Can we build the math from the ground up? (And does Vancian help or hurt that?)

[johnbragg]

One thing I feel game design needs to acknowledge is that there's a soft ceiling on how much power any individual in a world can have, and how many how-powered individuals there are overall, before that world ceases to function according to anything other than comic book logic.

My E6 metaphysics states this explicitly: If a single intelligence accumulates too much narrativium, it collapses into a solipsistic pocket universe, along the lines of a a black hole. So powerful entities dissipate their narrativium outwards, either through regional effects for distant megathreats like dragons, in building local lair effects for BBEGs and sub-BBEGs, or through investing power in minions and social technologies (the high level fighter spends downtime training up the mooks, getting mass-combat bonuses.)

[Kyutaru]

There's nothing wrong with doing fantasy superheroes, of course, but many D&D players are deeply resistant to that idea and certainly much of the media upon which D&D is based is likewise based on fantasy worlds where things like armies and fortifications actually matter.

At some point people have to remember that the world-building and mechanics are built for a game and not some thought experiment of what it might be like to live in a magically infused world. Certain things will always be superior when you try to make worlds as realistic as possible which is why the fantasy superhero worlds work better for roleplaying games. Fewer restrictions on creativity and room to embrace all playstyles.

But as for power caps, D&D has long held the position that your PCs are not the be-all end-all of creation. Players with subpar DMs in wholly medieval worlds may certainly feel that way trouncing around like gods themselves but the cosmology and backstory of the official campaign settings says no. There are beings more powerful than PCs, beings more powerful than gods even. Even if your PC managed to munchkin his way into becoming nigh omnipotent, there are even beings stronger than THAT. The oldest beings in creation were but infants when they came into existence, predated by beings that were already ancient when they arrived. The gods themselves were born after the universe was and had to contend with beings that were their superior in great climactic wars. Ages before Good vs Evil we had Chaos vs Law, and before even that we effectively had Existence vs Nonexistence, Order vs Destruction. The eldritch horrors that lurk beyond time and space were once a threat to the cosmos before being locked out of reality and how can you kill that which even death does not hold authority over? The origin of creation is scattered across many books and it's a failing in D&D that there is no single collective history written that describes it all plainly but the layers of power levels make it clear that the gods themselves are effectively children compared to what else lurks beyond the shadows. Even AO, overgod and highest of all, has been regarded as potentially not being the strongest entity in existence.

For truly epic campaigns that go well beyond what mere morals can do, reaching level 20 is merely the end of the tutorial. It's only the tip of the iceberg in just how vast, deep, and complex the rest of the lore has been laid out to be. There are beings with effective character strengths in the hundreds of levels with stat blocks that effectively say "I win" and even deities can't deal with them.

[NigelWalmsley]

We agree on the part I wanted to make clear, good. Because my position is that of those who say, “Buff fighters; don’t nerf mages.”

Big agree. And as I've been saying throughout the thread, what really drives this home is looking at the source material. For the most part, the casters in the source material do things that can be done in D&D, and vice versa. Whereas every martial character of substantive power is impossible to reproduce in D&D as anything other than a caster. Even the one that are well below any "the world stops making sense" point.

I will assume that you meant "they need to be explicitly supernatural and non-mundane", because "do magic" to me sounds like "spellcasting". Spellcasting shouldn't be the only way to fantastic powers.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. Sanderson calls the thing Kaladin is doing a "magic system". "Magic" is as good a catch-all for "supernatural and non-mundane" as anything you are likely to find, so I think insisting that the guy who can fly is doing something else just because he fights with a weapon is bizarre and ultimately pointless.

How can you add more effects to the game? What sort of interaction with basic mechanics is still not covered?

Kelgore's Grave Mist was a new effect that was added to the game with the PHBII. That doesn't mean it invented an entirely new kind of thing to do, just that it did a particular thing that no existing effects did. A game like MTG has considerably less mechanical depth available to it than D&D does, and yet its designers manage to produce hundreds of new effects for it every year.

But nobody in those books could summon a few fervently loyal creatures instantly, resurrect the dead, heal damage magically, or do half the stuff Wizards actually get up to.

Sure, and Wizards don't get at-will Plane Shift, and can't replicate what Corwin and Bleys did on the steps of Amber, and I'm not claiming that they're 20th level characters. But in a 10th or 13th level party, there's absolutely a place for someone who has infinite Plane Shift, some additional minor magic, and is crazy good in combat.

There are certainly things D&D characters do that particular characters from the source material can't, and their powers are generally more impressive in some ways (very few characters are a match for the level of one-on-one firepower a D&D character has), and more impressive in other ways (despite D&D's wargaming roots, its magic is fairly unimpressive on the scale of armies and nations). You are generally correct that D&D characters get a wider range of abilities than others do, but it's worth pointing out that D&D campaigns typically take a lot longer than most book series do.

I'd say that while Fighters should grow up to be Thor, that doesn't put them on equal footing with high-level D&D Wizards. That just means that they don't need to be buffed to do their thing, and they do their thing so well that a Wizard cannot really compete with it.

How is that not equal footing? What you are describing is a situation where characters are comparably good, then insisting they are not comparably good for... some reason.

And if they can, then why do we have Thor again, if we can have another Doctor Strange to bend reality into a donut again?

I mean, if you look at the actual Avengers movies, Thor gets Plane Shift (which in that particular context is probably closer to Interplanetary Teleport, but whatever), and Doctor Strange apparently doesn't. It's not terribly difficult to imagine a set of abilities Thor could have that would be competitive with what comparably powerful Wizards are doing.

[Cluedrew]

But doesn't the way you're describing those things reveal that your argument is fundamentally flawed?

I'm going to go with no it isn't thank-you for asking because as far as I can tell you just advocated for my position. Fix the paradigms so everyone gets new abilities.

But you have to pay attention to the math, and you can use the math to identify problem spots, and make and use design guidelines. "Caster-strike << Unbuffed Martial strike << Buffed Martial strike", and "Skill-negating-spell << Unbuffed skillmonkey << Buffed skillmonkey."

Oh yes the math will be necessary but to run with the metaphor adjusting the numbers only does so much when one side gets a + and one side gets a *. Theoretically you can do that, but the multiply numbers have to be really small which is the nerfing casters options which I don't like as much. Maybe push back a few things but I have no problems with the end-point (except for wish). But dropping the metaphor, I thing martial-strike and skill-monkey are just going to have to be more varied at high levels.

