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

[Ignimortis]

Sure. But that doesn't mean anything. It's like saying "you shouldn't be able to build a character who is overpowered" or "you shouldn't be able to build a character that can't solve enough problems". Those statements only make any sense relative to a set of benchmarks. My point isn't that the Wizard is perfect. You should certainly make changes to the Wizard -- though even then, many of those things will be buffs like "gets class features at levels that aren't multiples of five" -- but the starting point of "rain down a bunch of nerfs on the Wizard" is unhelpful. You have to start by thinking about what characters should be able to do. And starting from that point of view, the Wizard is clearly doing a lot of things right.

Summoner and Necromancer are minionmancers. The "mechanics for your minions" is the whole class. If your class is "you could have this core mechanic or this entirely separate core mechanic", it is too broad. It's like making Warlock and Wizard the same class and saying "just choose a mechanic for your magic". Conversely "archer Fighter" and "sword Fighter" aren't even distinct concepts. You use a sword and a bow at different times, and it is entirely plausible (even desirable) that you would have access to both of those things, just as the Summoner and Necromancer should each have access to multiple types of minion.

You've got to let go of the notion that "Sword Fighter" is a meaningful character concept if you want to have any hope of balancing the game. You'll never get there unless you're able to accept that martial character concepts need to be things like "Hero of Ragnarok" or "Bear Warrior", rather than "uses this kind of pointy stick instead of that kind of pointy stick". Kaladin is good at fighting with a spear, but he's not a "Spear Fighter", he's a Windrunner. Because that's the kind of concept that has legs at high levels.

Not really. Spells are doing a lot of things right. Wizard is doing a lot of things wrong. My benchmark would involve spells and perhaps the general speed of progression between levels from the Wizard list, but not any of the actual Wizard class features, including spell preparation or methods of adding new abilities.

Sorcerer would be far more workable as a baseline, and even Sorcerer would have to suffer some restrictions - as a very simple (and probably too unrestrictive) example, Sorcerers should be Fire Sorcerers (or Efreet/Fire Elemental/Red Dragon Sorcerers, if you like), not just Sorcerers. And that should be both a bonus and a limitation, instead of just a bonus - not only you get better at fire spells, but you cannot take cold spells, and perhaps your fire resistance is offset by somewhat less powerful weakness to cold.

The same goes for every other class - yes, perhaps Sword Fighter and Bow Fighter are concepts that don't work anywhere past level 5. But no Fighter should be a Warlord and an Armsmaster or an Eldritch Knight at the same time. You're either one or the other, despite both being, at their core, a Fighter. The best you should be able to do is to be a poor Warlord and a poor Armsmaster at the same time - by not picking successive talents from one way, and instead picking entry features from both - so you get a retinue, but it's not very numerous and not very strong, and you get some special moves, but they're not that strong. The core issue here is to balance the game so that the hybrid would suffer in performance, but still be able to clear challenges, and the single-class would not excel as much as to make the hybrid fully irrelevant.

That's why Summoner and Necromancer can be the same class with a distinction by archetype. The difference between them is usually defined by two things - how they get their minions/what type their minions are, and how long their minions last. Is that enough to make them two different base classes, especially if you have to design summoned/raised creature statblocks to avoid splatbook diving for summons with specific abilities?

The marginal cost of using Open Lock is 0 GP. The marginal cost of activating a Wand of Knock (even an Eternal Wand of Knock) is some larger number than that. Even if you want to talk about opportunity cost, I think Open Lock is very plausibly one of the ten-ish best skills on the Rogue list, and therefore not taking it makes your character worse.

So what? Who says that the DC 30 lock that Knock beats is a more common problem than the "two locked doors in a row" that Open Lock beats? Again, you're getting caught up on "I can do this thing you can't do" without actually considering the overall package of capabilities these characters have and the challenges they might face (and, yes, Wand of Knock screws with that but A) charged magic items are broken and B) it also screws over the Wizard).

How does the wand screw over the Wizard, who can just stop preparing Knock and free up a spell slot if they even were using it? Rogue would have to retrain away (if they even can) those Open Lock skillpoints, perhaps to UMD. Wizard can just take that Wand and use it without UMD. You are paying 90 GP for each lock, opened in this manner - that's it.

You can also get an at-will Knock item for 12000 GP. How does it compare to investing, say, 20 ranks into Open Lock? Can you buy skill ranks for 600 GP per rank? Probably not. Does that mean that when the party can afford to spend 12000 GP on that, Open Lock becomes an irrelevant skill unless caught in a rarely occurring antimagic zone?

[Quertus]

With regards to the minion discussion, the thing with Necromancers vs. Summoners is what else they can do. Necromancers are in many cases expected to have plenty enough personal killing power, and the iconic minion roster is various flavors and scales of chaff. Meanwhile, the flavor on Summoners is typically a matter of getting very nearly anything done by calling up the relevant form of creature to solve it for you, with personal ability actually being largely irrelevant. In both cases, the on-the-face "basic" idea is far too broad in options so you need to bleed in limitations to have either be one decent class, but the Necromancer has enough mechanical overhead to justify being its own thing, given it generally needs dead things to animate.

Conceptually, either can do a lot. Limitation? How about "not yet"? Sure, a 100th level Necromancer or Summoner could solve any problem, but an Xth level one only has "level X appropriate" abilities.

The issues brought up with Martial minion masters drawing on stuff that should be universal is very much the issue, but to me the real problem is the second-order justifications and third-order balancing issues for the boosting solutions. Because if they have caster-type minions, they need caster-type buffs, and that's something very hard to justify without the class being flat-out Magical itself, or spellcasters directly reliant on stuff that ties directly into the non-magical fluff. And for this to be good niche-filling, the minions need to reach level-appropriate abilities, and pulling this off without the minions outright stepping on the party's toes runs into either needing frequent turnover of specialists that makes running them outside the urban very iffy and ruins the distinction from the summoners, or faces the problem of the boosts needing very weird availability schemes for a Martial character to have the normal PC specialization be run by proxy.

And if they can target party members, then everything will be nasty. Even if you manage to balance the performance shifts so it's sensible to take the chaffy hireling and make them level-appropriate at a couple things while still getting to apply those to allies, the party can then end up wildly more versatile at a given level than expected because far more build resources can be focused on specializing while the Martial master keeps their other things level appropriate, leading to forced specialization degrees or parties with campaign-distorting levels of versatility.

You've lost me.

If "level X appropriate" abilities are granted to a class through minions, what's the problem?

Not really. Spells are doing a lot of things right. Wizard is doing a lot of things wrong. My benchmark would involve spells and perhaps the general speed of progression between levels from the Wizard list, but not any of the actual Wizard class features, including spell preparation or methods of adding new abilities.

Sorcerer would be far more workable as a baseline

Well, that removes the D&D Wizard. Go that route, and you should just remove all the troublesome, unbalanced muggle classes, too.

, and even Sorcerer would have to suffer some restrictions - as a very simple (and probably too unrestrictive) example, Sorcerers should be Fire Sorcerers (or Efreet/Fire Elemental/Red Dragon Sorcerers, if you like), not just Sorcerers. And that should be both a bonus and a limitation, instead of just a bonus - not only you get better at fire spells, but you cannot take cold spells, and perhaps your fire resistance is offset by somewhat less powerful weakness to cold.

Are you talking about something as mechanically unimportant as 2e kits as a solution to balance?

The same goes for every other class - yes, perhaps Sword Fighter and Bow Fighter are concepts that don't work anywhere past level 5. But no Fighter should be a Warlord and an Armsmaster or an Eldritch Knight at the same time. You're either one or the other, despite both being, at their core, a Fighter. The best you should be able to do is to be a poor Warlord and a poor Armsmaster at the same time - by not picking successive talents from one way, and instead picking entry features from both - so you get a retinue, but it's not very numerous and not very strong, and you get some special moves, but they're not that strong. The core issue here is to balance the game so that the hybrid would suffer in performance, but still be able to clear challenges, and the single-class would not excel as much as to make the hybrid fully irrelevant.

Maybe it's just my hubris as a genius, but "can be the best at multiple sub-fields" sounds realistic and desirable to my ears.

I guess "game balance" would likely be the deciding factor (at least for this thread), so let's not "guy at the gym" the muggles in the design phase.

That's why Summoner and Necromancer can be the same class with a distinction by archetype. The difference between them is usually defined by two things - how they get their minions/what type their minions are, and how long their minions last. Is that enough to make them two different base classes, especially if you have to design summoned/raised creature statblocks to avoid splatbook diving for summons with specific abilities?

Hmmm… actually, splatbook expansions could be fine, *if* there were build resources involved.

For example, if summoners could summon X *types* of things, and splatbook support introduced new, balanced types.

How does the wand screw over the Wizard, who can just stop preparing Knock and free up a spell slot if they even were using it? Rogue would have to retrain away (if they even can) those Open Lock skillpoints, perhaps to UMD. Wizard can just take that Wand and use it without UMD. You are paying 90 GP for each lock, opened in this manner - that's it.

You can also get an at-will Knock item for 12000 GP. How does it compare to investing, say, 20 ranks into Open Lock? Can you buy skill ranks for 600 GP per rank? Probably not. Does that mean that when the party can afford to spend 12000 GP on that, Open Lock becomes an irrelevant skill unless caught in a rarely occurring antimagic zone?

It means neither should invest in the ability to open locks. My theoretical Hermione expy, whose only "signature" spell is "Aloha Mora", looks dumb in the presence of a Wand of Knock.

[Morphic tide]

Conceptually, either can do a lot. Limitation? How about "not yet"? Sure, a 100th level Necromancer or Summoner could solve any problem, but an Xth level one only has "level X appropriate" abilities.

The problem is how many areas of function they get ahold of, rather than going too high. The Summoner has too much breadth they can Summon to solve tasks with, being able to call up all manner of thieving demons, healing angels, crippling fae, and all manner of other things. To say "Not Yet" isn't enough because a general Necromancer not being able to control Ghosts, Ghouls, Zombies, and Skeletons is off-brand, but each of those has different possibilities attached to them. It's much worse with the Summoner, as a general Summoner has little justification in lack of kind of Summon. If a creature of the relevant type exists with a kind of function, the Summoner can access it by proxy. Angels to heal, fae to steal, demons to kill, and so very much more.

In both cases, because of the breadth covered by the high-level concept, they need subdivided to limit variety of tasks. So the one who summons Fae to charm and steal and manipulate can't turn around and call up an Angel to heal the party, and the Necromancer doesn't have functionally unbreakable meatshields and intangible scouts while simultaneously possessing a wide array of curses, blights, and raw necrotic energy expressions to kill or disable virtually everything in existence in every permutation of kind that may be needed. "Not Yet" is a function of how high they can punch, my issue is that the high-level concepts are so broad because they're iconically all-solving hammers.

You've lost me.

If "level X appropriate" abilities are granted to a class through minions, what's the problem?

Because in this case those minions are other people, not summoned outsiders, reanimated corpses, or some variety of awakened natural force, and thus making the basic access to that form of proxy a class feature means that you're "breaking the rules" to RP your way into having a small army's worth of niche-filling hangers-on. Solving this means the class features are buffs, so either the minions or the buffs need specialized, and the former has RP problems while the latter is complicated to justify on a Martial character's usage schemes.

And if those level-appropriate abilities include magic, the fluff becomes very weird unless you contort the magic system around being Martial-boost compatible, while allowing the buffs on party members cracks party design open spectacularly because either somebody's specialized in punching ridiculously above their level with those buffs, or somebody's deliberately leaning on them to function at their current level so they can dump resources in being a lot more versatile than intended, and balancing these build-around cases is going to become a mind-numbing exercise in frustration and mathematical tedium.

