that got brought over. Furthermore, action economy is much more powerful in 5e, and mooks went from barely-nuisances-after-a-few-levels to acknowledgement-required parts of the fight.

So Animate Dead went from "flavorful but a dime a dozen" to "standing out among the rest".

[LudicSavant]

I would argue it is more because there was many more spells that let you get tons of minions, or fewer but powerful minions, in 3.X, and Animate Dead is one of the few that got brought over. Furthermore, action economy is much more powerful in 5e, and mooks went from barely-nuisances-after-a-few-levels to acknowledgement-required parts of the fight.

It wasn't the swarms of mooks and action economy they removed from Animate Dead, it was the smaller number of larger, more powerful monsters -- you know, the option with less action economy. You can't make a zombie T-Rex anymore. You can make a legion of generic skeleton archers that's considerably stronger than a zombie T-Rex, though. Or use other minionmancy spells that are also more powerful than a zombie T-Rex.

Not only that, but they actually removed many of the costs and limitations that creating a swarm of mooks had in prior editions. Action economy getting stronger isn't a dealbreaker for balance -- you just adjust the cost to however effective the mooks are. But they actually made the cost lower, rather than higher!

They gutted the options and narrative, but the power, the resource efficiency? They gave it more. Now our skeletons have no more HD limit, no more gold cost, no more chance of losing control mid-adventure, no more need to seek out better corpses like it was loot, and the corpses are even reusable now. And if there's any downtime at all, you can just make your army with resources from before you rested. And if you can get it on a short rest recharge, it gets even crazier. Something that just plain wouldn't have been an issue if they gave it proper limitations.

The opportunity exists to give Animate Dead (and indeed, a lot of spells) more options, more narrative interaction, and still make it more balanced than the current version. Heck, even just making it so that those spell slots actually stay invested would go a long way.

[Theodoxus]

You could put the wizard in an interrogation scenario where he needs to get some vital information out of a prisoner, and the wizard can say, in a funny voice, "I won't use my go-to spells this time, I'll use Fireball" and the DM will say "Oooookaaaay, you totally incinerate him and he dies, and now the information is lost". That's what Speak with Dead is for :smallbiggrin:


School choice should matter. Something like this can't be implemented without also changing the spells because their aren't enough spells to fill out each school to a playable level, but wizards should feel different from one another. And they don't, cause they all use them same spells regardless.

Make non-school spells cost an extra slot? I'd boost spell slots to six 1st, four 2nd - 5th, and leave the rest untouched. Yes, that means you can only cast your specialization spells at the highest levels. Boosting the number of slots is a small boost in power, but really only if you're using your school spells primarily. An Abjurer casting MM or Fireball consistently will have fewer castings overall. I didn't want to just double the number of slots, that'd be a huge power boost.


Because people would like to be able to make a character that has damaging spells and also spells that create illusions and it is not inherently broken to do that. Also because not all of the schools support an entire character ("Diviner" tends to be a concept that lacks any legs in combat), and even for the ones that can making each specialist an entire character means effectively writing seven extra classes that are just Wizard in different hats.

Potentially... though I agree with you. But I'm sure there's some savant out there that could do it.



Limiting the Wizard's list to only their specialization school also has the immediate problem of the non-specialist subclasses.

In 2e and 3e specialization locked off a couple schools from you, in 2e Player's Options Wizard had 40 points and each school costed 5 points, so access to every school of magic costed all your wizard creation points available. 5e could try to do something similar like every wizard chooses 3 schools at chargen and learn new schools as they reach certain levels, showcasing the growth of the wizard in a scholarly fashion who is now versed in a new subject.

The point is, limitations could be applied without having to turn the Wizard into effectively 8 different classes (which I think would make no sense, just write 8 different classes instead)

I like this idea too... maybe even in conjunction with upping the cost of non-specialized spells.


There’s a tough way and an easy way to do this imo.

The tough way is to take staple spells and try to squeeze them into every school. My mind immediately went to Shield. Abjuration, but can easily be refitted for Conjuration (Conjure Shield), Evocation (Wind Shield/Deflection), Transmutation (would require a worn item to transmute via reaction). Other schools aren’t as easy. Necromancy may have to wait until they get Undead Thralls to use Meat Shield. Illusion can’t really increase AC, but perhaps a toned down Mirror Image (Double Image) to give an attack disadvantage via reaction. Divination could do something like (Heightened Senses) which increases the wizard’s awareness effectively raising their AC. No magical shield but same mechanical result. As for Enchantment, I am drawing a blank on that school. Like I said, it’s the tough way.

Just make a universal non school. Anything that deals with the Force ends up as a universal spell anyone can take and cast at normal cost. Shield, MM, Force Wall, Forcecage, etc. Maybe two 'iconic' spells at each level, if there isn't a Force option available.


The easy way is to apply a tax. Wizards can cast any spell, but the effort to cast a spell outside their school of expertise requires extra effort (in the form of requiring a higher level spell slot). So a 1st requires a 2nd level slot, etc. Upcasting a 1st to 4th level would need a 5th level slot, and so on. The Wizard subclasses could then include a “Secondary School” at 6th level and “Tertiary School” at 14th level that lets the player eliminate the tax as the wizard becomes gains experience outside their main school of magic. Cantrips would be exempt from the tax.

I prefer the double slot cost, but wouldn't be sad if this was the overall preferred method (or even more ideal, have the player choose at chargen, and be unchangeable outside divine/wish/unique quest type deal).


summons vs animate et al. 100%

[Rukelnikov]

If push comes to shove, I'll generally pick a little bit of interesting gameplay or ludonarrative design over a little bit of balance. But often that sacrifice doesn't need to be made; it's possible to make a meaningfully better-balanced game than 5th edition D&D while simultaneously increasing the narrative, immersion, and general interactivity with the world. And I think that should be the goal.

For example, some weaker spells like Melf's Acid Arrow, Ice Knife, and Chromatic Orb in BG3 got buffed in a way that makes them more interactive with the world (Ice Knife for example makes an ice surface). In D&D, spells like Melf's Acid Arrow are just plain... mathematically bad, despite largely being no-frills direct damage spells that should be low-hanging fruit on the balance tree. Melf's is worse than Magic Missile in basically every regard (DPR, range, damage type, slot versatility, reliability, time, target versatility, you name it).

By a similar note, Animate Dead in 5e actually got more troublesome than it was in prior editions, despite them cutting off an awful lot of its narrative oomph (limiting it to just making medium humanoid skeletons and zombies), because they let it hedge slots and more or less directly convert downtime to minions without any of the safeguards that previously existed (and let's not even talk about what happens when you get it on a short rest recharge). Worst of both worlds. They didn't have to limit it to medium humanoids, and indeed, this matters less for balance than the things that they overlooked that wouldn't have negatively impacted the spell's narrative potency.

There's low hanging fruit here that just hasn't been touched.

I agree both things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and balancing numbers generally doesn't have much impact in the narrative, an 6d4/3d4 Melf's would not change a thing narratively, and would be more in line with Magic missiles damage*. But things like Dragon Sorc's wings being either physical or spectral means the PC's mechanical ability to fly is weighted above the PC's narrative of becoming dragon-like, since neither chromatic nor metallic dragons tend to have spectral wings.

* 6d4/3d4 means 7.5 avg on a miss 22.5 avg on a hit, assuming 60% chance to hit that's:

7.5 * 0.4 + 22.5 * 0.6 = 3 + 13.5 = 16.5

A bit above a 2nd lvl MM 14 avg, but it's a less reliable damage type and is less flexible than MM since it can't be cast with a 1st lvl slot.

[ZRN]

I don't understand why school selection doesn't determine what spells a wizard ends up with. An abjurer should have abjuration spells. An evoker should have evocation spells. But instead every wizard just has their pick of the entire wizard list, and lo and behold, there's a top tier of spells that everyone picks.

Wizards wouldn't be broken if they couldn't take barbs AND shield AND misty step AND fireball AND hypnotic pattern AND banishment AND....

School choice should matter. Something like this can't be implemented without also changing the spells because their aren't enough spells to fill out each school to a playable level, but wizards should feel different from one another. And they don't, cause they all use them same spells regardless.

Yeah, if there's a design failure that makes balancing very difficult, I'd say it's that some spellcasters just have too broad a selection of spells. Even some of the current "overpowered" spells would be a lot less egregious if they were restricted to suitable types or subclasses of spell caster - e.g. if only Abjurers could cast Shield and Counterspell (or if only they got the current, OP versions and other casters got lesser versions of those spells), and the same were done with other powerful spells, I don't think you'd see nearly as much complaining.

[stoutstien]

Yeah, if there's a design failure that makes balancing very difficult, I'd say it's that some spellcasters just have too broad a selection of spells. Even some of the current "overpowered" spells would be a lot less egregious if they were restricted to suitable types or subclasses of spell caster - e.g. if only Abjurers could cast Shield and Counterspell (or if only they got the current, OP versions and other casters got lesser versions of those spells), and the same were done with other powerful spells, I don't think you'd see nearly as much complaining.

Worse part is once you hit a certain point of threshold for features like spell casting you start reducing options. New options need to meet or beat the existing option or they are dead weight. They didn't even make it out of the PHB before this started and while splats have added pages of new spell the overall selection has gotten smaller.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Worse part is once you hit a certain point of threshold for features like spell casting you start reducing options. New options need to meet or beat the existing option or they are dead weight. They didn't even make it out of the PHB before this started and while splats have added pages of new spell the overall selection has gotten smaller.

Yeah. That's the inherent problem with menu-type features that have mutually-comparable options. If the cost for <big shiny powerful thing> and <lesser, directly comparable thing> is the same...you have a dominating option. And that produces issues across the board. And the more you pump out sub-options, the worse this gets and the list of directly comparables grows.

[KorvinStarmast]

... and provide DMs with explicit (and accurate) guidance about what assumptions the system is balanced for and what happens when you change those assumptions. Wouldn't that be nice


There was basically one full caster in 3e that had enough class features that you kept taking it as long as you could, and it was the Druid.
Interesting.


I am not convinced you can get to eight schools of magic in a way that makes them meaningfully "schools of magic"

For my money, Enchantment and Illusion can be in the same school ... they are both about mind tricks.


Make non-school spells cost an extra slot? Before you do that, scrub and reorganize/rebalance the spells and the schools they belong in.


Just make a universal non school. Anything that deals with the Force ends up as a universal spell anyone can take and cast at normal cost. Shield, MM, Force Wall, Forcecage, etc. Maybe two 'iconic' spells at each level, if there isn't a Force option available. Yep. Consistent with Force damage being pure magical damage.

I disagree with the penalty for casting non school spells. Where does that leave War Wizard and Bladesinger?

[ZRN]

Wouldn't that be niceI disagree with the penalty for casting non school spells. Where does that leave War Wizard and Bladesinger?

For bladesinger at least, it leaves them as gishes with full wizard spell progression.

I agree, though, that there's probably not a way you could take the current wizard spell list and come up with a way to penalize that would make sense for both, say, an evoker and a diviner. Like, there just aren't enough broadly useful divination spells for the latter to make sense.

[sithlordnergal]

May I make a suggestion: Instead of trying to "punish" a generalist, instead reward the specialist.

So, in 3.5 you could choose to specialize. When you did so, you were able to prepare an extra spell of your chosen school for each spell level, and you gained a bonus to spellcraft when dealing eith your specialized school. In exchange, you weren't allowed to learn any spells from two schools of your choice.

Porting it to 5e, you'd basically have an extra spell slot for each spell level that you can only use to cast a spell from your chosen School, and you'd either have Advantage or some bonus to Arcana checks involving your school

Generalists become the baseline in this system. They have the benefit of learning any wizard spell, but the drawback of having fewer spell slots.

Of course, you'd still need to rebalance to schools to be a lot more even then they currently are, but its better than punishing a player who wants to be a generalist instead of a specialist.

[Rukelnikov]

May I make a suggestion: Instead of trying to "punish" a generalist, instead reward the specialist.

So, in 3.5 you could choose to specialize. When you did so, you were able to prepare an extra spell of your chosen school for each spell level, and you gained a bonus to spellcraft when dealing eith your specialized school. In exchange, you weren't allowed to learn any spells from two schools of your choice.

Porting it to 5e, you'd basically have an extra spell slot for each spell level that you can only use to cast a spell from your chosen School, and you'd either have Advantage or some bonus to Arcana checks involving your school

Generalists become the baseline in this system. They have the benefit of learning any wizard spell, but the drawback of having fewer spell slots.

Of course, you'd still need to rebalance to schools to be a lot more even then they currently are, but its better than punishing a player who wants to be a generalist instead of a specialist.

The thing is now specialization is a subclass, so you can't be a specialized warmage, and if you are a specialist your subclass gives you the mechanical benefits, adding an extra slot of each level in exchange from not being able to learn from 2 schools has traditionally been a worth tradeoff, so it would be a further buff for one the already most powerful classes.

[tKUUNK]

Yes that is how writing things works.....
....Knowing a wide range of spells is not inherently broken. You can write stuff that is balanced against knowing a wide range of spells. The thing that's broken is broken spells. The problem has always been a combination of the designers being really bad at identifying and avoiding broken and being unwilling to write a version of "Fighter" that is as a good as getting to have a variety of magic.

This says it nicely.

I'm all in favor of wizards having options.
And yes, even a wide variety. They're still limited on how many spells they can prep any given adventuring day. Making that crucial daily decision is part of the fun. It's not like they have free run of the entire wizard list.

The issue here is largely
1) specific spells are too over or under powered.
2) non-casters, as others have said, are stuck with "bricks" rather than "clay". What a great analogy! My feeling is the game is more fun if everyone has more clay, NOT if everyone is stuck with bricks.

[tKUUNK]

oh...and if there IS a class stuck with a "brick" or two, and that's all they get, those bricks had better be heavy, hard, and brutally effective for the intended purpose. imo they should be the obvious best at that one thing, by far. It's a trade-off; specialization vs variety. In other words, the big guy with the axe should be hella dangerous to everything within his striding distance. If all he gets is that axe, that axe should be SCARY. slight side note but relevant to the discussion of "what makes any RPG 'balanced'".

(sry for the slight topic spammage)

[PhoenixPhyre]

This says it nicely.

I'm all in favor of wizards having options.
And yes, even a wide variety. They're still limited on how many spells they can prep any given adventuring day. Making that crucial daily decision is part of the fun. It's not like they have free run of the entire wizard list.

The issue here is largely
1) specific spells are too over or under powered.
2) non-casters, as others have said, are stuck with "bricks" rather than "clay". What a great analogy! My feeling is the game is more fun if everyone has more clay, NOT if everyone is stuck with bricks.

