Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

[PhoenixPhyre]

And the Dread Necromancer shouldn't be actively worse than the Wizard or any other class at necromancy, too. The Dread Necromancer should be the best there is to do necromancy, or at least only rivaled by other classes which make necromancy their schtick (why are there more than one, though?).

Which really means that the generalist wizard (and cleric, etc) have to go. Even if they're only 80% as good as any of the specialists in their specialty, not having a weak side means they're all around better. Because most of the time, you don't need a specialist's full power.

I personally think that most of the "plot changing" spells should either go away or become tools that anyone can use. Make them actual rituals that require research, proper tooling, and likely more than one person cooperating. That both makes them more special and lets everyone have a crack at it.

[Kane0]

That is where we are. Without agreement on what a Wow Cool Thing should be in effect and game mechanics the so called problem of martial power will never be satisfied.

See my concept above, simply exchange things like 'can shield people behind you' and 'get out of grapples faster' for other things like 'make tremor with stomp', 'swim up waterfall' and beyond to taste. Or better yet, have a sliding scale. Everyone will have their own tolerance to superhuman vs magical and can pick where they are happy for it to be.

But some sort of vote system would make it easier, so louder voices don't automatically make for more influential arguments.

[Ignimortis]

Which really means that the generalist wizard (and cleric, etc) have to go. Even if they're only 80% as good as any of the specialists in their specialty, not having a weak side means they're all around better. Because most of the time, you don't need a specialist's full power.

I personally think that most of the "plot changing" spells should either go away or become tools that anyone can use. Make them actual rituals that require research, proper tooling, and likely more than one person cooperating. That both makes them more special and lets everyone have a crack at it.

Exactly. A generalist that is balanced should pay more. Like being a 2/3 caster, at least.

Also agreed about rituals for Teleport, Raise Dead, etc.

As I see it, a ritual to teleport could be based in arcane magic and drawing a proper circle — or it could be a skilled tracker finding an ancient ruined portal that can be restored with a bit of hard work and leads very close to where you want to be. Or even something like a ley-line flow that you can capitalize on and move at x10 speed if you have enough strength of will and endurance.

[Agthor]

Have anyone checked out the radical 5e overhaul, level up / advanced 5e that's on Kickstarter. I am on the fence as I have not had time to analyze it in depth. But it looks cool with fun stuff at every level and the classes seems to have more out of combat options.

[Talakeal]

Where does this logic end? Showing up with Hulk also means one less Scarlet Witch. Showing up with a Duskblade means one less Wizard. Showing up with a Wizard means one less Pun-Pun. Why even bother playing anything below T0?

I imagine it ends with kicking people with different tastes from the gaming group entirely.

[RandomPeasant]

Frankly, I think Thor is a bit too relatable for what I'd expect of a level 20 character to be. He shoots lightning, can fly, and has super strength, all feats that a Wizard could accomplish by level 5. We need to think bigger.

I think that's overstating. It's true that a 5th level Wizard gets some version of those abilities, but Thor's are scaled substantially more, both in subjective/relative ways (e.g. "Thor's lighting hurts Thanos, who is super-tough, so Thor's lightning must be super-strong"), but also in ways that are pretty clear-cut, like the scale he demonstrates when he cuts loose in the first Avengers movie. He also demonstrates (in Infinity War) the ability to teleport through space by using the Bifrost, which is at least on par with plane shift (and since at this point Heimdall is dead and Asgard destroyed, he must be drawing on the power fairly directly).

And that sort of leads to a caveat, which is part of why movies aren't perfect examples of how TTRPGs should work: Thor doesn't get all that much screen time. He's in three Thor movies and four Avengers movies, and he's not on-screen for the full runtime of any of them. If we charitably assume he gets two hours of focus time in each Thor and an hour per Avengers, that's ten hours total. That's more than most people's gaming sessions, but not so much that you couldn't imagine blowing through it in a weekend. So while Thor isn't showing off a huge range of powers, the ones he does show off are impressive enough that I would be okay with Thor being the peak of what D&D could do (even if I could also imagine it scaling somewhat more), just with the understanding that a D&D character would demonstrate some number of additional powers that were thematically appropriate for Thor.

>repeatedly tells me I know nothing about 3.5
>tells me 3.5 warlock is a good example of a simple class outpacing spellcasters

Except that's not remotely what I said. I said the Warlock is a simple class that is not power crept. It doesn't outpace the spellcasters (because it was never better than them), but it scales enough through the edition that it isn't any worse relative to them at the end than it was at the beginning.

It certainly isn't a classless system, its just a pool of features that every class pull from. Like, you know. Feats.

Feats, which are well-known for replacing class features.

Where does this logic end? Showing up with Hulk also means one less Scarlet Witch. Showing up with a Duskblade means one less Wizard. Showing up with a Wizard means one less Pun-Pun. Why even bother playing anything below T0?

