Opinion: Will D&D ever acheive caster vs martial balance?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Complexity bloat is a problem. 2e AD&D actually had a bunch of rules to mitigate the advantages of flying creatures generally - ex. no flying below 50% of max HP, and dragons specifically - dragons couldn't cast spells while engaged in powered flight, only while gliding, and since they dropped rapidly while gliding this made it very difficult for them to throw spells at anything on the ground without crashing. 2e generally had all kinds of special rules for different creatures, often applied entirely ad hoc in the various MM entries, and they were confusing and bizarre and not at all balanced.

The real world is complicated, and a game is a necessarily simplified model. The more complexity that is added to the model the more difficult to utilize it becomes. Simplification of various real-world phenomena is essential. The problem is that doing so inevitably creates imbalances in the system. D&D, especially from 3e onwards, simplifies flight in a manner that in unbalanced in favor of flying beings. That wouldn't be a problem if flying enemies were rare encounters built around a gimmick, but flying enemies are found at every level, and players quickly realized that flight was an OP ability and significant investment was justified in getting it as soon as possible. This meant that class/race combinations able to acquire flight quickly or at minimal cost gained an advantage over those that were not able to do that. That's a consequence of simplifying in favor of mechanistically easy but fundamentally inaccurate flight rules.

I don't disagree. Frankly though, I've never had too much of an issue with flying creatures, because the party isn't usually (or even always) fighting them in a big open field where they can do nothing but fly around. And even if they were, those kinds of fights are boring for everyone. And most flying things don't have all that great of ranged attacks.

Dragons might be inherently magical (in some settings, not all of them), but a huge number of fantasy fliers are not. No one's calling a Griffon or Hippogriff inherently magical. The square cube law actually allows for really, really big terrestrial animals, like sauropods, so massive animals like landwyrms are perfectly plausible. Even giants are to a degree doable if you alter the bone structure from something beyond 'scaled-up human.'

And the worlds of D&D are trying to be realistic (admittedly how much varies by edition), but it's confined to the bottom end of the power scale. Notably the extraordinary amount of detail lavished on tiny mechanical differences between various weapons - 2e AD&D applied minutely different stats to something like thirty different polearms right in the PHB - is absolutely intended to simulate a more 'realistic' quasi-medieval world. D&D moves away from realism as power increases, not out of any deliberate intent, but because the amount of input supplied by differences in wholly fantastical factors simply swamps that provided by simulated variation.

Martial classes are at a disadvantage because they get more boosts to simulated real-world abilities, like skills or combat moves (feats, etc.) while caster classes get boosts to wholly fantastical abilities.

I'm coming from the standpoint of 5e, which doesn't do much of any of that, and explicitly states that dragons (and griffons, etc) are fantastical. Heck, there are birds that are way too big to fly. As well as things like giant insects. If you insist on any kind of actual realism, the entire setting and system falls entirely apart.

And that last part? That's the real kicker--people insist that "not casting spells === totally mundane and not fantastic". When there's so much more possibility out there if we were to just allow everything in a fantastic world to be fantastic. That doesn't mean throwing fireballs or punching mountains out (or punching holes in reality), but it would let us be a little bit elastic with our sense of realism.

Especially since most of what people demand to be "realistic" isn't actually even in keeping with real reality. Real reality is the weirdest thing I know of. Lots of crazy crap happens there that would never fly in a fictional work.

[Telok]

But increases the complexity and overhead tremendously, slowing play. Also, it is ripe for the same sorts of abuse as called shots.

And unless every type of monster had their own chart, absurdity results. Because not all monsters have vulnerable underbellies. And adding those charts is a big undertaking to do right.

Why the assumption that called shots are some sort of over powered one-shot-kill? Why assume every critter needs a custom chart? Why can't successive called shots to motive limbs reduce speed by 10' each and ground a winged flyer when its fly speed drops under half? Why not have one generic chart that runs off the rolled to-hit total to determine a location? Why can't occasional weird shape monsters just have one sentence tacked on the modify the general location results?

All these things have been done in other games. They work, casual gamers pick it up easy fine because its less complicated than the jank bonus action spell stuff or poor beastmaster ranger pet. It can be an optional rule in the DMG like check DC examples so players don't get to expect it be default and near nobody will ever use it, or you could put it in the front explanation bit of the monster manual.

I mean, I've done those 'why' things (well not the one hit kill or custom locs per critter) in the first paragraph in other games. They add player options & open up new tactics. Shoot the bear in the foot then run away because now you're faster than it. But you can't do that in D&D because its perfect since the expert users can make up everything they need and you must not let players expect to be able to do anything without explicit DM pre-approval or let mundanes have nice things.

[False God]

But increases the complexity and overhead tremendously, slowing play. Also, it is ripe for the same sorts of abuse as called shots.

No.

And unless every type of monster had their own chart, absurdity results. Because not all monsters have vulnerable underbellies. And adding those charts is a big undertaking to do right.

Also no.

The chart is fairly simple. The average body consists of 10 pieces. Head, Neck, 4 Limbs, 4 torso segments (two on the bottom/front upper and lower and two on the back/top upper and lower). This divides nicely into 100% of whatever their HP total is. This is applicable to almost every creature imaginable. Dragons have 3 additional parts: Tail and 2 wings. The math is equally simple:
Calculate the total HP of your monster, lets say it's 100 for simplicity.
Divide by 10 and apply 40% of it to the torso section.
Divine the remainder by the number of limbs and count the head and neck as bonus limb. (it doesn't matter how many you have), that's the percentage of the total health each limb. Then separate out the head and neck again into their own parts.
Assign bonuses or penalties appropriately to the AC or DR of each piece.
Each body part represents a specific penalty when damaged to a certain point. The wings can't sustain flight, the legs can't sustain movement arms can't make the moves for attacks or spells. Some body parts have special effects, ie: destroying the head or neck or any 2 torso parts often kills the creature. Maybe the dragon can't breathe fire if its neck is below 50% health. Enough damage and the body part may bleed out, draining health from the rest of the creature.