The whole point of a class system (as opposed to something like GURPS) is to have bricks, not clay. Having clay breaks everything, because it says wildly varying things all have the same costs. Which is just a mess.

[Pex]

Here's the thing. The existence of "bad" spells is only an issue because it's a waste of book space. Nothing else. Because those bad spells? Just get ignored unless someone intentionally chooses them. The only spells that matter for balance are the strongest ones in any given comparable group. And the strongest spells are way out of bounds.

This is different from class features, because those you don't have a choice.

Effectively, D&D spellcasting is broken by design. And I don't mean "broken" as in "OP." I mean "broken as in non-functional from a system design perspective. Impossible to balance."

Yet thousands of players are playing the game without any problems. The fighter players cheer when the wizard players cast Fireball, and everyone is happy to teleport to get the adventure they want to play instead of weeks of traveling in two or three game sessions doing random stuff they don't care about.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Yet thousands of players are playing the game without any problems. The fighter players cheer when the wizard players cast Fireball, and everyone is happy to teleport to get the adventure they want to play instead of weeks of traveling in two or three game sessions doing random stuff they don't care about.

I'm going to hard disagree with your last statement. The travel and exploration part of D&D is great, and a huge part of the game that our group leans into. Probably the single biggest reason for us losing interest in campaigns and them ending is when some characters get abilities that can bypass this part. Something is lost when a group can just blink around with a snap of the fingers.

[JNAProductions]

I'm going to hard disagree with your last statement. The travel and exploration part of D&D is great, and a huge part of the game that our group leans into. Probably the single biggest reason for us losing interest in campaigns and them ending is when some characters get abilities that can bypass this part. Something is lost when a group can just blink around with a snap of the fingers.

That's not a universal opinion.

In one of my campaigns, I gave the party an ally with the ability to teleport them pretty much at-will. Short distances as an action or bonus action, and anything more travel-like over a short rest or so.
He was a great addition, because the travel just wasn't super relevant.

[RandomPeasant]

I'm going to hard disagree with your last statement. The travel and exploration part of D&D is great, and a huge part of the game that our group leans into. Probably the single biggest reason for us losing interest in campaigns and them ending is when some characters get abilities that can bypass this part. Something is lost when a group can just blink around with a snap of the fingers.

teleport doesn't interfere with exploration at all. It takes you from a point to another point and tells you nothing about the points in between. It is almost literally useless for an adventure of the form "there's gold in them hills, find out where it is". It interferes with travel some, but frankly by 13th level it's probably okay if "walk a long way" doesn't take multiple adventuring sessions, and you can still have "escort the caravan a long way" adventures if you really want them, which are better-suited to high level PCs anyway.

[tKUUNK]

The whole point of a class system (as opposed to something like GURPS) is to have bricks, not clay. Having clay breaks everything, because it says wildly varying things all have the same costs. Which is just a mess.

Well sure. If we take what I said to the extreme, I agree with this statement. At some point, with too much "clay" we're effectively playing a classless system (which is fine but isn't D&D). The trick is, make sure the options & strengths each class enjoys don't overlap to the point of losing all class identity.

Are you saying: "wizards should feel just a touch (or a lot) more 'bricky', like 5e warrior classes."? And if so, what's the key change to make?

[Brookshw]

That's not a universal opinion.

In one of my campaigns, I gave the party an ally with the ability to teleport them pretty much at-will. Short distances as an action or bonus action, and anything more travel-like over a short rest or so.
He was a great addition, because the travel just wasn't super relevant.

Eh, there's a lot of world development and roleplay opportunities that get lost if you just skip over the world. I'm not a fan, but to each their own.

[JNAProductions]

Eh, there's a lot of world development and roleplay opportunities that get lost if you just skip over the world. I'm not a fan, but to each their own.

Sure. I'm not saying "Teleport is the only way to play!" That'd be silly of me.
I am saying "Some tables don't care for travel."

Sorta like tracking arrows or rations. Some tables love that minutiae, some prefer to handwave it.

It'd only be an issue if there's a mismatch, and even then, it can often be dealt with. For instance-a player who cares about encumbrance and arrows and rations can track their own stuff, even if they have a DM who doesn't care about it. The opposite, though, would probably not work super well.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

That's not a universal opinion.

In one of my campaigns, I gave the party an ally with the ability to teleport them pretty much at-will. Short distances as an action or bonus action, and anything more travel-like over a short rest or so.
He was a great addition, because the travel just wasn't super relevant.

I appreciate that it's not a universal opinion, and there are different parts of D&D that groups lean into. For me a lot of the joy is in the journey. I do think there's some causation (not just correlation) that campaigns tend to wind down about the time spells like long distance teleports come online.

[RandomPeasant]

Eh, there's a lot of world development and roleplay opportunities that get lost if you just skip over the world. I'm not a fan, but to each their own.

teleport lets you skip over stuff, but it doesn't force you to. If the table is interested in going out an exploring the wilderness, they can still do that. teleport is good because it moves some agency over what sorts of adventures and roleplaying opportunities the campaign includes to the players. It's true that you can develop the world by looking at isolated hamlets or chance encounters while traveling. But you can also develop it by looking at bustling cosmopolitan cities and locations of great enough renown to be worth burning a teleport to visit. I think a lot of people look at teleport in terms of what it obsoletes rather than what it enables, which is just not a good attitude to have towards the game.

[Rukelnikov]

I appreciate that it's not a universal opinion, and there are different parts of D&D that groups lean into. For me a lot of the joy is in the journey. I do think there's some causation (not just correlation) that campaigns tend to wind down about the time spells like long distance teleports come online.

I don't think campaigns need to die, but the style of the campaigns definitely change, my group used to play a lot 13-20+ during 3e and we played 2 high level campaigns in 5e.

Having Teleport, and more importantly Plane Shift, complete changes the campaign but it can be interesting in a different way. Same as giving powerful features at low levels, in 3e I gave a PC wish at will at lvl 3, to this day we still think that was one of the best campaigns we played. In 5e one campaign the DM gave us an artifact with dials that basically let us jump universes un a multiverse, but we didn't know that when we first obtained it, and we were blindly changing reality until we started to figure out how it worked, and it was a very interesting campaign. As part of a group that leans more to the sandbox aspects of the game having low level easy access to teleport can help a lot at filling places of the map and start describing the world more precisely.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well sure. If we take what I said to the extreme, I agree with this statement. At some point, with too much "clay" we're effectively playing a classless system (which is fine but isn't D&D). The trick is, make sure the options & strengths each class enjoys don't overlap to the point of losing all class identity.

Are you saying: "wizards should feel just a touch (or a lot) more 'bricky', like 5e warrior classes."? And if so, what's the key change to make?

Cutting back their spell list (overall or effective) and giving them actual class features. The sorcerer is just about right as to spells known, but could have better class features.

No, having nearly 400 spells, which includes most of everyone else's thematic space (CF Fizbans, which gave every single spell in it to wizards!, even the highly sorcerer-coded ones) and very few actual class features that aren't "I cast more spells" isn't a good design.

And I agree that there's a balance to be struck between brick and clay. But the main way you provide more options in a class-based game is by making more classes. WotC can't do that effectively, in some part because all the thematic space is used up by wizards and fighters (and to a much lesser degree clerics)...and they just squat on it and do nothing interesting or useful with it. At extreme cost to the whole game. It's the crude stereo type of rich people as scrooge mcduck with his vault of treasure that just sits there doing nothing, except it's conceptual space. Any new interesting idea will always be "wizard, but..." or "fighter, but..." and will struggle. Or it'll introduce something new...and that will immediately get stolen by wizards because wizards only thing is getting to have everyone else's cool toys.

Imagine if there was a class that was "build your own homebrew...every adventuring day." You could assemble your class features from scratch, pretty much every single day. And none of them built on others, so you could cherry pick the strongest ones at every point without opportunity cost. That's...yeah. Not a good fit for a game that has thematic classes at its core[1].

[1] And no, earlier editions mean zero in this. I don't care that in 2e the Magic User was blah blah blah. 2e is not 5e. 2e is an entirely different game. Arguments from history/tradition are only persuasive in comparison to pure "because I said so".

Edit: as to teleport and kin...yeah, I don't have an issue with those at all. That sort of thing is entirely plot level--you're never going to go somewhere the DM doesn't want to allow you to, because nothing exists outside of the DM's mind until he says it does. I've had campaigns where they had a helm of teleportation from like level 7. And my setting canonically has a teleport portal network spanning a good chunk of it. All it does is spread the points you adventure in out a bit and speeds up the travel timelines. NBD. Travel isn't exploration, it's how you get to exploration.

But really, when you have wizards (or other casters) being able to step on other people's toes during the parts of exploration and social stuff that actually matter (ie when you're in a site), when the rogue says "I'll sneak up and..." and the wizard says "nah, I already sent my invisible, undetectable sensor through the whole place." Etc. And pays basically zero cost for it, opportunity or otherwise. That grinds my gears a bit.

[RandomPeasant]

WotC can't do that effectively, in some part because all the thematic space is used up by wizards and fighters (and to a much lesser degree clerics)...and they just squat on it and do nothing interesting or useful with it.

You can just write new classes that overlap in concept with existing ones. It's fine. To some extent you need to do it, because you want to have something that lets people play some sort of before you print your undead-themed splatbook with a Necromancer class in it. It is fine if you print something that is "a Wizard who is focused on X subset of effects and has class features to compensate for what they miss out on", and indeed it's better to do that than to limit the Wizard in hopes you will print a Fire Mage and a Necromancer and an Illusionist and a Seer and a Stormcaller and so on before people wander off and lose interest since you didn't give them any way to play a guy with zombie minions in the PHB.


Any new interesting idea will always be "wizard, but..." or "fighter, but..." and will struggle.

You'll note that 3e printed the Warmage, the Beguiler, and the Dread Necromancer and they were all broadly well-received. Hell, people like the Wu Jen and the pitch for that class is "what if the Wizard, but vaguely orientalist". The idea that the Wizard is sitting on this vast trove of conceptual space is just not really supported. Can you build a Wizard that is recognizably a "lightning mage" without feeling like you're gimping yourself? What about one who seems like they deal in plague and poison magic?


Imagine if there was a class that was "build your own homebrew...every adventuring day." You could assemble your class features from scratch, pretty much every single day. And none of them built on others, so you could cherry pick the strongest ones at every point without opportunity cost. That's...yeah. Not a good fit for a game that has thematic classes at its core[1].

This is just the 3e Binder and it's fine. It is just not nearly the intractable problem you think it is to give people a lot of options and have them pick from them. Insofar as you've identified a problem, it's that the devs keep writing "Wizard" on other class's abilities, but that's not a problem with the Wizard, that's a problem with the devs doing that. They could just not do it, and the Wizard would be exactly what it is now, and also the new Blood Mage they introduced would have a bunch of Blood Mage spells that were not also Wizard spells because the devs didn't write "Wizard" next to them.

(Incidentally, by far the most effective way to hedge against this is to allow classes to vary substantially in how they mechanically function -- the notion of simply writing "Wizard" next to the Soulmelds of 3e's Incarnate or the Vestiges of 3e's Binder is all but incoherent)


when the rogue says "I'll sneak up and..." and the wizard says "nah, I already sent my invisible, undetectable sensor through the whole place." Etc. And pays basically zero cost for it, opportunity or otherwise. That grinds my gears a bit.

I mean the Wizard spent a spell slot. They don't actually get very many of those, and they would like to spend them on spells that kill people (though 5e's baffling decision to split the difference between prepared and spontaneous casting in the Wizard's favor gives them a huge leg up). If you are a 7th level character and you are choosing between spending your one 4th level slot on arcane eye or a spell that does literally anything in combat, I think that is actually a fair trade to make for getting something that show's up the Rogue's stealth skills, as those can be used without limit and without degrading their combat capacity. The problem is that eventually you reach a point where the 4th level spell slot doesn't mean as much, and the Rogue hasn't picked up anything fundamentally new, but frankly I think it's fair to call that a Rogue problem.

[KorvinStarmast]

And I agree that there's a balance to be struck between brick and clay. But the main way you provide more options in a class-based game is by making more classes.

I disagree. Having better crafted sub classes / archetypes within class concepts strikes me as the better value. (Two examples I'll offer are the Way of Shadows Monk and Arcane Trickster Rogue).

As an example of good design with fewer classes, Blades in the Dark has IIRC 8 classes, but when you get into the customization piece there are a lot of different ways to advance and build each of the classes. (And leveling/change process is at a measured pace).

Also, D&D 5e needs to clean up the multiclassing scheme. It has a few holes in it, but it could be improved to give more customization with fewer loopholes. It's in, at best, OK shape at present, but it could use some fine tuning.

[Skrum]

Also, D&D 5e needs to clean up the multiclassing scheme. It has a few holes in it, but it could be improved to give more customization with fewer loopholes. It's in, at best, OK shape at present, but it could use some fine tuning.

What are the loopholes, out of curiosity? I think the only multiclassing bit I don't like is how easy it is for casters to get heavy armor prof. I don't think the answer to that is to change multiclassing though, I think the answer is to change spellcasting rules.

The majority of multiclassing options are either not worth it, or only worth it within a specific window (like, works at level X by not so much at Y, usually because of the front-loaded nature of most classes). Actual synergy isn't few and far between.

[Waazraath]

What are the loopholes, out of curiosity? I think the only multiclassing bit I don't like is how easy it is for casters to get heavy armor prof. I don't think the answer to that is to change multiclassing though, I think the answer is to change spellcasting rules.

I think the synergy between cha using (half)casters is a bit much as well. I don't think its disbalanced per se (given how powerful single class pally is) but it's a bit weird that pally/full caster class smites better than single class pally. And 2 levels of pally give a bit much to a martial focusses bard or warlock.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

I don't think campaigns need to die, but the style of the campaigns definitely change, my group used to play a lot 13-20+ during 3e and we played 2 high level campaigns in 5e.

Having Teleport, and more importantly Plane Shift, complete changes the campaign but it can be interesting in a different way. Same as giving powerful features at low levels, in 3e I gave a PC wish at will at lvl 3, to this day we still think that was one of the best campaigns we played. In 5e one campaign the DM gave us an artifact with dials that basically let us jump universes un a multiverse, but we didn't know that when we first obtained it, and we were blindly changing reality until we started to figure out how it worked, and it was a very interesting campaign. As part of a group that leans more to the sandbox aspects of the game having low level easy access to teleport can help a lot at filling places of the map and start describing the world more precisely.