D&D is not a combat game and if you treat anyone who isn't explicitly geared for smashing dragons as bad then you're missing the point.

Yeah that character concept that I mentioned yesterday (in a different thread) it was a bard that focused on the social side instead of being a music themed caster. It fell so flat because the system is built for winning once off favours and not a lot more than that. Everything else required the GM to make the entire thing up on the spot.

[Vahnavoi]

White room balance is trivial: everyone rolls the same dice the same number of times, with equal chances of victory. You can't claim it doesn't work - plenty of populat gambling games exist to prove you wrong! People can even feel like they're achieving something or doing "better" or "worse" due to their own skill, despite it being a statistical illusion!

But that doesn't model a world or leave room for anything beyond aesthetic difference between classes.

So you'd better be careful of what you wish for. If the goal is white room, scenario-independent, mathematical balance, then every apparent difference between characters is just a veil you're pulling on your players' eyes to obfuscate the fact that they're all doing the same things and probably playing glorified Snakes & Ladders.

[johnbragg]

For truly epic campaigns that go well beyond what mere morals can do, reaching level 20 is merely the end of the tutorial. It's only the tip of the iceberg in just how vast, deep, and complex the rest of the lore has been laid out to be. There are beings with effective character strengths in the hundreds of levels with stat blocks that effectively say "I win" and even deities can't deal with them.

Which means, effectively, that it's not gameable. You can't effectively run a campaign with Probability and Electromagetism or Primordial Chaos and Ultimate Law as BBEGs. It's like running an Avengers game with Continental Drift as the enemy. The two sides just don't scale to each other.

I think you're misunderstanding the point of power or level caps--it's not that the DM can't challenge the party, it's that the DM can't *enjoyably* challenge the party. The DM can always throw a Bigger Badder Evil Guy at the party. But either things bog down in wildly inflated math, or party-balance issues that are manageable at lower-to-mid levels become un-manageable at cosmic levels. Or just because plot problems crop up--what exactly was Bigger Badder Evil Guy *doing* in the first half of the campaign when the party was struggling against the original BBEG? Maybe those are all solveable problems, but they're problems that have to be solved, they're not just going to work themselves out.

Avengers: Endgame is a pretty relevant example of how a high-power campaign can break down at the table. Consider Endgame as an RPG module, and consider how many major characters basically had no influence on the resolution of the final battle. That's not a criticism of Endgame as a movie, just a commentary on how when the power level gets that big, it's hard to keep an entire gaming group relevantly engaged.

Again, I don't think you can use the same ruleset to play Conan or Hercules or Gilgamesh that you use to play Thor. Which, in the context of a hypothetical 6th edition, means I'd publish them as two separate games, and we'd need a chapter in the Upper Level Game about how to convert PCs from the lower level game to the upper level game. (Your martial character picks from a selection of templates representing the blessings of the gods or whatever).

[Vahnavoi]

Which means, effectively, that it's not gameable.

Oh, it's gameable allright, as long as you accept that you're just throwing the same dice as before and whoever wins gets to spin whatever BS fits the theme of the day.

It's only ungameable if you're trying to model it, which is an exercise in futility.

[Kyutaru]

I think you're misunderstanding the point of power or level caps--it's not that the DM can't challenge the party, it's that the DM can't *enjoyably* challenge the party. The DM can always throw a Bigger Badder Evil Guy at the party. But either things bog down in wildly inflated math, or party-balance issues that are manageable at lower-to-mid levels become un-manageable at cosmic levels. Or just because plot problems crop up--what exactly was Bigger Badder Evil Guy *doing* in the first half of the campaign when the party was struggling against the original BBEG? Maybe those are all solveable problems, but they're problems that have to be solved, they're not just going to work themselves out.

D&D did have solutions though, as well as campaign settings based around the planar endgame. Sigil City of Doors is a perfect example of a hub for epic-level characters with the epic handbooks, spellcasting, and combat being less about numbers and more about WHAT you are capable of doing. This goes back to what I said about D&D not really being a combat game but one centered around roleplaying with numerous mechanics that simply have no effect without a DM to determine it. At those level ranges, the gameplay matches closer to that of Vampire the Masquerade or Mage the Ascension or even the popular game Planescape: Torment, which was significantly regarded as not about the combat but the choices. When omnipotent superbeings can end your existence with a mere thought you have to figure out how you're going to foil their plans in subtler ways. The gods play this cosmic Game of Thrones on a universal scale chessboard and players of sufficiently powerful level can join in as more than mere pawns. Skill checks and personal ingenuity play bigger roles on that scale than how much damage your sword inflicts. At a point it's even assumed that players can afford basically all the magic items they could ever want are effectively capped in terms of item progression, something easily done in a world where astral diamonds (rated in terms of millions of gold) are the standard currency.

Low level adventures play out like Conan and high level adventures play out like Doctor Strange.

But epic level adventures play out like Rand al'Thor and his world of schemes or Elminster's many adventures traversing all of reality. It stops being about are you powerful enough and starts being about are you smart enough.

[Lagtime]

Yes. Which is why other classes should get better abilities.

Though this is the slippery slope to 4E: Just give each class what are in everything except name "spells".

If you think Thor, Doctor Strange, and Wonder Woman aren't source material for D&D (especially now), I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding what people are expecting from the fantasy genre.

I'd question the idea of using super heroes as biases for classes in D&D: they are not the same thing. Basic, default D&D is not and should not be about recreating super hero like characters. But, maybe you could add a Super Hero splat book to the rules....just not in the core rules.

Captain America has a magic artifact shield, super-strength, and gets lightning powers in Endgame. Batman is, particularly in incarnations where he teams up with Superman, basically a near-Epic Artificer. Black Widow and Hawkeye are basically sidekicks for most of the movies they're in, and at no point are they treated as being as important as the likes of Thor, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange to the heroes'

Well, I guess this depends on 'what' hero you are talking about from when and where. Each super hero has had many, many, many versions and incarnations.

In other words, the understanding of what levels represent certain concepts cleans up objections to buffing fighters to keep up with mages by pointing out that you’re not denying the lower-“magic” concepts by buffing fighters, but the players need to know at what level they want to play to have the characters they want.

I'd disagree here. Before 3E magic and spellcasters were balanced with other classes just fine. 3E removed all the balance points and greatly unbalanced the game in favor of magic. The answer does seem simple though: bring back the balance from older D&D.

I'm all for adding martial abilities......but the problem is that unless those abilities are exact copies of the spellcasting and the spells themselves, the abilities will always fall short of balance.