Would you allow a player at your table to play a Commoner, if that was what they really wanted to play? What about a Truenamer who was insufficiently optimized to be able to use any of their abilities on level-appropriate opposition? Or a 5th level character in a 15th level party? "You must play a character that is appropriate for the game you are playing in" is not some bizarre position, nor is it a slippery slope that inevitably leads to everyone playing only the most powerful character possible in the system. It's a basic tenet of how TTRPGs work, and when you apply it in ways like "no, you can't play Pun-Pun in a 5th level adventure just because you can build that on 5 levels worth of abilities" or "no, you can't play a Solar Exalted in our Shadowrun game, those don't exist in the setting at all", no one bats an eye. But for some reason, the idea that there could be any concept in D&D that any D&D adventures scale past causes a certain segment of the fanbase to lose it and demand that the offending adventures be excised from D&D entirely so that they can continue writing "20" on their character sheet while playing a mundane warrior. And then they turn around and don't play at high level anyway.

In 3E there were several books (the Complete X series) that talked about parties of all _____s. I think it is reasonable to expect the game could handle parties that do not have stereotypical class quotas.

The game should not collapse because the party showed up with a Sorcerer, a Wizard, a Bard, and a Cleric. It should also not collapse because the party showed up with a Fighter, a Paladin, a Ranger, and a Rogue. Ideally it should function at least okay if the party is two Wizards and two Clerics, though at the limit that becomes unsustainable. That means a couple of things that are a really hard sell for some people.

First, it means that martial classes need to have abilities that let them engage with high level adventures. The Paladin doesn't need to get "literally plane shift", or even any plane shift-alike at all. But someone in the second party does, or we need to explicitly have a paradigm where plane shift is not an ability that it matters if you have.

Second, it means that characters need to have a fairly large range of problems they can solve. Not necessarily as many as the Wizard and friends, but much closer to them than any other published class. To a first approximation, if every class provides a tool that solves half of the problems that exist, that means that a party that has not been specifically optimized to ensure good coverage of the problem space has better than 5% chance of having no solution for a given problem.

To me, what all that says is that when we approach the problem of balancing the martials in this context, we need to think about it less in terms of reducing the number of options casters have, and more in terms of deepening the way non-combat encounters work so that multiple characters can have viable solutions to each problem the party faces. After all, no one complains that characters "do too much" when they have viable actions to take in a variety of combat encounters, because the gameplay of combat is deep enough that different characters can contribute in different ways.

For example, I can count universal cleric spells on one hand: Guidance, Bless, Bane (divine favor/disfavor is easy enough), Cure OR Inflict Wounds, Revivify (but not Raise Dead/Resurrection). Everything else should probably be locked behind domains — war cleric might not get damaging cantrips to encourage weapon use, even.

My favored solution is the abolition of the Cleric class. There should not be a "nature cleric", there should just be Druids that take a (class-agnostic) "is a priest" archetype* that grants whatever you consider to be the core priestly magic.

*: Incidentally, the vast majority of archetypes should not be class-specific. There should not be separate "is a gish" archetypes for each martial and caster class, there should be one "gets some magic" archetype you can take on any martial you want and one "good at stabbing" archetype you can take on any caster you want. You can write some more if you think of genuinely novel takes on either approach. Archetype should only be class-restricted if they interact specifically with the mechanics of that class.

And the Dread Necromancer shouldn't be actively worse than the Wizard or any other class at necromancy, too. The Dread Necromancer should be the best there is to do necromancy, or at least only rivaled by other classes which make necromancy their schtick (why are there more than one, though?).

As a point of order, the Dread Necromancer totally is better than any other class at necromancy. It's just that there's a sufficient range of things the Wizard is almost as good at as the Dread Necromancer is at necromancy (and also the Dread Necromancer gets various arbitrary and unwarranted penalties for being a spontaneous spellcaster) that the Wizard is better overall. But "the Dread Necromancer should be the best at necromancy, but is not" is simply not an accurate criticism of the class.

I personally think that most of the "plot changing" spells should either go away or become tools that anyone can use. Make them actual rituals that require research, proper tooling, and likely more than one person cooperating. That both makes them more special and lets everyone have a crack at it.

This is one of those things (like "we should have absolutely separate lists of combat and non-combat abilities") that sounds better than it works in practice. There are certain abilities that have a plot impact that either make a lot of sense as options for specific classes (Necromancers should get speak with dead for free), or flow automatically from class abilities (if you can make illusions in combat, you can presumably use those illusions in various social settings). The baseline idea of having a ritual system is a good one, but there also needs to be a way of accommodating non-combat utility and even plot powers that flow from your class, because those are going to exist.

[strangebloke]

Except that's not remotely what I said. I said the Warlock is a simple class that is not power crept. It doesn't outpace the spellcasters (because it was never better than them), but it scales enough through the edition that it isn't any worse relative to them at the end than it was at the beginning.

The specific point I was making was how over the course of many releases, classes that have access to new spells that get printed with each edition are going to get stronger while other classes do not, leading to power creep. I've cited examples for this, like how BM vs. EK used to be a matter of damage-dealing vs. resilience, but over time the EK has gotten way better at damage dealing and ALSO gotten way more resilient.

Warlock is a class that's worse than most of the ToB classes, nearly all of the full casters, and most of the partial casters. The fact that it never got power crept by barbarians and rogues isn't really relevant to anything.

Feats, which are well-known for replacing class features.