This is also in addition to the above issue of minions as a class specialty being difficult to niche-confine to prevent a class carrying them becoming the wielder of an all-solving hammer, though at least with actual allies they have fairly limited ability to decide they'll do something completely different today, unlike a summoner deciding to call up an Angel to deal with the packs of plague-based Undead instead of the Fae they summoned yesterday to drive half the guards insane, or a Necromancer deciding to make an incorporeal level-draining spirit instead of a nearly indestructible zombie from the latest fight.

[NigelWalmsley]

Not really. Spells are doing a lot of things right. Wizard is doing a lot of things wrong.

The Wizard is, at worst, slightly too versatile. That's it, and even insofar as it's a problem, it's more a problem for conceptual reasons than power ones. People really like the idea that their character is a "Necromancer" or a "Fire Mage" or a "Shadowcraft Adept" rather than a "Wizard", even if those things are all mechanically balanced. Almost all the problems people complain about are spells. Planar Binding is broken, but the reasons it's broken have **** all to do with anything about the Wizard.

Sorcerer would be far more workable as a baseline, and even Sorcerer would have to suffer some restrictions - as a very simple (and probably too unrestrictive) example, Sorcerers should be Fire Sorcerers (or Efreet/Fire Elemental/Red Dragon Sorcerers, if you like), not just Sorcerers.

Why? Any Sorcerer is going to be, de facto, extremely limited in their spell selection (as a 10th level Sorcerer, you get one 5th level spell). You don't need to declare that they can only take Fire spells on top of that, the fact is that they only ever have a single-digit number of spells at any relevant level.

The same goes for every other class - yes, perhaps Sword Fighter and Bow Fighter are concepts that don't work anywhere past level 5. But no Fighter should be a Warlord and an Armsmaster or an Eldritch Knight at the same time.

Yes, and no Wizard should ever be an Evoker and a Diviner at the same time. Meaningful specialization does exist for casters. Moreover, without defining what those archetypes are, it's not necessarily clear that they should be mutually exclusive. I can absolutely imagine characters who fight with sword and spell while leading armies.

Is that enough to make them two different base classes, especially if you have to design summoned/raised creature statblocks to avoid splatbook diving for summons with specific abilities?

Yes, absolutely. FFS, we have different base classes for "Wizard" and "Wizard from China". Is there a system where there's one "has minions" class and you can choose if those minions are summoned monsters, bound demons, raised undead, charmed enemies, hired soldiers, or crafted constructs? Sure. But that system is not D&D. D&D is a system with a whole bunch of classes in it. Even Pathfinder, with its more restrained approach of making some things archetypes ended up at least doubling the number of classes over the lifespan of the system, and probably more.

Also, it's not like you save any time writing up the minions by making them the same class. Classes can share abilities, and often do (take a look at the number of classes that get Cure Light Wounds). And in this particular case, it's not clear to me there's that much overlap in minions even if they are the same class. Hordes of zombies should be mechanically distinct from angelic bodyguards, whether the people who get them are under the same class umbrella or not.

How does the wand screw over the Wizard, who can just stop preparing Knock and free up a spell slot if they even were using it?

It means that he's not getting to solve the challenge. I thought the whole point was that getting to use Knock to solve challenges was a big deal. If it isn't, who cares if it displaces the Rogue in the first place? The point is that once you've got the item, no one's abilities matter. And you'll note that even in the scenario of "custom item of Knock", it's still replacing the Wizard more than the Rogue, because the Wizard is also screwed over by an AMF.

How does it compare to investing, say, 20 ranks into Open Lock? Can you buy skill ranks for 600 GP per rank?

You're only looking at one version of the opportunity cost. The question isn't just "can you buy a skill point for 600 GP", but "can you buy something worth more than a skill point for 600 GP" and "can you buy something better than Open Lock with your skill points". I submit that the answers to those questions indicate that the most efficient use of your resources is still going to involve the Rogue taking Open Lock.

Also, technically, if we're allowing custom magic items, you can buy four different kinds of +5 bonus for only 10k GP.

It's much worse with the Summoner, as a general Summoner has little justification in lack of kind of Summon.

In fairness, they also have little justification to have any particular kind of Summon. No one is particularly upset that your standard summoner can't summon a Phase Spider. The nice thing about summoning is that you can put pretty much whatever you want on the list of "stuff you can summon" and exclude things equally arbitrarily. If you feel it's morally important that the summoner not get Enervation, you can just not put anything with Enervation on the list of stuff they are allowed to summon.

that the high-level concepts are so broad because they're iconically all-solving hammers.

Then maybe we should accept that characters have a wide range of competencies? It seems to me that if your choices are "characters do a range of stuff" or "every Necromancer is gimped", the former is an obviously superior prospect.

[RedMage125]

4e's issue was that it approached the problem of "Wizards have interesting abilities but Fighters don't" by ensuring that no one had an ability that was more interesting than what Fighters could do in 3e (which some limited exceptions that are still less compelling than 3e magic items). Unsurprisingly, this approach crippled D&D as a product because it turns out that the abilities Wizards have are an important part of the game, and the solution is not to nerf them into the ground.

I feel like...based on your responses, that you never actually PLAYED 4e. Like, at all. And you're basing your criticisms off of half-remembered readings of a book from years ago, combined with all the 4e hate that permeates our hobby.

For starters "everyone only got what Fighters could do in 3e" is 100% blatantly false. There's not a shred of anything remotely resembling truth in this.

Just going off memory:
Rogues had a level 1 Daily that could BLIND enemies in a 3x3 square.
Fighters in Heroic Tier (1-10) had an encounter power that targetted EVERY enemy within 2 squares' WILL defense, pulled them closer if that hit, and then did a weapon attack against all of them.
Wizard had at-will AoEs, and encounter powers that changed terrain, even from low levels.
Sorcerers has an at-will that could bounce to multiple targets
Barbarian rages were their Daily powers, and each one gave a unique buff after one big attack at the start.

"What a 3e Fighter could do" equates in 4e to a "Basic Melee/Ranged Attack".

So...yeah. Everything in this first paragraph is SO wrong, that I'm going to call it what it is...BLATANTLY FALSE.

Skill Challenges mathematically did not work as printed and went through multiple rounds of errata without ever producing a functional system. The basic concept of "roll multiple times" is good (although you will note it was first introduced to D&D in 3e's Unearthed Arcana, not 4e), but 4e's execution defined the concept of "dumpster fire".

And another falsehood.

Skill Challenges worked great, and they actually didn't go through ANY major errata, least of all that altered the math. The only math alterations 4e had errors with was the hit points of monsters above level 10 (especially elites and solos), and the to-hit numbers of PCs (which was "corrected" only in terms of the "X Focus" feats, which were basically a feat tax).

The DMG2 gave us some better ideas about USING Skill Challenges, yes. Especially because what the DMG1 called "secondary skills" was not as useful as what they clarified in the DMG2 (which, by the way, was also the way Secondary Skills were used in Skill Challenges in the published modules, even before the DMG2 was printed).

But as for "multiple rounds of errata"...no. Simply untrue. And they worked fine, and could easily be worked into the narrative of the game. I've seen some posters who have claimed that a Skill Challenge meant that the game ground to a complete halt, and everyone just treated it as a mini-game where only one person makes all the skill checks to pass. Which is patently absurd.

At any rate, as I said to QUERTUS (not you), 4e answered to all of his suggested "fixes".

And those same "fixes" were what made people say it "didn't feel like D&D". Although I never had that complaint at MY table. I even converted a few "h4ters". But my experience, as I have gathered, was not the norm.

[Kyutaru]

And those same "fixes" were what made people say it "didn't feel like D&D". Although I never had that complaint at MY table. I even converted a few "h4ters". But my experience, as I have gathered, was not the norm.

The sentiment was common around my area too. What 4E did was try to turn the game into a tactics tabletop game which it blatantly is not. Combat is but one of the three pillars and not even the one most valued until 3rd edition brought in the munchkins. The game was always meant to have abstraction incorporated into the experience and 4E fought hard to give a rigid play experience. It would have worked great if they went the full way and just made D&D the Tactics Wargame with exact rules like Mage Knight, Warhammer, or Chainmail but folks would still yearn for the more free-form counterpart as well. 5E did an alright job combining the playstyles of the various editions including the stack-free simplicity of AD&D but it has room to grow.

[Man_Over_Game]

I feel like...based on your responses, that you never actually PLAYED 4e. Like, at all. And you're basing your criticisms off of half-remembered readings of a book from years ago, combined with all the 4e hate that permeates our hobby.

For starters "everyone only got what Fighters could do in 3e" is 100% blatantly false. There's not a shred of anything remotely resembling truth in this.

I think a big part is the emphasis on REAL grid combat. In 3.5, and now in 5e, the majority of builds that really care about any finnicky cover, Opportunity Attack, movement, Reach, etc. rules that all were very technical for the grid itself were the Fighter-types. The ones that attacked with weapons and defended themselves with their own body (instead of some kind of debuff or conjured obstacle).

Consider that 5e's Fireball hits a 8x8 grid, and has a 120ft range. Most of my battlemaps are about 60 game-feet to get into melee range of the enemy, as a creature generally moves 30 feet per round and I don't want more than one round of repositioning.

Something that's 120 feet of range is an abstract, non-combat aspect. That's not something you handle on a grid, that's "Yeah, you guys see each other at 200 feet out and there's a window of opportunity for a skirmish of explosions before each side get within range." An 8x8 grid is enough to cover most of the relevant parts of a battlefield, and it ignores cover, and it deals half damage if you save, and it rolls a ton of dice so that the damage is even consistent.

A wizard basically points, says "These people take about 30 damage unless they roll this number". The "grid" is hardly relevant.

For a Fighter, though, he may need to split off from the party to avoid being hit by an enemy's AoE, but not too far so that he doesn't get hit by Hold Person and then surrounded without his allies. He has to stand in the proper position to ensure that enemies are focusing him enough to make sure the Wizard isn't running around like a chicken with his head cut off casting Misty Step, and he has to be aware of the burst capabilities of the enemy so that he isn't running out of HP too fast. Any ranged attacks he makes takes cover into account (and creatures usually count as cover in DnD against ranged attacks), and there's naturally the token Opportunity Attacks that end up using more grid-based rules than anything else in the game.



Then 4th edition tipped everything on its head by making grid-based concepts the standard:

You can't solve a badguy problem from casting Call Lightning from almost a mile away to smite the badguys, now you have to actually be in range of a counterattack. Having knowledge of the enemy isn't always enough anymore, but that was always the case for the Fighter.
So of course the Wizard feels like a Fighter now.

The effects you DID use in combat often had physics-changing effects that had few means to counter against (Wall of Force, for example), but the Fighter never really had any of those.
So of course the Wizard feels like a Fighter now.

Not to mention that 4th edition took away almost all of the simulationist spell and skill features that people used out of combat to modify the world to their choosing. Sure, the Fighter didn't really change, but the Wizard sure did.
So of course the Wizard feels like a Fighter now.



And those simulationist, "I solve combat before it starts" aspects of DnD are often what people actually want out of the game. So when 4e took all of those away and focused on making everyone equals in combat, it was natural for people to hate it for "not being DnD".
But it also meant support for hate on a lot of the other changes too, as making it so "the Wizard feel like a fighter now" was "not being DnD".

DnD does a lot of things well. It does not do combat well, and it never really has (from the combat/board game perspective, DnD can be fun with bad combat).