My 'nerf' for spellcasters is just making their spells harder to get and removing the crazy broken freedom they have now.

Just think how some simple things would work like:

*Spellcasters need three, four or even five times the XP as martial types.

*Spellcasters only get new spell slots every three, four or even five levels

*Only martial types can ever get more then one attack

Wonder what that balance would look like?

[Ignimortis]

That seems like a distinction without a difference. Sanderson calls the thing Kaladin is doing a "magic system". "Magic" is as good a catch-all for "supernatural and non-mundane" as anything you are likely to find, so I think insisting that the guy who can fly is doing something else just because he fights with a weapon is bizarre and ultimately pointless.

Very well. My usual definition for fighter stuff not being "magical" is that they do things with an Ex tag instead of Su/Sp, if we go by 3.5 standards. I'd also like it to be mechanically distinct from spellcasting, not just reflavoured spells like some people suggest.

Kelgore's Grave Mist was a new effect that was added to the game with the PHBII. That doesn't mean it invented an entirely new kind of thing to do, just that it did a particular thing that no existing effects did. A game like MTG has considerably less mechanical depth available to it than D&D does, and yet its designers manage to produce hundreds of new effects for it every year.

Kelgore's Grave Mist isn't anywhere a new effect. It's HP damage (cold) and status effect application (fatigue) with several more tags like AoE and "Living creatures only". When I say "new effect", I mean something that interacts with the game in a new way. HP damage (fire) is an effect, Fireball is just one of many means of delivery. That's what I mean when I say Wizards have almost universal access to effects - the only things off their spell list completely (IIRC, 3.5 has too many spells to remember all of them) is non-undead resurrection, healing HP damage, and I think healing ability damage and level damage? HP damage, conjuring creatures, teleportation, ability enhancement, several new senses, several new movement modes - Wizards can get it all with very little restrictions.

That's why I propose a decisive nerf to Wizards - having not only a potential, but very readily realized access to most things you can do in the game cannot be balanced. Either you do things well enough to not need anyone who does those things as well, or you do them too poorly to be level-appropriate with those abilities, and thus are mostly dead weight. In both 3e and 5e, it's been squarely in the "wizards do things well enough to not need fighters in the party", despite 5e's attempts to cut down on that.

Specialization would force wizards to forgo some effects forever, and thus free the party space for someone who does those things exclusively. A Wizard with no Evocation or Conjuration cannot do direct damage, for example, and a Wizard with no Transmutation or Conjuration cannot access new movement modes, and a Wizard with no Abjuration or Conjuration can't defend themselves very well. (Conjuration is a very stupid school and needs to be completely rebalanced, dammit).

Sure, and Wizards don't get at-will Plane Shift, and can't replicate what Corwin and Bleys did on the steps of Amber, and I'm not claiming that they're 20th level characters. But in a 10th or 13th level party, there's absolutely a place for someone who has infinite Plane Shift, some additional minor magic, and is crazy good in combat.

There are certainly things D&D characters do that particular characters from the source material can't, and their powers are generally more impressive in some ways (very few characters are a match for the level of one-on-one firepower a D&D character has), and more impressive in other ways (despite D&D's wargaming roots, its magic is fairly unimpressive on the scale of armies and nations). You are generally correct that D&D characters get a wider range of abilities than others do, but it's worth pointing out that D&D campaigns typically take a lot longer than most book series do.

Are you sure they can't replicate that? Some buff spells and martial weapon proficiency, and you've got a good chance of doing pretty similar things. Hell, a level 10-13 Fighter might very well be better than Corwin or Bleys in combat, that just depends on how you stat Amber's soldiers and other enemies they've fought.

How is that not equal footing? What you are describing is a situation where characters are comparably good, then insisting they are not comparably good for... some reason.

I mean, if you look at the actual Avengers movies, Thor gets Plane Shift (which in that particular context is probably closer to Interplanetary Teleport, but whatever), and Doctor Strange apparently doesn't. It's not terribly difficult to imagine a set of abilities Thor could have that would be competitive with what comparably powerful Wizards are doing.

They're not comparably good, because if we really take a D&D Wizard and set him, at appropriate level, in an adventure where Thor would be a legitimate party member, chances are, the Wizard can pull out a few Frost Giants (I have passing knowledge of Marvel films, so I'm not sure about movie Thor) or something else that would be a comparable beatstick to Thor, and possibly provide the same Plane Shift/Teleport capability (either through his own spell slots or summons again).

[NorthernPhoenix]

In the relatively tight game math of Pathfinder 2e, from what i've seen, casters are still gods to weaker beings but the math is such that they can't dominate level appropriate fights in the same way. A level 20 Sorcerer can destroy an entire army of regular soldiers with a wave of the hand, but still benefits greatly from having a Fighter and Paladin with him if he's facing a Pit Fiend, who he is probably not going to "save or die".


Now, powercreep may have changed that, i don't know. But that's the basic idea.

[Ignimortis]

In the relatively tight game math of Pathfinder 2e, from what i've seen, casters are still gods to weaker beings but the math is such that they can't dominate level appropriate fights in the same way. A level 20 Sorcerer can destroy an entire army of regular soldiers with a wave of the hand, but still benefits greatly from having a Fighter and Paladin with him if he's facing a Pit Fiend, who he is probably not going to "save or die".


Now, powercreep may have changed that, i don't know. But that's the basic idea.

My friends are playing PF2e and they're saying casters are almost useless if they aren't buff/heal bots. I presume that's because they mostly fight hard fights with few high-power monsters, to which debuffs have a very hard time sticking due to PF2 math. Fighters and Champions have been the stars of combat so far (they're level 10 by now), because they slightly break the math everyone else has to follow.

[Kyutaru]

That's what I mean when I say Wizards have almost universal access to effects - the only things off their spell list completely (IIRC, 3.5 has too many spells to remember all of them) is non-undead resurrection, healing HP damage, and I think healing ability damage and level damage? HP damage, conjuring creatures, teleportation, ability enhancement, several new senses, several new movement modes - Wizards can get it all with very little restrictions.

Wizards could get around even those restrictions. Wizards could simply summon something like an archon to do the healing for them. Even raising the dead could be replicated using Limited Wish which permitted you to use ANY 5th level spell or lower. In fact there are few things a wishing wizard can't do and the spell doesn't fail when you replicate existing magic.