There. Body chart done for any creature you can imagine in about 2 minutes.

And before you say "but that's so much more work!" no, it isn't. You'll do it once for any given creature and have it ready for that creature forever. You'll get a feel for what penalties are best on any body part, what bonuses are best, and it'll take you 30 seconds to slap the "body damage chart" on top of any creature you want to run.

Arms get a dodge bonus, torso's get DR, necks are smaller targets and harder to hit, etc...

PLUS! And stay with me because this offer is only available for a limited time! You'll never have to deal with "called shot" rules again. Each body part has it's own defined AC, HP, DR, etc..., if someone wants to shoot at the neck, it's no different than saying they want to shoot at goblin #5.

Edit: more fundamentally, dragons are powerful flying creatures because they're magical creatures. A dragon inherently draws on power to fly and to even exist. Heck, the square cube law has gone out the window a long time ago just by getting to land-dwelling creatures that size. Let alone giants. Introducing realism to D&D always goes poorly. Which also gives us the out--martials can do heroic things that aren't realistic because the world isn't realistic. Or even trying to be.

Not my argument.

[PhoenixPhyre]

No.


Also no.

The chart is fairly simple. The average body consists of 10 pieces. Head, Neck, 4 Limbs, 4 torso segments (two on the bottom/front upper and lower and two on the back/top upper and lower). This divides nicely into 100% of whatever their HP total is. This is applicable to almost every creature imaginable. Dragons have 3 additional parts: Tail and 2 wings. The math is equally simple:
Calculate the total HP of your monster, lets say it's 100 for simplicity.
Divide by 10 and apply 40% of it to the torso section.
Divine the remainder by the number of limbs and count the head and neck as bonus limb. (it doesn't matter how many you have), that's the percentage of the total health each limb. Then separate out the head and neck again into their own parts.
Assign bonuses or penalties appropriately to the AC or DR of each piece.
Each body part represents a specific penalty when damaged to a certain point. The wings can't sustain flight, the legs can't sustain movement arms can't make the moves for attacks or spells. Some body parts have special effects, ie: destroying the head or neck or any 2 torso parts often kills the creature. Maybe the dragon can't breathe fire if its neck is below 50% health. Enough damage and the body part may bleed out, draining health from the rest of the creature.

There. Body chart done for any creature you can imagine in about 2 minutes.

And before you say "but that's so much more work!" no, it isn't. You'll do it once for any given creature and have it ready for that creature forever. You'll get a feel for what penalties are best on any body part, what bonuses are best, and it'll take you 30 seconds to slap the "body damage chart" on top of any creature you want to run.

Arms get a dodge bonus, torso's get DR, necks are smaller targets and harder to hit, etc...

PLUS! And stay with me because this offer is only available for a limited time! You'll never have to deal with "called shot" rules again. Each body part has it's own defined AC, HP, DR, etc..., if someone wants to shoot at the neck, it's no different than saying they want to shoot at goblin #5.

But now you have to do that...and balance it...for every single monster you ever use. And now each monster takes 10x the space in the books, meaning 1/10th the monsters. And you have to look up those tables for every attack and track 10 separate AC/HP pools, plus all the effects attendant to each body part. Meaning that if you're running anything more than one monster, everything now takes ~20x as long to resolve and the mental tracking overhead goes up ~100x (because demands are roughly quadratic on memory). Per monster at the table. You also have to adjudicate how area affects affect HP of each part. Tables are slow.

Basically, this only works if you only ever fight one big monster. Which is the pathological case for D&D as a whole.

And you get absurdity if you try to apply blanket rules, so each and every monster is a special case. And so you can't really learn much, or you're restricted to a very limited palette of monsters. That's going to make balance worse, not better.

Yes, you could do it in a system designed around that from the get go. One where you're not expecting to run 2x as many monsters as PCs (the default for 5e, for instance) on a regular basis. One where if a single turn takes 15 minutes, that's normal and expected. But that's not a game I want to play.

[False God]

But now you have to do that...and balance it...for every single monster you ever use. And now each monster takes 10x the space in the books, meaning 1/10th the monsters. And you have to look up those tables for every attack and track 10 separate AC/HP pools, plus all the effects attendant to each body part. Meaning that if you're running anything more than one monster, everything now takes ~20x as long to resolve and the mental tracking overhead goes up ~100x (because demands are roughly quadratic on memory). Per monster at the table. You also have to adjudicate how area affects affect HP of each part. Tables are slow.

You're really making a mountain out of a mole-hill here.

It's really nowhere near as complicated or time consuming as you make it sound.

But considering you haven't tried it, I suspect you probably don't know anything about how it actually works in play. So, ya know.

And you get absurdity if you try to apply blanket rules, so each and every monster is a special case. And so you can't really learn much, or you're restricted to a very limited palette of monsters. That's going to make balance worse, not better.

I mean, you're patently wrong on both claims here. I don't know how to explain how wrong you are other than I literally run this on almost every single game and every single monster.

Yes, you could do it in a system designed around that from the get go. One where you're not expecting to run 2x as many monsters as PCs (the default for 5e, for instance) on a regular basis. One where if a single turn takes 15 minutes, that's normal and expected. But that's not a game I want to play.