So it's no surprise that the edition with the most focus on combat is also the one that most people have decided as "not being DnD".

[Kyutaru]

And those simulationist, "I solve combat before it starts" aspects of DnD are often what people actually want out of the game. So when 4e took all of those away and focused on making everyone equals in combat, it was natural for people to hate it for "not being DnD".
But it also meant support for hate on a lot of the other changes too, as making the Wizard 'feel like a fighter' was "not being DnD".

Big thumbs up on that one. Magical combat frequently looked like an anime with both sides trying to outsmart the other. Fighter combat was more boring but there was also a huge assortment of magical weapons they could collect which helped against various creatures, especially back in AD&D's immunity-heavy days. You needed the right tool for the right job which of course had nothing to do with what tactics you employed once combat actually began. It was all theater of the mind planning and contingency plans and a twisty labyrinth of move/countermove/counter-countermove that made D&D more like a thought experiment. Players would take mundane tools with no purpose or value and come up with ingenious ways to actually abuse them for something purposeful. Hard to do that when the system is quite clear on what you can and cannot do with no room for improvisation.

D&D was founded as a roleplaying game. Roleplayers LOVE improvisation.

[NigelWalmsley]

"What a 3e Fighter could do" equates in 4e to a "Basic Melee/Ranged Attack".

No, it doesn't. Fighters got things like Trips, Disarms, and Sunders that would have been powers in 4e. They got the various weapon style feats that granted additional tricks. They also got access to martial maneuvers, which are the equivalent of encounter powers. Moreover, the real thrust of this argument is about non-combat powers, not combat ones. 4e characters simply do not get the non-combat effects 3e ones did, at least not in any source I have seen, nor seen 4e fanboys produce in any of the numerous edition war threads I've seen across the various gaming forums of the world.

Skill Challenges worked great

This is mathematically false. The design incentives of skill challenges point in the opposite of the direction they are supposed to. This is not a question where there is subjective debate to be had like "is trying to focus on a specific sweet spot better than trying to support a range of power levels" or "are dragonborn cooler than gnomes". It's not even a complex mechanical question like "are martial characters more versatile in 3e or 4e". It's simply an objective, mathematical fact. Counting failures means discouraging participation. It's not a subject you get to argue about, it's just a simple function of the fact that numbers that are smaller aren't as big as numbers that are larger.

and they actually didn't go through ANY major errata, least of all that altered the math.

This is straightforwardly and objectively a lie. And unlike the times you call me a liar, I can back it up with evidence. Here's some skill challenge errata (specifically, the bit starting on page four). You'll note that it changes the DCs and the required numbers of successes acceptable number of failures or, in layman's terms, "the math".

And those same "fixes" were what made people say it "didn't feel like D&D".

People are good at understanding when they are unhappy, but bad at understanding why they are unhappy. People didn't like 4e because it was a bad game. The core mechanic of skill challenges had incentives that pointed in the wrong direction. Classes lost their cool non-combat powers. Combat was grindy and miserable, especially against high-level solos. But most people aren't doing detailed enough analysis to express that. So the meme that caught on was "doesn't feel like D&D". That doesn't mean they hated everything, or even any particular thing. After all, this like of logic leads us to conclude that "having 30 levels" or "including a Warlock" don't feel like D&D.

Combat is but one of the three pillars and not even the one most valued until 3rd edition brought in the munchkins.

Again, no. Combat has always been the core of the game. That's why we have Monster Manuals and Fiend Folios, but not big books of intrigue setups or military campaigns.

Not to mention that 4th edition took away almost all of the simulationist spell and skill features that people used out of combat to modify the world to their choosing. Sure, the Fighter didn't really change, but the Wizard sure did.

Yes, exactly. The point is not what happened in the tactical minigame. Some stuff moved around there, and Fighters are at least arguably ahead (though not nearly as far as RedMage is trying to claim). The point is what happened on the strategic layer. Frankly, it was never all that robust, but in 4e it's basically gone and the thing that was supposed to replace it is broken.

[Man_Over_Game]

D&D was founded as a roleplaying game. Roleplayers LOVE improvisation.

Moreover, the real thrust of this argument is about non-combat powers, not combat ones.

[...]

The point is not what happened in the tactical minigame. Some stuff moved around there, and Fighters are at least arguably ahead (though not nearly as far as RedMage is trying to claim). The point is what happened on the strategic layer. Frankly, it was never all that robust, but in 4e it's basically gone and the thing that was supposed to replace it is broken.

The point I was trying to emphasize by explaining what happened to 4th Edition DnD was to show that what it did wasn't wrong, it was just wrong for DnD.

It made its foundation based on combat, and made everything centered around combat. As a result, since it has a foundation built on combat, the narrative noncombat rules of the game failed the deeper you got into it, and THAT was what killed it from the DnD crowd (which is to say, everyone).



Then 5th edition basically produced mediocrity from both sides, compensated by making so many things open-ended that a DM can just fill in the weakpoints as-needed. You still have to choose one or the other, causing one side to fail or for your balanced character to feel boring.

Consider that a Barbarian isn't really allowed to "Barbarian" in a civilization. He's just not really able to, and the times that he can is usually because the DM gave him a toy to play with (like someone to Intimidate or someone from the wilds to talk to or something else that generally gets the player involved without actually doing anything "Barbarian"). This is because we have a learned bias that "Barbarian" means "Savage Guy who fights all the time", and he's not really supposed to do anything other than that.

But Tarzan taught himself how to read and could learn a language in days. Conan was a master thief and strategist. Yet we can't break the mold that there is a class that's only good at killing or savagery.

Combat has always been the core of the game.

You're right, which is why it made a LOT of sense for them to attempt to make everyone equals by focusing on combat. They just forgot that the non-combat stuff is just as important for the players' vision of DnD.

5e tried to learn, but still have to choose between roleplaying or gaming. Bards deal the least damage, yet can basically command all of the NPC attention by himself. They compensated for this by making everyone basically output the same levels of combat contribution as everyone else (so Bards don't really feel that useless in combat, in the sense that nobody ever does). If Fighters want to have noncombat features, it's generally limited to the equivalent of a noncombat cantrip, or spending one of their extra feats on something that doesn't improve combat (which is counterintuitive, since combat features on weapons often synergize with other weapon combat features, making it feel like a waste to not do).

Combined, it feels like if you want to be interesting out of combat, you have to be boring in combat. Even though there are options (to choose a different problem), it's still "Us vs. Them", where you have to make a choice on where your priorities lie. This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you get someone that wants to fight all the time in a table where they don't, or someone who made a politician in a group of murderhobos, or just someone who doesn't want either half of the game to be boring for them.

The lesson? You can't have tactical combat and narrative world-powers in the same game, not without making it so that you don't have to prioritize one over the other.



So what's the answer?

Well, don't focus on making everyone equals in combat right off the bat, like 4e did. Focus instead on making them equals out of it, and don't separate combat and noncombat features. When something does a noncombat effect, explain what that means in combat. Give the player an expectation on when it's reasonable to convince someone to give up, or what kinds of things Religion checks should provide you in most fights, or how reading someone's mind can give you an edge, with enough room for DMs to adjust per situation. Every noncombat feature needs to also have a combat feature.

That doesn't mean you need a whole bunch of unique combat rules for every single spell. It could just be something like "Disguise Self gives you the Disguised tag that's held by the Illusion tag" (and then both Disguises and Illusions are addressed on how you could expect them to work in combat under a list of combat conditions).

You might think that sounds like adding a bunch of more confusing rules, but that's a lot better than the current method of adding the Disguise Self spell with a bunch of unique Disguise text with no info on what it does in combat, and the Disguise Kit with its own list of unique/copied Disguise text with no info on what it does in combat, and the Mastermind feature with its own list of unique/copied Disguise text with no info on what it does in combat, or the Assassin feature..., or the College of Whispers feature..., or the Actor feat... If Disguise Self has an exception to it that [Disguise + Illusion] can't cover, you can friggin' add it to the spell description and still cut down a lot of the unnecessary "This is an illusion!" and "This is a disguise!" text. I don't even need to read Disguise Self to get a gist as to what it does as is, and that could still be done with just the concept of [Disguise+Illusion] with a couple lines of text.

So that's my theory. Make the foundation for every class be noncombat features, to identify them as equals, on the most important attribute of ROLEPLAYING games, right off the bat. Then define what all of those noncombat features do in combat, as combat comes down to numbers and numbers can be modified to fit what you need (while saying Illusions don't work against paranoid creatures as a means of nerfing illusions doesn't make sense in the simulationist element).

So when you you make an Illusion-specialist Wizard, he literally fights with illusions. When the Barbarian goes into town, he knows exactly who is watching him, that they are a Polymorphed humanoid, and what kind of mood they have, from his Primal Instinct feature. Why should you ever have to choose between playing a tactical game or a storytelling game when TTRPGs are usually supposed to be both?



If you can do that - if you can make the Barbarian as useful out of combat as the Bard or Wizard AND break the divide between combat and noncombat features - you can make a balanced game. The rest comes easy.
The question is...can you?

[RedMage125]

No, it doesn't. Fighters got things like Trips, Disarms, and Sunders that would have been powers in 4e. They got the various weapon style feats that granted additional tricks. They also got access to martial maneuvers, which are the equivalent of encounter powers. Moreover, the real thrust of this argument is about non-combat powers, not combat ones. 4e characters simply do not get the non-combat effects 3e ones did, at least not in any source I have seen, nor seen 4e fanboys produce in any of the numerous edition war threads I've seen across the various gaming forums of the world.

Trips in 3e required specific weapons that could be used to trip. Disarm and Sunder were next to worthless without investing in the specific feat tree to do them well. These weren't things that saw universal or near-universal use at 3e tables, so that's disingenuous vis your original claim that 4e "ensured nobody had anything more interesting than a Fighter could do in 3e".

And as far as non-combat effects:
Druids could still change into beast forms.
Rituals were still a thing, for divinations, teleportation, and several utility spells.
EVERYONE got utility powers. Some more useful than others, true. Rogues might have one that allowed them to shift several squares (AoO-free movement). Pretty sure Battleminds got teleportation. Leader classes got healing powers.

This is mathematically false. The design incentives of skill challenges point in the opposite of the direction they are supposed to. This is not a question where there is subjective debate to be had like "is trying to focus on a specific sweet spot better than trying to support a range of power levels" or "are dragonborn cooler than gnomes". It's not even a complex mechanical question like "are martial characters more versatile in 3e or 4e". It's simply an objective, mathematical fact. Counting failures means discouraging participation. It's not a subject you get to argue about, it's just a simple function of the fact that numbers that are smaller aren't as big as numbers that are larger.

{scrubbed}

"Counting failures means discouraging participation" is NOT a factual statement. Skill Challenges were never meant to be some kind of "mini game within the game" where everyone stops playing their character and has only one person make a few dice rolls to make it stop.

There was a chart for what an Easy, Moderate, or Hard DC is for each level, and Skill Challenges made in accordance with the RAW should allow for multiple skills to be used. Skills which usually appeal to a wide variety of expected character strengths. Even if it was only as a "Secondary Skill" (which might negate a failure, or grant a bonus to the next Primary Skill check, or have some other effect except counting as success or failure for the overall challenge). So at least 3 or 4 (of the expected party size of 5), if not ALL members of a party should be able to contribute meaningfully to each Skill Challenge, outside of some niche situations (you have a homogenous party where everyone only has the same 5 or 6 skills trained, for example). That actually IS in the RAW for how to build a Skill Challenge, and is further seen in the Skill Challenges in published adventures.