But then many of these powerful effects were balanced in older editions because of the substantial costs involved. Not the 300 xp 3e loses you that is one monster kill from recovering but an entire year of lost lifespan. Haste was the same way and many spells had ludicrous XP or Material costs that balanced them by denying any non-lich caster from abusing them. Potent emergency powers are great in games when they have a long cooldown. This coupled with all the other wizard disadvantages that have been removed from the game over time has upset the balance noticeably. Where previously some effects were meant to be rarely used due to their power, now they are freely thrown about thrice daily. Heck some spells used to take weeks of preparation and couldn't just be chain cast because you memorized them every long rest.

Now I know some don't fancy balancing mechanics by making them annoying to use... but if that's the case then you also don't leave those mechanics in the game once you've stripped them of their disincentives. Instead of removing these spells that broke the balance and were never meant to be on the same power level as other spells of their level that lacked these costs the designers left them in almost exactly as they were because they had become iconic. It's why there are so many spells that stand out for their level as an outlier that should probably be several levels higher of an effect. But no, you can't adjust spell levels because they've always been this level. Magic Missile should never have been a 1st level spell yet it will forever be one because of tradition.

[NorthernPhoenix]

My friends are playing PF2e and they're saying casters are almost useless if they aren't buff/heal bots. I presume that's because they mostly fight hard fights with few high-power monsters, to which debuffs have a very hard time sticking due to PF2 math. Fighters and Champions have been the stars of combat so far (they're level 10 by now), because they slightly break the math everyone else has to follow.

Yes, this is by design. In High Level Fights, the Main Character Guys take the center stage. But in the context of "normal people", the Wizard is a god. He can't fail at making mind puppets of the masses, blowing away squads of guards with a single spell, turning people permanently into animals, turning himself into anything, coming or going where he pleases, or anything else you imagine a fictional super-Wizard doing. The power fantasy is absolutely there, it just can't be applied to powerful foes.

[Kyutaru]

Yes, this is by design. In High Level Fights, the Main Character Guys take the center stage. But in the context of "normal people", the Wizard is a god. He can't fail at making mind puppets of the masses, blowing away squads of guards with a single spell, turning people permanently into animals, turning himself into anything, coming or going where he pleases, or anything else you imagine a fictional super-Wizard doing. The power fantasy is absolutely there, it just can't be applied to powerful foes.

I commented on another thread about this but this is more in line with how old D&D and JRPGs balance casters. They treat them as they Swiss army knife support character instead of the main battle tank. They don't exist to singlehandedly solve every problem but as an enhancer to the party's stabmasters. Sometimes something can't be solved by beating it into a pulp and the wizard gets to shine extra specially by magicking it out of existence. They do well at AOE pest control and preventing HP loss through disabling or buffing. But all of this needs someone to buff or kill that isn't the wizard because the wizard is busy being useful in other ways.

[Pex]

White room balance is trivial: everyone rolls the same dice the same number of times, with equal chances of victory. You can't claim it doesn't work - plenty of populat gambling games exist to prove you wrong! People can even feel like they're achieving something or doing "better" or "worse" due to their own skill, despite it being a statistical illusion!

But that doesn't model a world or leave room for anything beyond aesthetic difference between classes.

So you'd better be careful of what you wish for. If the goal is white room, scenario-independent, mathematical balance, then every apparent difference between characters is just a veil you're pulling on your players' eyes to obfuscate the fact that they're all doing the same things and probably playing glorified Snakes & Ladders.

4E ladies and gentlemen.

Which means, effectively, that it's not gameable. You can't effectively run a campaign with Probability and Electromagetism or Primordial Chaos and Ultimate Law as BBEGs. It's like running an Avengers game with Continental Drift as the enemy. The two sides just don't scale to each other.

I think you're misunderstanding the point of power or level caps--it's not that the DM can't challenge the party, it's that the DM can't *enjoyably* challenge the party. The DM can always throw a Bigger Badder Evil Guy at the party. But either things bog down in wildly inflated math, or party-balance issues that are manageable at lower-to-mid levels become un-manageable at cosmic levels. Or just because plot problems crop up--what exactly was Bigger Badder Evil Guy *doing* in the first half of the campaign when the party was struggling against the original BBEG? Maybe those are all solveable problems, but they're problems that have to be solved, they're not just going to work themselves out.

Avengers: Endgame is a pretty relevant example of how a high-power campaign can break down at the table. Consider Endgame as an RPG module, and consider how many major characters basically had no influence on the resolution of the final battle. That's not a criticism of Endgame as a movie, just a commentary on how when the power level gets that big, it's hard to keep an entire gaming group relevantly engaged.

Again, I don't think you can use the same ruleset to play Conan or Hercules or Gilgamesh that you use to play Thor. Which, in the context of a hypothetical 6th edition, means I'd publish them as two separate games, and we'd need a chapter in the Upper Level Game about how to convert PCs from the lower level game to the upper level game. (Your martial character picks from a selection of templates representing the blessings of the gods or whatever).

Physically you can if you have that chapter of conversion in the book where both exist and be specific in the distinctiveness of power level. Let the DMs who can't or refuse to adapt to the change in power level, and possibly warriors can only ever be Guy At The Gym, have their game end when the PCs reach the top mundane level and let the rest of us move on to the Upper Level. Those who want the Upper Level should not be denied it in the game just because those who don't like don't like it.

[NigelWalmsley]

I'd also like it to be mechanically distinct from spellcasting, not just reflavoured spells like some people suggest.

Depends on what exactly you're asking for. If you write something for a 3e-derived game, it's likely that a lot of the effects are going to be function calls to spells, as that's how things are specified. If you want to give the Fighter an ability where he crafts things at a prodigious rate, it's simply better design for that ability to be a function call to Fabricate than for you to write your own custom fast crafting ability. Similarly, whatever abilities you give people are likely to be leveled in a very similar way to spells. But if you just mean that those abilities should be mechanically distinct in the way that a Dread Necromancer, a Crusader, a Binder, and a Warlock already are, I whole-heartedly agree.

Kelgore's Grave Mist isn't anywhere a new effect. It's HP damage (cold) and status effect application (fatigue) with several more tags like AoE and "Living creatures only". When I say "new effect", I mean something that interacts with the game in a new way.

That seems like an extremely (and, frankly, unhelpfully) nonstandard definition of "effect". By that standard there are probably between twenty and thirty "effects" in the whole game, depending how finely you slice it. I think most people would acknowledge "damaging AoE DoT debuff" to be a new effect distinct from "damaging AoE" or "AoE debuff" or "DoT".