Like you I've played a couple of 5e campaigns into higher levels, and most of them not. And yeah, it can be interesting, and yeah it's definitely different. Some of these higher level abilities change the game in a way that isn't always sustainable or desirable. I don't really think I'm disagreeing with you and some of the other posters here. If you have the right group, and particularly the right DM, those higher level abilities, like teleport, can work. Most of the time I just prefer a lower magic game, and given the stats on participation falling off the edge of a cliff at low tier 3 I'm not the only one.

[Pex]

I'm going to hard disagree with your last statement. The travel and exploration part of D&D is great, and a huge part of the game that our group leans into. Probably the single biggest reason for us losing interest in campaigns and them ending is when some characters get abilities that can bypass this part. Something is lost when a group can just blink around with a snap of the fingers.

What kind of world is it when we're 13th level facing 13th level encounters every day going from Little Town to Podunk two weeks by horseback? Even so, Exploration is not just about what's between Little Town and Podunk. Exploration includes finding out what's in Podunk once we get there and if takes an instant or two weeks doesn't change that. The game changes as you gain levels. Things that were obstacles at 3rd level no longer are at 13th. That's the progress and nature of the game. Not every campaign is about saving the world at 13th level, but you're not exactly escorting the merchant caravan or dealing with goblin bandits on the road either. 13th level parties deal with 13th level problems, but now the spellcaster is down a spell slot because he had to teleport the party just to get to the closest area possible to deal with it.

[Brookshw]

Sure. I'm not saying "Teleport is the only way to play!" That'd be silly of me.
I am saying "Some tables don't care for travel."

Sorta like tracking arrows or rations. Some tables love that minutiae, some prefer to handwave it.

It'd only be an issue if there's a mismatch, and even then, it can often be dealt with. For instance-a player who cares about encumbrance and arrows and rations can track their own stuff, even if they have a DM who doesn't care about it. The opposite, though, would probably not work super well.

Sure, I completely agree.


teleport lets you skip over stuff, but it doesn't force you to. If the table is interested in going out an exploring the wilderness, they can still do that. teleport is good because it moves some agency over what sorts of adventures and roleplaying opportunities the campaign includes to the players. It's true that you can develop the world by looking at isolated hamlets or chance encounters while traveling. But you can also develop it by looking at bustling cosmopolitan cities and locations of great enough renown to be worth burning a teleport to visit. I think a lot of people look at teleport in terms of what it obsoletes rather than what it enables, which is just not a good attitude to have towards the game.

Anything that reduces opportunities for interactions by definition results in less opportunities for interactions, how relevant the lost opportunities are and how they can be compensated for are dependent upon the nature of a campaign. As to enabling, ehhh, sort of? If a game is going to involve going to place then good chances already that the DM is going to put opportunities to for those to occur and is going to effectively waive irrelevant things between point A & B. I'm not sure that ignoring a cost for a benefit which otherwise would be realized is a good outlook, but, like I said, to each their own (and that may not even be each person, but each campaign).

[Schwann145]

I think the "teleport issue" is particularly overblown on the mechanical end (read the spell, it's definitely not a safe option most of the time), and the reason it's a problem on the narrative end is simply because DMs don't want to deal with the hassle of creating the journey as well as the destination adventure (something I don't blame them for... but calling a spade a spade remains important).
It also doesn't help that many (most? idk) players don't want to play the game, they want to play the video game. A big part of "exploration" is the minutiae that so many players complain about - tracking resources. If all you ever do is write down some basics that you carry in your bag, and then never have to worry about it again, then of course exploration is going to get stale and boring real fast. You're gonna yearn for the "Skyrim fast travel" option... and it's not long after doing that that the game begins to feel like a rush to the end, and that's when games begin to unravel.

Now, that's not to say you must enjoy these parts of the game. Certainly not. But I wonder why people prefer TTRPG over VRPG when they're different beasts, and the latter better caters to the playstyle many people seem to prefer.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I think the "teleport issue" is particularly overblown on the mechanical end (read the spell, it's definitely not a safe option most of the time), and the reason it's a problem on the narrative end is simply because DMs don't want to deal with the hassle of creating the journey as well as the destination adventure (something I don't blame them for... but calling a spade a spade remains important).
It also doesn't help that many (most? idk) players don't want to play the game, they want to play the video game. A big part of "exploration" is the minutiae that so many players complain about - tracking resources. If all you ever do is write down some basics that you carry in your bag, and then never have to worry about it again, then of course exploration is going to get stale and boring real fast. You're gonna yearn for the "Skyrim fast travel" option... and it's not long after doing that that the game begins to feel like a rush to the end, and that's when games begin to unravel.

Now, that's not to say you must enjoy these parts of the game. Certainly not. But I wonder why people prefer TTRPG over VRPG when they're different beasts, and the latter better caters to the playstyle many people seem to prefer.

Meh, "exploration == travel == tracking resources" is a really cramped way of looking at it.

Exploration is all the things you do while you're not
a) trying to take someone out of combat by inflicting the dead condition while preventing yourself/allies from being taken out of combat
b) or talking to an NPC

And that's on a round-by-round, action-by-action level. You can engage in exploration during combat by, say, interacting with the terrain or a trap. Opening a door. Closing a door. Etc. You can engage in social during combat "scenes". You can engage in combat during exploration "scenes". You can engage in exploration during social "scenes". Etc.

It's so much more than just travel. Travel/bare survival is, in fact, negligible past level 5 or so no matter your group composition except in very unusual circumstances (e.g. exceedingly hostile terrain).

[Schwann145]

I simply mean to suggest that "exploration" involves more than simply "roll a skill check" or "have a specific movement type." Yet, that's what it tends to get boiled down to... because many tables want to ignore the rest of the moving parts of the "pillar" for convenience-sake.

[Skrum]

I simply mean to suggest that "exploration" involves more than simply "roll a skill check" or "have a specific movement type." Yet, that's what it tends to get boiled down to... because many tables want to ignore the rest of the moving parts of the "pillar" for convenience-sake.

That cause it's often incredibly tedious and takes hours of work for the DM, just for something that's by definition an interlude from the main plot?

Listen, I've run hexcrawl survival games. They're great. I spend a ton of prep making a large map, lots of stuff to find, different trails, traps, random encounters, potentially friendly NPC's, etc. I really like running those games. But the exploration is the game. I would not use anything nearly that complicated or in-depth if it was "just" travel, and the actual goal was to reach to next town so the you can talk to the Who about the What. It's inappropriate for a lot of games.

[KorvinStarmast]

Meh, "exploration == travel == tracking resources" is a really cramped way of looking at it.

Exploration is all the things you do while you're not
a) trying to take someone out of combat by inflicting the dead condition while preventing yourself/allies from being taken out of combat
b) or talking to an NPC

Which is part of why I prefer to see that pillar of the game called "discovery" of which exploration is a sub set. :smallcool:

[5eNeedsDarksun]

What kind of world is it when we're 13th level facing 13th level encounters every day going from Little Town to Podunk two weeks by horseback? Even so, Exploration is not just about what's between Little Town and Podunk. Exploration includes finding out what's in Podunk once we get there and if takes an instant or two weeks doesn't change that. The game changes as you gain levels. Things that were obstacles at 3rd level no longer are at 13th. That's the progress and nature of the game. Not every campaign is about saving the world at 13th level, but you're not exactly escorting the merchant caravan or dealing with goblin bandits on the road either. 13th level parties deal with 13th level problems, but now the spellcaster is down a spell slot because he had to teleport the party just to get to the closest area possible to deal with it.

I can totally understand that point of view, but it doesn't jive with my vision. Seems to me in the old edition there was a small chance of this going horribly wrong so casters at least had to think about risk/ reward; also I often come back to LOTR and Gandalf, who doesn't ruin the entire series with a snap of his fingers. There's just some enjoyment factor that gets lost most of the time for me when the game gets to this point.

The only other thing I'd say is the first time I encountered this was not at 13th, but 11th. I was DMing OotA and a Druid got Transport via Plants. Given the number of plants we'd encountered by then, a lot of the travel was avoided and it changed the last 1/3 of the adventure significantly.

[Zalam]

So, I'm working on something where knowing what (core) spells people think could use changes is useful.
So I tried to pull specific information out of it, and grouped it into three categories:


Miserable Spells:
-Melf's Acid Arrow, Ice Knife, and Chromatic Orb (noted as being buffed in BG3 by gaining environmental impact?)


Top Spells:
barbs AND shield AND misty step AND fireball AND hypnotic pattern AND banishment
counterspell
(Not sure what "barbs" is, feels like this is a "greatest hits" list - some are over the top?)


Spells With Balance Issues Someone Described:
- Animate Dead (hedge slots and more or less directly convert downtime to minions)


Do people generally agree with this assessment? Are there other spells people would put on their "balance is poor" lists? Both positive and negative: things that could use a buff are well worth mentioning.

(Sorry, coming to this late but feel like I need to know the state of the spell meta...)

[JNAProductions]

Witch Bolt is another stinker of a spell.

[Notafish]

The problem is that eventually you reach a point where the 4th level spell slot doesn't mean as much, and the Rogue hasn't picked up anything fundamentally new, but frankly I think it's fair to call that a Rogue problem.

I guess if the issue is that mundane characters don't have features that match the casters at high levels, it's a Rogue problem that can be resolved by giving the Rogue (and other mundanes) features/items that let them have superpowers, but the system also does not present clear support for how to run a game once the high-level spells become options for PCs. It could be a game of high-level rocket tag for everyone, a game about the heroes managing a kingdom and occasionally fighting a demon, it could even be a game about people with vastly different power levels trying to get along... None of the rule systems presented in the core books (that I can think of) suggest how to manage running the game at higher levels other than mentioning that the players will have access to more resources at higher levels and to let them own property.

The issue of some spells being clearly worse than others is another issue, but I think also related to a lack of guidance in the rules. It isn't really an issue to me that Melf's Acid Arrow sucks, but it is an issue that the DMG pretends that the published spells are balanced and gives almost no advice on how to "price out" a homebrew spell (3 paragraphs, focused on damage progression was what I could find).

(If "Felm's Acid Arrow" adds a 1d4 AC damage on a hit, is it still okay as a 2nd level spell? I might think so, but it would make at least one player I know more comfortable if I were homebrewing 'by the rules' instead of the seat of my pants)

[KorvinStarmast]

barbs AND shield AND misty step AND fireball AND hypnotic pattern AND banishment
No, on banishment, since a lot of hard core enemies in Tiers 3 and 4 have solid Cha saves.
But it has its moments, that's for sure.

Silvery barbs is {censored} and should have never seen print.

[RandomPeasant]

Anything that reduces opportunities for interactions by definition results in less opportunities for interactions

Sure, but teleport reduces the number of options for interactions from "vastly more than you could possibly play out in your out-of-game lifetime" to "slightly less than that". Like, yes, if you have teleport you don't get to do the interaction where you meet a guy on the road. But you still get to do the interaction where you meet a guy at the tavern or the church or just outside the dungeon or while shopping for supplies or at the court wizard's research library and I can go on naming these, but we should get the point by now, which is that there are more contexts in which you could possibly meet guys than there is time to meet guys without having the game turn into a guy-meeting montage, so removing one doesn't actually matter.


A big part of "exploration" is the minutiae that so many players complain about - tracking resources. If all you ever do is write down some basics that you carry in your bag, and then never have to worry about it again, then of course exploration is going to get stale and boring real fast.

I really don't think that's the interesting part of exploration. The interesting part of exploration is finding new stuff. Whether you get to the serpent temple with six days or eight days of rations remaining is not, I think, particularly interesting. Figuring out that there is a serpent temple to be found based on the evidence you saw in a half-dozen different spots is.


I often come back to LOTR and Gandalf, who doesn't ruin the entire series with a snap of his fingers.

This is a bad analysis of LotR, though to be fair what it misses is not really made explicit by the text. The thing about LotR is that it is not really told from Gandalf's point of view. It is mostly about the hobbits, and they are having a low-level adventure (get from point A to point B without being murdered by orcs). Gandalf is not having that adventure, nor is he having some higher-level equivalent where he is trying to get from point A to point B without being murdered by balrogs. Gandalf is having an adventure where there is a McGuffin that needs to get to point B, but he can't actually personally touch it (because it will eat his soul) or go near point B (because Sauron will know he's there and swoop in to stop him). Instead, he has to support and clear the way for a bunch of low-level characters who are arbitrarily immune to the corruption of the Ring and can enter Mordor.

This explains why he does not send the eagles to carry the hobbits into Mordor and why a Gandalf with teleport would not simply teleport into Mordor. If Gandalf puts the hobbits with the Ring on eagleback, that results in the eagles getting corrupted to the side of Sauron, and defecting by dropping off the hobbits and Ring in the middle of the nearest orcish army. Similarly, you can reasonably assume that casting teleport to move the ring would max out the Ring's corruption of Gandalf, triggering his lose condition. If Gandalf could teleport, that would help with some stuff (e.g. dealing with Rohan and Gondor would be smoother, though note that teleport does not move armies), but it doesn't obviate the plot.


The only other thing I'd say is the first time I encountered this was not at 13th, but 11th. I was DMing OotA and a Druid got Transport via Plants. Given the number of plants we'd encountered by then, a lot of the travel was avoided and it changed the last 1/3 of the adventure significantly.

IMO this is something 5e does right. Travel powers in general need to show up before teleport, because teleport is pretty obviously the best travel power, so if transport via plants is going to exist it needs to be lower-level so that there is a point where it makes sense to care about where the plants are.

[Witty Username]

Shield breaks the AC system in fundamental ways, and is funcky with the action economy, it is cheap as a 1st level spell but I don't think that is even part of the core problem as there are problems with the inherent effects, nerfing its AC bonus or increasing its spell level will very quickly invalidate its core function, but leaving it where it is is problematic due to how it interacts with other parts of the game. Reworking is a possible solution, but arguably such a spell already exists with mage armor (doesn't stack with armor, more difficult to use re-actively, lower high end effect, but long duration to use proactively).
And unlike many other problem spells it is not a high level spell, so it is accessible to most games and all levels of play.

I think the best solution is outright removal, you could however bring it in line with defensive duelist and make it only apply to one attack to cement its use as a reaction effect, if you are determined to keep it. Kinda like the changes in One D&D to counterspell, it is intended to disrupt an active turn of a monster, not drain them of resources into oblivion to have a long term effect on the combat. My only complaint is that counterspell should be renamed to Remand, just for the MTG community to get a pained laugh.

[Brookshw]

Sure, but teleport reduces the number of options for interactions from "vastly more than you could possibly play out in your out-of-game lifetime" to "slightly less than that". Like, yes, if you have teleport you don't get to do the interaction where you meet a guy on the road. But you still get to do the interaction where you meet a guy at the tavern or the church or just outside the dungeon or while shopping for supplies or at the court wizard's research library and I can go on naming these, but we should get the point by now, which is that there are more contexts in which you could possibly meet guys than there is time to meet guys without having the game turn into a guy-meeting montage, so removing one doesn't actually matter.