Feats make up like a third of all fighter class features. Being able to take ACFs at every level is not a classless system unless those options consistently outpace the base class options.

[OldTrees1]

And the Dread Necromancer shouldn't be actively worse than the Wizard or any other class at necromancy, too. The Dread Necromancer should be the best there is to do necromancy, or at least only rivaled by other classes which make necromancy their schtick (why are there more than one, though?).

snip

As a point of order, the Dread Necromancer totally is better than any other class at necromancy. It's just that there's a sufficient range of things the Wizard is almost as good at as the Dread Necromancer is at necromancy (and also the Dread Necromancer gets various arbitrary and unwarranted penalties for being a spontaneous spellcaster) that the Wizard is better overall. But "the Dread Necromancer should be the best at necromancy, but is not" is simply not an accurate criticism of the class.

Before this miscommunication goes too far:

I was using Wizard and Dread Necromancer as examples of a game providing the player the option to pick their "Get Good Stuff" paradigm without having to sacrifice "play a necromancer".

In this context I would argue the game could get away with having the Dread Necromancer be worse at necromancy than the Wizard as long as it is not strictly worse and not too much worse. That is not ideal, but I think that displays the broader design limit (greater imbalance tolerance in this case) that the game has in contrast to a particular playgroup.

Now Ignimortis is indeed correct that, all else equal, the design should aim for the Dread Necromancer being at least as good or better at necromancy compared to the generalist Wizard. They did not comment on if the design goal was met for the Dread Necromancer of unspecified edition.

And RandomPeasant is indeed correct that, barring certain extreme examples, the example of the 3E Dread Necromancer does achieve the design goal that Ignimortis describes.

That is why I used the Dread Necromancer as a fait accompli of how the game can present multiple paradigms to the player. The fact that it also accomplished the additional optional design goal was bonus points.

I think D&D would be better able to handle solving the martial situation if it attempted a "pick which solution works for you" approach similar to Wizard & Dread Necromancer. This does mean the designers would still need to solve the harder solutions, but it means mutually incompatible solutions (at the playgroup level) might not be mutually incompatible (at the game design level).

I think this is one way to deal with the issue that Pex observed

That is where we are. Without agreement on what a Wow Cool Thing should be in effect and game mechanics the so called problem of martial power will never be satisfied.

The game should not collapse because the party showed up with a Sorcerer, a Wizard, a Bard, and a Cleric. It should also not collapse because the party showed up with a Fighter, a Paladin, a Ranger, and a Rogue. Ideally it should function at least okay if the party is two Wizards and two Clerics, though at the limit that becomes unsustainable. That means a couple of things that are a really hard sell for some people.

First, it means that martial classes need to have abilities that let them engage with high level adventures. The Paladin doesn't need to get "literally plane shift", or even any plane shift-alike at all. But someone in the second party does, or we need to explicitly have a paradigm where plane shift is not an ability that it matters if you have.

Second, it means that characters need to have a fairly large range of problems they can solve. Not necessarily as many as the Wizard and friends, but much closer to them than any other published class. To a first approximation, if every class provides a tool that solves half of the problems that exist, that means that a party that has not been specifically optimized to ensure good coverage of the problem space has better than 5% chance of having no solution for a given problem.

To me, what all that says is that when we approach the problem of balancing the martials in this context, we need to think about it less in terms of reducing the number of options casters have, and more in terms of deepening the way non-combat encounters work so that multiple characters can have viable solutions to each problem the party faces. After all, no one complains that characters "do too much" when they have viable actions to take in a variety of combat encounters, because the gameplay of combat is deep enough that different characters can contribute in different ways.

Agreed.

PS: That "covers half" hypothetical has a fun math problem. What if you lay down N semicircles down on a circle with each evenly rotated around at 2Pi/N radians. If you randomly pick 4 different semicircles, what is the slice of uncovered circle?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Here's the thing--

If you plan your adventure around the idea that planeshift (or any other specific spell) must be available at a particular point, you're planning a very linear adventure and should have OOC player buy in to what that means. And even just having a party of a sorcerer, a wizard, a cleric, and a druid doesn't mean you'll have planeshift (or any other particular spell) available. So what you need to do is sit the players down and say "hey, we're doing a linear adventure and you need to have planeshift/spell Y by level X". Or provide an in-adventure way of accessing it (which works for any class). Same as any other mcguffin/plot token. Anything "required by the plot" should be provided by the plot. Otherwise you end up running a high risk of unintended bad ends. Just like any other single point of failure.

If I have a full-caster party, I plan different adventures than if I have a full-martial party. In many many ways. Heck, two different groups with exactly the same combinations should end up with very different adventures. The adventure depends on the players and their characters, not vice versa.

[OldTrees1]

Here's the thing--

But here is the other thing--

The issue is not about needing a particular solution. The issue is about an obstacle existing, and due to some classes having very narrowly scoped options, and a lack of variety in the available solutions, some parties will not contain a solution to the obstacle.

These issues arise in sandboxes more often than in linear campaigns. Linear campaigns drop in scripted solutions if the party is lacking (although some players prefer game systems that don't require that). Sandboxes expect the party to solve the obstacles the party chooses to face. The party has more options in the sandbox than in the linear campaign, but it does not help when some classes are lacking in ways to engage with high level emergent obstacles.