That's why I propose a decisive nerf to Wizards - having not only a potential, but very readily realized access to most things you can do in the game cannot be balanced.

By your standard, access to "most things you could do in the game" is something like 12 abilities. If you get a new ability every level, by 20th level, every single character will have access to "most effects" as you've defined the term.

Are you sure they can't replicate that?

They can't replicate it for free, which is the claim people who complain about Wizards tend to make. You can certainly build a Wizard who is an effective gish. But that requires committing actual build resources, in terms of feats, PrC levels, and/or magic items that you then cannot spend on your minionmancy, or battlefield control, or single-target debuffing. You can't be a Corwin-level melee combatant one day, then a maximally-effective utility caster the next day (at the levels where I would consider Corwin a reasonable party member).

They're not comparably good, because if we really take a D&D Wizard and set him, at appropriate level, in an adventure where Thor would be a legitimate party member, chances are, the Wizard can pull out a few Frost Giants (I have passing knowledge of Marvel films, so I'm not sure about movie Thor) or something else that would be a comparable beatstick to Thor, and possibly provide the same Plane Shift/Teleport capability (either through his own spell slots or summons again).

Then you haven't set him at an appropriately level. If you look at the Marvel movies, Doctor Strange (despite being an enormously powerful Wizard), does not seem to have Thor-level summons. You seem to have this notion that it's factually impossible to write something that could compete with a Wizard, but that's obviously false. Summons have some particular amount of power, Thor could just be stronger than that. In the same way that he is stronger than Thanos's minions, or Ultron's minions, or Loki's minions.

Wizards could get around even those restrictions. Wizards could simply summon something like an archon to do the healing for them. Even raising the dead could be replicated using Limited Wish which permitted you to use ANY 5th level spell or lower. In fact there are few things a wishing wizard can't do and the spell doesn't fail when you replicate existing magic.

Sure, and if you want to complain about Planar Binding or Limited Wish being stupid, I won't stop you. But that's very clearly different from the Wizard being broken, because those spells are also broken in the hands of every single class that gets them. It's like looking at the problems with Leadership and concluding that because you can use the Rogue's Bonus Feat ability to take it, we need to nerf the Rogue as a first step to balancing the game.

Yes, this is by design. In High Level Fights, the Main Character Guys take the center stage.

Which does not include the Wizard? Assuming I'm understanding correctly, and the intention is to have the sword guys take center stage in fights, this seems like another thing that doesn't pass the "how does the fantasy genre actually work" test.

[Pex]

*Spellcasters need three, four or even five times the XP as martial types.

Takes away the fun of playing one.

*Spellcasters only get new spell slots every three, four or even five levels

Takes away the fun of playing one.

*Only martial types can ever get more then one attack

That's fine.

Wonder what that balance would look like?

No one would want to play spellcasters. That may make the 3E haters happy, but you now you just reverse the sides of who hates D&D or rather this hypothetical game, achieving nothing. You don't balance the game by making something not fun to play.

[JNAProductions]

No one would want to play spellcasters. That may make the 3E haters happy, but you now you just reverse the sides of who hates D&D or rather this hypothetical game, achieving nothing. You don't balance the game by making something not fun to play.

Grod's Law, paraphrased. And a damn good law, one worth following.

[Pex]

Now I know some don't fancy balancing mechanics by making them annoying to use... but if that's the case then you also don't leave those mechanics in the game once you've stripped them of their disincentives. Instead of removing these spells that broke the balance and were never meant to be on the same power level as other spells of their level that lacked these costs the designers left them in almost exactly as they were because they had become iconic. It's why there are so many spells that stand out for their level as an outlier that should probably be several levels higher of an effect. But no, you can't adjust spell levels because they've always been this level. Magic Missile should never have been a 1st level spell yet it will forever be one because of tradition.

As one of those people I don't object to this. I've always said, if something is so powerful you feel the need to punish the player for using it then get rid of it or do something else instead. Trouble comes in the disagreement of where there's a problem. You say Magic Missile should not be first level. Others disagree it's a problem even if they go by tradition. No problem in not wanting wizards to be able to do everything powerful, but they're still allowed to do powerful things. Having and wanting iconic sacred cows is not an inherently bad thing.

[Ignimortis]

Depends on what exactly you're asking for. If you write something for a 3e-derived game, it's likely that a lot of the effects are going to be function calls to spells, as that's how things are specified. If you want to give the Fighter an ability where he crafts things at a prodigious rate, it's simply better design for that ability to be a function call to Fabricate than for you to write your own custom fast crafting ability. Similarly, whatever abilities you give people are likely to be leveled in a very similar way to spells. But if you just mean that those abilities should be mechanically distinct in the way that a Dread Necromancer, a Crusader, a Binder, and a Warlock already are, I whole-heartedly agree.

Well, about that - note that none of those four classes have anywhere as wide of an access to things as Wizards do. They have their own niches of stuff they do, even if they can switch it up a bit (like Binder).

That seems like an extremely (and, frankly, unhelpfully) nonstandard definition of "effect". By that standard there are probably between twenty and thirty "effects" in the whole game, depending how finely you slice it. I think most people would acknowledge "damaging AoE DoT debuff" to be a new effect distinct from "damaging AoE" or "AoE debuff" or "DoT".

Why is it non-standard? It's the smallest function that one can discern in something. Causing HP damage is an effect. Applying a status effect is an effect. And yes, there would be about 20-30 of them in the game total. That's absolutely fine. You can create tons of abilities that apply those effects with variations in area of delivery, method of delivery, resource expenditure, action economy, etc. You can very easily make a party out of 4 or even 6 characters that each have access to about 7-10 of those effects and apply them in various ways, and that game would still be fun, I'd wager.

By your standard, access to "most things you could do in the game" is something like 12 abilities. If you get a new ability every level, by 20th level, every single character will have access to "most effects" as you've defined the term.

Why should you get access to a whole new thing every level? I don't want to suddenly learn to summon monsters or heal people just because I'm level 13 and I have all the "damage" and "cause debuff" effects somewhere in my repertoire. I'm fine with characters not being able to do everything.

Then you haven't set him at an appropriately level. If you look at the Marvel movies, Doctor Strange (despite being an enormously powerful Wizard), does not seem to have Thor-level summons. You seem to have this notion that it's factually impossible to write something that could compete with a Wizard, but that's obviously false. Summons have some particular amount of power, Thor could just be stronger than that. In the same way that he is stronger than Thanos's minions, or Ultron's minions, or Loki's minions.