Considering it's an optional, entirely home-brewed system, play whatever you want. And yes, I think it should be included as an entirely optional extra system for people who want more complex play, but the level of hyperbole you're using is just plain silly.

[Tanarii]

I've played plenty of games with hit locations. They almost universally slow down game play and are always abusable using features built in to the game. The slowing down of the game is usually ameliorated if there's a layer of wound points before e.g. hit locations for critical hits, but those system very often have methods to inflict critical hits bypassing wound points, which is even more abusable.

The upside is they typically give you a far more brutal game where maiming and death is common and expected.

[KorvinStarmast]

I've payed plenty of games with hit locations. They almost universally slow down game play and are always abusable using features built in to the game. The slowing down of the game is usually ameliorated if there's a layer of wound points before e.g. hit locations for critical hits, but those system very often have methods to inflict critical hits bypassing wound points, which is even more abusable.

The upside is they typically give you a far more brutal game where maiming and death is common and expected.

We used the Hit Location a bit in OD&D and eventually discarded as being too clunky.

[Psyren]

So making the GM having to account for that when designing encounters would be bad but making the GM having to account for a very wide range of power levels and abilities when designing encounters (to ensure that everyone can contribute) is good?

BRC nailed it again but also - what "very wide range?" Are we playing the same 5e, or are you thinking of 3e?

[RandomPeasant]

You still haven't responded to the fact that he beat Hela, a major villain, with his magic - not any weapons.

Because that's not a fact? Thor beats Hela with a McGuffin.

I tried to be generous but let's be frank lol, I'm not the problem here.

Real "generous" energy there.

You constantly shift goal posts.

No, I don't. You're just dropping the ball at the 50-yard line repeatedly and expecting people to score you touchdowns. When I say "Aragorn is not a good example of a high level character", and then your next example of the archetype is another character that isn't as powerful as high level characters are, that's you not reaching the goalposts, not me moving them.

LMAO, coming from the same guy that said Captain America doesn't count because he was wielding Mjolnir, meanwhile I use him as an example all the time.

So your definition of a "mundane" character is one who A) is explicitly super-human and B) has the power of a god from an artifact weapon? There are book series where characters who are literal demigods are less powerful than that. So, like, maybe the issue here is that you just don't have super consistent preferences.

Once again RandomPeasant refusing to elaborate at all on their position.

What "elaboration" is necessary for the argument that "normal people don't survive getting hit by meteors"? Do you have some examples of people who walked off getting hit with something that would disintegrate a grizzly bear? And, no, this is not magic items helping out, a Fighter (even in 5e) is quite capable of surviving a meteor swarm naked. That's simply not "mundane" by any useful definition of the word.

And you haven't explained how your caster would either, nor why that should be the standard. Nor even what the difficulty would be for an epic level warrior to face a xixecal. By all means, please do the work to make your case.

Do you honestly believe a Wizard can't do that? Because I am willing to do the work if it'll change things, but I don't think the ability of Wizards to be effective at high levels is much in dispute. This strikes me as an isolated demand for rigor, and I believe that if I were to present such a build I would be told that I had violated the system logic, or that it didn't mean every Wizard could do such things, or that what did my arguments with 3e content matter after 5e.

I think it should be the standard because it is an encounter that seems pretty "epic" to me. I don't think it should be the only standard, but you've violently rejected the idea that there could be some standards that your purely mundane warrior doesn't reach, so going out and agreeing with you that Ogres should be the standard at 3rd level or Ettins should be the standard at 8th level or whatever seems less than productive. For all that you seem to think I'm the worst person in the world and that I hate the things you love, I'm fairly sure that my position involves mundane martials getting more things at low levels than you'd give them.

It is certainly possible to produce an epic level warrior that could fight a xixecal. They're just not going to be "mundane". Even ignoring the manifestly superhuman ability they have, they will have picked up Epic feats that allow them to move at superhuman speed or imbue their weapons with magical powers or all manner of other things.

No matter which edition of D&D I choose, I can play a mundane martial at high levels.

This is just wrong.

In 5e, your "mundane" can survive that meteor swarm, so unless you're prepared to claim that all a person needs to be tough than a grizzly bear or an elephant is train really hard, that's not a mundane character.

In 4e, you can probably manage a Paragon-tier character that's fully mundane with a path like Pit Fighter or something. But your Epic Destiny is going to put you in solidly non-mundane territory.

In 3e, your "mundane" can survive falling from orbit naked. He can reasonably have enough HP that he doesn't even need to check the damage rolls to do so. He just walks it off automatically. Honestly, that's probably more durability than the MCU versions of the heroes that are being categorically rejected as even being "martial", let alone "mundane".

I don't know enough about AD&D to say for sure if you're wrong there, but you are wrong in every edition for the last 20 years, which is plenty wrong for me.

What puzzles me is that your argument seems to explicitly support the worst kind of DM, who only lets PCs do what he thought of beforehand and shuts down any solution that would "ruin" his encounter. You're admitting that clearer skill rules enable player creativity more than they impede it, but then saying that's a bad thing.

This is an exactly correct analysis. Fuzzy rules don't help players. You can always appeal to the DM with "wouldn't this be cool". Clear rules empower players, because they provide a way to work towards a character that you know can do the cool thing you want to do. If there's no DC for jumping on the dragon's back and wrestling it to the earth, my only strategy to do that is to hope I can sell it to my DM in a way that makes him think it sounds cool. If there's a DC for it, I can simply build a character that makes that DC.