Consider a castle built on a cloud. There are plenty of possible solutions the designers could provide to the classes. Even Badass Normal characters could reach that cloud by building a balloon or taming a winged beast. Is that a good thing? Is it a good thing that parties without a Wizard could also explore the cloud castle? Or is a paradigm where a Wizard casting the Fly spell was required a better paradigm? Compare that to other emergent obstacles. 5E is not completely at either of those paradigms but I know which way I would prefer for the game system I would use to run a sandbox.

[RandomPeasant]

Warlock is a class that's worse than most of the ToB classes, nearly all of the full casters, and most of the partial casters. The fact that it never got power crept by barbarians and rogues isn't really relevant to anything.

Except it's not worse than the ToB classes, or most of the partial casters, or most of the weird casters (like Incarnates and Binders). At release, the Warlock was a middle-of-the-pack class. At 3e's close, Warlock was a middle-of-the-pack class. Adding additional options results in substantially less power creep than many people imagine, especially for classes that don't simply have access to all their options all the time.

If you plan your adventure around the idea that planeshift (or any other specific spell)

I think you're missing the point. You shouldn't be planning an adventure around "plane shift the specific spell", you should be planning an adventure around "plane shift the category of effect", and there should be enough classes that have that category of effect that you can just have a "go to another plane" challenge at whatever level that becomes an appropriate challenge without needing to consult with the party. In the same way you can do that with combat encounters, because people get a range of combat encounters that leave them broadly equipped to handle the combat challenges that appear at various levels.

[Man_Over_Game]

I think you're missing the point. You shouldn't be planning an adventure around "plane shift the specific spell", you should be planning an adventure around "plane shift the category of effect", and there should be enough classes that have that category of effect that you can just have a "go to another plane" challenge at whatever level that becomes an appropriate challenge without needing to consult with the party. In the same way you can do that with combat encounters, because people get a range of combat encounters that leave them broadly equipped to handle the combat challenges that appear at various levels.

Agreed. There's a distinct difference.

A Martial may be able to, but a Wizard chooses.

Simply having those options at your disposal means you have more game to play with. You're not just capitalizing on the solutions your DM gives to you, you're able to make your own. In a sense, Wizards can make the game their own instead of waiting on permission.

Is that a good thing? Probably not when taken to an extreme, but it's acceptable at lower levels. A Bard casting Sleep to take out a guard or two without risking a failed Stealth Check is the same kind of scenario on a smaller scale, one that we'd encourage, and it's not asking too much for everyone to have access to tools that let them perceive the game world differently.

Every second the Bard has that Sleep spell, or the Wizard has Planeshift, is a second that the caster is choosing not to use it. He is actively making the choice on whether it's a valid strategy along with everything else going on in the game. It is one plausible solution to a dozen different problems, while the DM's handout is one solution to one problem.

A 1-time-use solution advances the story, but it doesn't add tension or strategy. It's a Barbarian's Rage, used immediately in the most obvious place that it's relevant, instead of a constant debate of whether another option is more efficient. Having those features available to players at all times makes them feel directly responsible for their actions, as opposed to being actors in a story.

[PhoenixPhyre]

In a sandbox, people made their choices about what they want to explore starting at character creation. And those choices should matter. If they didn't pick classes who could all fly, maybe they don't want to investigate that flying temple? Not all pieces of a sandbox need to be hit by every party. If we made a party of thieves to explore this city/urban environment, saying "but you need some way to cut through dimensions, because otherwise you can't explore <thing over there>" would feel very forced.

My perspective may be a bit different because I run a living world for many campaigns, all campaigns sharing the same world. There are pieces that some parties will never hit. In fact, most of the world will never be hit by any individual party, but may be hit by some party, somewhen.

Furthermore, there should always be other options. I'm fully in favor of moving most of the transport and other "taxi" type spells out of the sole grasp of casters. Make them doable by anyone, with appropriate fiction-grounded limits and requirements. But beyond that, there are
* the possibility of finding/taming flying mounts
* hitching a ride on an inter-planar ship
* finding portals
* etc.

None of which require specific class abilities--anyone can do them as long as the DM doesn't have specific solutions in mind and is willing to work with the party. And they're likely to be way more interesting than "I push the 'get me there now' button. Yawn."

Spells (and class abilities) are fundamentally boring when they bypass adventure possibilities and provide single-press 'solve situation' buttons. All such spells (or other abilities) should not exist for anyone. Imagine if there was a class ability called "A winner is me." When used upon rolling initiative, the enemies all lose the combat. That's a horrifically anti-fun ability. The same goes for lots of other spells, just not quite as blatantly.

[Xervous]

Spells (and class abilities) are fundamentally boring when they bypass adventure possibilities and provide single-press 'solve situation' buttons. All such spells (or other abilities) should not exist for anyone. Imagine if there was a class ability called "A winner is me." When used upon rolling initiative, the enemies all lose the combat. That's a horrifically anti-fun ability. The same goes for lots of other spells, just not quite as blatantly.