Sure, and if you want to complain about Planar Binding or Limited Wish being stupid, I won't stop you. But that's very clearly different from the Wizard being broken, because those spells are also broken in the hands of every single class that gets them. It's like looking at the problems with Leadership and concluding that because you can use the Rogue's Bonus Feat ability to take it, we need to nerf the Rogue as a first step to balancing the game.

Because Doctor Strange, for all of his cosmic power, isn't a D&D Wizard. When I say "D&D Wizard" I mean not only the class chassis/abilities, but also the Wizard spell list. If the Wizard spell list had a total of five spells like Invisibility, Fireball, Mage Armor, Spider Climb and Web, Wizards wouldn't be a problem, they'd be IN problem. But the Wizard problem is mostly in their spells - because their spells do everything. And if you want to separate Wizards as a class from their spells, then I don't understand that, because spells are basically the only class feature they get outside of some free metamagic, which also doesn't work without spells to apply it to.

[NigelWalmsley]

That's fine.

Frankly, I'm somewhat convinced the game simply shouldn't be giving out multiple attacks, as a general rule. Resolving iterative and secondary attacks is generally more trouble than it's worth.

Well, about that - note that none of those four classes have anywhere as wide of an access to things as Wizards do. They have their own niches of stuff they do, even if they can switch it up a bit (like Binder).

But that's not fundamental to how they work. The reason why the Binder has a small list of abilities which are kinda medium is because that's all the devs wrote for Binders to have. Nothing about preparing ability suites rather than individual abilities means they're inherently any more limited than the Wizard. I could go out and write up a set of vestiges that made them as powerful as the average Wizard right now, and it would require changing precisely zero things about the Binder class as written.

You seem to have this myopic focus on the game as it exists, which you've translated into sweeping assumptions about how certain types of mechanics could possibly work. But it doesn't follow. There's nothing about the Wizard that is conceptually any broader than most other classes, and nothing about having a wide range of abilities that is insurmountably better than having a narrow range of abilities.

It's true that the Wizard is at the top of the heap, but if you look at the system as a whole, it's clear that most of the things people complain about Wizards doing are clearly not inherently powerful. The Incarnate can swap its abilities every day to whatever it wants (and even customize them during the day), but it's substantially worse than the Warblade, who's selection of abilities is even smaller than the Sorcerer's. "How do I make a narrow set of abilities balanced with a broad one" is just empirically not an unsolvable problem.

Why is it non-standard?

Because everyone I've ever met considers spells to be new abilities. Prior to this exact argument, I have never met anyone who would claim that Kelgore's Grave Mist is not a new effect because Cone of Cold exists. And, frankly, it undermines your argument about the versatility of Wizards. If there are only twenty effects in the whole game, the problem with the Wizard can't be that it learns a whole bunch of spells, because they have access to the same set of effects as a Sorcerer, or a fixed list caster who's done a little bit of list expansion.

You can very easily make a party out of 4 or even 6 characters that each have access to about 7-10 of those effects and apply them in various ways, and that game would still be fun, I'd wager.

Sure. But why do you need to do that? It's not like having more effects necessarily allows you to solve more problems, or like multiple characters with the same effects necessarily feel exactly the same. A Warblade does damage in combat. A Warmage does damage in combat. No one would consider the two classes to be identical, or have any trouble identifying situations where one might be more useful than the other. Similarly, a 3rd level Wizard has access to a far wider range of effects than a 10th level Warlock, but the latter is substantially more effective as a character. It is even fairly easy to imagine situations where the exact same ability has radically different value based on the mechanics of the class (e.g. a no-save stun is much better as an Invocation than a Maneuver).

Why should you get access to a whole new thing every level? I don't want to suddenly learn to summon monsters or heal people just because I'm level 13 and I have all the "damage" and "cause debuff" effects somewhere in my repertoire. I'm fine with characters not being able to do everything.

What's the alternative supposed to be? If you have all the damage and debuff abilities, at a new level you either get something that is not a damage or a debuff ability, or you get nothing. Only one of those choices makes people happy, and it's not "nothing".

But the Wizard problem is mostly in their spells - because their spells do everything.

A Wizard's spells don't do everything. They have real limitations, both in the specific (e.g. complaints about Teleport typically reveal a disturbing lack of understanding of what the spell actually says) and in the general (Wizards have a limited number of spell slots, constraints on how many spells they can learn, and have to prepare spells at the beginning of the day).

It is simply not very difficult to imagine situations where someone who was not a Wizard could be competitive with a Wizard, and indeed such situations exist in the game as it is written. A Beguiler is simply better than a Wizard at navigating social situations. It is entirely possible to write the game so that characters shine because they have the best ability of anyone in the party for solving a particular problem, rather than because they have the only ability that solves that problem. In my view, such a setup is in fact preferable, because it makes the particular characteristics of your abilities important. If the party is using my Ranger's Tree Stride for fast travel because it's the only fast travel ability we have, it doesn't matter how or even if Tree Stride is different from Teleport. But if I have Tree Stride, and the Rogue has Shadow Walk, and the Cleric has Air Walk, and the Wizard has Teleport, it matters what each of those abilities specifically does.

[ExLibrisMortis]

So why should someone who wants to play a Fighter be necessarily worse than someone who wants to play a Wizard?

Why is their game fantasy less valid than the magic one?

Neither concept is more valid. However, high-level fighters and wizards don't go together in this game and in this setting. If you are playing this game and this setting, you should be aware of the imbalance and pick your concepts to suit the party. Past low levels, mundane characters will not engage quests of the same type highly magical characters will routinely deal with. That's fine and that's interesting.

I agree with what you sketched out there. It has been famously argued that Gandalf and Aragorn were 5th level. Conan could adventure with those guys and it's a perfectly playable game.

I usually have Aragorn at level 5 (start of LotR) to level 6 (Paths of the Dead) to 7 (king of Gondor) and Gandalf at level 9 (start of LotR) to 10 (Gandalf the White)--note that this is Gandalf as half-celestial bard or something, not as a wizard. Gandalf and Aragorn are definitely not in the same league, but Aragorn can get to Gandalf's level some of the time, whereas the hobbits (level 1 to 3) really can't.

(Side note: Even in Avengers: Endgame, the Hulk is essentially written out of the story, and Thor has a breakdown because solving the Thanos problem beatstick-style was pointless).

It is not easy living in a magical world when all your powers are beatstickery. D&D 3.5 represents this very well (completely by accident, I think we can agree, but still).

