Party optimisation philosophy

[Eldariel]

First of all, excellent posts everyone, thank you. This is quite the fruitful conversation, I can see.

The point of going all in on the gimmick is to reduce the number of non-trivial threats to as near zero as possible. Every marginal increase to the vulnerability you're exploiting actually has exponential gains, because you're basically working with a geometric distribution representing a mean time to happen of "we actually need to try for this encounter".

For example, a regular basic rogue with reliable talent at level 11 can never get lower than a 23 on a hide check. That alone means that they only have to exert effort when:

An enemy has a PP above 23
There is no source of heavy obscuration
The enemy has an action economy advantage that allows them to both make a perception check and take useful action, and a reason they need to be killed and not just bypassed
The enemy has good AoE and a reason they need to be killed and not just bypassed

That's a very small proportion of encounters already. Let's call it 5%

If you just add pass without trace, suddenly the PP to beat becomes 33. Let's call that now 4% of encounters.

That may seem like a small difference on the surface, but it has huge implications. You're going from "We can expect to complete 12 encounters trivially" and "we can expect to complete 17 encounters trivially."

Now say that having invisibility takes it down to 3%. That's 23 trivial encounters. Now say that mage hand ledgerdemain takes it down to 2.5% (Because one out of 200 encounters is about retrieving an attended object from someone with AOE damage or powerful action economy), it's now 27 encounters. Etc etc.

And those % are probably too high. Unfortunately I can't seem to find a way to search monsters by passive perception or other relevant attributes, but I think a fair estimate for the optimized stealth party is that they probably coast through 99.95% of encounters by level 11. There are several CR 20+ monsters that are a trivial challenge to them. There's quickly increasing marginal returns to extreme numbers just in terms of how rare it is for an enemy to exceed them.


The kiting thing is more complicated because your real enemy becomes geometry. But again, it's all about the increasing returns to extreme cheese. If, at level 4, you all can go back and forth 25ft a turn, shoot from 600ft away, and push the target 10ft back per hit, you're already trivializing a huge number of encounters. Getting more features to make it even more extreme has huge returns.

There is first a more fundamental framework we need to work on: namely, the one Ludic refers to. What are we optimising towards? And what are our assumptions for the DM? My default for DM is "neutral DM who neither panders for the party nor builds against them" and default optimisation goal is "campaign arc efficiency"; ergo, a party that can just divine the big bad behind the story, teleport to them, imprison them forever in a ring and then proceed on to the next campaign is better than the party that has to slog through the encounters to get to the oracle, then fight through the BBEG's lieutenants and underlings, then get the McGuffin and then disable them via. McGuffin. There are other options: if you want to optimise towards "encounters" instead of "campaign", then things like stealth and flight parties become more relevant; they aren't very good at dealing with campaign level stuff but their gimmick is good for encounters. Similarly, they're good with neutral or favourable DM but absolutely worthless with adversial DM who will obviously just make sure no encounter ever caters to your gimmick and thus it's useless.

If we assume "campaign" and "neutral" as our optimisation paradigm, we can discuss your idea further. The problem with stealth optimisation as suggested is that Reliable Talent means 11 levels in Rogue. At that point a casting class would be pretty close to trivialising every single encounter that doesn't deal with the object itself via e.g. Scrying, Contact Other Plane and Teleport. Stealth is first and foremost a low level power; we want to ensure sufficient minimum stealth to never be detected by standard enemies while stealthing without overspecialising. The thing is, overspecialising detracts from your ability to deal with the encounters that do beat your gimmick: a Rogue is just far worse at dealing with [thing] than any casting class, almost regardless of what [thing] is (call it 95% of [thing] on higher levels, which we're talking about). The number of enemies that have 19 but not 22 PP is not very significant. I posit you gain more encounter points by focusing on your ability to deal with the 19+ PP enemies than by trying to further go for 22 PP enemies, especially since most cases where this matters are where stealth fails (that is, the circumstances don't lend themselves to stealth). More to the point, you gain way more campaign solving points by having the right spell to the task instead of having to engage with whatever mundane nonsense the campaign expects you to (take SKT for example; instead of going through the whole nonsense you can just figure out Iymrith and Slarkather are behind the whole deal, unveil their facade and proceed to kick their asses so hard they kiss the moons and skip ~5+ levels worth of encounters entirely).

Overall, I think all this just speaks for maximising your casting, specifically because campaign level magic does skipping encounters way better than skills. Better than Teleport is Rope Trick + Plane Shift, which we can include many classes in and thus get in and get out at will. The more 7th level spells the party has, the easier it is to, instead of bypassing encounters in some circumstances, to entirely just circumvent the whole arc of "get to X". I posit that Stealth is a Tier 1-2 strategy; Tier 3 changes the landscape of the whole game with the ability to just skip travel and movement entirely. Tier 1 travel is walking/flying, Tier 2 travel is Phantom Steed/equivalent, Tier 3 travel is teleportation. Tier 3 travel negates the whole concept of "encounter".