But is an adventure of “cross the three mile wide river” (as an example) always supposed to be a valid adventure option? What are the rules for constructing a set of protected adventure options, or singling out adventure options that are allowed to be invalidated?

[Dr.Samurai]

Agreed that everyone at the table should understand what kind of game they're getting into.

With regards to flying temples and what not... this in no way requires casters. There are magic items, there are mounts, there are airships, there are portals, there are bargains with creatures, and all other types of circumstances that can be baked into the game.

With all respect to the differing opinions in this thread, I do believe there is a sentiment here that things have to get crazy wacky at some level of the game AND that PCs should be able to circumvent all of that wackiness with their own features/powers. I don't think either of these assumptions is self-evident.

A warrior can take on a devil at level 7 (where some people pegged warriors should cap out at), and a warrior can still take on a pit fiend at level 20. It's not self-evident that higher encounters MUST be gonzo, as someone put it before. DMs can always modify encounters so that they require the right combination of spells to succeed, but that shouldn't be the default of the setting at higher levels. Unless Dungeons & Dragons is specifically a game about wizards pwning everything.

EDIT: This is a little similar to sentiment towards the fighter class in 3rd edition on the CO board. Forum goers would complain that fighters couldn't stack up to NPC wizards that were optimized assuming PC stats, classes, prestige classes, PC wealth by level, and just general OP combos. "The fighter sucks because it can't beat this totally tricked out incantatrix with a million contingency spells and simulacrum and glyphs of warding and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, that's not a default position of the game. NPCs aren't generally assumed to be optimized like that or have that amount of wealth, etc.

You can do that. The DM has all the tools in their toolkit to run those types of encounters. But it's not self-evident that should be the default.

[PhoenixPhyre]

But is an adventure of “cross the three mile wide river” (as an example) always supposed to be a valid adventure option? What are the rules for constructing a set of protected adventure options, or singling out adventure options that are allowed to be invalidated?

I'd take a hard line and say that the issue is invalidating adventure options with a single mechanical button. And yes, that's any adventure option.

Instead, I'd leave the "this is an insignificant challenge, so let's just handwave it" in the hands of the table as a whole, OOC. Characters don't need a "win trivial battles without rolling initiative" button--the DM and table, acting together, should decide "this is a trivial battle, let's not spend the time playing this out". Same for crossing a 3-mile river. Whether that's an invalid adventure challenge is a decision for a table to make, not for the designers to hard-code in. Because tables differ in what they want and hard-coding produces wrong results in most cases.

Rules are scaffolds (in the instructional-design sense). And scaffolds have tradeoffs. Adding more of them, adding more mechanical bits and buttons has real costs. In this case, it encodes "this is trivial" into the game system itself, requiring the system to be modified (which is always an operation with side-effects) if you want to change it. Which for something that varies between groups and even between sessions for the same group (in my experience) is a bad idea, at least IMO.

[OldTrees1]

In a sandbox, people made their choices about what they want to explore starting at character creation. And those choices should matter. If they didn't pick classes who could all fly, maybe they don't want to investigate that flying temple? Not all pieces of a sandbox need to be hit by every party. If we made a party of thieves to explore this city/urban environment, saying "but you need some way to cut through dimensions, because otherwise you can't explore <thing over there>" would feel very forced.

Did you consider the alternative? You keep trying to cast this as a GM vs Player issue. In my case the GM and Players both want this. These are emergent obstacles that face the party where the party chose to go. They didn't "pick classes that can't fly", they picked classes based on other factors, then later wanted to reach a castle in the sky.

To tie into something I said earlier, why not just give the players the option. Some players like you PhoenixPhyre will decide that choosing to be a thief must come with the "can't go to flying castles" drawback. Other players will choose that being a thief means their options to get to a flying castle would make sense for a thief rather than lacking those options or having out of place features.

Now the Flying Castle is the lowest challenge example in this class. I would argue that 5E does an okay job rather than a failing job at this case. There are more advanced examples, however the basic premise is this, should adventures have class quotas, should classes be able to have their own ways to engage with the obstacles the PCs choose to face, or should the players get to choose between those paradigms without sacrificing a more important choice?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Did you consider the alternative? You keep trying to cast this as a GM vs Player issue. In my case the GM and Players both want this. These are emergent obstacles that face the party where the party chose to go. They didn't "pick classes that can't fly", they picked classes based on other factors, then later wanted to reach a castle in the sky.

To tie into something I said earlier, why not just give the players the option. Some players like you PhoenixPhyre will decide that choosing to be a thief must come with the "can't go to flying castles" drawback. Other players will choose that being a thief means their options to get to a flying castle would make sense for a thief rather than lacking those options or having out of place features.

Now the Flying Castle is the lowest challenge example in this class. I would argue that 5E does an okay job rather than a failing job at this case. There are more advanced examples, however the basic premise is this, should adventures have class quotas, should classes be able to have their own ways to engage with the obstacles the PCs choose to face, or should the players get to choose between those paradigms without sacrificing a more important choice?

If the DM and the players are aligned, there are no barriers. You're stuck in the "must have a class feature to do X" (ie button-based) mode of thinking. But class features are only a tiny fraction of the capabilities of the PC. As I mentioned, if the DM and the players are aligned there are other ways available.