It's not a subject you get to argue about, it's just a simple function of the fact that you have a very narrow definition of how a Skill Challenge should be approached, one that is NOT in the rules, NOR is supported by anecdotal evidence from those who played 4e.

This is straightforwardly and objectively a lie. And unlike the times you call me a liar, I can back it up with evidence. Here's some skill challenge errata (specifically, the bit starting on page four). You'll note that it changes the DCs and the required numbers of successes or, in layman's terms, "the math".

I said that what you were saying was "blatantly untrue", not that you were a liar. That just means you are blatantly WRONG, not that you are telling untruths intentionally to mislead (which would be lying).
{scrubbed}.

The DC changes were part of the overall math fix that applied to ALL skill uses, not just Skill Challenges. And that errata happened in January 2009, mere months after 4e came out, and no further errata came out after that. I actually still have a digital copy of that errata from January 2009, and just compared it to the final errata from August 2012. No change between them.

SO...what does that mean? I was wrong about "any errata", because there was one within 3 months of the book being published. And that change was incorporated into later published hard copies. But your claims about "multiple rounds of errata" is STILL completely wrong. Especially because the system was quite functional.

And only the change to "required # of failures by complexity" (which, the errata actually made MORE simply by making them all "3") is the only errata that EXPLICITLY affected Skill CHALLENGES.

People are good at understanding when they are unhappy, but bad at understanding why they are unhappy. People didn't like 4e because it was a bad game. The core mechanic of skill challenges had incentives that pointed in the wrong direction. Classes lost their cool non-combat powers. Combat was grindy and miserable, especially against high-level solos. But most people aren't doing detailed enough analysis to express that. So the meme that caught on was "doesn't feel like D&D". That doesn't mean they hated everything, or even any particular thing. After all, this like of logic leads us to conclude that "having 30 levels" or "including a Warlock" don't feel like D&D.

Thank you for your expert insight into the psyche of every single person, everywhere, and their true feelings and motivations. You are so much smarter than everyone else, and only you actually understand real truth especially of what people you've never met ACTUALLY want, and WHY they feel the way they do. Everyone is dumber than you.

Is that...what you were hoping to hear? Does seeing it in print assuage your ego?

4e wasn't a "bad game". It was different from every other edition of D&D...drastically so. But a great deal of what was so different was part of the design plan from the beginning (this can be verified by reading the 4e preview books "Races&Classes" and "Worlds&Monsters"). It had its faults, certainly. A lot of the classes in the PHB1 were too similar, it wasn't until the PHB2 classes came out that we got more variety, but by then a lot of people were already turned off the system. Combat took too long, but that was a side effect of "more cinematic combat encounters" with so many combatants. Hit point values for High-level solos...yes that actually was a failing that they admitted to. The whole "padded sumo" effect.

But your claims about skill challenges, and the incentives...just wrong. {scrubbed}

Yes, exactly. The point is not what happened in the tactical minigame. Some stuff moved around there, and Fighters are at least arguably ahead (though not nearly as far as RedMage is trying to claim). The point is what happened on the strategic layer. Frankly, it was never all that robust, but in 4e it's basically gone and the thing that was supposed to replace it is broken.

What I'm "trying to claim" was a response to Quertus, and what he said about getting rid of the "quadratic wizard, linear fighter" dynamic, and several other points. All of which were done by 4e, and 4e was not well received, overall.

You've inserted yourself with your baseless claims about 4e Skill Challenges ({scrubbed}). And you're still wrong.

[Ignimortis]

Well, that removes the D&D Wizard. Go that route, and you should just remove all the troublesome, unbalanced muggle classes, too.

It's either that or making obtaining new spells very cost-prohibitive. Muggle classes don't have any of those problems - their problem is not getting anything level-appropriate after level 7 but damage.

Are you talking about something as mechanically unimportant as 2e kits as a solution to balance?

I don't think anything on the level of subclasses/archetypes is mechanically unimportant.

Maybe it's just my hubris as a genius, but "can be the best at multiple sub-fields" sounds realistic and desirable to my ears.

I guess "game balance" would likely be the deciding factor (at least for this thread), so let's not "guy at the gym" the muggles in the design phase.

I don't see how that's "guy at the gym". Anyone who doesn't specialize in one field should be worse at that field than the specialist. If hybrids are just as effective as specialists, why would anyone play a specialist?

Hmmm… actually, splatbook expansions could be fine, *if* there were build resources involved.

For example, if summoners could summon X *types* of things, and splatbook support introduced new, balanced types.

So you'd have to invest into summoning new things instead of summoning old things? Yes, perhaps that could work. Your demon summoner might have an archetype where they become a devil summoner, something like that. The issue is that a demon summoner without custom demons would be able to reach into some Fiend Folio 6 and drag out a caster-demon that knows about as many spells as a party caster of the same level.

The Wizard is, at worst, slightly too versatile. That's it, and even insofar as it's a problem, it's more a problem for conceptual reasons than power ones. People really like the idea that their character is a "Necromancer" or a "Fire Mage" or a "Shadowcraft Adept" rather than a "Wizard", even if those things are all mechanically balanced. Almost all the problems people complain about are spells. Planar Binding is broken, but the reasons it's broken have **** all to do with anything about the Wizard.

Except the opportunity cost of getting Planar Binding on a Wizard is way lower than on any other caster who doesn't get it innately.

Why? Any Sorcerer is going to be, de facto, extremely limited in their spell selection (as a 10th level Sorcerer, you get one 5th level spell). You don't need to declare that they can only take Fire spells on top of that, the fact is that they only ever have a single-digit number of spells at any relevant level.

Well, perhaps that will be balance enough. I'm not saying that they can only take Fire spells - I'm saying they can't take Cold spells. D&D casters, in general (at least those that get into every PHB), are very lax on themes. Druid and Bard are somewhat more limited, but Wizard and Cleric are "all the concepts at once, and you can mix-n-match most of them". There should be at least some more conceptual bindings. I like Warmage, Beguiler and so on, because they have a clear theme and concept - "I blow things up", "I sneak about and charm people", etc. Short, bounded concepts.

Yes, and no Wizard should ever be an Evoker and a Diviner at the same time. Meaningful specialization does exist for casters. Moreover, without defining what those archetypes are, it's not necessarily clear that they should be mutually exclusive. I can absolutely imagine characters who fight with sword and spell while leading armies.

All at once? Then they should be less of a warrior or a mage or a leader than anyone who specialized in one of those things. Noticeably so, I presume, and not like "well, you lose +2 to-hit and half a spell level progression and you have to have 14 CHA, I guess".

Yes, absolutely. FFS, we have different base classes for "Wizard" and "Wizard from China". Is there a system where there's one "has minions" class and you can choose if those minions are summoned monsters, bound demons, raised undead, charmed enemies, hired soldiers, or crafted constructs? Sure. But that system is not D&D. D&D is a system with a whole bunch of classes in it. Even Pathfinder, with its more restrained approach of making some things archetypes ended up at least doubling the number of classes over the lifespan of the system, and probably more.

Also, it's not like you save any time writing up the minions by making them the same class. Classes can share abilities, and often do (take a look at the number of classes that get Cure Light Wounds). And in this particular case, it's not clear to me there's that much overlap in minions even if they are the same class. Hordes of zombies should be mechanically distinct from angelic bodyguards, whether the people who get them are under the same class umbrella or not.

I mean, if you take the classplosion approach like 3.5 and to a lesser extent PF 1e, then yes, they have to be different classes. If you go the 5e or refined PF 1e route, they can be subclasses/archetypes.

It's the hardest part about balancing minionmancers - their minions are so obviously narratively different that it's hard to make them anywhere balanced. Especially if someone wants to summon/animate a statblock from somewhere instead of the predetermined "bruiser" or "specialist" or "horde" template with some adjustments for type.

It means that he's not getting to solve the challenge. I thought the whole point was that getting to use Knock to solve challenges was a big deal. If it isn't, who cares if it displaces the Rogue in the first place? The point is that once you've got the item, no one's abilities matter. And you'll note that even in the scenario of "custom item of Knock", it's still replacing the Wizard more than the Rogue, because the Wizard is also screwed over by an AMF.

You're only looking at one version of the opportunity cost. The question isn't just "can you buy a skill point for 600 GP", but "can you buy something worth more than a skill point for 600 GP" and "can you buy something better than Open Lock with your skill points". I submit that the answers to those questions indicate that the most efficient use of your resources is still going to involve the Rogue taking Open Lock.

If that's not such a big deal, then would Knock granting a +10 bonus to Open Lock attempts on a particular lock and perhaps allowing you to try it untrained be better than its' current effect? Because that would be an equal boon to Wizard and Rogue, even somewhat benefitting the Wizard because they probably don't have Open Lock trained. Wand of Knock would no longer invalidate Rogue's skill in any situation, too.

Also, technically, if we're allowing custom magic items, you can buy four different kinds of +5 bonus for only 10k GP.

Weird. IIRC, getting a +10 to one skill is also 10k GP.

[NigelWalmsley]

Trips in 3e required specific weapons that could be used to trip. Disarm and Sunder were next to worthless without investing in the specific feat tree to do them well. These weren't things that saw universal or near-universal use at 3e tables, so that's disingenuous vis your original claim that 4e "ensured nobody had anything more interesting than a Fighter could do in 3e".

Could a Fighter, in fact, do those things? Why, yes, they could! They are, therefore, "things a Fighter could do".

Rituals were still a thing, for divinations, teleportation, and several utility spells.

Rituals are the equivalent of buying scrolls, not the abilities 3e characters got.

"Counting failures means discouraging participation" is NOT a factual statement. Skill Challenges were never meant to be some kind of "mini game within the game" where everyone stops playing their character and has only one person make a few dice rolls to make it stop.

Well, then the designers should have made them something other than that. But that is what they are. I'm not going to bother arguing with you about this, because {scrubbed}. Instead, I want you to find me some numbers that prove you right. If I am wrong, and it is not in fact mathematically true that having people with a lower chance of succeeding makes you more likely to fail, you should be able to do this. If I am right, and you cannot do this, I expect you to eat your crow before I pay any attention to another word you say. To be specific, I expect:

1. A chance of success between 0% and 100%, S.
2. Another chance of success in the same range that is smaller than the first one, S'.
3. A non-zero number of attempts made at the second chance of success, N.

And those numbers should together satisfy the property that if I make N attempts at S', I expect more successes than if I make N attempts at S. You will note that this is actually much easier than defending skill challenges as written, because I'm allowing you to pick whatever numbers you want, rather than saddling you with the numbers the game uses. So if you can't do this, or refuse to do it, it will be a direct admission that I am in fact correct about the mathematical properties of the core mechanic of skill challenges.

Skill Challenges made in accordance with the RAW should allow for multiple skills to be used. Skills which usually appeal to a wide variety of expected character strengths. Even if it was only as a "Secondary Skill" (which might negate a failure, or grant a bonus to the next Primary Skill check, or have some other effect except counting as success or failure for the overall challenge).

Allowing multiple skills doesn't do anything. I don't care about whatever secondary skills did in the version of skill challenges you believe in, because the claim I am making is about the core mechanic, not whatever epicycles have been added.

I said that what you were saying was "blatantly untrue", not that you were a liar.

I consider that a distinction without a difference. Saying that I might merely be ignorant is, in this respect, also calling me a liar, it's just saying that I'm lying when I claim to know how things work. Either I'm lying when I present my points as informed, or I'm lying about my specific points. In either case, you're calling me a liar.

And only the change to "required # of failures by complexity" (which, the errata actually made MORE simply by making them all "3") is the only errata that EXPLICITLY affected Skill CHALLENGES.