I hear you, but the what/where/when/ etc. of encounters is dependent upon the world and campaign, I don't agree that the variables can be waved away in a blanket statement and consider that they're dependent on what's actually going on. What you're proposing is also self defeating regarding your earlier point about wanting an expanding view to be taken; you're example was visiting various cosmopolitan areas or places of reknown, but if the significance of things is interchangeable then there's no reason to visit those places either as their significance could just be plopped down anywhere.

[kazaryu]

Shield breaks the AC system in fundamental ways, and is funcky with the action economy, it is cheap as a 1st level spell but I don't think that is even part of the core problem as there are problems with the inherent effects, nerfing its AC bonus or increasing its spell level will very quickly invalidate its core function, but leaving it where it is is problematic due to how it interacts with other parts of the game.

an additional layer to this that rarely gets talked about is perceived differences vs actual differences. dropping the AC down to only a +4 might genuinely make it perfectly balanced...but to some thats not going to feel like enough. whereas dropping it to +3 might make it genuinely too weak, but players celebrate the change because to them it feels better. and thats not something you can easily account for, especially when nerfing. and that gets further compounded when you talk about various game tables.

at my table, shield is really just...not a problem. its "spend a spell and use your reaction to get to an AC that a frontliner just walks around with." otoh other tables where the wizard has gone out of their way to get heavy armor proficiency. or are playing a bladesinger. so their normal AC is already 20+ in combat. then shield can be MUCH harder to overcome. meaning that..how OP the shield spell is changes based on the table...so how do you balance that out, which group do you gear the spell toward?

[PhoenixPhyre]

an additional layer to this that rarely gets talked about is perceived differences vs actual differences. dropping the AC down to only a +4 might genuinely make it perfectly balanced...but to some thats not going to feel like enough. whereas dropping it to +3 might make it genuinely too weak, but players celebrate the change because to them it feels better. and thats not something you can easily account for, especially when nerfing. and that gets further compounded when you talk about various game tables.

at my table, shield is really just...not a problem. its "spend a spell and use your reaction to get to an AC that a frontliner just walks around with." otoh other tables where the wizard has gone out of their way to get heavy armor proficiency. or are playing a bladesinger. so their normal AC is already 20+ in combat. then shield can be MUCH harder to overcome. meaning that..how OP the shield spell is changes based on the table...so how do you balance that out, which group do you gear the spell toward?

That's one of the inherent challenges with balancing things that have faster-than-linear scaling. If AC were linear, adding +5 would always be just as effective (or not effective) at any base AC level. If AC had diminishing returns (ie sub-linear scaling), you could stack AC to the moon and it wouldn't mean anything, because the effect would naturally cap (or soft cap). But because it has super-linear scaling, having "enough" of a boost at low base values means you have too much of a boost at high base values. There may be a single base AC value where it's "balanced", but on either side it's got issues. Of course, you can balance this by having boosts to AC themselves have non-linear scaling--for example, you could say "shield gives you +5 if your AC is 15 or below, +3 if it's 16-18, or +2 if it's above 18." Or whatever numbers make sense. But that's way more complicated and has other (mostly feeling) issues.

That's not to say that having systems with super-linear scaling is bad. It's just...problematic and difficult in ways that linear and sublinear scaling aren't. And slapping a constant +X on things makes it all problematic. It's one reason I'm a very strong fan of really leaning into bounded accuracy and basically removing all stacking boosts to AC, attack value, and saving throws. Or at least concentrating them down into universal features (basically letting everyone do defensive duelist at some resource cost). Shield can give you something like the Abjurer's Arcane Ward. Etc. +X to damage is totally fine--adding more damage in "normal" amounts rarely skews anything too much. Adding to accuracy or to AC or especially to save DCs, on the other hand...

[kazaryu]

That's one of the inherent challenges with balancing things that have faster-than-linear scaling. If AC were linear, adding +5 would always be just as effective (or not effective) at any base AC level. If AC had diminishing returns (ie sub-linear scaling), you could stack AC to the moon and it wouldn't mean anything, because the effect would naturally cap (or soft cap). But because it has super-linear scaling, having "enough" of a boost at low base values means you have too much of a boost at high base values. There may be a single base AC value where it's "balanced", but on either side it's got issues. Of course, you can balance this by having boosts to AC themselves have non-linear scaling--for example, you could say "shield gives you +5 if your AC is 15 or below, +3 if it's 16-18, or +2 if it's above 18." Or whatever numbers make sense. But that's way more complicated and has other (mostly feeling) issues.

That's not to say that having systems with super-linear scaling is bad. It's just...problematic and difficult in ways that linear and sublinear scaling aren't. And slapping a constant +X on things makes it all problematic. It's one reason I'm a very strong fan of really leaning into bounded accuracy and basically removing all stacking boosts to AC, attack value, and saving throws. Or at least concentrating them down into universal features (basically letting everyone do defensive duelist at some resource cost). Shield can give you something like the Abjurer's Arcane Ward. Etc. +X to damage is totally fine--adding more damage in "normal" amounts rarely skews anything too much. Adding to accuracy or to AC or especially to save DCs, on the other hand...

i agree with you that another layer to the struggle of balance is what you call the super linear scaling. but that isn't really the struggle i was trying to highlight. I was trying to highlight the layers that are rarely talked about. different games, and how the ability feels. it doesn't matter how effective it is. being able to snap get +5 to AC feels way cooler than +3 would. even if mechanically its relatively weak, like if you're normally at 10 AC a +5 is going to matter less often than if you were at an 18AC. but its still going to feel cool to do. and how fun an ability is is an important part of game design. this would be less of a concern if it was, for example, a +3 to start with. but if you want to try to nerf it, you should consider the perceived affect that has, in addition to the real affect.

the other layer i was intending to point out (and didn't do a great job of) was that different campaigns change things. shield wouldn't be a problem in my campaigns even if one of my players played a 20int 20dex bladesinger, because im comfortable employing means of damage that don't care about AC *and* because in my campaign, combat lethality isn't really the point. for the most part combats aren't about "can the players survive" they're more often about "can the players stop the bad guys". so having a powerful defensive spell isn't OP, because the goals of my combats are different. in fact, from that perspective nerfing shield could be a problem.

As opposed to in campaigns where combat is intended to be highly lethal, and encourage smart play and optimization in order to survive/overcome consistently. and in those games shield could be seen as a problem.

basically, game design and balance isn't just about the numbers in a white room. there are practical aspects to consider that don't directly interact with the numbers of the game. thats why earlier i said that yeah, it is sort of impossible for WoTC to balance 5e..but thats because there are a vast amount of styles of campaigns that people might want to use 5e for, and you can really only balance for a specific subset of those. (to be clear, im not saying that 5e is particularly balanced even for the style it purports to be for. just pointing out that saying "it can't be balanced" is kind of a non-sequitor. its true...but in a way that doesn't really help)

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Sure, but teleport reduces the number of options for interactions from "vastly more than you could possibly play out in your out-of-game lifetime" to "slightly less than that". Like, yes, if you have teleport you don't get to do the interaction where you meet a guy on the road. But you still get to do the interaction where you meet a guy at the tavern or the church or just outside the dungeon or while shopping for supplies or at the court wizard's research library and I can go on naming these, but we should get the point by now, which is that there are more contexts in which you could possibly meet guys than there is time to meet guys without having the game turn into a guy-meeting montage, so removing one doesn't actually matter.



I really don't think that's the interesting part of exploration. The interesting part of exploration is finding new stuff. Whether you get to the serpent temple with six days or eight days of rations remaining is not, I think, particularly interesting. Figuring out that there is a serpent temple to be found based on the evidence you saw in a half-dozen different spots is.



This is a bad analysis of LotR, though to be fair what it misses is not really made explicit by the text. The thing about LotR is that it is not really told from Gandalf's point of view. It is mostly about the hobbits, and they are having a low-level adventure (get from point A to point B without being murdered by orcs). Gandalf is not having that adventure, nor is he having some higher-level equivalent where he is trying to get from point A to point B without being murdered by balrogs. Gandalf is having an adventure where there is a McGuffin that needs to get to point B, but he can't actually personally touch it (because it will eat his soul) or go near point B (because Sauron will know he's there and swoop in to stop him). Instead, he has to support and clear the way for a bunch of low-level characters who are arbitrarily immune to the corruption of the Ring and can enter Mordor.

This explains why he does not send the eagles to carry the hobbits into Mordor and why a Gandalf with teleport would not simply teleport into Mordor. If Gandalf puts the hobbits with the Ring on eagleback, that results in the eagles getting corrupted to the side of Sauron, and defecting by dropping off the hobbits and Ring in the middle of the nearest orcish army. Similarly, you can reasonably assume that casting teleport to move the ring would max out the Ring's corruption of Gandalf, triggering his lose condition. If Gandalf could teleport, that would help with some stuff (e.g. dealing with Rohan and Gondor would be smoother, though note that teleport does not move armies), but it doesn't obviate the plot.



IMO this is something 5e does right. Travel powers in general need to show up before teleport, because teleport is pretty obviously the best travel power, so if transport via plants is going to exist it needs to be lower-level so that there is a point where it makes sense to care about where the plants are.

That's a fair explanation of LotR and why Gandalf can't just snap his fingers and fix the problem. But in light of the larger point of contention here I'm not sure how it helps. LotR is a great story in large part because of your well laid out reasoning that prevents Gandalf from intervening. Similarly, some published 5e adventures (Dungeon of the Mad Mage is front and center) basically ban teleport to keep some guardrails on.

[RandomPeasant]

Shield breaks the AC system in fundamental ways

Only because of bounded accuracy. If you just went back to the way numbers work in any other edition of D&D, shield would be a pretty mediocre spell like it is in all the other editions of D&D. This sort of thing is why I am broadly skeptical of bounded accuracy as a design principle, especially in the long run. You are simply never going to get people to maintain the kind of discipline around bonuses that is necessary for it to work, especially in the long run.


I hear you, but the what/where/when/ etc. of encounters is dependent upon the world and campaign, I don't agree that the variables can be waved away in a blanket statement and consider that they're dependent on what's actually going on. What you're proposing is also self defeating regarding your earlier point about wanting an expanding view to be taken; you're example was visiting various cosmopolitan areas or places of reknown, but if the significance of things is interchangeable then there's no reason to visit those places either as their significance could just be plopped down anywhere.

Their significance can't be plopped down anywhere. Sigil is Sigil because Sigil is a place that beings from various widely-spread origins can all reach with relative ease. You can't just "plop it down" somewhere, because Sigil in the middle of some random kingdom on the Prime without all the portals is just some random city on the Prime. You can't even plop it down in the middle of the various outsider faction's physical territories, because then it becomes the center of a battlefield rather than a neutral space for negotiations, diplomacy, and intrigue.

Or in real world terms, think about the difference between New York and a small town. New York is different from a small town, in no small part because people can use various forms of fast travel (e.g. planes) to go directly to New York in a way they can't to small towns. That means that New York is meaningfully different from a random small town in terms of what sort of adventures you can have there and what sorts of people you can encounter. And, sure, there are some things that could happen in both places, particularly if you squint. And, sure, there are things you can do in the small town you can't do in New York. But, while there is a reduction in that sense, that reduction is better understood as a shift in the distribution of adventures than any kind of limitation, as in neither case are you going to run out of adventure premises until long after the campaign has run its course. And, insofar as teleport allows people to express this sort of preference about the distribution of possible plots, it should be seen as a good thing since (unless your players are truly awful) picking a distribution of adventures that interests them more should cause them to be more engaged by the campaign.

And, yes, in some sense this is all an illusion and you could just say (as a player) "we'd like to do some big city adventures" or (as a DM) "now you all get moved over to the big city". But the whole point of the game is shared illusions, and the level of indirection is important.


That's a fair explanation of LotR and why Gandalf can't just snap his fingers and fix the problem. But in light of the larger point of contention here I'm not sure how it helps. LotR is a great story in large part because of your well laid out reasoning that prevents Gandalf from intervening. Similarly, some published 5e adventures (Dungeon of the Mad Mage is front and center) basically ban teleport to keep some guardrails on.

The thing is you don't need to ban teleport to keep guardrails on. For all the complaining teleport gets (and has gotten for multiple editions now), it's not that hard to write around. As noted, any properly exploration-based adventure is immune to teleport by its nature. Similarly, teleport is of fairly marginal relevance if your adventure is about a Mortal Kombat-style tournament, or an Aliens-style bug hunt, or any sort of intrigue or murder mystery. it is true that teleport requires some thought when constructing adventures, and somewhat more for it to be meaningful but not overpowering. But, frankly, that's a reason teleport is good. The abilities the PCs have should matter for how adventures work, or what's the point of giving the PCs abilities at all?

[KorvinStarmast]

Only because of bounded accuracy. If you just went back to the way numbers work in any other edition of D&D, shield would be a pretty mediocre spell like it is in all the other editions of D&D. This sort of thing is why I am broadly skeptical of bounded accuracy as a design principle, especially in the long run. You are simply never going to get people to maintain the kind of discipline around bonuses that is necessary for it to work, especially in the long run. Then make it +3 instead of +5. (Like mage armor).


Sigil is Sigil because Sigil is a place that beings from various widely-spread origins can all reach with relative ease. You can't just "plop it down" somewhere, because Sigil in the middle of some random kingdom on the Prime without all the portals is just some random city on the Prime. You can't even plop it down in the middle of the various outsider faction's physical territories, because then it becomes the center of a battlefield rather than a neutral space for negotiations, diplomacy, and intrigue.
Good point about Sigil.

[tKUUNK]

regarding balancing
Shield, either:
1) it only enhances AC for the triggering attack
OR
2) Make it a bonus action to cast; duration is still until the start of your next turn. This makes it a tactical decision to cast with all the usual action economy tradeoffs rather than being an effectively passive defensive ability.
OR
3) It grants resistance to force, piercing, bludgeoning, and slashing. This would need further thought but it removes the interaction with AC.

I don't have major beef with Shield, but if I were going to houserule it, I'd lean in one of these directions.

Far as teleport and keeping a game fun at high levels, here's some DM advice:

The players can still only be in one place at a time, so make their choice of where to teleport next meaningful. It's great when they're torn between teleporting to New York to stop the giants, or Minnesota to stop the vikings. With plot consequence either way, even if it's just "whichever you delay will be more difficult to deal with later". or "there's supposedly a chance we can persuade the vikings to fight at our side....but the odds of negotiation going well would improve if we can show them we already defeated the giant king".