So making the GM having to account for that when designing encounters would be bad but making the GM having to account for a very wide range of power levels and abilities when designing encounters (to ensure that everyone can contribute) is good?

It's interesting that Psyren just dodged here. Because, yeah, it sure does seem that way. And, as Elves points out, the overall model this points to is basically "you shouldn't have any abilities that will let you off the DM's rails or let you do things without the DM's permission", and that's giving up the things that make TTRPGs interesting.

The DM should be accounting for their party's abilities regardless.

There's a difference between "okay this party has shadow walk as their fast-travel power rather than teleport, I'll add a scene where they can use the fact that they can take a bunch of extra people easily lets them save civilians" and "alright how do I set up the archery challenge for this adventure so that the bow guy isn't hosed".

If you've got a table for "Jumping on a creature's back" that says "Landing on the back of a large flying creature is DC 12+1 for every 10 feet of fly speed it has". Well your griffon has a fly speed of 80ft, rules say making that jump is going to be Extraordinarily Difficult for your low level fighter, so much so that it's probably just better for him to throw javelins from the ground rather than try to do anything cool.

I agree that if you expect people to do cool things, you need to give them abilities that make pulling off those cool things realistic. But I really don't see how that's an argument for mechanical fuzziness in your rules for doing cool stuff. Casters have very explicit allowances in their stuff-doing, and while there are complaints about casters, "my Wizard isn't able to do enough cool stuff" is very seldom among them.

Unfortunately, fantasy aesthetics is heavy wedded to super-flight - and I'll be the first to admit that classical dragons are indeed supremely cool looking - so this fix is difficult to sustain.

I don't know that you need to nerf fliers that much to make "throw javelins at it" a viable alternative for the Fighter. After all, "throw javelins at it" is a weapon attack, and the Fighter's plan after jumping astride the dragon probably involves making a lot of weapon attacks. So from a balance perspective, all you really need to do is ensure that Fighters don't have to hyper-specialize into a specific type of weapon and things will work alright organically. It's not even difficult to imagine why the dragon might want to close to melee with the Fighter. A breath weapon is a crowd-control AoE, so in a relatively balanced environment, you'd expect that shots from it wouldn't win the damage race with a Fighter making single-target attacks. The reason strafing works so well for Dragons in D&D is as much a function of melee characters tending to have very poor ranged options as any question of realism around flight.

Notably the extraordinary amount of detail lavished on tiny mechanical differences between various weapons - 2e AD&D applied minutely different stats to something like thirty different polearms right in the PHB - is absolutely intended to simulate a more 'realistic' quasi-medieval world.

I don't think that's a "realism" thing so much as a "D&D writers really like obsessively listing out weapons" thing. When this comes up, people always seem to object to some part or other of the weapons charts, declaring swords or spears or bows or whatever to be too good or too bad or to model the relative strengths wrong. And, yeah, some percentage of those people are probably wrong, but the degree of argument indicates to me that it's at least not being very effective at producing something that feels realistic.

[Telok]

I've played plenty of games with hit locations. They almost universally slow down game play and are always abusable using features built in to the game.

So, I'm thinking this is maybe like part of the "mundanes can't have nice stuff" type things. Adding something like a hypothetical disadvantage attack to call hit location for effect & target gets save" is seen as too complicated, too over powered, and too slow. Despite it basically being battle master moves for taking disadv instead of maneuver dice, and despite it being basically similar or same mechanical effects to low level spells like sleep, hold, and darkness.

People hold up battle master as like the in-combat martial wizard for tossing a few low level spell effects as riders on hit. But bring the effects more in line with spells higher than 2nd level, open it up to non-combat effects, or try to formalize actual "yes the game intends a 15th fighter level fighter is allowed to jump 25' without having to roll a 30" as advice? Nope. You get an instant chorus of "too slow", "too complex", "impossible to balance", and "takes too much space in books".

Doing the hard work to create, balance, test, and manage real & interesting choices & options is what you're supposed to be paying professional game designers for. Shelling out $60 & more for books of wonky frameworks that shaft 30% or more of pc options, saying its the DMs fault when the game gives outright stupid or invalid results if the DM doesn't have a decade of previous DMing & a deep understanding of stats math, complaining when anyone suggests alternative to try to improve the status quo... Nah, they'll never fix the "casters rule & fighters beg". Too many people are happy with the way things are and very vocally fight all suggestions to help the mundanes, no matter how much they also complain about the problems.

Anyways, this thread had wandered back into the weeds of how the DM can fiat fix everything so anything else is bad. I'm out. Peace be on ya berks.

[Tanarii]

So, I'm thinking this is maybe like part of the "mundanes can't have nice stuff" type things. Adding something like a hypothetical disadvantage attack to call hit location for effect & target gets save" is seen as too complicated, too over powered, and too slow. Despite it basically being battle master moves for taking disadv instead of maneuver dice, and despite it being basically similar or same mechanical effects to low level spells like sleep, hold, and darkness.

No. It's usually "hit and hamper or maim a limb for days to weeks, possibly permanently" or "critical head shot and kill"

I had no problems with 4e damage + rider powers, even as a resource, for Martials. That doesn't require taking extra time out of every attack, weapon or magical, throughout combat to determine each one's hit locations and tracking individual damage per location or long term critical effects.

I've played a few such systems that were fun despite slowing things down. They always had ablative damage first, followed by brutal critical hits with location only determined when there was a critical and the only way to kill something was said criticals. But even then they had ways to bypass the ablative damage and go straight to criticals. They were fun in spite of the problems in such systems though. Because I personally happen to like games where enemies that don't flee face being messily killed, and PCs have to deal with long term injuries and the death spiral that usually results.