You understand how that still makes you wrong though, right? I mean, setting aside the fact that "they errata'd other things" doesn't make the errata magically not effect Skill Challenges, if the errata'd the failure numbers that is in fact errata to Skill Challenges, which is the exact thing you claimed didn't happen.

4e wasn't a "bad game".

D&D has failed to be the market leader in TTRPGs twice. Once, TSR went bankrupt in the late 90s, and Vampire took over for a time. Then, WotC released 4e, and Pathfinder took over (admittedly, not instantly). I feel quite comfortable saying that a product that is as bad for your business as bankrupcy is, in fact, a bad product.

{scrub the post, scrub the quote}

{scrubbed}

[Ignimortis]

D&D has failed to be the market leader in TTRPGs twice. Once, TSR went bankrupt in the late 90s, and Vampire took over for a time. Then, WotC released 4e, and Pathfinder took over (admittedly, not instantly). I feel quite comfortable saying that a product that is as bad for your business as bankrupcy is, in fact, a bad product.

Well, as we all in this forum should probably know by now, quality and popularity are only tangentially related when we're talking about TTRPGs. Hell, Vampire was always trash as a game (still is, in lots of ways), but it was very popular (and still is to some extent). Same with Shadowrun. Same with D&D, which is popular more than ever because it caters to the lowest common perception of D&D these days, and has the lowest entry barrier in years, not because it's actually good (3.5 was better than 5e in lots of ways at that same point in development, as in, 6 years after release).

[NigelWalmsley]

Well, as we all in this forum should probably know by now, quality and popularity are only tangentially related when we're talking about TTRPGs. Hell, Vampire was always trash as a game (still is, in lots of ways), but it was very popular (and still is to some extent). Same with Shadowrun. Same with D&D, which is popular more than ever because it caters to the lowest common perception of D&D these days, and has the lowest entry barrier in years, not because it's actually good (3.5 was better than 5e in lots of ways at that same point in development, as in, 6 years after release).

Well, sure. But since RedMage is unwilling to accept "the game mathematically does not do the thing it is supposed to do" as a reason the game is bad, there's not really anywhere else to go but the market.

I'll probably just end up putting him on ignore. I doubt he'll be able to come up with an explanation of why being more likely to fail a single test doesn't also make you more likely to fail multiple tests (seeing as that is just how probability works), so I assume he'll continue to tell me I'm lying and claim that I'm actually someone else. He seems to have a big chip on his shoulder, and based on this conversation, I'm not optimistic about being able to get anywhere productive with him on this or any subject.

Actually, I'm just going to do that now. If he's reading this, he can feel free to not reply to the previous post, because I'm certainly not going to reply to any of his. There are people in this thread making more interesting points in better faith.

If hybrids are just as effective as specialists, why would anyone play a specialist?

Because they're just as effective? People like specialized classes. People are interested in playing classes that reflect their particular character concept. If someone wants to command the dead and curse their enemies, they'll pick Dread Necromancer over Wizard, even if the latter might be equally effective.

But beyond that, I think you're not really considering your terms very well. What does it mean to be a specialist? Consider the various specialist casters that exist in the game, like the Warmage, the Beguiler, and the Dread Necromancer. I'll talk about specifically the Warmage, because it's by far the weakest, and because it illustrates the point best. As it happens, the Warmage gets a bunch of blasting spells, and maybe one decent BFC spell per level. Is that because they're a "specialist"? Well, not really. The Warmage is, conceptually, a Mage that does War. That's a pretty clear specialty, distinct from things like "mage who summons things" or "mage who messes with people's minds". Except is it? Because there's actually a lot of magic that one might use for war. Divination spells provide useful intelligence. Summoning spells provide fresh allies. Buffs improve your troops. Fabricate produces equipment without needing logistics. The Warmage doesn't get any of that. But would giving those things to him really dilute his identity that much? It depends whether you think his identity is defined by his spell list, or his class concept.

Except the opportunity cost of getting Planar Binding on a Wizard is way lower than on any other caster who doesn't get it innately.

So what? The spell gives you infinite power. It doesn't really matter what the opportunity cost of learning Planar Binding is, because if you have spell slots you can use for Planar Binding, that's what you use them for. Planar Binding is, assuming pure RAW and no desire to sandbag, the single best spell you can take at 6th level.

D&D casters, in general (at least those that get into every PHB), are very lax on themes.

Sure, but there are pressures driving things in that direction. The PHB, as any book, is of a finite length. That means PHB classes need to be broader than other classes. Just as the core sneaky type is a Rogue (who could be anything from a miltary spec ops guy to a fast-talking con man), while splat sneaky types are Scouts, Ninjas, or Factotums, the core casters are going to be more diverse than later ones. Certainly, they could be more focused than they are now, but that would require either abandoning some concepts, or adding more classes to the PHB. And even then, you'd still end up with relatively broad classes. Your PHB might have an Elementalist in it, but it's not going to have a Fire Mage, even though Fire Mage has a decent shot at being more popular.

All at once?

Yeah. That's just Kaladin. He has magic (flight, super speed, absurd healing speed), he fights in melee, and he leads a bunch of men. I guess my issue is that what you seem to see as three things (sword, spell, followers), I only really see as two (not considering "sword" a thing that is particularly character-defining), one of which I think should be a default assumption for high level characters (having a bunch of followers).

It's the hardest part about balancing minionmancers - their minions are so obviously narratively different that it's hard to make them anywhere balanced. Especially if someone wants to summon/animate a statblock from somewhere instead of the predetermined "bruiser" or "specialist" or "horde" template with some adjustments for type.

I dunno. Zombies work pretty well as minions. In general, I think the only really problematic minionmancy spells are ones like Planar Binding or Charm Monster that are (almost) completely open-ended. The ones that define a specific creature or creatures you can summon are fine, and are probably better for verisimilitude that summoning a "Demon Bruiser" that is completely different from all the melee demons in the MM. Basically, minions need to work like Summon Monster or Animate Dead.

If that's not such a big deal, then would Knock granting a +10 bonus to Open Lock attempts on a particular lock and perhaps allowing you to try it untrained be better than its' current effect?

A 3rd level Rogue could easily have a +10 bonus to Open Lock. I'm not necessarily opposed to the notion that Knock could work in a less absolute way (if only because that makes the eventual "magic lock that beats Knock" and "better Knock that unlocks that magic lock" less stupid to write), but that bonus seems clearly too small to have an interesting dynamic. The limited-use ability needs to blow the unlimited-use one away, or it's worthless.

Weird. IIRC, getting a +10 to one skill is also 10k GP.

The custom magic item rules do dumb things. A +10 Competence bonus is 10k GP, but +5 is only 2.5k GP, and you can (in theory, as with all things about custom items) convince your DM to let you buy as many of those as there are bonus types. And there are a lot of bonus types.

[Quertus]

The problem is how many areas of function they get ahold of

Sure. That's part of the math to be solved. There's disagreement whether that's 20% of expected scenarios, 60% of expected scenarios, 100% of expected scenarios, so I'll not weigh in on that at this time. But, once you've chosen your math, you let them handle that much.

That said, bringing a Diplomacer to a fist fight, or a Barbarian to the royal ball, or a Fighter to anything but a fight? It's not just suboptimal, it's kinda boring for the odd man out. My (likely misguided) original intent with this thread was to let everyone participate everywhere (ie, 80+% coverage). But the problem is, realistically, so many problems really only get solved by one person - it's not "participate", it's "solo". (Nevermind 4e's misguided attempt at skill challenges. "Rolling dice" isn't "playing the game". And "I get to lose for the party" is just about the worst - tis better to have not participated at all than 4e skill challenges.)

So, we're looking (apparently) for abilities that can do their fair share of soloing solo encounters. Making the different types of summons be at different levels of power could allow others to shine more if, say, the Summoner's tertiary ability overlapped a specialist's primary area of expertise. So, even if everyone got 80% coverage, there'd still be clear area where, for example, just because the tertiary fey summons *could* try a simple theft, the Rogue who chose to primary legerdemain is clearly the goto for such acts. As one example of attempting to make the math work.

Because in this case those minions are other people, not summoned outsiders, reanimated corpses, or some variety of awakened natural force, and thus making the basic access to that form of proxy a class feature means that you're "breaking the rules" to RP your way into having a small army's worth of niche-filling hangers-on. Solving this means the class features are buffs, so either the minions or the buffs need specialized, and the former has RP problems while the latter is complicated to justify on a Martial character's usage schemes.

And if those level-appropriate abilities include magic, the fluff becomes very weird unless you contort the magic system around being Martial-boost compatible, while allowing the buffs on party members cracks party design open spectacularly because either somebody's specialized in punching ridiculously above their level with those buffs, or somebody's deliberately leaning on them to function at their current level so they can dump resources in being a lot more versatile than intended, and balancing these build-around cases is going to become a mind-numbing exercise in frustration and mathematical tedium.

This is also in addition to the above issue of minions as a class specialty being difficult to niche-confine to prevent a class carrying them becoming the wielder of an all-solving hammer, though at least with actual allies they have fairly limited ability to decide they'll do something completely different today, unlike a summoner deciding to call up an Angel to deal with the packs of plague-based Undead instead of the Fae they summoned yesterday to drive half the guards insane, or a Necromancer deciding to make an incorporeal level-draining spirit instead of a nearly indestructible zombie from the latest fight.

So, as one of my class features, I have an ally who has a starship, who can solve our "get from point A to point B" problem. I also have a hacker ally, who can bypass *most* security systems… if we bring them to him. And my tertiary ally is a small-time fence.

My primary summons is social Demons; my secondary is transportation-focused elementals; my tertiary is trickster fey.

My Necromancer has primary in animating (and reanimating and reanimating) masses of humanoid corpses; secondary in breeding new creations; tertiary in life transferral.

What does this have to do with buffs? What (other than errors in my "back of the napkin math") makes one concept more or less versatile than another?

Give everyone an equal amount of level-appropriate abilities. Where is the necessity for any added complexity?

[Hytheter]

{scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I have no background on this but if you suspect some kind of funny business you should probably take it up with the mods rather than making passive-aggressive insinuations in the middle of an argument.

[Ignimortis]

Because they're just as effective? People like specialized classes. People are interested in playing classes that reflect their particular character concept. If someone wants to command the dead and curse their enemies, they'll pick Dread Necromancer over Wizard, even if the latter might be equally effective.

I'll correct that - why would anyone play a specialist if a generalist is just as effective at that one thing specialist does? I don't mind them generally being a valuable party member, but someone who can do 10 things doesn't deserve to do any of them as well as someone who does only 2 things does theirs.

But beyond that, I think you're not really considering your terms very well. What does it mean to be a specialist? Consider the various specialist casters that exist in the game, like the Warmage, the Beguiler, and the Dread Necromancer. I'll talk about specifically the Warmage, because it's by far the weakest, and because it illustrates the point best. As it happens, the Warmage gets a bunch of blasting spells, and maybe one decent BFC spell per level. Is that because they're a "specialist"? Well, not really. The Warmage is, conceptually, a Mage that does War. That's a pretty clear specialty, distinct from things like "mage who summons things" or "mage who messes with people's minds". Except is it? Because there's actually a lot of magic that one might use for war. Divination spells provide useful intelligence. Summoning spells provide fresh allies. Buffs improve your troops. Fabricate produces equipment without needing logistics. The Warmage doesn't get any of that. But would giving those things to him really dilute his identity that much? It depends whether you think his identity is defined by his spell list, or his class concept.