If we add flight, that's again a really worthwhile Tier 1-2 strategy. It comes at the cost of Tier 3 power (where everyone can fly of their own volition and more to the point, encounter skipping forms other than flight become more important). I don't think overspecialising for the few percentages is really worth it compared to just using minimum resources for a gimmick and then using your actual build resources towards making sure you can overcome scenarios that completely negate your gimmick. Again, increasing your combat range from 600' to 1200' is just not that major; the bigger issue in 600' vs. 1200' is spotting and terrain rather than your attack range per ce. You can get 600' combat range and flight fairly cheap which can easily be worth it but I posit that the difference between 600' and 1200' is marginal; the number of encounters that can deal with one but not the other is just minor. Neither is good for dealing with any non-combat encounter, trap, social encoutner, etc. for instance

Right, but when calculating these values you need to consider every order of adding the characters.

In a Paladin / Wizard / Druid / Bard party, for the paladin you'd add up:

The change in value for him vs nobody
The change in value for every other class solo vs that class + the paladin (a HUGE change with the wizard)
The change in value for any two of the other classes vs that pair plus the paladin
The change in value for all three of the others together plus the paladin.

To put it another way, the paladin, bard, and cleric are all equally the first, second, and third characters with healing.



But I think this is the wrong way of looking at things.

If you want to decide the whole party at once, I think we can agree that the top choices are going to be specific janky exploit build.

If you want to look at the overall power level, that's nice but kind of irrelevant (being more powerful rarely lets you win more).

If you want to asses classes by their contribution to a fair party playing normal DnD, that's where I think wizards fall behind in the "Party Member" rankings compared to the "Class Power" rankings.

I actually think the opposite. In normal D&D as well as janky exploits parties, I think the party with a Wizard simply has options normal parties do not, which makes it more powerful. I don't think any individual gimmick is all-encompassing enough to make up for lacking e.g. Contact Other Plane, Teleport, Scrying, Clairvoyance, familiars or company.

If we're playing campaign level D&D, nothing bypasses campaign arcs like a Wizard. Similarly, if we think combat, nothing solves [enemy] like a Wizard simply because Wizard spell list is the most encompassing. But Wizard power is more in altering encounter nature to be more favourable and fighting CaW style information wars (Find Familiar, Magic Mouth, Phantom Steed/Tiny Hut, etc. are all scaling effects of the same style) - though it certainly also brings irreplaceable combat effects (Wall of Force is the best way to negate 99% of the Monster Manual; even if the enemy survives, it doesn't matter since you're miles away by the time it can move again and if the party has multiple casters, you can ensure the enemy will not survive with a DoT of course).

Re: Janky exploits specifically, I think they're just too one-sided. If they ever do run into a campaign arc where their janky exploit doesn't work, they lack the ability to bypass said arc like a party with all the 9th level spell lists available does. I think it's more important to be able to skip encounters than it is to defeat them, and more important to outmaneuver the enemies than it is to defeat them. Though I think you also want a decent degree of ability to defeat the enemy in cases where that is the campaign arc. If you must kill Zariel in hell, you must kill Zariel in hell; no amount of encounter bypassing gets you around that fact (though it can give you advantage in the act itself). I don't think a single module for instance is solvable via. Stealth without extremely loose stealth DMing (so not with a neutral DM). Many, however, are quite solvable via. teleportation and planar shifting combined with the ability to use a couple of Glyphs of Warding to nova an encounter dead with couple of hundred gold pieces (that you can trivially generate).

EDIT: I suppose I should also defend my position on Wizard vs. a Generic DPS Class With Healing Word. I think the most important way of preventing "cascading character failure" as you put it is to minimize the chances of it happening. I think the best way to do it is magic that disables; this is because enemy HP scales ridiculously but enemy saves don't. Thus the most reliable way of making sure the enemy isn't outputting more damage than you're capable of taking without the whole party being downed before the healers get to it. As an example, Princes of the Apocalypse features an encounter for level 5 characters featuring up to half a dozen Fireball casting enemies with 50+ HP each. The only real way to deal with something like that is to use magic like Hypnotic Pattern and to beat their initiative.

Again, I think Wizard is just the best party to such an end though Bard also works. I don't think a Healing Word class really adds much to it; it's a failsafe after the "TPK potential" is disabled but the part that makes the party survive the encounter is a couple of concentration disables that prevent the Fireball Doom. And that's something only CC classes can provide; they do so proactively so it's not as obvious since the party doesn't get to know what would've been but that's all the more valuable since it not only saves the party but also significantly conserves party resources.


To try to formulate what I believe is the ultimate measurement of party power, I think narrative overrides are the de-facto thing we should be looking at since that allows the party to pick exactly what to engage in and thus picks what's the most favourable to them. Of course, this links purely to CaW, but I don't think CaS really makes sense in the context of ~a third of the spells chapter of the PHB, so provided we consider the whole system, I posit we should assume CaW framework.


But it's true that the framework needs at least four components before we can get to the party optimisation framework itself:
1) Combat-as-War or Combat-as-Sports?
2) Pandering, neutral or adversary DMing?
3) Encounter-level or campaign-level optimisation?
3b) Maximal difficulty or maximal endurance?

Are there any aspects I'm missing here?

I think we should assume RAW WRT e.g. yoyo healing since that is the only common framework we all have and probably the most commonly used, though we could also try and address common houserules (Exhaustion upon healing or negative HP, I think). I think that would make the list most broadly applicable. It would probably be too cumbrous to consider more than few outliers (but perhaps yoyo healing specifically is common enough a house rule consideration that it warrants mentioning in rankings).