Now teleport isn't just a tool to get somewhere, it's a crucial turning point in the plot.

[Brookshw]

Their significance can't be plopped down anywhere. Sigil is Sigil because Sigil is a place that beings from various widely-spread origins can all reach with relative ease. You can't just "plop it down" somewhere, because Sigil in the middle of some random kingdom on the Prime without all the portals is just some random city on the Prime. You can't even plop it down in the middle of the various outsider faction's physical territories, because then it becomes the center of a battlefield rather than a neutral space for negotiations, diplomacy, and intrigue.

Or in real world terms, think about the difference between New York and a small town. New York is different from a small town, in no small part because people can use various forms of fast travel (e.g. planes) to go directly to New York in a way they can't to small towns. That means that New York is meaningfully different from a random small town in terms of what sort of adventures you can have there and what sorts of people you can encounter. And, sure, there are some things that could happen in both places, particularly if you squint. And, sure, there are things you can do in the small town you can't do in New York. But, while there is a reduction in that sense, that reduction is better understood as a shift in the distribution of adventures than any kind of limitation, as in neither case are you going to run out of adventure premises until long after the campaign has run its course. And, insofar as teleport allows people to express this sort of preference about the distribution of possible plots, it should be seen as a good thing since (unless your players are truly awful) picking a distribution of adventures that interests them more should cause them to be more engaged by the campaign.

And, yes, in some sense this is all an illusion and you could just say (as a player) "we'd like to do some big city adventures" or (as a DM) "now you all get moved over to the big city". But the whole point of the game is shared illusions, and the level of indirection is important.


I agree that a location's individual significance is particular to it, that's why all those locations in between are opportunities to create additional significance; arguing that 'locations don't matter and their significance can just be shifted' and also 'locations do matter and their significance can't be shifted' is just trying to have your cake and eat it to. As I've mentioned repeatedly, its something that comes down to the campaign and game and can't just be addressed in the abstract. If the intervening distance is just [Dirt Road # 1423], then, yeah, the the relevance of a lost opportunity is likely minimal or can otherwise be compensated for, but that's not always the case; to use Kobold Press' setting as an example, if the intervening distance is a trip through the Margreave (which has quite a bit of significance to significant powers and locations in the world) or the outskirts of the ongoing dragon empire expansion and resulting wars, then those intervening distances do have a lot more going on with them that can't just be shifted to another location without crashing a lot of the world's function.

Certainly different locations lead themselves to different adventure opportunities, my earlier point was that there's a cost to that, engaging in the world is generally the best way to generate those opportunities in the first place; if, theoretically there was a list of adventure plot points and the players are trying to decide which is most appealing to them, completely skipping over #13-#74 on the list just means a lot of lost opportunities for players to find something which may be engaging and enjoyable to them.

[Pex]

Currently playing a Pathfinder 1E game. I'm playing an Arcanist where I get 5th level spells at 10th level. It's a linear campaign. Pre-10th level we needed to go from Point A to Point B. We traveled by boat. It took 30 game world days to get there. We had to play 30 days worth of random encountersplus some campaign relevant plot hook adventures in the Dreamland. Playing the boat trip was fun, but for me it became a bit boring as we fought yet another sea monster or dealt with some other on shore crisis that had nothing to do with anything with the plot. We finally reach Point B and deal with campaign plot stuff.

I'm now 10th level and have Teleport. We now need to go to Point C. I've never been to Point C. However, not even the other players want to take another boat trip or spend game world weeks of traveling just to get there. We want to get to Point C already and deal with what we need to do. I could Teleport us there, but it's significantly risky since I've never been there so we hire NPC Service. We pay. We teleport. We're there. We continue the game doing the Plot. We're still Exploring as we now need to travel through a large museum complex, i.e. a dungeon. We did the minutiae of traveling already with the boat trip. It was fun. It was great. All good, but we want to get on with it already with the main plot. We did not want to have to do it again. The monk and fighter players were happy enough an uberpowerful spellcaster allowed us to avoid another 4 or 5 game sessions worth of minutiae traveling random encounters of no interest to us. Meanwhile I have used Teleport to get the party out of a sticky situation to a known safe location, and they were grateful I could do it. The fighter player is not crying he can't cut a hole in reality to do the same thing.

[Theodoxus]

I don't know why Shield doesn't interact with the world like the Protection fighting style does. Just impose Disadvantage on the triggering attack, and any other after until the caster's next turn.

Everyone says that Advantage/Disadvantage is an equivalent +/-5 to a roll, so it should conceivable provide the same general effect, but without breaking bounded accuracy by stacking AC to Crit Only ranges.

Forcing disadvantage has the side benefit of nearly guaranteeing that the hit won't crit; which is far more detrimental to the squishies who generally cast the spell more often, than just a regular hit would be.

The description could be changed to "A shimmering barrier of magical force appears, warping the light around you, making it harder to see and target you. Until the start of your next turn, opponents have disadvantage to hit you with attacks that target your AC, including against the triggering attack, and you take no damage from magic missile."

[PhoenixPhyre]

I don't know why Shield doesn't interact with the world like the Protection fighting style does. Just impose Disadvantage on the triggering attack, and any other after until the caster's next turn.

Everyone says that Advantage/Disadvantage is an equivalent +/-5 to a roll, so it should conceivable provide the same general effect, but without breaking bounded accuracy by stacking AC to Crit Only ranges.

Forcing disadvantage has the side benefit of nearly guaranteeing that the hit won't crit; which is far more detrimental to the squishies who generally cast the spell more often, than just a regular hit would be.

The description could be changed to "A shimmering barrier of magical force appears, warping the light around you, making it harder to see and target you. Until the start of your next turn, opponents have disadvantage to hit you with attacks that target your AC, including against the triggering attack, and you take no damage from magic missile."

But then it won't stack with blur and all the other ways to impose disadvantage on attacks! The horror! /blue-text

[Theodoxus]

But then it won't stack with blur and all the other ways to impose disadvantage on attacks! The horror! /blue-text

True... too bad the game is so dumbed down. This would be the perfect time to have something like "if you're already under the effects of a spell that provides disadvantage, such as blur, shield instead grants a +3 bonus to your AC."

I just don't think embedded if/then statements will ever make their way back into the ruleset.

[Rukelnikov]

True... too bad the game is so dumbed down. This would be the perfect time to have something like "if you're already under the effects of a spell that provides disadvantage, such as blur, shield instead grants a +3 bonus to your AC."

I just don't think embedded if/then statements will ever make their way back into the ruleset.

Maybe if/when we get a new edition of the game.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I just don't think embedded if/then statements will ever make their way back into the ruleset.

Yeah, for good reason. If I want to pilot a spreadsheet + flowcharts, EVE Online is right over there. Anyone who wants that kind of thing has tons of other editions. No need to foul up this one.

My rework of shield is (X is still undecided)



An invisible barrier of magical force appears and protects you. This barrier has 2X hit points. Whenever you would take damage and the barrier is active, the barrier takes the damage instead, reducing its hit points. If the barrier absorbs all the damage, you do not need to make Concentration saves if you are concentrating on a spell or ability. You take any damage in excess of the barrier's hit points, which provokes Concentration saves as normal. When the barrier is reduced to zero hit points, the spell ends. Because this barrier takes damage instead of you, it does not benefit from any resistances or immunities you may have. Any overflow damage is, however, affected.

In addition, you are immune to the magic-missile spell as long as the barrier is active.

Overcast When you cast this spell using more than 2 AET, the barrier's hit points increase by X for every additional AET spent.


2 AET is the equivalent of a 1st level spell...in a world where you have a lot fewer spell points (full casters have 4x level/LR).

[Schwann145]

Currently playing a Pathfinder 1E game. I'm playing an Arcanist where I get 5th level spells at 10th level. It's a linear campaign. Pre-10th level we needed to go from Point A to Point B. We traveled by boat. It took 30 game world days to get there. We had to play 30 days worth of random encountersplus some campaign relevant plot hook adventures in the Dreamland. Playing the boat trip was fun, but for me it became a bit boring as we fought yet another sea monster or dealt with some other on shore crisis that had nothing to do with anything with the plot. We finally reach Point B and deal with campaign plot stuff.

I'm now 10th level and have Teleport. We now need to go to Point C. I've never been to Point C. However, not even the other players want to take another boat trip or spend game world weeks of traveling just to get there. We want to get to Point C already and deal with what we need to do. I could Teleport us there, but it's significantly risky since I've never been there so we hire NPC Service. We pay. We teleport. We're there. We continue the game doing the Plot. We're still Exploring as we now need to travel through a large museum complex, i.e. a dungeon. We did the minutiae of traveling already with the boat trip. It was fun. It was great. All good, but we want to get on with it already with the main plot. We did not want to have to do it again. The monk and fighter players were happy enough an uberpowerful spellcaster allowed us to avoid another 4 or 5 game sessions worth of minutiae traveling random encounters of no interest to us. Meanwhile I have used Teleport to get the party out of a sticky situation to a known safe location, and they were grateful I could do it. The fighter player is not crying he can't cut a hole in reality to do the same thing.

To each their own.
Sounds like trying to rush through the game to get to... the game. Missing the forest for the trees and all that.

[Skrum]

2 AET is the equivalent of a 1st level spell...in a world where you have a lot fewer spell points (full casters have 4x level/LR).

So, each base cast creates a shield that prevents....4 damage? 2X? Am I understanding that correctly?

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, each base cast creates a shield that prevents....4 damage? 2X? Am I understanding that correctly?

X isn't set yet. I'm thinking x = 5, so at base 10 hp. But not set on any particular number.

Edit: and I forgot to mention that it's a 10 minute duration, 1 action cast. So less "stop this attack" and more "I need to keep concentration for this fight".

[Toofey]

I have always been of the opinion that wizards are "Broken" because the concept of wizards is "Broken" from a game design standpoint. In the Genre, and D&D is a genre game, wizards have wildly different power levels, and some wizards are "broken" because they use their magic well and some wizards are "Broken" because they've found spells that are "overpowered" and some wizards are "Broken" because they're just not that good at what they do. It's part of the concept of wizards, and it's fitting that given a 'realistic' translation of their abilities they end up "broken" in that same way.

One of the things that earlier ed's got right was that different classes needed different amounts of experience to advance in level, and wizards rightly were the hardest class to level, it's not a great fix but it's the closest there is to a fix that doesn't 'break' the concept of wizard that we have from the genre.

[Skrum]

X isn't set yet. I'm thinking x = 5, so at base 10 hp. But not set on any particular number.

Edit: and I forgot to mention that it's a 10 minute duration, 1 action cast. So less "stop this attack" and more "I need to keep concentration for this fight".

Isn't that just armor of agathys? But with no damage retribution?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Isn't that just armor of agathys? But with no damage retribution?

And doesn't provoke concentration checks. One's great if you know you're going to be in melee (since the retribution only happens in melee), the other is for holding onto concentration at the cost of resources.

[TurboGhast]

True... too bad the game is so dumbed down. This would be the perfect time to have something like "if you're already under the effects of a spell that provides disadvantage, such as blur, shield instead grants a +3 bonus to your AC."

I just don't think embedded if/then statements will ever make their way back into the ruleset.

Alternatively, make multiple sources of advantage and disadvantage stack, so shield + blur now makes enemy attack rolls 3d20 use the worst.

[Rukelnikov]

I have always been of the opinion that wizards are "Broken" because the concept of wizards is "Broken" from a game design standpoint. In the Genre, and D&D is a genre game, wizards have wildly different power levels, and some wizards are "broken" because they use their magic well and some wizards are "Broken" because they've found spells that are "overpowered" and some wizards are "Broken" because they're just not that good at what they do. It's part of the concept of wizards, and it's fitting that given a 'realistic' translation of their abilities they end up "broken" in that same way.

One of the things that earlier ed's got right was that different classes needed different amounts of experience to advance in level, and wizards rightly were the hardest class to level, it's not a great fix but it's the closest there is to a fix that doesn't 'break' the concept of wizard that we have from the genre.

Yup, archetypically magic users are more powerful than non magic users (unless they have magic by a different name, like being a demigod, a chosen, etc.)

How to reconcile the game having both be viable can be made in multiple different ways, I'd start by making the most setting impactful spells require a good ammount of preparation and resources to cast, so deciding to destroy a castle with an earthquake is something that would take time to do and not 6 seconds away.

[Ryuken]

I wish that 5e would have explored more of the mechanics presented in 3.5e Epic concerning spell seeds. Give wizards the building blocks to create their own version of spells, even if it's a version of something already printed. I mean, we have Arrows, Huts, and Hands named for legendary casters, right?

"Hey did you just cast Melf's Acid Arrow?"
"Nah, that was Ryuken's Razor Ray."

Wizards could start off knowing seeds that cover some of their generic utility spells plus their school seed, without which spells can be known but not cast. Require downtime research or make it treasure to mastering elements, touch, distance variables. Tie it to an arcana check to learn. Add class features that allow for learning school seeds, but never enough that a 20th will know all. Allow for feats to [know seed: school].

It might be a little more work for players and DMs, but the longest part of any table game I've played, regardless of edition, is spell prep. If players are more involved in crafting their own spells, and if their spells are built out of a familiar tool set, it may be better. And you could probably cover the mechanics and examples in less pages than the current PHB devotes to arcane spells.

[Rukelnikov]

I wish that 5e would have explored more of the mechanics presented in 3.5e Epic concerning spell seeds. Give wizards the building blocks to create their own version of spells, even if it's a version of something already printed. I mean, we have Arrows, Huts, and Hands named for legendary casters, right?

"Hey did you just cast Melf's Acid Arrow?"
"Nah, that was Ryuken's Razor Ray."

Wizards could start off knowing seeds that cover some of their generic utility spells plus their school seed, without which spells can be known but not cast. Require downtime research or make it treasure to mastering elements, touch, distance variables. Tie it to an arcana check to learn. Add class features that allow for learning school seeds, but never enough that a 20th will know all. Allow for feats to [know seed: school].

I would've also liked 5e taking 3e's epic spell seeds as in inspiration, but in the end DnD entry barrier ain't that low, and I assume they don't want to make it higher.


It might be a little more work for players and DMs, but the longest part of any table game I've played, regardless of edition, is spell prep. If players are more involved in crafting their own spells, and if their spells are built out of a familiar tool set, it may be better. And you could probably cover the mechanics and examples in less pages than the current PHB devotes to arcane spells.

That's not very different from WoD Mage works, I've really liked that system.

[LudicSavant]

I would've also liked 5e taking 3e's epic spell seeds as in inspiration, but in the end DnD entry barrier ain't that low, and I assume they don't want to make it higher.