[Mechalich]

So, I'm thinking this is maybe like part of the "mundanes can't have nice stuff" type things. Adding something like a hypothetical disadvantage attack to call hit location for effect & target gets save" is seen as too complicated, too over powered, and too slow. Despite it basically being battle master moves for taking disadv instead of maneuver dice, and despite it being basically similar or same mechanical effects to low level spells like sleep, hold, and darkness.

For a great many tables on the low end of system mastery, a huge fraction of the overall D&D mechanical system is seen as 'too complicated, too over powered, and too slow,' and - and this is important - those tables simply ignore those rules. A common example from the 3.X was grappling. The grappling rules weren't overpowered, but they were comparatively complicated and slow, and so in many tables the unspoken agreement was 'no grapples.' Likewise, Energy Drain has always been one of the most annoying abilities in the game, because it forces players to recalculate essentially every role on their character sheet, and many GMs, myself included, operated with the understanding the monsters with energy drain were not to be used and spells like Enervation functionally did not exist. Even whole massive subsystems, like Psionics, were often banned from games entirely not because anyone disliked psionics, but because learning an adjudicating another, slightly different, magic system was considered more trouble than it was worth.

And, in fairness, many of the most broken things casters can do, like Summoning and Shapechanging, are in fact complicated and slow, and many of the tables that avoid martial/caster balance issues do so by soft banning those sorts of things. For example, a table might not ban Planar Binding outright, but if the GM and every other player roll their eyes when the Wizard proposes casting it, well...it probably doesn't see that much play. Additionally, when you take a full caster and simplify them down to the level of the standard martial - so that 90% of their combat turns are 'I attack X' - you get something like the 3.5 Warlock, which isn't out of balance with the Martials at all.

However, there's huge resistance to stripping away options from games, even options that mostly exist in a primarily theoretical space and only see play at some frightfully tiny fraction of tables. A good example is super-high level monsters. Paizo managed to, through the course of PF 1e, write up stats for all 9 Lords of Hell, numerous Demon Lords, a half-dozen Great Old Ones (including Cthulhu itself), and a bunch of other stupidly powerful entities with CRs at or approaching 30. None of this was actually necessary, but some fraction of players wanted stats to exist for such beings even though they'd never actually play in a campaign where they were engaged in combat, and so books were filled to that end. In many ways the problem is ultimately one of legacy; after all 4e made it clear that balance is possible if you slaughter enough sacred cows, but the fanbase values those cows higher than any principle of good game design.

[Pex]

No. It's usually "hit and hamper or maim a limb for days to weeks, possibly permanently" or "critical head shot and kill"

I had no problems with 4e damage + rider powers, even as a resource, for Martials. That doesn't require taking extra time out of every attack, weapon or magical, throughout combat to determine each one's hit locations and tracking individual damage per location or long term critical effects.

I've played a few such systems that were fun despite slowing things down. They always had ablative damage first, followed by brutal critical hits with location only determined when there was a critical and the only way to kill something was said criticals. But even then they had ways to bypass the ablative damage and go straight to criticals. They were fun in spite of the problems in such systems though. Because I personally happen to like games where enemies that don't flee face being messily killed, and PCs have to deal with long term injuries and the death spiral that usually results.

It's the non-combat stuff that gets the more flak. Even something simple as climbing a tree gives people a conniption fit. How dare there be rules for it! Let me the DM decide, and if another DM doesn't do it the way I do they're just playing wrong. That has happened. You were there.

For a great many tables on the low end of system mastery, a huge fraction of the overall D&D mechanical system is seen as 'too complicated, too over powered, and too slow,' and - and this is important - those tables simply ignore those rules. A common example from the 3.X was grappling. The grappling rules weren't overpowered, but they were comparatively complicated and slow, and so in many tables the unspoken agreement was 'no grapples.' Likewise, Energy Drain has always been one of the most annoying abilities in the game, because it forces players to recalculate essentially every role on their character sheet, and many GMs, myself included, operated with the understanding the monsters with energy drain were not to be used and spells like Enervation functionally did not exist. Even whole massive subsystems, like Psionics, were often banned from games entirely not because anyone disliked psionics, but because learning an adjudicating another, slightly different, magic system was considered more trouble than it was worth.

And, in fairness, many of the most broken things casters can do, like Summoning and Shapechanging, are in fact complicated and slow, and many of the tables that avoid martial/caster balance issues do so by soft banning those sorts of things. For example, a table might not ban Planar Binding outright, but if the GM and every other player roll their eyes when the Wizard proposes casting it, well...it probably doesn't see that much play. Additionally, when you take a full caster and simplify them down to the level of the standard martial - so that 90% of their combat turns are 'I attack X' - you get something like the 3.5 Warlock, which isn't out of balance with the Martials at all.

However, there's huge resistance to stripping away options from games, even options that mostly exist in a primarily theoretical space and only see play at some frightfully tiny fraction of tables. A good example is super-high level monsters. Paizo managed to, through the course of PF 1e, write up stats for all 9 Lords of Hell, numerous Demon Lords, a half-dozen Great Old Ones (including Cthulhu itself), and a bunch of other stupidly powerful entities with CRs at or approaching 30. None of this was actually necessary, but some fraction of players wanted stats to exist for such beings even though they'd never actually play in a campaign where they were engaged in combat, and so books were filled to that end. In many ways the problem is ultimately one of legacy; after all 4e made it clear that balance is possible if you slaughter enough sacred cows, but the fanbase values those cows higher than any principle of good game design.