Pretty much. It's true that some things are better than other things. But we have a mechanism to represent that: level. If "mundane sword guy" is worse than "archmage", you can simply set up your level system so that the former is a 2nd level character and the latter a 15th level one. The whole notion that we need imbalance to represent a rich and detailed world is just false.

You don't need to have imbalance, but it does help. You can choose not to represent farmers and city guards (cut out low tiers), or you can choose not to represent Incantatrices and Dweomerkeepers (cut out high tiers), or you can choose not to represent city guards and apprentices (cut out low levels), or you can choose not to represent Kas and Vecna (cut out high levels), but if you want to represent high and low levels of high and low tiers under the same coherent system, there will be imbalance. Yes, you can deal with that by limiting your PCs to certain classes. Then we get what I've been saying: balance to the table by picking characters to suit the scope and magnitude of the quest you're on.


My point is not that a game should necessarily be imbalanced (though it is helpful, for the aforementioned reasons), nor that a setting should necessarily favour spellcasters (though I don't see what the point of 'zero-sum' magic is, i.e. magic that doesn't provide utility over mundane approaches). The point I'm trying to make is that D&D is not 'balanced' (3.5 especially, but to a lesser extent all the various editions) in the sense that different character concepts are all mechanically equally effective when given equal amounts of build resources, and that creates a game and describes a setting that is perfectly playable and well-suited to representing a wide range of fantasy settings. You could perhaps change the game to achieve balance, but that would erode the setting as it exists in 3.5, and it would reduce the 'versatility' of the game, in the sense that different levels and tiers of characters no longer represent levels and qualities of power, and you no longer have the strong in-universe justification for different abilities belonging to different tiers. Why should you butcher a game like 3.5 to make it do something that it never did?

tl;dr If you want a 'balanced' game, don't start with D&D. Leave D&D to do what it does well, and start with another base to achieve 'balance'.

(Although, once again: 'balance' is, in and of itself, not fun, especially in a non-competetive role-playing activity.)

[NigelWalmsley]

You don't need to have imbalance, but it does help. You can choose not to represent farmers and city guards (cut out low tiers), or you can choose not to represent Incantatrices and Dweomerkeepers (cut out high tiers), or you can choose not to represent city guards and apprentices (cut out low levels), or you can choose not to represent Kas and Vecna (cut out high levels), but if you want to represent high and low levels of high and low tiers under the same coherent system, there will be imbalance.

Just because your power scale goes from guard to god rather than apprentice to archmage doesn't mean you need multiple power scales. D&D has twenty levels. That is plenty of space to represent the whole range of power available in the source material.

[Vahnavoi]

... the idea that you should cram all possible source inspirations into twenty levels is headachingly stupid, and not one that any edition of D&D has followed. If anything, if you want your farmer to god progression, a version of D&D would benefit from longer, smoother and more spread out power curve.

[Ignimortis]

A Wizard's spells don't do everything. They have real limitations, both in the specific (e.g. complaints about Teleport typically reveal a disturbing lack of understanding of what the spell actually says) and in the general (Wizards have a limited number of spell slots, constraints on how many spells they can learn, and have to prepare spells at the beginning of the day).

It is simply not very difficult to imagine situations where someone who was not a Wizard could be competitive with a Wizard, and indeed such situations exist in the game as it is written. A Beguiler is simply better than a Wizard at navigating social situations. It is entirely possible to write the game so that characters shine because they have the best ability of anyone in the party for solving a particular problem, rather than because they have the only ability that solves that problem. In my view, such a setup is in fact preferable, because it makes the particular characteristics of your abilities important. If the party is using my Ranger's Tree Stride for fast travel because it's the only fast travel ability we have, it doesn't matter how or even if Tree Stride is different from Teleport. But if I have Tree Stride, and the Rogue has Shadow Walk, and the Cleric has Air Walk, and the Wizard has Teleport, it matters what each of those abilities specifically does.

I've been writing a reply to your post for an hour and realized that I'm just getting lost in my own words, so I'll try to sum up my position as succinctly as possible to avoid any misunderstandings.

Wizard's problem has a root in four factors occurring simultaneously:
1) Spells generally produce the best solution for any problem that doesn't require direct HP damage. That is a universal problem of D&D, both 3e and 5e. Teleport has limitations, but it's still far superior to "just walking there" or even "turning into a bird and flying there". Fly is superior to Climb or Jump. Summon Monster is generally superior to hiring mercenaries. Plane Shift is better than "well uh let's find a portal I guess?".
2) Wizard's spell list is one of the biggest. They do share it with Sorcerers, who are generally much less of a problem, because:
3) Wizard has much better access to the list than its' other users. A sorcerer generally knows anywhere from 2 to 34 (3e) or 2 to 15 (5e) spells. A wizard knows at least from 2 to 40 spells, without considering learning anything extra from scrolls, and (3e) gets to learn any spells they can cast instead of fixed amounts by spell level.
4) Wizards can switch their active abilities (i.e. their prepared spells) with much less effort than most other classes do. Combining that with 2 and 3 multiplies this factor significantly - a Wizard is only as good as their spells known.

Your proposed solution is, how I understand it, to let everyone draw from a list of powers with similar strength and versatility at similar levels, so that when (this seems to be in line with your arguments) Wizard has Summon Monster, Fighter can Summon Army, Rogue can Animate Shadow and Cleric has Conjure Celestials - applied to every or almost every problem in the game. So everyone can contribute all the time in powerful ways, where the difference is mainly "what resource would be best to expend right now" and "how well does this particular ability, which does solve the issue in general, apply to this one situation". I.e. everyone can solve all the problems, but some solutions are better than others. So instead of fixing anything about the four factors above, they get applied to every class in the game to some degree.

I don't think that's a good idea. What is the point of a team-and-role based game, if you're not really vulnerable to anything? If you have no weak spots ("do a thing passably well" isn't a weak spot), then what is the distinction between classes? How is the player supposed to feel that they're bringing something unique and highly valuable to the table, if the situation could be solved well enough without them?

... the idea that you should cram all possible source inspirations into twenty levels is headachingly stupid, and not one that any edition of D&D has followed. If anything, if you want your farmer to god progression, a version of D&D would benefit from longer, smoother and more spread out power curve.

I don't get it. 5e is, IMO, already about 12 levels too long for the amount of progression provided. You can certainly cram a zero to god progression into 20 levels. That might actually make individual levels feel significant again.

[NigelWalmsley]

1) Spells generally produce the best solution for any problem that doesn't require direct HP damage.