And encoding these capabilities in the classes themselves means that all adventures past the threshold point have to include those elements or you're wasting class features (CF the ranger and the hate it gets for not always involving the favored foe/terrain).

[Man_Over_Game]

Spells (and class abilities) are fundamentally boring when they bypass adventure possibilities and provide single-press 'solve situation' buttons. All such spells (or other abilities) should not exist for anyone. Imagine if there was a class ability called "A winner is me." When used upon rolling initiative, the enemies all lose the combat. That's a horrifically anti-fun ability. The same goes for lots of other spells, just not quite as blatantly.

Well, yes, but there's more to it than just success or failure. They're tools that can be used in different ways, for different solutions, relevant exactly when the player decides they are.

Sleep, for instance, doubles as both a combat control spell and a stealth spell. Invisibility can be used to assist the Rogue, hide the NPC, or give your Fighter the chance to reposition for the first strike. Wall of Force functions as a barrier from incoming effects, an obstacle against oncoming enemies, and as a cage. Misty Step lets you retreat, advance, or even just teleport to the top of a building. Catapult can launch objects as more than just a damage spell. And we haven't even started with Enlarge/Reduce.

A Fighter gets a Fighting Style that's relevant for one solution for one kind of problem using one specific kind of gear. There's no additional decision-making or added complexity. Having a Fighting Style actually makes you think less instead of more, since your 'number of optimal choices' gets narrower, while a caster's expands over time.

Even stuff like Magical Items use separate resources, so they aren't quite as interesting as having to plan around specific problems, reserving resources in case those issues came up. Having a Scroll of Featherfall is a lot different than having Featherfall on your spell list - it's a lot less responsibility and less room for error. There's a lot less to think about when all of your solutions are "Emergency Buttons" instead of figuring out how to balance both offense and defense with the same limited resources.

Personally, I like the risk of error. It means each decision I make matters. Spamming the Attack button might be effective in a lot of games, but it's not really my choice when that's how you win the game, ​is it? Not just that, but balancing many options with limited resources means I'm constantly adapting around the world and inquiring about more, instead of relying on the one thing I know will always work without intervention.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well, yes, but there's more to it than just success or failure. They're tools that can be used in different ways, for different solutions, relevant exactly when the player decides they are.

Sleep, for instance, doubles as both a combat control spell and a stealth spell. Invisibility can be used to assist the Rogue, hide the NPC, or give your Fighter the chance to reposition for the first strike. Wall of Force functions as a barrier from incoming effects, an obstacle against oncoming enemies, and as a cage. Misty Step lets you retreat, advance, or even just teleport to the top of a building. And we haven't even started with Enlarge/Reduce.

A Fighter gets a Fighting Style that's relevant for one solution for one kind of problem using one specific kind of gear. There's no additional decision-making or added complexity. Having a Fighting Style actually makes you think less instead of more, since your 'number of optimal choices' gets narrower, while a caster's expands over time.

Even stuff like Magical Items use separate resources, so they aren't quite as interesting as having to plan around specific problems, reserving resources in case those issues came up. Having a Scroll of Featherfall is a lot different than having Featherfall on your spell list - it's a lot less responsibility and less room for error. There's a lot less to think about when all of your solutions are "Emergency Buttons" instead of figuring out how to balance both offense and defense with the same limited resources.

Personally, I like the risk of error. It means each decision I make matters. Spamming the Attack button might be effective in a lot of games, but it's not really my choice when that's how you win the game, ​is it?

That's a completely different issue than what I was talking about. Sleep, invisibility, etc aren't "solve situation with single button" spells. They're part of a solution, to be sure, but they don't solve anything by themselves. And I'm totally fine with opening up such capabilities to everyone in one form or another.

On the other hand, things like teleport, create food and water, planeshift are the equivalent of fast-travel buttons in games. They skip the middle. There's fundamentally no difference between someone saying "I want to be <there>" and casting teleport and someone saying "I want to be <there>" and the DM saying "ok, you're there. What now." Except that when the players can just fiat it into existence, they can miss out on a lot of fun along the way. If they are all agreed on wanting to skip something, having a class-based button doesn't improve anything. If they're not agreed, then there's an issue right there.

And I've said that I'm in favor of moving all of those "taxi" and "utility" options (or at least the broader-scope ones) to non-spell options for everyone. What I don't want is every class being mandated to include the full panoply of taxi-driving abilities and utility options in the framework, just because one class currently has a monopoly. Doing that leads to (justified) claims of "well, he can do <X> and I can't, so I should be able to do <X>" and the end result is that all classes are just the same thing with different colored explosions and animations.