Warmage's fluff is lacking, because magic would be the ultimate tool in war, in any shape or form. Instead, I presume Warmage is an artillery mage, someone who functions only to inflict incredible bodily harm to as many targets as possible, while staying safe. As such, I tend to take interpretations that fit the mechanics, not the fluff. So a fixed-up Warmage should be, perhaps, an Evocation/Abjuration (damage and shields) specialist mage.

So what? The spell gives you infinite power. It doesn't really matter what the opportunity cost of learning Planar Binding is, because if you have spell slots you can use for Planar Binding, that's what you use them for. Planar Binding is, assuming pure RAW and no desire to sandbag, the single best spell you can take at 6th level.

It does, if the opportunity cost is incredibly high. As in, you cannot learn it naturally, and instead have to spend, say, 100k GP to learn it. Sure, it's still powerful enough to do that, but that balances things out a bit. Also, I just remembered a nice neat concept from Pathfinder - spell rarity. If you can only learn Common spells on levelup, and perhaps Uncommon spells at (current spell level -1), and Rare spells at (current spell level -2), that would provide an interesting balancing tool, while giving designers the ability to increase opportunity costs for learning really valuable and powerful spells, even for something like Wizard. If a Rare scroll is ten times the price of a Common scroll, that really puts things into perspective, because getting that one spell is now equivalent to one third your WBL.

Sure, but there are pressures driving things in that direction. The PHB, as any book, is of a finite length. That means PHB classes need to be broader than other classes. Just as the core sneaky type is a Rogue (who could be anything from a miltary spec ops guy to a fast-talking con man), while splat sneaky types are Scouts, Ninjas, or Factotums, the core casters are going to be more diverse than later ones. Certainly, they could be more focused than they are now, but that would require either abandoning some concepts, or adding more classes to the PHB. And even then, you'd still end up with relatively broad classes. Your PHB might have an Elementalist in it, but it's not going to have a Fire Mage, even though Fire Mage has a decent shot at being more popular.

That much is true, except the PHB also has Bard, Barbarian, Ranger and Druid, who are pretty clear-cut in their niche. They can still be rather varied, but mostly on the same level as later releases, not as Rogue or Wizard. Perhaps we should replace those with broader chassises, then.

Yeah. That's just Kaladin. He has magic (flight, super speed, absurd healing speed), he fights in melee, and he leads a bunch of men. I guess my issue is that what you seem to see as three things (sword, spell, followers), I only really see as two (not considering "sword" a thing that is particularly character-defining), one of which I think should be a default assumption for high level characters (having a bunch of followers).

Does he actually do spellcasting, or is he just fantastical (i.e. non-mundane) enough to fly, have super speed and heal absurdly fast? Because I have a Street Samurai in Shadowrun who can attest to almost the same things (well, no flight, but slow controlled falls) to some extent, no magic involved. If he's just fantastical, and doesn't do any spellcasting or have any wider-reaching magic powers, then he's just what a high-level Warlord could look like.

Also, I disagree on that "every high level character should have a bunch of followers" part. I like having all my power compacted into my own character, thank you very much.

I dunno. Zombies work pretty well as minions. In general, I think the only really problematic minionmancy spells are ones like Planar Binding or Charm Monster that are (almost) completely open-ended. The ones that define a specific creature or creatures you can summon are fine, and are probably better for verisimilitude that summoning a "Demon Bruiser" that is completely different from all the melee demons in the MM. Basically, minions need to work like Summon Monster or Animate Dead.

That's because zombies pretty much remove every special ability and turn anything into a bruiser, don't they? Summon Monster lists need to be vetted harshly to avoid giving the summoner access to casting X of level Y.

A 3rd level Rogue could easily have a +10 bonus to Open Lock. I'm not necessarily opposed to the notion that Knock could work in a less absolute way (if only because that makes the eventual "magic lock that beats Knock" and "better Knock that unlocks that magic lock" less stupid to write), but that bonus seems clearly too small to have an interesting dynamic. The limited-use ability needs to blow the unlimited-use one away, or it's worthless.

Yes, but by how much? And what is supposed to happen when we combine the limited ability and the unlimited one? 3.5 (and 5e) already fell deep into that pit of "at-wills need to be several orders of magnitude worse than per-days, even if those per-days are numerous enough to use them on everything that occurs in a typical day", and I think that we'd need to climb back out a little.

The custom magic item rules do dumb things. A +10 Competence bonus is 10k GP, but +5 is only 2.5k GP, and you can (in theory, as with all things about custom items) convince your DM to let you buy as many of those as there are bonus types. And there are a lot of bonus types.

That's why I dislike the abundance of bonus types. It leads to dumb stuff like this.

[Hytheter]

Warmage's fluff is lacking, because magic would be the ultimate tool in war, in any shape or form. Instead, I presume Warmage is an artillery mage, someone who functions only to inflict incredible bodily harm to as many targets as possible

You don't have to presume. The flavour text for the class states outright that Warmages are concerned primarily with raining death and destruction on the battlefield. The text equates them with artillery just as you have and there's even a line that basically boils down to "Support magic? That's someone else's job!" Maybe Warmage is a slight misnomer (Battlemage might serve better, perhaps?) but the description is pretty clear on what they're all about.

[Satinavian]

And if those level-appropriate abilities include magic, the fluff becomes very weird unless you contort the magic system around being Martial-boost compatible, while allowing the buffs on party members cracks party design open spectacularly because either somebody's specialized in punching ridiculously above their level with those buffs, or somebody's deliberately leaning on them to function at their current level so they can dump resources in being a lot more versatile than intended, and balancing these build-around cases is going to become a mind-numbing exercise in frustration and mathematical tedium.

I don't see much of a problem. Why should the fluff that allows to buff mundane activities not help with magical activities ? Raising morale to benefit spellcasting ? Doing auxilaty activities for some rituals ? Coordinating things ? You only need a magic system that actually can have broad, not spell-specific buffs (which would benefit from casters actually rolling things) and you can have abilities to buff it.

This is also in addition to the above issue of minions as a class specialty being difficult to niche-confine to prevent a class carrying them becoming the wielder of an all-solving hammer, though at least with actual allies they have fairly limited ability to decide they'll do something completely different today, unlike a summoner deciding to call up an Angel to deal with the packs of plague-based Undead instead of the Fae they summoned yesterday to drive half the guards insane, or a Necromancer deciding to make an incorporeal level-draining spirit instead of a nearly indestructible zombie from the latest fight.

I will tell you how Splittermond does summoning. Splittermond also has distinct rules for companions so all of those concepts don't rely on summoning ules and don't need to be modelled with them.

There is a white-list of creatures that can be summoned. Each of them is assigned a number to represent its usefulness as a summon. This number is not closely related toits combat strenth. Additionally there is a creation system to build other summonable creatures by stacking templates.

There is a list of discrete tasks a summoner can command the creature to do with specific rules to set boundaries of those tasks. Giving such commands costs mana points in addition to the actual spellcasting cost (Splittermond has a mana point system)

All creatures only can do a limited subset of this list. There are for example spirits with healing powers or invisible spies or advising ancestors or mounts or fighting mosters etc. But if a task is not on a summons list, it never can be given as a command.


When a character learns a summoning spell (and learning a spell is a heavy investment similar to D&Ds sorcerers spell knowns) he chooses a single creature of usefulness appropriate to the spell level and a single task that summon has on its list. And he can only summon this particular creature and give this particular task with that spell.

Now a specialized summoner can do more. There are things that work like feats that allow e.g. to choose a more powerful creature for a spell level (but still only one per spell), or allow to give different kinds of orders (but they still need to be on the summons list) or buff all summons or reduce mana cost for summoning.




From experience this system works reasonably well. You can build most kinds of summons from different stories / inspirations. It is no longer a toolbox that can do anything, a summon spell is roughly as versatile as another spell, not more. You can still be a summoner specialist that solves most of his problems with summons. But that will cost you and in the end you won't be able to solve more problems than other characters. It is just that your tools are summons.

[NigelWalmsley]

It does, if the opportunity cost is incredibly high. As in, you cannot learn it naturally, and instead have to spend, say, 100k GP to learn it. Sure, it's still powerful enough to do that, but that balances things out a bit.

You are correct in general, increasing costs enough can make things balanced. But Planar Binding is just broken. As long as the spell allows you to bind an Efreet, which can itself cast not just Planar Binding but Greater Planar Binding, there's no way to make it balanced.

That much is true, except the PHB also has Bard, Barbarian, Ranger and Druid, who are pretty clear-cut in their niche. They can still be rather varied, but mostly on the same level as later releases, not as Rogue or Wizard. Perhaps we should replace those with broader chassises, then.

The Bard is doing a pretty wide range of things. They've got illusion magic, enchantment magic, healing magic, summoning magic, magical music, and they're supposed to be competent as a combatant or a skillmonkey. And as the game went on, Bards got support for builds that try to do most of those things. It's true that "magical musician" is a fairly limited concept, but mechanically they were quite diverse.

The Druid is even less focused. They get animal magic, elemental magic, plant magic, nature magic, shapeshifting, and an animal companion. Any one of those could be its own class and still have range on par with the full casters.

The Ranger and the Barbarian are pretty focused. The Ranger at least has a couple of different things going on, trying to capture both an Aragorn-esque figure and something more like a WoW Hunter, but it definitely doesn't have nearly the range of the Wizard or the Rogue. That granted, it is true that there's just less variety in stuff for martials to do. When you consider the range of martial character concepts, it may well be that "Barbarian" is covering a reasonable percentage of them.

Does he actually do spellcasting, or is he just fantastical (i.e. non-mundane) enough to fly, have super speed and heal absurdly fast?

It depends what you mean by "spellcasting". I definitely wouldn't consider him a Wizard, but he has a spirit companion, the ability to alter the gravity of other objects, and the ability to make stuff stick together unbreakably. He doesn't have the range of magical effects a spellcaster would, but equally he doesn't just physical enhancements.

That's because zombies pretty much remove every special ability and turn anything into a bruiser, don't they?

Skeletons too. And that seems fine to me. I don't think you need particularly complicated for minions. Something that absorbs punishment and scales relatively well is enough.

3.5 (and 5e) already fell deep into that pit of "at-wills need to be several orders of magnitude worse than per-days, even if those per-days are numerous enough to use them on everything that occurs in a typical day", and I think that we'd need to climb back out a little.

I don't think that really applies with Knock. If you look at the level where Knock becomes available, and you don't let people buy wands or scrolls, getting enough Knocks to get past even minimal defensive precautions (like "the safe is inside a house that is also locked") is crippling for your combat ability. Even at higher levels, while you don't need to give up combat power to get half a dozen Knocks, that's still a fairly small number of locks in real terms.

That said, I am generally in favor of moving away from daily resources for basically this reason, which necessarily complicates the balance of an ability like Knock.

[Kyutaru]

Does he actually do spellcasting, or is he just fantastical (i.e. non-mundane) enough to fly, have super speed and heal absurdly fast? Because I have a Street Samurai in Shadowrun who can attest to almost the same things (well, no flight, but slow controlled falls) to some extent, no magic involved. If he's just fantastical, and doesn't do any spellcasting or have any wider-reaching magic powers, then he's just what a high-level Warlord could look like.

Also, I disagree on that "every high level character should have a bunch of followers" part. I like having all my power compacted into my own character, thank you very much.