This is true, but I absolutely cannot understand how this is a problem with spells. Non-spells simply don't solve these problems at all. It's not that there's some pretty good strategic mobility option for Fighters that Teleport crowds out, it's that Fighters (and Warblades) get absolutely nothing. In this particular area, I cannot comprehend any workable solution that starts anywhere other than unprecedentedly large buffs to martials.

2) Wizard's spell list is one of the biggest. They do share it with Sorcerers, who are generally much less of a problem, because:

So what? Size, as they say, matters not. How much of a level advantage would you need to pick a Dread Necromancer or a Beguiler over a Wizard? Two, maybe three at the high end. Having a thousand spells isn't ten times as good as having a hundred spells. Especially when you prepare spells and spend resources to learn them.

4) Wizards can switch their active abilities (i.e. their prepared spells) with much less effort than most other classes do. Combining that with 2 and 3 multiplies this factor significantly - a Wizard is only as good as their spells known.

So can the Incarnate. So can the Binder. In fact, those classes can switch their abilities more easily than the Wizard can. So if this kind of flexibility is a problem, why aren't those classes busted? They're both substantially worse than the Sorcerer, and the Incarnate is in the bottom half of classes overall.

Your proposed solution is, how I understand it, to let everyone draw from a list of powers with similar strength and versatility at similar levels,

Not necessarily. My solution is to go back to the challenges. You have to stop looking at it in terms of competing with Teleport. You have to start looking at it in terms of challenges. What problems should characters be able to solve? What problems should parties be able to solve? You won't get anywhere by looking at the Wizard and blindly modifying it. You can intuit the direction things should move, to a degree, but to make real progress you have to understand what kinds of challenges people are going to be facing, and what kinds of resources they should spend to overcome them.

What is the point of a team-and-role based game, if you're not really vulnerable to anything? If you have no weak spots ("do a thing passably well" isn't a weak spot), then what is the distinction between classes?

This is how the game works in combat right now. A Wizard, a Warblade, a Rogue, and a Cleric are all able to make meaningful but distinct contributions to overcoming challenges like "a Fire Giant" or "a squard of Bearded Devils" or "two Gorgons". Those contributions will be larger or smaller in each of those encounters, but they will all always have something to do. That paradigm works. Why can't the rest of the game work like that?

[johnbragg]

This is how the game works in combat right now. A Wizard, a Warblade, a Rogue, and a Cleric are all able to make meaningful but distinct contributions to overcoming challenges like "a Fire Giant" or "a squard of Bearded Devils" or "two Gorgons". Those contributions will be larger or smaller in each of those encounters, but they will all always have something to do. That paradigm works. Why can't the rest of the game work like that?

....because RPG combat is fairly easily reducible to math. Math that the core competencies of D&D classes are built around. Monsters have been developed and modified over 45 years and 5 editions to be meaningful challenges for a party of 4-5 D&D PCs of level X.

Nothing else in the game both A) that math-able and B) that susceptible to all PCs making meaningful contributions. 4E Skill Challenges were a mess. But were they a mess compared to, say, domain-level play in AD&D? Or were they a mess compared to the d20 universal mechanic and the combat systems of 3E and 4E?

For most players, the game is fundamentally about killing monsters and taking their loot. Diversions like learning about the monsters and manipulating NPCs to help you get better gear or information for killing monsters (most social encounters) and getting to the monsters (traveling, stealthing, trapmonkeying) are immersion-building appetizers, not as important as the main course.

[Mechalich]

....because RPG combat is fairly easily reducible to math. Math that the core competencies of D&D classes are built around. Monsters have been developed and modified over 45 years and 5 editions to be meaningful challenges for a party of 4-5 D&D PCs of level X.

Nothing else in the game both A) that math-able and B) that susceptible to all PCs making meaningful contributions. 4E Skill Challenges were a mess. But were they a mess compared to, say, domain-level play in AD&D? Or were they a mess compared to the d20 universal mechanic and the combat systems of 3E and 4E?

For most players, the game is fundamentally about killing monsters and taking their loot. Diversions like learning about the monsters and manipulating NPCs to help you get better gear or information for killing monsters (most social encounters) and getting to the monsters (traveling, stealthing, trapmonkeying) are immersion-building appetizers, not as important as the main course.

RPG combat also is fairly white-room-ish, especially if you actually locate you combats in a room with walls the characters cannot trivially breakthrough, which includes pretty much any dungeon ever made. Many of the more obvious and balance breaking spellcaster tricks, like lobbing spells upon your enemies from hundreds of feet in the air, vanish if you're stuck in a room with a ten foot ceiling.

And engaging white room RPG combat is what video games do, even D&D video games. The central problem with this is that in a straight comparison of white room vs. white room, the video game experience is flat out superior to the tabletop one. Video games can effectively integrate more complex and varied options mathematically because everything is being calculated by a computer, not people doing arithmetic in their heads, allowing for more complex and varied ranges and also simply orders of magnitude more effects - a typical OP boss fight in an MMO lasts 10-15 minutes, involves 8 ore more PCs, potentially dozens or more NPCs, and might include well over 10,000 individual 'roll' equivalent calculations. That is simply impossible to do at a table. Also, because visual games are a visual medium, they can provide an interesting visual gloss that hides the overall similarity of various effects by using different symbols, alternative sounds, or varied animation. Video games even have better options for physical battlefield structure because digital art tools can build complex three-dimensional arenas (with platforms and reflectors and intermittent hazards among others) that even the most talented of Styrofoam-manipulators can't actually put on a tabletop.

Gygax and co. created D&D as a modified wargame, and for a long time D&D was a combat system with RPG elements loosely added to it. And in the 1970s and even up through the 1990s that made a lot of sense. Video games didn't really get even close to emulating the effective tabletop experience within a full immersive multimedia framework until the late 1990s, but its 2020 now, and they've lapped tabletop well and good. Pure combat is probably the least effective use of the capabilities of tabletop in the current entertainment market.

So it's balancing everything else that becomes much more important.

[johnbragg]

So it's balancing everything else that becomes much more important.

I didn't say it wasn't important. Just that it wasn't easy.

Those non-mathy or less-mathy, non-combat or semi-combat parts are the "killer app" for pencil-and-paper games over MMORPGs.

Sneaking a party past the guards, outwitting the orc trackers, even using clever tactics and breaking the morale of the goblins, is what human-DM games can do that MMORPGS can't.

Computers are pretty hopeless at that sort of thing. Below-average and beginner DMs are only "pretty bad" at it.