You don't need to slaughter cows to make things better. Let the wizard cast Forcecage, but suggest the idea that a fighter with 20 ST can jump down from a height of 20 ft to the ground below without injury and people go into figurative hysterics complaining even Olympians doing the high jump need mats to break their fall. Some people will not get past Guy At The Gym.

[Dr.Samurai]

Including a "body chart" with semi-independent HP, AC, and such really isn't that difficult to tack on.

I will let my DMs know that and tell them to jump right on it then

Real "generous" energy there.

I agree. You've done nothing to foster good will in this discussion, beginning with framing it as selfish people vs unselfish people. And yet I still tried to walk away respectfully and without placing blame. But you can't help yourself it seems, and neither can I.

No, I don't.

Yes, you do, as I've already demonstrated. And I'm about to demonstrate it again.

You're just dropping the ball at the 50-yard line repeatedly and expecting people to score you touchdowns. When I say "Aragorn is not a good example of a high level character", and then your next example of the archetype is another character that isn't as powerful as high level characters are, that's you not reaching the goalposts, not me moving them.

This is a poor example because it's not even the argument. We have explained numerous times what people mean when they point to Aragorn. You are making an argument that because Aragorn does not do high level things, mundane martials should be excluded from high level play.

No one is engaging with that argument, apart from disagreeing, because it's a ridiculous argument.

So your definition of a "mundane" character is one who A) is explicitly super-human and B) has the power of a god from an artifact weapon? There are book series where characters who are literal demigods are less powerful than that. So, like, maybe the issue here is that you just don't have super consistent preferences.

Captain America is not "super-human". And he has an artifact weapon, so do D&D characters. You know that we're dealing with imperfect definitions here, and you know what people are explaining/describing. I've already asked you why you ignore the context of D&D when it comes to mechanics representing mundanes in a way that would make them tougher and stronger than in the real world.

There is nothing Captain America does in the MCU that can't be replicated by a high level martial with a magic shield or magic hammer.

What "elaboration" is necessary for the argument that "normal people don't survive getting hit by meteors"?

Here we go. You are trying to hold us to this definition of "mundane" that simply can't work in D&D and it's just to win an argument. This point you're making erodes your own argument elsewhere. See below.

You have been so kind and generous as to tell us that you would allow mundane martials to play the game at say... levels below 10 or something to that effect.

An 8th level fighter can survive a fall at terminal velocity. That would, by your own definition, make him not mundane. Which means that these levels would be insufficient for mundane martials. And we can try to go even lower to satisfy your completely arbitrary wants and needs, but even at level 1 a fighter can wrestle a gorilla and knock it prone and prevent it from standing up with his bears hands.

By your standards, "mundane" people simply do not exist at all in D&D, because they can do things that "normal people" can't. And there's more.

At some point, a wizard can ALSO survive a fall at terminal velocity, or even a Meteor Swarm if they make their saving throw. And that's without spells or magic items. It's just a function of HP, which I've mentioned before. By your own reasoning, wizards are also not just mundanes that learn how to cast spells. Rather, at some point, since they aren't mundane, they should begin mutating or ascending into anime sword saints as well, and learn to lash together gravitational surges to fly without using a 3rd level spell slot.

Do you have some examples of people who walked off getting hit with something that would disintegrate a grizzly bear? And, no, this is not magic items helping out, a Fighter (even in 5e) is quite capable of surviving a meteor swarm naked. That's simply not "mundane" by any useful definition of the word.

"Mundane" is in the context of the D&D rules. Please stop pretending as if the game throws the concept of "mundane" out the window or something, or that wizards wouldn't also be transforming by this definition.

Do you honestly believe a Wizard can't do that? Because I am willing to do the work if it'll change things, but I don't think the ability of Wizards to be effective at high levels is much in dispute. This strikes me as an isolated demand for rigor, and I believe that if I were to present such a build I would be told that I had violated the system logic, or that it didn't mean every Wizard could do such things, or that what did my arguments with 3e content matter after 5e.

It's been many years since I've played 3rd edition, so I don't recall what options high level martials have, or what all the spells do, or what is the impact of a blizzard, etc. So... we don't have to have details I suppose, and then the example is just you asserting something.

But if I recall... the options at high level are rather skewed. 3rd edition itself wasn't exactly awesome toward martials either. I think at those levels a martial can grab a feat to increase their BAB by 1? And spellcasters can grab a feat to unlock Epic Spellcasting which lets you learn recipes to craft spells beyond 9th level. I'm sure there's nicer things there for martials but probably precious little that can assist vs the xixecal's saving throw DCs.

And if the martial is taking on the dragon entourage while the wizard attacks the xixecal, does that count? Or does the martial need to solo a xixecal?

I think it should be the standard because it is an encounter that seems pretty "epic" to me. I don't think it should be the only standard, but you've violently rejected the idea that there could be some standards that your purely mundane warrior doesn't reach, so going out and agreeing with you that Ogres should be the standard at 3rd level or Ettins should be the standard at 8th level or whatever seems less than productive. For all that you seem to think I'm the worst person in the world and that I hate the things you love, I'm fairly sure that my position involves mundane martials getting more things at low levels than you'd give them.

I think we just have wildly different expectations for high level play. NichG was the only one to answer my questions about what martials might need at high level play, and their examples are so far removed from my own experiences that I would think they're playing a different game altogether.