They actually added a spell creation thing to One D&D. It was just executed badly. And then they removed it entirely after survey feedback, rather than giving us a good version.

[Rukelnikov]

They actually added a spell creation thing to One D&D. It was just executed badly. And then they removed it entirely after survey feedback, rather than giving us a good version.

I know. Even when I'd have preferred more creativity involved in spellcrafting, it would have been nice to have a good version of that UA's system. But these UAs are nothing more than 5e revised.

[Witty Username]

Given that a decent chunck of the community don't like the idea of spellcasters casting spells, I am not all that surprised.

[Pex]

Given that a decent chunck of the community don't like the idea of spellcasters casting spells, I am not all that surprised.

https://i.postimg.cc/Z5hvFkPN/umnevermind.gif

[Amechra]

That's not very different from WoD Mage works, I've really liked that system.

The difference is that, in Mage, everyone is a spellcaster. As a result, it's less lopsided than D&D, where you have some classes where the prep is "sit down and grab the default equipment for your class" and others where it's "read this whole extra chapter and try to avoid the trap options. We believe in you, champ!".

I'd wager that most of the conflict in the 5e world is between people who think every class should be the former and people who think every class should be the latter.

EDIT:


Knowing a wide range of spells is not inherently broken. You can write stuff that is balanced against knowing a wide range of spells. The thing that's broken is broken spells. The problem has always been a combination of the designers being really bad at identifying and avoiding broken and being unwilling to write a version of "Fighter" that is as a good as getting to have a variety of magic.

While knowing a wide range of spells isn't inherently broken, it does warp the design of the other classes. You can actually see the warping pretty clearly if you look at what's on the spell list - spells like Knock or Levitate only really make sense if you've got a magical toolbox that can afford to spend spells known on specialized junk. And, on the flip side, spells that aren't specialized junk are a stronger on the Wizard, since they get to take more of them than everyone else.

I think it says something that, other than Shield, most of the spells people actually complain about in relation to Wizards are ones that break their class fantasy of being the specialized toolbox caster. There's a level of jank that just simply isn't there, and the Wizard kinda suffers for it.

[Unoriginal]

Yup, archetypically magic users are more powerful than non magic users

Archetypically magic users get killed by a guy with a sharp piece of metal.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Archetypically magic users get killed by a guy with a sharp piece of metal.

And are usually either background NPCs or villains. Except in media where everyone of any significance is a magic user (of spells or other magic).

[Amechra]

Or the spellcaster is bad at it. Looking at you, Schmendrick.

[Rukelnikov]

Archetypically magic users get killed by a guy with a sharp piece of metal.


And are usually either background NPCs or villains. Except in media where everyone of any significance is a magic user (of spells or other magic).


Or the spellcaster is bad at it. Looking at you, Schmendrick.

Or, like in the last DnD movie, the party goes "Sorcerer fix stuff"

[PhoenixPhyre]

Or, like in the last DnD movie, the party goes "Sorcerer fix stuff"

If that was your takeaway from the movie... Yeah. No comment.

Edit:

Of the following, only two can be true by definition.

1. Spellcasters[1] are more special and more powerful than non-spellcasters.
2. Non-spellcasters have a place in a team game.
3. Spellcasters have a place in a team game.

Pick your poison, and pay the price.

[1] "magic user" is hyper over-inclusive here. Because "magic user" is a strict superset of "spell-caster". Not all magic is spells. Spells are just one of many many many types of magic. And it's spell-casters that are at issue here.

[Unoriginal]

Or, like in the last DnD movie, the party goes "Sorcerer fix stuff"

That is not archetypal, no.

At least when the magic-user is in the party.

In fact if the magic-user is in the party they generally have to explain they actually are limited.

[Witty Username]

Of the following, only two can be true by definition.

1. Spellcasters[1] are more special and more powerful than non-spellcasters.
2. Non-spellcasters have a place in a team game.
3. Spellcasters have a place in a team game.


I mostly agree, perfect imbalance is a thing that exists, and power existing in a range doesn't mean the lower ones aren't valuable.

I would say 5e is close to this, I think martials are slightly undertuned, and mostly for high level play. To the surprise of few, this is when martials like barbarian and fighter just sorta stop getting new stuff.
Some new features for 11-20 and some proper capstones would solve this problem outright.

[awa]

If that was your takeaway from the movie... Yeah. No comment.

Edit:

Of the following, only two can be true by definition.

1. Spellcasters[1] are more special and more powerful than non-spellcasters.
2. Non-spellcasters have a place in a team game.
3. Spellcasters have a place in a team game.

Pick your poison, and pay the price.

[1] "magic user" is hyper over-inclusive here. Because "magic user" is a strict superset of "spell-caster". Not all magic is spells. Spells are just one of many many many types of magic. And it's spell-casters that are at issue here.

I agree with this in general but I'm pedantic
you could have a system where say a mid level warrior gets a swarm of ablative men at arms so a wizard is better than a warrior but your not playing just a warrior your playing a warrior and his half dozen friends. or a spy comes with an entire spy organization backing him up. The caster is the most powerful and special one because he is as good as an entire organization, but hes as good not better so he cant overshadow everyone.

some systems have meta currency of some-kind so that the wizard in setting is special and powerful but the muggles have more plot armor helping them along. I believe a Buffy rpg did this so slayers had amazing stats but limited meta currency and the normal humans had tons of it.

you could have a system where wizards need more to level up being balanced in that way like early editions of d&d did.

You could design your wizards so that even if they were better than the non wizards to a degree they had some kind of glaring weakness only a guy with a sword could solve. A problem that comes up often enough that you need those guys with sword in the party.

you could be playing a game with extreme party lethality and random or gated character creation so that sure this time you got to be the awesome wizard but everyone rotates characters fairly regularly so it doesn't matter.

Being more powerful does not necessarily matter if the conflicts are more social than combat and the wizards power does not give them a significant advantages in the area that matters.


Course d&d doesn't do any of these

[PhoenixPhyre]

I mostly agree, perfect imbalance is a thing that exists, and power existing in a range doesn't mean the lower ones aren't valuable.

I would say 5e is close to this, I think martials are slightly undertuned, and mostly for high level play. To the surprise of few, this is when martials like barbarian and fighter just sorta stop getting new stuff.
Some new features for 11-20 and some proper capstones would solve this problem outright.

I'm fine with imperfect balance. Prefer it, usually. But I prefer if everyone has strengths that no other class can match as well as weaknesses--that is, I prefer distributed imbalance across the multiple dimensions of balance. I'm totally fine with a wizard being a better spell-caster than, say, a paladin. But the wizard also shouldn't be able to be a better melee combatant than the paladin. Etc.

It's basically opportunity cost--by picking class X, you should have to give up substantial, meaningful amounts of ability in some areas to gain superiority in others. The contention upthread is that spell-casters are just flat better than non-spellcasters, period. And that that's just and right and the only way it should go (paraphrasing from years of these arguments).

I've started working up an analysis method for the combat side of my own class designs (which I do a lot of) that I call SDCT--(S)upport, (D)amage, (C)ontrol, (T)oughness.

Effectively, every class has a fixed budget (I use 20 points) to allocate between those four categories, with a few criteria, with each category being a scale from 1 (basically incapable) to 10 (overwhelming):
1. A score of 0 is not allowed.
2. Scores of 1-2 are strongly disfavored, as are scores of 9 or 10 (because having a 9-10 means you're going to be crippled somewhere else). Basically, everyone needs to have something in each bin.
3. Toughness needs to be 4+, because glass cannons are great in CRPGs or tactical games...but less so when that's your only character.

Each class gets one array of scores for its "archetypal" form, and then subclasses modify it from there.

An archetypal "barbarian" class might be 3/7/3/7 -- very tough, high damage output, but not incredibly supportive or controller. An archetypal life cleric might be 7/4/3/6. Buffing and healing are a huge chunk of their identity, but they suffer at direct damage and debuffs/control. Etc.

[Unoriginal]

I agree with this in general but I'm pedantic
you could have a system where say a mid level warrior gets a swarm of ablative men at arms so a wizard is better than a warrior but your not playing just a warrior your playing a warrior and his half dozen friends. or a spy comes with an entire spy organization backing him up. The caster is the most powerful and special one because he is as good as an entire organization, but hes as good not better so he cant overshadow everyone.

some systems have meta currency of some-kind so that the wizard in setting is special and powerful but the muggles have more plot armor helping them along. I believe a Buffy rpg did this so slayers had amazing stats but limited meta currency and the normal humans had tons of it.

you could have a system where wizards need more to level up being balanced in that way like early editions of d&d did.

You could design your wizards so that even if they were better than the non wizards to a degree they had some kind of glaring weakness only a guy with a sword could solve. A problem that comes up often enough that you need those guys with sword in the party.

you could be playing a game with extreme party lethality and random or gated character creation so that sure this time you got to be the awesome wizard but everyone rotates characters fairly regularly so it doesn't matter.

Being more powerful does not necessarily matter if the conflicts are more social than combat and the wizards power does not give them a significant advantages in the area that matters.


Course d&d doesn't do any of these

Or you can make that a PC of a given level is as powerful as any given PC of the same level, give or take, while still staying flavorful and mechanically distinct.

It's not actually that hard to do, and 5e *very nearly* achieved it (albeit in a way that can still draw criticism for stylistic reasons), if not for a few outlier spells that should have more limits and for non-spell actions being weirdly limited when they could have gone more epic.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Or you can make that a PC of a given level is as powerful as any given PC of the same level, give or take, while still staying flavorful and mechanically distinct.

It's not actually that hard to do, and 5e *very nearly* achieved it (albeit in a way that can still draw criticism for stylistic reasons), if not for a few outlier spells that should have more limits and for non-spell actions being weirdly limited when they could have gone more epic.

Agreed. Any kind of strongly-asymmetric design, where one group of people are playing a very different game than the others, is fragile unless it is the entire core point and you have Troupe Play in effect. So something like Ars Magica works--everyone has a Mage and one or more non-mage characters, and only one person is playing a Mage at any given time and they're the focus of the arc/session/etc. But in an actual team game, where everyone's supposed to be mutually supporting? No thanks. I'd rather have everyone have power, just different kinds and different strengths and weaknesses.

[JNAProductions]

If that was your takeaway from the movie... Yeah. No comment.

Edit:

Of the following, only two can be true by definition.

1. Spellcasters[1] are more special and more powerful than non-spellcasters.
2. Non-spellcasters have a place in a team game.
3. Spellcasters have a place in a team game.

Pick your poison, and pay the price.

[1] "magic user" is hyper over-inclusive here. Because "magic user" is a strict superset of "spell-caster". Not all magic is spells. Spells are just one of many many many types of magic. And it's spell-casters that are at issue here.

So, 1, 2, and 3 can all be true. Unless 1 is only true if even the WEAKEST caster is more powerful than the strongest non-caster, but that feels rather extreme.

Even for a level-based system. It could be that a level 5 Wizard is a novice and a level 5 Fighter is a veteran of a thousand battles, for instance. The Wizard is weak relative to other casters, while the Fighter is strong, relative to other non-casters. But they're roughly balanced against one another.

[PhoenixPhyre]

1. So, 1, 2, and 3 can all be true. Unless 1 is only true if even the WEAKEST caster is more powerful than the strongest non-caster, but that feels rather extreme.

2. Even for a level-based system. It could be that a level 5 Wizard is a novice and a level 5 Fighter is a veteran of a thousand battles, for instance. The Wizard is weak relative to other casters, while the Fighter is strong, relative to other non-casters. But they're roughly balanced against one another.

1. Extreme? That was the claim! That archetypally, the set of magic users >> the set of non-magic users. And that that should carry over to the game.

Furthermore, that's still not balanced--consider a case where 99.9999% of all non-casters are weaker than casters, but one is super strong because of one broken mechanic. Does that make the entire thing appropriate? Not at all. I'd say that unless the centroids and distributions are roughly similar, there's a problem with having them in the same game.

2. I don't even know what you're trying to say here. And it doesn't seem applicable to anything--it rejects criterion 1. Because all of that assumes that you're comparing like to like. Which in a class/level game is level. If a level X Wizard and a level X Fighter are roughly balanced together, then you've rejected criterion 1. By definition.

Differential leveling (wizards taking more XP to level up) doesn't actually solve anything--it's fundamentally a lie about the game. It says "hey, your level 10 is so super great...pity that you'll never actually see it because everyone stops playing when the Fighters are level 11 or so and you're level 8." Basically, it says that wizards don't actually have those higher level features and are instead a X-level class except under unusual circumstances. It basically lies about what it means to be level X. And I'd say that's bad design from the get go, a form of bait and switch.

[JNAProductions]

In-universe, a level 5 Wizard is a beginner and a level 5 Fighter is a hardened veteran.
Out-of-universe, a level 5 Wizard is a PC with 4,000 XP and a level 5 Fighter is a PC with 4,000 XP.

Because levels are metagame constructs. They're not (usually) tangible, in-unverse things.

And if you want to make an absolutely nuts, extremely hyperbolic claim... Then yeah, sure. The guy who can cast Dancing Lights three times a day is better than a level 20 Barbarian without any magic.

But I don't think anyone seriously claims "If you can cast so much as one spell, you're better than any non-caster could ever be!" And if they DO seriously argue that... They're just flat-out wrong.

[JNAProductions]

I think the hypothetical is "A lvl X Fighter is equal to a lvl X Wizard, but a lvl X Fighter is the elite of the elite for martial combatants in the world while a lvl X Wizard is weaker than 95% of the spellcasters in the world."

I disagree with that solving anything, though.

For what it's worth, I would definitely say that I was using hyperbole myself. For a more apt comparison, let's say at level 1, a Wizard is a green beginner, while a Fighter is a somewhat experienced combatant.
Also, for what it's worth, I think 5E does balance reasonably well.

[PhoenixPhyre]

In-universe, a level 5 Wizard is a beginner and a level 5 Fighter is a hardened veteran.
Out-of-universe, a level 5 Wizard is a PC with 4,000 XP and a level 5 Fighter is a PC with 4,000 XP.

Because levels are metagame constructs. They're not (usually) tangible, in-unverse things.

And if you want to make an absolutely nuts, extremely hyperbolic claim... Then yeah, sure. The guy who can cast Dancing Lights three times a day is better than a level 20 Barbarian without any magic.

But I don't think anyone seriously claims "If you can cast so much as one spell, you're better than any non-caster could ever be!" And if they DO seriously argue that... They're just flat-out wrong.

Then what you're saying is that in that case, no PC wizard can ever be any good, in-universe. Or that your concept of levels is just...bonkers. And fundamentally a bait-and-switch that has nothing to do with how levels are actually used in D&D.