Fantastical powers and followers sound like something that could be part of Fighter bonus feats or Rogue expertises. Perhaps rather than trying to force archetypes to fit a certain spread of abilities we simply let players choose what abilities they want their characters to have from a list. Rather than worrying about lore conflicts, it's up to the player to explain why his character is able to slow fall or regenerate. Not only fighters would be the same. Some can heal fast, some can detect enemies a mile away, some can teleport behind you instantly, some can float through the rooftops, whatever sort of style or theme you want your character to have you create from the selection of these extraordinary abilities. Wizards get spell choices, Fighters get physical upgrades.

[Morphic tide]

Sure. That's part of the math to be solved. There's disagreement whether that's 20% of expected scenarios, 60% of expected scenarios, 100% of expected scenarios, so I'll not weigh in on that at this time. But, once you've chosen your math, you let them handle that much.

Balance isn't that simple. The issue at hand is sticking to that portion of expected scenarios with such wildly divergent methods as turning dead enemies into answers, pulling your answers out of Hell, personally answering the situation, and making a device to answer it. These have starkly different mechanical expectations that need balanced against eachother, and adding "buffs allies as mechanic of contribution" means that you have to account for the buff in the balancing prospects, making another layer of surprisingly complex math to work out. And all the math in the world doesn't matter if the DM steps out of line of expected rewards and conflicts!

So, as one of my class features, I have an ally who has a starship, who can solve our "get from point A to point B" problem. I also have a hacker ally, who can bypass *most* security systems… if we bring them to him. And my tertiary ally is a small-time fence.

So nobody can RP their way into having an ally who has a starship because that invalidates one of your class features, nobody else can hire hacker allies to be escort mission fodder, and nobody else gets to have access to fencing? By making those class features, you make it much more difficult to justify allowing other players to roleplay their way into accessing mechanics that way or allowing similarly potent classless mechanics, because if those are things you can do, why bother playing the class that gets them as features?

What does this have to do with buffs? What (other than errors in my "back of the napkin math") makes one concept more or less versatile than another?

It's because of justifications, like the root of the "Guy at the Gym" fallacy. Because the summoner is calling stuff up from other planes, there's not much thematic limitation, and so you have to invent justifications for why a demon summoner can't get every kind of demon. Sure, there's mechanics you can get that with, but the ones that are compatible with actually summoning existing demons come down to various flavors of limited contracting for access to specific types. With Necromancers and Enchanters (of the D&D mind-altering magic kind), you are talking about literal direct control of enemies, making for a spectacular degree of "can't"s that aren't baked into the theme long before you actually get out from the All Solving Hammer problem.

Give everyone an equal amount of level-appropriate abilities. Where is the necessity for any added complexity?

Because the Artificer requires downtime to make their abilities and limiting how many they get is a frustrating mess, the Summoner calls theirs up as needed, the Fighter's locked to the gear they have and training they've done, the Necromancer needs dead enemies to work with, and generally different concepts function in different ways if you're going to actually implement the fantasy mechanically. Reanimating corpses is as versatile as the corpses you have access to, unless specifically limited in what abilities are retained, and item creation abilities are completely nuts with any but the strictest of resources to work with.

And whenever a character's ability is "provides bonus to other creature" that can apply to another character, you now have to balance for people merging their class features by way of one being a buff monster and the other being a monster to buff, thereby ending up some degree above the expected curve. Unless you specifically enshrine a buff class role in the expected math, which makes the parties without buffers suffer. Game balance is not basic math, especially with fungible resources like sharable items and bonus applications.

What's to stop the party from shopping around to over-gear the Fighter ridiculously by pooling their wealth? What's stopping a party of three Bards and a Fighter from running over the game with enormously overstacked buffs? Notably, both actually have answers in 3.5, in the form of item slots and unstackable bonuses respectively, but these are additional mechanical complexity that has to be added to reduce game breakage, and it very much was unsuccessful.

[RedMage125]

Could a Fighter, in fact, do those things? Why, yes, they could! They are, therefore, "things a Fighter could do".

And again, your original claim vis a vis this was "4e ensured nobody had anything more interesting than a Fighter could do in 3e".

Which I debunked immediately with several examples that I was able to remember from the top of my head. ALL more interesting than Grapple, Trip, Disarm, Sunder.

Rituals are the equivalent of buying scrolls, not the abilities 3e characters got.

They were non-combat powers that 4e characters could do. Many of which imitated effects of 3e spells. Several classes got Ritual Caster as a class feature, and anyone could get it with a feat. Furthermore, there were guidelines for including Ritual scrolls as treasure, so I find this point to be intentionally disingenuous.

Well, then the designers should have made them something other than that. But that is what they are. I'm not going to bother arguing with you about this, because {scrubbed}. Instead, I want you to find me some numbers that prove you right. If I am wrong, and it is not in fact mathematically true that having people with a lower chance of succeeding makes you more likely to fail, you should be able to do this. If I am right, and you cannot do this, I expect you to eat your crow before I pay any attention to another word you say. To be specific, I expect:

1. A chance of success between 0% and 100%, S.
2. Another chance of success in the same range that is smaller than the first one, S'.
3. A non-zero number of attempts made at the second chance of success, N.

And those numbers should together satisfy the property that if I make N attempts at S', I expect more successes than if I make N attempts at S. You will note that this is actually much easier than defending skill challenges as written, because I'm allowing you to pick whatever numbers you want, rather than saddling you with the numbers the game uses. So if you can't do this, or refuse to do it, it will be a direct admission that I am in fact correct about the mathematical properties of the core mechanic of skill challenges.

How is this an indictment of Skill Challenges at all?

Everything you are saying applies to ALL uses of skills, hell, even attack rolls, in any d20 system TO INCLUDE 3e.

The only thing different about Skill Challenges, SPECIFICALLY, is that they were geared to be an "encounter-like" system wherein skills could be used to reach a goal, bypass an obstacle, avoid damage, etc.

Allowing multiple skills doesn't do anything. I don't care about whatever secondary skills did in the version of skill challenges you believe in, because the claim I am making is about the core mechanic, not whatever epicycles have been added.

Allowing multiple skills is key to group participation in the Skill Challenge. The DC should be the same, regardless of what skill is being used, because a Skill Challenge has a given level, and the DCs of a given difficulty (Easy, Moderate, Hard) are set by level.

And Secondary Skills also play into that, because they allow a player who may not have a good modifier in one of the Primary Skills (and thus, be more likely to accrue a failure than a success, as per your own reasoning), to still contribute to the group. They could give another player a bonus to their roll, or even remove a failure that the group had accrued.

So you would be making N attempts at S, P, or R (all with a given DC of X). The Party Fighter may have a +9 modifier for S, the party Wizard a +9 for P, and the party Rogue a +9 for R. The Cleric and Warlock, not having good modifiers for S, P, or R, but having good modifiers for skills Y and Z, use their turns to make skill checks for those. Or, worse case scenario, take the Aid Another action, which is always an option.

This is in the RAW. Check the DMG2, or Skill Challenges in the published modules. It's also in the RAW for designing Skill Challenges in the DMG1 (page 75). So that IS in the Core mechanic. Your refusal to see that is not a sign that those rules don't exist.

I consider that a distinction without a difference. Saying that I might merely be ignorant is, in this respect, also calling me a liar, it's just saying that I'm lying when I claim to know how things work. Either I'm lying when I present my points as informed, or I'm lying about my specific points. In either case, you're calling me a liar.

No, lying is intentionally misrepresenting something with intent to mislead. You are just wrong.

It's okay to be wrong, it's not an insult. And it would be the sign of an extremely fragile ego to insist that it is an insult. You CHOOSE to be offended and take it personally when I say you are mistaken. I haven't called you a liar.

You understand how that still makes you wrong though, right? I mean, setting aside the fact that "they errata'd other things" doesn't make the errata magically not effect Skill Challenges, if the errata'd the failure numbers that is in fact errata to Skill Challenges, which is the exact thing you claimed didn't happen.

And I believe I addressed that. *looks up* Yup, I did. I admitted I was wrong about "any errata", but that was the ONLY errata, so your claim about "multiple rounds of errata is STILL in error.

D&D has failed to be the market leader in TTRPGs twice. Once, TSR went bankrupt in the late 90s, and Vampire took over for a time. Then, WotC released 4e, and Pathfinder took over (admittedly, not instantly). I feel quite comfortable saying that a product that is as bad for your business as bankrupcy is, in fact, a bad product.

I'm going to borrow a quote from another poster, Morty here:
"To put it another way, "I don't like 4E" is an opinion. "4E is a bad game" is an assessment that should be backed up with something even if it's still subjective."

Couching your opinion as "fact" is just an attempt to be contrarian and start fights. 4e had its flaws, to be sure, and I am certainly willing to engage in honest discussion about them. I do NOT, however, sit idly while people try and couch their opinion as objective fact.

And again, all this was a reply to SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU in regards to "fixes" they were looking for that 4e DID. And 4e was, overall, not well received.

Well, sure. But since RedMage is unwilling to accept "the game mathematically does not do the thing it is supposed to do" as a reason the game is bad, there's not really anywhere else to go but the market.

I did not, have not, and WILL not contest that 4e "failed" as a product line, economically.

It did. It's why I ended up putting 4e on my list of "Fantasy Heart Breakers" in a thread about a year and a half back. 4e was not a "bad game". It suffered from a poor start, certainly. It differed DRASTICALLY from other editions, absolutely. And it divided the D&D community. It is directly responsible for Paizo stepping up and entering the market with Pathfinder, further hurting the D&D brand.

But it was a fun game, and it accomplished a lot of what it set out to do*. It just happens that those results created a game that a lot of people didn't find familiar to them.

Good games can do poorly in terms of sales or customer response. It wasn't what people expected, and apparently, not what they wanted. Which was kind of my whole point in bringing it up (again, to QUERTUS, not you). "Balancing the classes, so all classes can shine", and so on. 4e did those, and the response was overwhelmingly negative. People thought that those things made it "not feel like D&D".

What's funny is that when I introduced my brother-in-law to D&D, we were playing 4e. Later, when I changed duty stations, 5e had come out, and he tried his hand at both 5e and Pathfinder. But he didn't like them because THEY "didn't feel like D&D" to him. So it's all a matter of subjective perception.

*The 4e preview books "Races&Classes" and "Worlds&Monsters" showcased the design goals of the ORCUS team (the team name for the project as it was being worked on, combinign the first initials of the people on the team, I think). 4e succeeded at those goals.

I'll probably just end up putting him on ignore. I doubt he'll be able to come up with an explanation of why being more likely to fail a single test doesn't also make you more likely to fail multiple tests (seeing as that is just how probability works), so I assume he'll continue to tell me I'm lying and claim that I'm actually someone else. He seems to have a big chip on his shoulder, and based on this conversation, I'm not optimistic about being able to get anywhere productive with him on this or any subject.

Ah yes, the "fingers in the ears" approach. A mature, and well-reasoned response to someone with a different viewpoint. Although, with the current zeitgeist of our country, it shouldn't surprise me.

[Mechalich]

Good games can do poorly in terms of sales or customer response. It wasn't what people expected, and apparently, not what they wanted. Which was kind of my whole point in bringing it up (again, to QUERTUS, not you). "Balancing the classes, so all classes can shine", and so on. 4e did those, and the response was overwhelmingly negative. People thought that those things made it "not feel like D&D".

To add to this, games consist of mechanics, fluff, and production design, and there's considerable evidence that, when it comes to market share, mechanics are the least important part of the equation. When Vampire overtook D&D as the most popular game on the market, it wasn't because Vampire's mechanics were better than those of 2e AD&D, the mechanics of vampire were a dumpster fire and they always have been, but that were a slightly less complex dumpster fire (there was no adding negative numbers in VtM) which seems to have been the only thing that really mattered.