It's the non-combat stuff that gets the more flak. Even something simple as climbing a tree gives people a conniption fit. How dare there be rules for it! Let me the DM decide, and if another DM doesn't do it the way I do they're just playing wrong. That has happened. You were there.

You don't need to slaughter cows to make things better. Let the wizard cast Forcecage, but suggest the idea that a fighter with 20 ST can jump down from a height of 20 ft to the ground below without injury and people go into figurative hysterics complaining even Olympians doing the high jump need mats to break their fall. Some people will not get past Guy At The Gym.

Agreed. And I've given the jumping example before in these threads. My DM was like "nope".

It's inconsistent to complain about complexity and bloat when the PHB devotes an entire chapter to spells and spellcasting and all but a handful of class/subclasses don't cast spells... This is a failure of imagination and/or will. Because we can easily produce a pared down, simple, "for the newbs" version of spellcasting. But we don't. It needs to be there. I think the same needs to be done for combat for martials.

[RandomPeasant]

You don't need to slaughter cows to make things better. Let the wizard cast Forcecage, but suggest the idea that a fighter with 20 ST can jump down from a height of 20 ft to the ground below without injury and people go into figurative hysterics complaining even Olympians doing the high jump need mats to break their fall. Some people will not get past Guy At The Gym.

I also just don't agree that people will automatically reject your game if you kill sacred cows. 3e killed plenty of sacred cows, and that was the most popular version of the game until 5e. It was so popular that "more 3e" outsold the next version of the game! People will play your game if they like it, and they won't play it if they don't. Sacred cows have, at best, an extremely tangential relationship to that.

beginning with framing it as selfish people vs unselfish people.

You don't exactly have the high ground here. For all that I've repeatedly said that I want the game to include all the same elements, you keep telling me I want to remove things from the game because I think that you should write "8" or "13" or "10" on your character sheet when you have a particular set of abilities rather than "20".

We have explained numerous times what people mean when they point to Aragorn.

And I have explained multiple times why I don't find those arguments compelling. That's not the same as not understanding them.

The first problem is that I don't really see any compelling examples of what this "Aragorn archetype" is supposed to look like at high levels. Apparently the archetype is one that scales via better magic items. But that's not how Aragorn scales. He gets Andúril reforged right at the start of the story, but he doesn't ever cash it in for a better sword, or pick up some named armor, or get a ring of power. When he gets a powerup, it's that he commands a ghost army. So right off the bat this seems like a shaky archetype to me. But, fine, can agree that Aragorn looks passably mundane for the events of LotR and we can just kinda handwave the rest. So where are the examples of characters like this that do scale up this way? Where are the stories where people get better just by upgrading their gear? The Avenger who fights Thanos with gear and no personal superhuman abilities is Iron Man, but apparently he's not part of the archetype. So who is?

The second problem is that I don't really see a compelling distinction between getting supernatural power from magic items and getting personal supernatural power. Especially since, for it to work from a game balance standpoint, these need to be class abilities. This is the "Relic Knight" issue (which, admittedly, is a deep cut, but apparently you wouldn't have recognized "Shardbearer" either). If the Fighter gets magic armor that lets him fly from a class ability, I don't see a lot of room to say "this is a fully mundane class", just because you've added a step of indirection between his class and his abilities.

Captain America is not "super-human".

He is literally turned into a super soldier by something called the "Super Soldier Serum". It's really a very core part of his character.

You are trying to hold us to this definition of "mundane" that simply can't work in D&D and it's just to win an argument.

There's the "generosity" again. Isn't it at least possible that I really do believe this? Are you unable to conceive of someone for whom D&D's HP system represents superhuman durability? Have I said elsewhere "yeah the Fighter's durability at 20th level is totally consistent with a regular human"?

By your standards, "mundane" people simply do not exist at all in D&D, because they can do things that "normal people" can't.

You phrase this like a refutation, but I don't understand why. What if D&D works in a fundamentally different way and our intuitions about "mundane" aren't a reliable guide to it? Why is it is that "survive a fall from orbit" or "arm-wrestle a silverback" are acceptable deviations from "mundane" for D&D characters to have while remaining "mundane", but "start flying" isn't? Because it seems like the subtext of what you are saying is that the game needs to support a character that complies with your exact set of hangups around the word "mundane" at 20th level, and I don't see how that is an inherently reasonable request at all.

By your own reasoning, wizards are also not just mundanes that learn how to cast spells. Rather, at some point, since they aren't mundane, they should begin mutating or ascending into anime sword saints as well, and learn to lash together gravitational surges to fly without using a 3rd level spell slot.

I don't see how you think that follows at all. My position is not that martials must start gaining the powers of a Knight Radiant, merely that they should gain some form of supernatural power. I don't think a high level Fighter needs to be Thor and Kaladin and Arthas and every other possible high level martial. He can just be one of them. Similarly, the Wizard can just grow up into an Archmage, rather than becoming a Surgebinder himself. That said, I'm not opposed to a system that allows cross-compatibility. If you want to be a Wizard/Death Knight or a Fighter/Archmage, I'm perfectly okay with that being mechanically allowable. Isn't the latter what happens with Rand al'Thor, if you look at it a certain way?

And if the martial is taking on the dragon entourage while the wizard attacks the xixecal, does that count? Or does the martial need to solo a xixecal?

If the fighter is taking on a lower-level challenge, what could that possibly make him but lower level? But, yes, the CR system does say that, eventually, if he gets enough levels, the fighter should not be challenged by a Xixecal. And the place I disagree with that is mostly that I know that the game needs to keep scaling that long, not that the CR system should stop holding up if it does. And I suppose that makes me somewhat hypocritical, but I would say that I'm not opposed to the inclusion of some power level higher than the Xixecal, I just don't know that I think there exist enough meaningful power gradations after it to reach the point it would become a trivial threat.