Because nothing in D&D actually cares about "beginner vs hardened veteran". That's a non-thing. A level 20 character might have as few as 100 days total experience under their belt from level 1. Or might have been campaigning for years when the game started at level 1, and took 15 years during the campaign. Both gain levels at the same rate. Is this in-universe observable? Yes. Because a level 20 character is inherently much harder to kill than a level 1 character. And has capabilities that no level 1 character can possibly have.

Plus, you run into the issue that you can have a Sage wizard (been studying wizardry his entire life) and a Urchin wizard (picked up a spellbook for the first time the day the campaign started)...and they behave identically.

Beyond that, the entirety of the claim was that game-level effects should represent the fact that casters are just superior to non-casters. That's always been the claim--apologia for casters being stronger. So this is not exactly on-point whatsoever.

My point is simple. If casters are supposed to be stronger at any given level, in game terms than non-casters, then either everyone needs to be a caster or no one should be a caster. At least in a team game.

[JNAProductions]

Then what you're saying is that in that case, no PC wizard can ever be any good, in-universe. Or that your concept of levels is just...bonkers. And fundamentally a bait-and-switch that has nothing to do with how levels are actually used in D&D.

Because nothing in D&D actually cares about "beginner vs hardened veteran". That's a non-thing. A level 20 character might have as few as 100 days total experience under their belt from level 1. Both gain levels at the same rate. Is this in-universe observable? Yes. Because a level 20 character is inherently much harder to kill than a level 1 character. And has capabilities that no level 1 character can possibly have.

Plus, you run into the issue that you can have a Sage wizard (been studying wizardry his entire life) and a Urchin wizard (picked up a spellbook for the first time the day the campaign started)...and they behave identically.

Beyond that, the entirety of the claim was that game-level effects should represent the fact that casters are just superior to non-casters. That's always been the claim--apologia for casters being stronger. So this is not exactly on-point whatsoever.

Are we talking 5E, or a hypothetical system?

Because you didn't say "In 5E, the following cannot be true." You said:


Of the following, only two can be true by definition.

1. Spellcasters are more special and more powerful than non-spellcasters.
2. Non-spellcasters have a place in a team game.
3. Spellcasters have a place in a team game.

That was posted as universally true, literally impossible to satisfy all three.

[ZRN]

Then what you're saying is that in that case, no PC wizard can ever be any good, in-universe. Or that your concept of levels is just...bonkers. And fundamentally a bait-and-switch that has nothing to do with how levels are actually used in D&D.

Because nothing in D&D actually cares about "beginner vs hardened veteran". That's a non-thing. A level 20 character might have as few as 100 days total experience under their belt from level 1. Or might have been campaigning for years when the game started at level 1, and took 15 years during the campaign. Both gain levels at the same rate. Is this in-universe observable? Yes. Because a level 20 character is inherently much harder to kill than a level 1 character. And has capabilities that no level 1 character can possibly have.

Plus, you run into the issue that you can have a Sage wizard (been studying wizardry his entire life) and a Urchin wizard (picked up a spellbook for the first time the day the campaign started)...and they behave identically.

Beyond that, the entirety of the claim was that game-level effects should represent the fact that casters are just superior to non-casters. That's always been the claim--apologia for casters being stronger. So this is not exactly on-point whatsoever.

My point is simple. If casters are supposed to be stronger at any given level, in game terms than non-casters, then either everyone needs to be a caster or no one should be a caster. At least in a team game.

I can't imagine the point of view that would require that a spell caster of level X should always be more powerful than a non-caster of level X. Levels are an abstraction whose ONLY POINT is to indicate how powerful a character is.

If your game world is the Harry Potter universe and every 10-year-old with "wizard blood" is a few memorized lines of pseudo-Latin away from being able to telepathically murder or enslave people, then yeah, your wizard urchin should probably start like 10 levels above the non-caster urchins. If you want to play in that world with a balanced party, you create your characters and then select backstories to justify them. So maybe the level X wizard is a kid who just got told he won the genetic lottery, and the level X fighter is a guy who trained for 25 years at a secret military academy to fend off the wizarding menace. The thing you probably DON'T do is just make it so a level X fighter is useless next to a level X wizard and assume everyone knows that going in.

[LudicSavant]

Of the following, only two can be true by definition.

1. Spellcasters[1] are more special and more powerful than non-spellcasters.
2. Non-spellcasters have a place in a team game.
3. Spellcasters have a place in a team game.

This is incorrect, because there is a scenario in which all 3 can be true: If X and Y have a stronger synergy than X and X, then team X&Y may be stronger than team X&X even if Xs are individually stronger than Ys.

[Unoriginal]

This is incorrect, because there is a scenario in which all 3 can be true: If X and Y have a stronger synergy than X and X, then team X&Y may be stronger than team X&X even if Xs are individually stronger than Ys.

"I want to play a Wizard, so you should play my sword-waving sidekick for optimal team synergy."

"So you play the powerful one and I have to play the weak one? Doesn't seem fair or nice."

"Jeez, this isn't about you, this is a team game. The team won't be optimal unless you play the weak one."

[LudicSavant]

"I want to play a Wizard, so you should play my sword-waving sidekick for optimal team synergy."

"So you play the powerful one and I have to play the weak one? Doesn't seem fair or nice."

"Jeez, this isn't about you, this is a team game. The team won't be optimal unless you play the weak one."

This is a completely backwards way of thinking. The support Bard is not "the weak one" even if they won't beat you in a duel. A sweeper is not "the weak one" because they scaled better off of party buffs. And so forth.

[Unoriginal]

This is a completely backwards way of thinking. The support Bard is not "the weak one" even if they won't beat you in a duel. A sweeper is not "the weak one" because they scaled better off of party buffs. And so forth.

That's not what you said, though.

You presented a situation where, to quote yourself directly, "Xs are individually stronger than Ys."

You don't get to say "X is stronger than Y" and then go "Y isn't the weak one because they can do Z" and claim that it's backward thinking to explore what "Xs are individually stronger than Ys" would actually mean at a table.

[LudicSavant]

That's not what you said, though. It is exactly what I said.


You presented a situation where, to quote yourself directly, "Xs are individually stronger than Ys." Indeed I did.

If X is stronger than Y, but X+Y is stronger than X+X, then Y is a strong party member, even if they're a weak individual.

For example, many things are individually stronger than full support Bard builds, but as soon as you put them in a party they're beasts.

[Unoriginal]

If X is stronger than Y, but X+Y is stronger than X+X, then Y is a strong party member, even if they're a weak individual.

Is Y+Y stronger than X+X?

[LudicSavant]

Is Y+Y stronger than X+X?

Either is possible.

So long as introducing a Y to the team composition is better than having a team entirely of non-Ys, it's possible to satisfy all 3 statements simultaneously.

[KorvinStarmast]

They actually added a spell creation thing to One D&D. It was just executed badly. And then they removed it entirely after survey feedback, rather than giving us a good version. Because it takes effort to do good work. And they've been mailing it in of late.

Archetypically magic users get killed by a guy with a sharp piece of metal. Yes they do. Or arrows. (Note that "arrows", plural, was used).

And are usually either background NPCs or villains. Except in media where everyone of any significance is a magic user (of spells or other magic). Usually. Or they are cursed, like Rand al'Thor.

In-universe, a level 5 Wizard is a beginner and a level 5 Fighter is a hardened veteran.
Out-of-universe, a level 5 Wizard is a PC with 4,000 XP and a level 5 Fighter is a PC with 4,000 XP. In universe, the level 5 wizard can cast fireball, can become invisible, can fly, can dispel magic, can countgerspell, and can put folks to sleep.
A beginner?

[Blatant Beast]

In universe, the level 5 wizard can cast fireball, can become invisible, can fly, can dispel magic, can countgerspell, and can put folks to sleep.
A beginner?

Good point, but keep in mind a 5th level Paladin or Ranger has access to 2nd level slots. Even in 1e, while a Thaumaturgist, (5th level Magic-User), wouldn’t be considered a ‘beginner’…said Magic-User is quite a bit away from achieving “Name Level” and building a Wizard’s Tower.

I will go out on a limb and say a 5th level Wizard is not going to be presented as a Sauron Level Threat in most published 5e Settings.

The Mouth of Sauron, might be a 5th level Wizard…but A World Conquering threat is going to have a bit more oomph.

So much of this type of judgement depends upon context. A really punishing D&D game that starts people at 5th level, just so they can survive, (as reportedly Jim Ward’s home game was like), might consider a 5th level Wizard as a beginner.

[Pex]

Agreed. Any kind of strongly-asymmetric design, where one group of people are playing a very different game than the others, is fragile unless it is the entire core point and you have Troupe Play in effect. So something like Ars Magica works--everyone has a Mage and one or more non-mage characters, and only one person is playing a Mage at any given time and they're the focus of the arc/session/etc. But in an actual team game, where everyone's supposed to be mutually supporting? No thanks. I'd rather have everyone have power, just different kinds and different strengths and weaknesses.

When I played Ars Magica everyone played a Magus. It was up to the individual player when to take a break to play his Companion, sometimes both if plot was relevant.

[Doug Lampert]

When I played Ars Magica everyone played a Magus. It was up to the individual player when to take a break to play his Companion, sometimes both if plot was relevant.

Yep, the number of mages used in a session was variable when I played Ars Magica; often varying within the session as everyone played their mage for coven activities, library access, and lab use parts of the game and we often started with that.

On an adventure, it's up to you:
Going to a tribunal meeting, it's likely mostly mages and someone may well bring both his mage and companion as they may both have interests involved.
The Fey are bothering that town over there and we might get blamed, one Jerbiton, one Bejorner (if you've got one), all the rest companions or grogs.

Because IN UNIVERSE, sending mages on adventures is typically bad. Mages learn more and faster via lab work than adventures in most editions. Which is a big part of how they balance the deliberately unballanced system. A munchkin's mage will rarely leave the tower.

[Theodoxus]

D&D doesn't really play that much differently. 'Tower Wizards' aka NPCs are far more powerful, since they tend to have plot armor and are the ones giving the quests and big bounties for monster bits or ancient tomes.

PC Wizards are really more like hedge wizards. Yeah, they eventually get decent big booms in tier 2, and then by tier 3 have become the Tower Wizard type. But since more games don't get that far, most players don't experience the 'Ars Magica' level of game play.

I think this ultimately becomes an issue of expectations vs reality. And since there are hundreds, if not thousands of memes regarding that, I doubt I need to extrapolate.

[Unoriginal]

Good point, but keep in mind a 5th level Paladin or Ranger has access to 2nd level slots. Even in 1e, while a Thaumaturgist, (5th level Magic-User), wouldn’t be considered a ‘beginner’…said Magic-User is quite a bit away from achieving “Name Level” and building a Wizard’s Tower.

I will go out on a limb and say a 5th level Wizard is not going to be presented as a Sauron Level Threat in most published 5e Settings.

The Mouth of Sauron, might be a 5th level Wizard…but A World Conquering threat is going to have a bit more oomph.

So much of this type of judgement depends upon context. A really punishing D&D game that starts people at 5th level, just so they can survive, (as reportedly Jim Ward’s home game was like), might consider a 5th level Wizard as a beginner.

Not gonna lie, this post puzzles me in many ways...

Is the implication that a D&D Wizard should eventually become a Sauron-level powerhouse?

Is the implication that a non-beginner Wizard should be a Sauron-level powerhouse?

[Amechra]

The funny thing about the "how experienced is the Wizard supposed to be?" discussion is that earlier editions actually had an answer for that - Wizards have always had the highest suggested starting age out of all of the classes, with the implication that you spent all of that time studying and learning to tell reality to stop, collaborate, and listen. The decision to decouple your character's background from their class in 5e leads to some weirdness, especially when you consider that they didn't do a very good job of removing the implied background from the classes themselves — consider how the "skilled" classes are basically Criminal, Entertainer, and Outlander in class form, with the Rogue even getting their own background feature built into the class in the form of Thieves' Cant!.

[Rukelnikov]

The funny thing about the "how experienced is the Wizard supposed to be?" discussion is that earlier editions actually had an answer for that - Wizards have always had the highest suggested starting age out of all of the classes, with the implication that you spent all of that time studying and learning to tell reality to stop, collaborate, and listen. The decision to decouple your character's background from their class in 5e leads to some weirdness, especially when you consider that they didn't do a very good job of removing the implied background from the classes themselves — consider how the "skilled" classes are basically Criminal, Entertainer, and Outlander in class form, with the Rogue even getting their own background feature built into the class in the form of Thieves' Cant!.

Very true. /10

[Unoriginal]

The funny thing about the "how experienced is the Wizard supposed to be?" discussion is that earlier editions actually had an answer for that - Wizards have always had the highest suggested starting age out of all of the classes, with the implication that you spent all of that time studying and learning to tell reality to stop, collaborate, and listen.

How much time you study to do X isn't the same as how much experience you have doing X.

And regardless of how long it took for the PC to train for their class in past edition, lvl 1 was still the "I've now trained enough to do X" level for everyone.

[PhoenixPhyre]

How much time you study to do X isn't the same as how much experience you have doing X.

And regardless of how long it took for the PC to train for their class in past edition, lvl 1 was still the "I've now trained enough to do X" level for everyone.

There's an old IT-industry joke about this--roughly that someone with 10 years experience may actually have 10 years of experience...or more likely 1 year, repeated 10 times.

If level doesn't mean capability, then level has no meaning. Every character goes from level = NULL to level = 1 at the instant you start the game, assuming you start at level 1. If you start higher, then the time it took to get to STARTING_LEVEL is entirely indeterminate, and for good reason. Because experience (aka level) isn't about time spent training, otherwise no adult would be level 1 and everyone would have some crazy multiclass. But NPCs (which includes PCs before the game started) have no levels (by default).

So if you ask "how experienced is a level 5 wizard relative to a level 5 fighter", the answer must be "they have the same amount of experience in every way that is relevant to the game." Otherwise your definition of "level" and "experienced" is meaningless.

[Unoriginal]

the answer must be "they have the same amount of experience in every way that is relevant to the game."

Which includes the old "they were stronger before but got depowered/amnesia/are way rusty" backstory concept, because that just means the character has *effectively* the same amount of experience as anyone else of that level now.

[awa]

There's an old IT-industry joke about this--roughly that someone with 10 years experience may actually have 10 years of experience...or more likely 1 year, repeated 10 times.