4e differed dramatically from all previous D&D editions in both mechanics and fluff, and a lot of people were primarily angry about the changes to the fluff, often because said changes made certain settings, impossible to play in the new system. Pathfinder, despite having to change the names of almost everything, actually maintains greater fluff continuity with earlier D&D editions than 4e does. And one of the key moves for 5e was to basically put all the old fluff back in place. It's worth noting that Star Wars SAGA, which has an awful lot of 4e-style mechanics and was to at least some degree used as a 4e testbed, faced none of the vitriol of 4e, because it made every effort to lean in to extant fluff and make the game work around it.

And this circles back to the central problem of modifying D&D. D&D has a lot of major mechanical problems, with balance and otherwise, baked into the fluff that are essentially impossible to fix as a result, because if you actually do it you get a 4e-style rebellion. It's not even unique to D&D - White-Wolf tried it with the nWoD (I wouldn't say the nWoD is mechanically superior to the oWoD but it's certainly different) and the company ended up bankrupt as the result.

Ultimately, a huge portion of the player base has sacred cows in the fluff that they value more than the entire mechanical system.

[Kyutaru]

Ultimately, a huge portion of the player base has sacred cows in the fluff that they value more than the entire mechanical system.

Yep. D&D has always been about the roleplay more than the combat. Other games like Vampire which were almost 100% roleplay and DM fiat even showed how important it was to people.

[Quertus]

Spoiler: spoiled for length

Show

Balance isn't that simple. The issue at hand is sticking to that portion of expected scenarios with such wildly divergent methods as turning dead enemies into answers, pulling your answers out of Hell, personally answering the situation, and making a device to answer it. These have starkly different mechanical expectations that need balanced against eachother, and adding "buffs allies as mechanic of contribution" means that you have to account for the buff in the balancing prospects, making another layer of surprisingly complex math to work out. And all the math in the world doesn't matter if the DM steps out of line of expected rewards and conflicts!


So nobody can RP their way into having an ally who has a starship because that invalidates one of your class features, nobody else can hire hacker allies to be escort mission fodder, and nobody else gets to have access to fencing? By making those class features, you make it much more difficult to justify allowing other players to roleplay their way into accessing mechanics that way or allowing similarly potent classless mechanics, because if those are things you can do, why bother playing the class that gets them as features?


It's because of justifications, like the root of the "Guy at the Gym" fallacy. Because the summoner is calling stuff up from other planes, there's not much thematic limitation, and so you have to invent justifications for why a demon summoner can't get every kind of demon. Sure, there's mechanics you can get that with, but the ones that are compatible with actually summoning existing demons come down to various flavors of limited contracting for access to specific types. With Necromancers and Enchanters (of the D&D mind-altering magic kind), you are talking about literal direct control of enemies, making for a spectacular degree of "can't"s that aren't baked into the theme long before you actually get out from the All Solving Hammer problem.


Because the Artificer requires downtime to make their abilities and limiting how many they get is a frustrating mess, the Summoner calls theirs up as needed, the Fighter's locked to the gear they have and training they've done, the Necromancer needs dead enemies to work with, and generally different concepts function in different ways if you're going to actually implement the fantasy mechanically. Reanimating corpses is as versatile as the corpses you have access to, unless specifically limited in what abilities are retained, and item creation abilities are completely nuts with any but the strictest of resources to work with.

And whenever a character's ability is "provides bonus to other creature" that can apply to another character, you now have to balance for people merging their class features by way of one being a buff monster and the other being a monster to buff, thereby ending up some degree above the expected curve. Unless you specifically enshrine a buff class role in the expected math, which makes the parties without buffers suffer. Game balance is not basic math, especially with fungible resources like sharable items and bonus applications.

What's to stop the party from shopping around to over-gear the Fighter ridiculously by pooling their wealth? What's stopping a party of three Bards and a Fighter from running over the game with enormously overstacked buffs? Notably, both actually have answers in 3.5, in the form of item slots and unstackable bonuses respectively, but these are additional mechanical complexity that has to be added to reduce game breakage, and it very much was unsuccessful.

OK, as far as I can see, I think you're a bit too far into the D&D implementation of things to get what I was saying. Because most of that - i think - isn't actually a problem.

For example, buffs. M&M buffs have (by default) the same power level limit the buffing character has. So, of you can solve… huh. Looks like I forgot to post one of my posts. Anyway, if you can solve "level 7" problems, then your buffs simply allow people to solve "level 7" problems.

So, by this logic, Flight, Invisibility (2e), and Divine Power are good buffs; Wield Skill, Divine Favor, and True Strike are not.

But what *is* going to be really hard to balance is mind control. And, to a lesser extent, abilities that have prerequisites for use (like time or resources) that could be negated.

As for "allies as a class feature"… I've always felt that this discussion was a little odd, but… this is over and above what everyone (including the guy with "free" allies) can get - so 3+X vs 0+X allies. Also, if one of the "3" is "lost" (killed, imprisoned, unfriended, whatever), it is automatically replaced. Unlike the X NPCs each PC otherwise collects during the adventure.

And this circles back to the central problem of modifying D&D. D&D has a lot of major mechanical problems, with balance and otherwise, baked into the fluff that are essentially impossible to fix as a result, because if you actually do it you get a 4e-style rebellion.

Can you list a few of these "unsolvable" "fluff causes imbalance" problems?

I ask because Illithids are *supposed to* be afraid of Undead, as they are both immune to their mental powers *and* invisible to their infravision. 3e did away with infravision, slaughtering that fluffy cow in the process.

[I3igAl]

Personally I would like for narrower Specialisations. Wizards could mostly get spells from their chosen school and said school would be way more specialized. Maybe instead of the bonus spell from their school, they get one bonus spell from a school of their choice.
If the schools are hyperspezialized they can actually be good at one thing. The Evocation school would be 99% blasting and not much else. Such a wizard could actually be allowed to match or even slightly outdamage a fighter without ending up overpowered.
Maybe limiting the amount of spells each school gets, would be finishing step. Splatbooks could than add new spell school or archetyped ones to not break said system and make the spell lists to versatile.

This would also be quite flavourful IMO and lead to many totally different wizards.

Well, there is an easy fix for the "math" and it's the 0E/1E/2E/BECMI way: Wizards do NOT get automatic free access to every published spell on a whim. Spells are treasure. This also needs the 0E/1E/2E/BECMI way that making magic items...any items, but more so scrolls and wands...is hard and difficult and expensive. So again: magic items are treasure. Not something a character can just make on a whim.

This alone puts fighters and wizards on the same starting base: they must both adventure for things to get more powerful. Also, you might as well throw in feats/class abilities too....make it so a character must either find a trainer or a special location or such. Maybe even add a mechanic, like an experience upgrade that can be earned and then used to get an ability. So the player has to have the character do something in the game to get the experience upgrade, based on the character and the game world.

While this a flavorful idea, you are basically just reducing the number of known spells and equating it to the amount of magic items the wizard gains. He has now worse equipment and less spells. It also includes a sneaky ban of spells the DM deems too powerful, since he is the one selecting the spells found.

It could work though, if done well. In 3.PF one could even go as far as baking known spells into the Wealth Per Level guidelines. One could treat their price as an item (1/day spell effect?) maybe giving some small discount on the cost(10-25%?) to the wizard to protect his niche.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Personally I would like for narrower Specialisations. Wizards could mostly get spells from their chosen school and said school would be way more specialized. Maybe instead of the bonus spell from their school, they get one bonus spell from a school of their choice.
If the schools are hyperspezialized they can actually be good at one thing. The Evocation school would be 99% blasting and not much else. Such a wizard could actually be allowed to match or even slightly outdamage a fighter without ending up overpowered.
Maybe limiting the amount of spells each school gets, would be finishing step. Splatbooks could than add new spell school or archetyped ones to not break said system and make the spell lists to versatile.

This would also be quite flavourful IMO and lead to many totally different wizards.

I like the idea of enforcing specializations and would go a few steps further.

First, not just on wizards. Every spell-caster should have to specialize.

Second, not by spell school. They're too horribly balanced and...oddly defined for this.

I wrote up an idea once where I took the (5e) spell lists and tagged every spell with one or more "themes" (such as Pyromancer, Animal Friend, Gardener (plant specialist), conjurer, witch, etc). Then each spell-casting class (including the 4 element monks, which sort of cast spells) got access to their choice (from a class-based restricted list) at least one and sometimes a couple of these themes. So wizards had basically a free choice (except for a couple out-of-theme ones like Healer and Holy Warrior) for their primary theme, where their two free spells per level had to come from. But could scribe discovered spells from other themes. Bards were locked down on their primary theme (either Illusionist or Mentalist, IIRC), but had an ability to add some spells that they saw being cast, even entirely from other themes. Classes with themed sub-classes had a primary theme set by the class (or chosen) and then secondary access to other themes came from the sub-class. For operational reasons, every cleric got access to the Healer theme, but then their other themes were set by their chosen domain. Etc.

Tons of work, and probably impossible in a 3e context (simply due to the explosion of spells), but it's an interesting idea.

[Morphic tide]

OK, as far as I can see, I think you're a bit too far into the D&D implementation of things to get what I was saying. Because most of that - i think - isn't actually a problem.

For example, buffs. M&M buffs have (by default) the same power level limit the buffing character has. So, of you can solve… huh. Looks like I forgot to post one of my posts. Anyway, if you can solve "level 7" problems, then your buffs simply allow people to solve "level 7" problems.

So, by this logic, Flight, Invisibility (2e), and Divine Power are good buffs; Wield Skill, Divine Favor, and True Strike are not.

The problem is that set-to buffs like that are very narrow design space, and make being applicable to allies utterly superfluous because they usually won't actually do anything. They also face versimilitude issues in that set-to buffs make for extremely pathetic bystanders abruptly turning into comparable combatants to the party. And perhaps more importantly, an enemy with them will be capable of exploiting it to have infinitely disposable "munitions", because any random idiot off the street will have just the same damage output once buffed.

It also doesn't solve the excess versatility problem, in fact it makes it worse because the relevant capability can be completely ignored as opposed to left to smaller investment. If the buffs include staple requirements like survivability, then the rest of the party can promptly ignore that and put everything into actively solving a wider range of problems.

As for "allies as a class feature"… I've always felt that this discussion was a little odd, but… this is over and above what everyone (including the guy with "free" allies) can get - so 3+X vs 0+X allies. Also, if one of the "3" is "lost" (killed, imprisoned, unfriended, whatever), it is automatically replaced. Unlike the X NPCs each PC otherwise collects during the adventure.

The issue that you seem to have difficulty grasping is that they are other goddamn people. Them being trivially replaced as a class feature means the world is factually bending itself in pretzels for the sake of your character concept working, because of that concept hinging so utterly on treating other in-world people as tools. This board is overwhelmingly D&D slanted, and people focusing there generally look for simulationist mechanics. This goes double for those concerned with "feel" rather than raw numeric balance, as they care they can do a thing without browbeating the DM far more than if that thing is strictly useful to do.

For roleplay, treating other people as disposable in a mechanical assumption doesn't work. At some point, what you have suggested leads to a player abusing it, and then the DM has to either let the world's sensibilities be utterly violated, or strip someone's class features. Or at least partially usurp control of that player's character. Or punish the player for bothering to use part of their class's text. In other words, the mechanic forces a failure of design in a roleplaying game because it's so utterly thematically broken that it's inherently open to abuse to get downright disposable meatshields, because it doesn't actually properly work otherwise. Which is what the Summoner and Necromancer are for, not the point of the guy who leads other actual people.