-------

To be perfectly clear--my favored "solution" would be several-fold.
1) Remove all generalists entirely. This means breaking the wizard and cleric classes (especially) into much smaller pieces or locking most of their spell lists behind sub-class barriers, as well as trimming the spell lists to remove spells that do many things. Spell-casters should have a bunch of uni-tasker spells, each one powerful but limited in scope.
2) Add in both non-combat and combat-related "cool things" to those classes now lacking them.
3) Move most of the pieces that were once in spells into "incantations" (ie actual rituals) that anyone can access.
4) Define clear "magic cannot ..." and "only magic can ..." parameters.[1]

[1] hypothetical thought experiment--what if your ability to use magic items were inversely proportional to your ability to cast spells. So a full-caster could not attune to any items and could only use consumables, while a non-caster wouldn't have an attunement limit at all. Alternate one--what if all spells were temporary, including damage ones? So you could KO someone with magic, but they'd come back to life unless you thoroughly sworded them first. You could raise someone from the dead, but it'd only last for a while. You could teleport, but you'd "snap back" after a certain time. Etc. These are all totally hypothetical, but the idea remains. There has to be some limits on magic, otherwise there's no way to have any kind of balance. You can never have balance between "unbounded" and "bounded".

[Man_Over_Game]

That's a completely different issue than what I was talking about...

On the other hand, things like teleport, create food and water, planeshift are the equivalent of fast-travel buttons in games. They skip the middle.

Ah, I understand. I agree completely. Rangers are a perfect example of that second clause: Being able to solve an important step of the game without equal effort ends up just making there less of the game to play. It makes things more boring.

1) Remove all generalists entirely. This means breaking the wizard and cleric classes (especially) into much smaller pieces or locking most of their spell lists behind sub-class barriers, as well as trimming the spell lists to remove spells that do many things. Spell-casters should have a bunch of uni-tasker spells, each one powerful but limited in scope.
2) Add in both non-combat and combat-related "cool things" to those classes now lacking them.
3) Move most of the pieces that were once in spells into "incantations" (ie actual rituals) that anyone can access.

I think that would be very tricky. Taken to an extreme, that could end up with Druids being stuck like Barbarians, having their mechanics locked into a specific kind of solution for a specific kind of problem. Even if the Barbarian can contribute using general rules (as suggested in #3), a Barbarian might want to Barbarian his way out of problems, and that requires a Barbarian solution.

Given, I think there are ways you could add general rules for players to use while still tying them into each character so that the solutions each character brings to the table each feel unique to that character (for instance, tying rituals into your proficiencies or backgrounds or something), so I think there are ways to add generic options without making the game feel more generic as long as it's thorough.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Ah, I understand. I agree completely. Rangers are a perfect example of that second clause: Being able to solve an important step of the game without equal effort ends up just making there less of the game to play. It makes things more boring.

Right. And that's where I struggle with the idea that every class needs "taxi-driving" mechanisms built in. It's the ranger problem writ large.

I think that would be very tricky. Taken to an extreme, that could end up with Druids being stuck like Barbarians, having their mechanics locked into a specific kind of solution for a specific kind of problem. Even if the Barbarian can contribute using general rules (as suggested in #3), a Barbarian might want to Barbarian his way out of problems, and that requires a Barbarian solution.

Given, I think there are ways you could add general rules for players to use while still tying them into each character so that the solutions each character brings to the table each feel unique to that character (for instance, tying rituals into your proficiencies or backgrounds or something), so I think there are ways to add generic options without making the game feel more generic as long as it's thorough.

There's a balance to be struck. I think, for instance, that casters can feel quite different from non-casters by playing off of how they get their versatility. Non-casters could use general mechanisms with a cost being that they don't work all the time, while casters could have more power...but each of their tools only work in this one narrow case, so you have to choose your tools wisely. This doesn't work if they have "swiss-army-knife" tools, where they can do basically anything on just a few key picks.

But you have to start by trimming back the "do anything" abilities. Make room in class budgets by trimming the spell lists back to where they're not the only meaningful class feature. Imagine if you could trim the druid's spell power back far enough that you could bake the Moon druid into the base class, making druids mostly about shape-shifting, with a sideline of spells (rather than the reverse). Or where a war cleric and a life cleric play completely differently instead of having small sprinkles of different behavior past about level 5 or so. Or where a necromancy wizard and an evocation wizard had ~0 overlap in prepared spells in most cases and instead had major meaningful class abilities that played into their themes strongly.

If something is a "must have" spell or ability, it needs to get removed and either baked into the class directly or turned into a generic thing that anyone can access. If it's something that most people are willing to dip into a class for, it needs to be rethought. And in reverse--if there's something that everyone's willing to trade out or is a "don't pick unless you have to", it needs to be rethought or removed as well. Build choices and play choices should be pared down to the ones that can be actually made meaningful--each class should have the necessary tools out of the box to do whatever the designers decide is the right thing. And those "necessary tools" should focus on theme more than checking some metaphorical box on a checklist of "must be this tall to ride" capabilities. Those "permission token" ones should be part of the general system itself. If teleporting is deemed a necessary ability by level 11 (or whatever), then there's a generic "ok, at level 11 you can all teleport" rule. I don't think that particular example is a wise thing, personally, but it's an example.

I'm not opposed to things like "barbarians being really good at breaking things, including possibly metaphysical things or magical things"--a barbarian (under that method) could, in principle, punch through a wall of force or knot the concept of death in a tangle for a bit. Or "fighters are really good at anticipating their opponents moves, so they can predict what the best thing to say is" or "a good thief can steal things that aren't physical".