If level doesn't mean capability, then level has no meaning. Every character goes from level = NULL to level = 1 at the instant you start the game, assuming you start at level 1. If you start higher, then the time it took to get to STARTING_LEVEL is entirely indeterminate, and for good reason. Because experience (aka level) isn't about time spent training, otherwise no adult would be level 1 and everyone would have some crazy multiclass. But NPCs (which includes PCs before the game started) have no levels (by default).

So if you ask "how experienced is a level 5 wizard relative to a level 5 fighter", the answer must be "they have the same amount of experience in every way that is relevant to the game." Otherwise your definition of "level" and "experienced" is meaningless.

The areas it matters are
1) in the fiction; people often make some assumption that a guy who swings a sword should always be inferior to one who swings a sword but also knows magic this is just an explanation for why he is so good he can compete with the magic man. If knock off Batman and spider-man start an adventure together it would generally be assumed batman has been fighting longer than spider-man.

2) the way you design classes. A game could choose to take that into consideration when designing the class by say giving a starting muggle a bonus to skills and wealth to represent the fact that they has been doing this longer. Or perhaps a second background to show what they were doing as an early adventurer.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The areas it matters are
1) in the fiction; people often make some assumption that a guy who swings a sword should always be inferior to one who swings a sword but also knows magic this is just an explanation for why he is so good he can compete with the magic man. If knock off Batman and spider-man start an adventure together it would generally be assumed batman has been fighting longer than spider-man.

2) the way you design classes. A game could choose to take that into consideration when designing the class by say giving a starting muggle a bonus to skills and wealth to represent the fact that they has been doing this longer. Or perhaps a second background to show what they were doing as an early adventurer.

I mean...you could. Or you could just assume that power is power and that casting spells[1] isn't anything particularly special other than one way to power. And get better results without the fragility and heavy thumb on the scales (all non-casters must have had long adventuring careers before starting? No "fresh off the farm" farmboys? Yeah, that's going to go over well...)

After all, the Charles Atlas superpower is a well-known trope.

The one thing this doesn't solve is the burning need some people have for wizards (and yes, this is entirely about wizards and the discount wizards known as sorcerers, clerics never have these problems) to be the absolute best at everything for merely picking the right class at level 1, probably because they're nerds and this is revenge for the jocks beating the nerd-players up in middle school.

[1] spells are not the entirety of magic. They're not even the majority. They're one tiny sliver of magic given outsized weight because of the mistakes and stupidities of old editions. Seriously. Let's be real here. It's not "muggles" and "magic users", it's people who are powerful in ways not possible on earth who don't cast spells and people who are powerful in ways not possible on earth who do cast spells.

[Unoriginal]

The areas it matters are
1) in the fiction; people often make some assumption that a guy who swings a sword should always be inferior to one who swings a sword but also knows magic this is just an explanation for why he is so good he can compete with the magic man.

Caster supremacy is not a good assumption to have. If the works wants to make it true, sure, but you can't just *assume* that.



2) the way you design classes. A game could choose to take that into consideration when designing the class by say giving a starting muggle a bonus to skills and wealth to represent the fact that they has been doing this longer. Or perhaps a second background to show what they were doing as an early adventurer.

Or they can just make the level 1 sword person and the level 1 spell person as powerful as each other and as experienced as each other.

Because that's what level 1 means.

Also, calling non-spellcasting adventurers "muggle" is nothing but an insult.

[awa]

Caster supremacy is not a good assumption to have. If the works wants to make it true, sure, but you can't just *assume* that.


Or they can just make the level 1 sword person and the level 1 spell person as powerful as each other and as experienced as each other.

Because that's what level 1 means.

Also, calling non-spellcasting adventurers "muggle" is nothing but an insult.

I'm not saying that you need to assume that spending 3 years of magic school should get better result than 3 years of sword school, I'm saying that as an objective fact many people have a hard time with that idea and this is a way to get around that hang up. They want magic people to be better than normal people and strongly resist the idea that a normal person can be good. I'm not saying its a good thing just that it is a thing.

In regards to muggle, ehh. First I don't consider it an insult and second I'm not concerned with insulting people without magic; third I often use the word martial but in this case I deliberately chose muggle because is a say social focused rogue really more martial than a paladin. Muggle lets us know that this is a character who just has skill and experience and nothing "extra".

[Zanos]

School choice should matter. Something like this can't be implemented without also changing the spells because their aren't enough spells to fill out each school to a playable level, but wizards should feel different from one another. And they don't, cause they all use them same spells regardless.
People argue this about optimal wizards for no real reason. Wizard isn't 7 classes, it's one class. Yes, they play mostly the same. So do the vast majority of subclasses for literally every class. The subclasses that diverge greatly from the base class are uncommon by design. That's kind of the point. I'm not really interested in playing a learned magic man who is incapable outside of one of seven fields. If you want to play a savant caster, sorcerer is right there. And it's not as though subclasses aren't impactful; most people don't take it because diviner exists, but enchanter literally gives free twin on some of the best save or lose spells in the game. Of all the classes that lack meaningful build variety in 5e, wizard is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

[Skrum]

People argue this about optimal wizards for no real reason. Wizard isn't 7 classes, it's one class. Yes, they play mostly the same. So do the vast majority of subclasses for literally every class. The subclasses that diverge greatly from the base class are uncommon by design. That's kind of the point. I'm not really interested in playing a learned magic man who is incapable outside of one of seven fields. If you want to play a savant caster, sorcerer is right there. And it's not as though subclasses aren't impactful; most people don't take it because diviner exists, but enchanter literally gives free twin on some of the best save or lose spells in the game. Of all the classes that lack meaningful build variety in 5e, wizard is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

I mean, I know that's not what I said above, but I would be thrilled if there was just more differentiation in spells. Like, 40% of the total spells were universal, and the other 60% were split among the various schools.

The issue is when every wizard has access to every spell, wizards end up using a lot of the same spells. When the choice between taking fireball or taking sleet storm is simply "well, pick the one that's better," everyone is going to pick fireball. But if fireball was limited to evokers, and sleet storm was the universal option, someone might opt to be an evoker cause they want to cast fireball. And because they made that choice, they don't also get hypnotic pattern (an illusion spell) or counterspell (abjuration). They have to take major image and dispel magic instead (universal spells).

I'm just spitballing, I'm not gonna plant the flag and say that's all perfectly balanced, but I like the look of it a lot more than every wizard taking fireball, hypnotic pattern, and counterspell...because why wouldn't they?

[Zanos]

I mean, I know that's not what I said above, but I would be thrilled if there was just more differentiation in spells. Like, 40% of the total spells were universal, and the other 60% were split among the various schools.
The design space you're looking for is called a class spell list.


The issue is when every wizard has access to every spell, wizards end up using a lot of the same spells.
This really isn't dissimilar to clerics, or sorcerers, or warlocks, or fighters, or barbarians, or etc. Many of them look nearly identical with their build choices, because that's the optimal thing to do.


When the choice between taking fireball or taking sleet storm is simply "well, pick the one that's better," everyone is going to pick fireball. But if fireball was limited to evokers, and sleet storm was the universal option, someone might opt to be an evoker cause they want to cast fireball. And because they made that choice, they don't also get hypnotic pattern (an illusion spell) or counterspell (abjuration). They have to take major image and dispel magic instead (universal spells).
In older editions of the game, you could get extra spell slots by losing access to spell schools. Nearly everyone concerned with optimization just chose to ban the schools that had bad spells and specialize in the schools that had good spells. Creating a weird space where wizards that aren't specialists are simply incapable of casting certain spells for some reason does not address the core issue. You just shift the burden of balance from being from individual spells to schools.


I'm just spitballing, I'm not gonna plant the flag and say that's all perfectly balanced, but I like the look of it a lot more than every wizard taking fireball, hypnotic pattern, and counterspell...because why wouldn't they?
Or you could just balance spells so that there aren't 2-3 at every given level that are far and away better than the other options, and let subclasses do what they're supposed to, which is to boost a characters use of their core resources in specialized areas? Some of the subclass features in 5e are already good at this; necromancy healing you when you drop an enemy with a spell is a good example. That's a good idea to encourage the necromancy school guy to prepare and use necromancy spells; the problem is that they made every necromancy damage spell so absolutely horrid that even if you were a necromancer, you probably aren't going to bother casting any of them. Enchantment subschool is one example of doing it right, and an enchanters wizard spell preps should look pretty different from other wizards unless they don't know what they're doing.

[KorvinStarmast]

... you could just balance spells so that there aren't 2-3 at every given level that are far and away better than the other options, and let subclasses do what they're supposed to, which is to boost a characters use of their core resources in specialized areas? Some of the subclass features in 5e are already good at this; necromancy healing you when you drop an enemy with a spell is a good example. That's a good idea to encourage the necromancy school guy to prepare and use necromancy spells; the problem is that they made every necromancy damage spell so absolutely horrid that even if you were a necromancer, you probably aren't going to bother casting any of them. Enchantment subschool is one example of doing it right, and an enchanters wizard spell preps should look pretty different from other wizards unless they don't know what they're doing. I like this idea, but do you think they'll bother to do this for D&Done?

[Witty Username]

So if you ask "how experienced is a level 5 wizard relative to a level 5 fighter", the answer must be "they have the same amount of experience in every way that is relevant to the game." Otherwise your definition of "level" and "experienced" is meaningless.

That is really only true in a system that has one of 2 characteristics:
-A system that expects classes to be balanced level by level
-Level by level class selection for multiclassing

Outside these particulars, level in one class doesn't mean anything in relation to another class no matter how you slice it.

Now for 5e we do need to consider multiclassing, so entry into a level of another class should have the same effort value. But level by level balance is outright impossible when classes don't get new features and subclass features at the same levels.

Rogue sneak attack having damage scaling ailien to every other class means there will be hills and valleys as the game progresses, for example.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That is really only true in a system that has one of 2 characteristics:
-A system that expects classes to be balanced level by level
-Level by level class selection for multiclassing

Outside these particulars, level in one class doesn't mean anything in relation to another class no matter how you slice it.

Now for 5e we do need to consider multiclassing, so entry into a level of another class should have the same effort value. But level by level balance is outright impossible when classes don't get new features and subclass features at the same levels.

Rogue sneak attack having damage scaling ailien to every other class means there will be hills and valleys as the game progresses, for example.

Only if you insist on hard balance. Balance within a range is fine doing level-by-level. And yes, 5e does assume that any level X character is similar in power to any other level X character--otherwise the encounter building guidelines entirely fall apart, as do lots of other things. Similar =/= equal, but no one expects equal.

The reverse, the assumption that naturally, casters are just supposed to be better at any given level, is no-where found in 5e. And makes a mockery of most of the rest of the system.

[Rukelnikov]

Only if you insist on hard balance. Balance within a range is fine doing level-by-level. And yes, 5e does assume that any level X character is similar in power to any other level X character--otherwise the encounter building guidelines entirely fall apart, as do lots of other things. Similar =/= equal, but no one expects equal.

The reverse, the assumption that naturally, casters are just supposed to be better at any given level, is no-where found in 5e. And makes a mockery of most of the rest of the system.

Right, because they are very useful.

I do think they should be relative to each other, but that's not the why.

[Witty Username]

The reverse, the assumption that naturally, casters are just supposed to be better at any given level, is no-where found in 5e.

In fairness, it is found in Tier 3+ level design, which is the problem most of us are motivated to fix. the arguments are about how much downward movement the casting classes should do and how much upward movement of non-casters.

I generally prefer the idea of increasing the power in the Fighter, rogue, barbarian, etc. direction, because it seems that they are the only ones that cause problems for system expectations when they start falling below the expected par for encounter design (going of the descriptions of easy and medium difficulty encounters and the intended expectations)

[PhoenixPhyre]

In fairness, it is found in Tier 3+ level design, which is the problem most of us are motivated to fix. the arguments are about how much downward movement the casting classes should do and how much upward movement of non-casters.

I generally prefer the idea of increasing the power in the Fighter, rogue, barbarian, etc. direction, because it seems that they are the only ones that cause problems for system expectations when they start falling below the expected par for encounter design (going of the descriptions of easy and medium difficulty encounters and the intended expectations)

Except that fighter rogue and barbarian are right on schedule according to that math. Like...seriously. They're 100% of the way there numerically in combat. In fact, rogues are the ones the entire math is built around! Its the others that trivialize those encounters, meaning the difficulty scale has to shift to accommodate them...and thus the spiral continues.

[Duff]

The ability to choose spells does not increase the range of options characters can have. It increases the number of combinations of options you can build an individual character with, but this is generally not really the thing that causes problems. I am not as familiar with the char-op tricks of 5e, but in 3e the broken stuff for Wizards is pretty much that there is a list of stuff that is broken on its own terms and you take it and it makes you broken. The problem has never really been the terrible power of, like, "you could know fireball and haste or stinking cloud and magic circle" but "you could know simulacrum at all".



The number of spells does make it much more likely for there to be problems though.
Getting 3 variations on class features and a dozen feats to all be balanced is simply a smaller job with less chances to get it wrong then 50 spells

And then 15 items are likely to be proof read and play tested better than 50.

So while spells as such are not a problem mechanic, the number of them does mean a few bad ones are more likely to slip through

[Witty Username]

Except that fighter rogue and barbarian are right on schedule according to that math. Like...seriously. They're 100% of the way there numerically in combat. In fact, rogues are the ones the entire math is built around! Its the others that trivialize those encounters, meaning the difficulty scale has to shift to accommodate them...and thus the spiral continues.

Er, this is getting into my reading of encounter difficulty a bit, based on what is mentioned in the DMG, Easy and Medium encounters are intended to be trivialized by design. Easy and Medium both have taking damage in such encounters is considered as failure cases (in the case of Medium its damage sufficient to warrant healing resources). regularly having issues with these encounters is actually a sign of under-performance, which also tends to explain why the CR system is as conservative as it is, as even mild build decisions will put a party to trivializing them, arguably this is by design, and why it goes on to describe hard and deadly encounters in the first place. This also matches with the experiences of both martials and casters in Tier 1 and 2 play, A party of fighters is probably better at dealing with a medium encounter at levels 3-5 than a party including a wizard because of the at will damage they have available. Its only in Tier 3 where encounters begin to stretch in time, and monsters start having a wider array of problematic effects that this doesn't keep holding true.


And this is less about damage numbers in general, a Rogue with basic assumptions will mostly out damage wizards in general sense. But damage is only part of the puzzle of a combat, defensive options, control effects to soften encounters, amplifiers like buff and debuff effects to enhance oneself or more likely others, etc.

That being said that is getting more into opinion (I think that is what the DMG is getting at, but advice isn't really its strong suit from the outset), suffice to say in 5e it appears from how things are set up any level of difficulty appears to be deliberately optional, and based on that if the party is being challenged by it in a significant way that may actually be unintended design.