[strangebloke]

As I've said before, I think the biggest problem with class balance currently is that

1) there's no universal subsystem that only martials get access to meaning they get powercrept
2) its far too easy for casters to beat martials within their own niche of being tough, reliable damage dealers, and has become more easy over time.

like at launch if you're a bard and you want to be a hardy damage dealer you probably want to dip fighter and play a valor bard and crib swift quiver at 10th level. You have to spend a lot of your build resources and though the result is (and was) strong and represented an issue for the supposed niche of the martial, it was one of relatively few ways to do so. The biggest 'problem' from the perspective of casters encroaching on the supposed martial niche were basically: clerics and druids (sorta) and some fighter/warlock and fighter/bard multiclasses.

Nowadays, all CHA casters can become great melee fighters overnight with a single hexblade dip to get CHA-based attacks and damage, a 1/sr hex-like effect, and booming blade and shield and Shield 1/SR and medium armor proficiency and a strong melee cantrip like BB. Take one more level and you're also a great ranged damage dealer, better than most non-SS options and also more hardened (because you can hold a shield while doing it.) Bladesingers are some of the best melee characters while single-classed, and hexblade is up there as well. You don't even need to multiclass to steal fighter tricks, just use a feat whenever its relevant.

The power creep is real, and more importantly this happens in t1 and t2, the tiers people actually play in. Its one thing to say that in a hypothetical 16th level campaign, the fighter might have fallen behind, its another thing to say that a 6th level S&B fighter is getting outpaced within their niche in every possible way by a bard 5/hexblade 1.

And yet within the last two weeks I've seen someone "hoping they add a REAL gish in 5.5e"

[Ralanr]

And yet within the last two weeks I've seen someone "hoping they add a REAL gish in 5.5e"

The more I hear about people wanting Gish's in 5e, the more I feel myself gagging.

"But we don't have an arcane half-caster that isn't the artificer!"

Please make do with the several other options!

[Amechra]

Honestly, I think the real issue here is that D&D is incredibly permissive when it comes to what PC-available magic is capable of. And... maybe it shouldn't be? Maybe things would flow better if "I teleport into the afterlife to have a chat with a god" or "I create a flawless clone of myself, so that Dr. Doom I can just reveal that it was a robot simulacrum all along if I die" weren't things that a particular subset of player characters were handed on a silver platter just for reaching level X?

Like, the problem isn't just that spellcasters can do things that martial characters can't, it's that the stuff martial characters can do is a subset of what spellcasters can do. It'd be different if, I dunno, there were situations where magic was just straight-up inapplicable, and where you had to defer to the Fighter or Rogue to get things done.

I mean, my preference would be if spellcasting was treated more like magic items, with spellcasting classes just being better-suited to using them. So if you found a scroll of Invisibility, for example, you'd hand it over to the Rogue, who'd add it to their toolbox. Or you'd give it to the Wizard, who might be able to make it affect more targets or whatever.

[Kane0]

Ive lost track of how many 'the real problem is X' we're up to.

[Amechra]

Ive lost track of how many 'the real problem is X' we're up to.

Look, the real problem is whatever petty gripe I want to talk about. Get out of here with all of your fake problems, guys.

In all honesty, we have differing ideas of what the issues are, and framing your particular stance as the "real problem" is an easy and convenient rhetorical device.

[Ralanr]

In all honesty, we have differing ideas of what the issues are, and framing your particular stance as the "real problem" is an easy and convenient rhetorical device.

One might say that's a real problem.

[strangebloke]

Pretty much the entire debate comes down to whether the solution is to "nerf casters" or to "buff martials" and then also down to what a theoretical buff to martials would even look like.

Personally, my goal in starting the thread wasn't to talk about a balance fix, it was to talk about making martials more interesting. But obviously that flows into talking about balance.

[Pex]

Here's the thing--

If you plan your adventure around the idea that planeshift (or any other specific spell) must be available at a particular point, you're planning a very linear adventure and should have OOC player buy in to what that means. And even just having a party of a sorcerer, a wizard, a cleric, and a druid doesn't mean you'll have planeshift (or any other particular spell) available. So what you need to do is sit the players down and say "hey, we're doing a linear adventure and you need to have planeshift/spell Y by level X". Or provide an in-adventure way of accessing it (which works for any class). Same as any other mcguffin/plot token. Anything "required by the plot" should be provided by the plot. Otherwise you end up running a high risk of unintended bad ends. Just like any other single point of failure.

If I have a full-caster party, I plan different adventures than if I have a full-martial party. In many many ways. Heck, two different groups with exactly the same combinations should end up with very different adventures. The adventure depends on the players and their characters, not vice versa.

It's fine you do that, but some people resent having to thus their complaint spellcasters rule warriors drool. Some people's solution is to ban anything and everything associated with being a spellcaster with a few wanting to apply restrictions a player would wish he wasn't playing one. Others wants to give warriors bells and whistles with a few who would prefer they just be relegated to NPC hireling status.

It's an argument brought up in past threads. If an adventure needs Plane Shift but the party's class abilities can't do it, the DM will provide it via Portal, magic item, or NPC. It's then a question of does the DM resent having to do that, do the players resent that was necessary, or no one cares, Plane Shift, and do the adventure. It's the first two who do the yelling about D&D magic.