I would think they're playing a different game altogether.

And, yet, those expectations are very much congruent with what D&D has historically offered. So is it not, perhaps, time to consider that if those are things people want to do with D&D, and those are things you don't want to do, that it would be a good idea to arrange D&D so it included a range where you got the things you wanted and another one where the people who want different things got the things they wanted? Or to ask, on the other end, what "I can have the things I want in D&D but you need a different game" could be other than selfish?

[Psyren]

Because that's not a fact? Thor beats Hela with a McGuffin.

You know the part where she's about to kill him and he uses lightning to turn the tables? With no weapons? Or macguffin? The part I even linked for you?

No, I don't.

You really do.

"Aragorn isn't high level, he runs from the Balrog."
"Disagree but okay, here are plenty of other examples of LotR martials that could take on a balrog."
"Elves don't count, they're all gishes!"
"They're not, even in LotR - but okay, Elendil and Ar-Pharazon aren't Elves."
"Anyway, moving on!"

[Tanarii]

It's the non-combat stuff that gets the more flak. Even something simple as climbing a tree gives people a conniption fit. How dare there be rules for it! Let me the DM decide, and if another DM doesn't do it the way I do they're just playing wrong. That has happened. You were there.

What's that got to do with the price of milk? 😂 I was commenting on hit location rules.

[RandomPeasant]

You know the part where she's about to kill him and he uses lightning to turn the tables? With no weapons? Or macguffin? The part I even linked for you?

You watch the rest of that scene? Because he is in that situation exactly because he fights Hela up close and personal. So, no, I don't find an example of Thor behaving as a martial character to be a compelling argument that Thor is not a martial character.

"They're not, even in LotR - but okay, Elendil and Ar-Pharazon aren't Elves."

LotR Elves are very much explicitly superhuman. The whole "elves are better than you" meme comes from LotR. But, sure, let's talk about those examples. Those mundane warriors who are totally normal humans who succeed because they have cool gear and are not supernatural. Let's take a look at Elendil. Oh, what's this, he lived to be 322? Yeah, seems like a super mundane guy who was exactly a regular human and had no special powers or abilities. Ar-Pharazon similarly lives hundreds of years. These are not regular dudes.

You seem to think you are entitled to a rebuttal of every argument you make, even when they do not support your position and bring nothing new to the table. You aren't. If you want me to spend time dealing with you, make arguments that are worth my time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

What's that got to do with the price of milk? 😂 I was commenting on hit location rules.

Yeah. And hit location rules as well as just expanding the skill system (including giving tables) doesn't actually improve balance. Casters have just as much access or more to these default systems than martials do, plus ways to avoid them if necessary. That's why limits on magic are important--to set some things that casters can't do. Because if casters can do everything martials can do plus more, balance is impossible. And that's the case in 3e and in high op 5e play.

[Batcathat]

The DM should be accounting for their party's abilities regardless.

Of course, but I think it takes a lot more work and skill to do so (assuming the goal is for everyone to contribute more or less equally) if the party member's abilities are very varied in both power and versatility.

My point was just that it seems inconsistent to say "It's no problem, a good enough GM can deal with it" about one issue while saying "This is bad because it causes more job for the GM" about another potential issue. It's possible to have inconsistent opinions, of course, but I thought it was worth pointing out.

BRC nailed it again but also - what "very wide range?" Are we playing the same 5e, or are you thinking of 3e?

Yes, I would say it's a pretty wide range in 5e too. Smaller than in 3e in some areas, but still wide.

You know the part where she's about to kill him and he uses lightning to turn the tables? With no weapons? Or macguffin? The part I even linked for you?

To be fair, the actual beating of Hela is pretty McGuffin-based, even if the lightning bought Thor some time. (That said, I've completely lost track of how this part of the discussion has anything to do with anything, so I should probably stay out of it. )

[KorvinStarmast]

Is it any of the following or some combination or both or something else I haven't listed?

1. Ability to navigate different terrain. (Altitude, underwater, hazardous, other dimension, etc.)
2. Ability to debilitate the enemy other than through HP damage.
3. Ability to contribute outside of combat. (On a par with utility spells? Differently?)
4. Ability to withstand enemy attacks/abilities?
5. Ability to reshape the battlefield?

Yes.

There's no requirement that a games resolution system has to be able to represent what normal people can do.

If you watch movies, the protagonists are a little bit "larger than life" in a lot of them, and in the Superhero genre that just gets steroid injections. Flash. Daredevil. Batman. At least Green Lantern has a magic ring.

I will let my DMs know that and tell them to jump right on it then

Or just have them run Runequest.

An 8th level fighter can survive a fall at terminal velocity. That would, by your own definition, make him not mundane.

If we presume that D&D world physics roughly approximates RL physics. That was a fair assumption until the idiot ball got inflated in Xanathar's.

"Mundane" is in the context of the D&D rules.

Yes, good point.

What's that got to do with the price of milk? 😂 I was commenting on hit location rules.

Back to the Aragorn silliness: the Ranger in D&D was originally inspired, as a sub class of fighter in a campaign game, by the Aragorn of the book LoTR (not the movies in three parts, Raiders of the Lost Ring by Peter Jackson). They were not an attempt to make Aragorn, but to take what was in the story and emulate some of it with game mechanics that already existed. Magic spell use didn't show up until level 8 (and that was when 8th level was one level away from Name level and was hard as heck to survive to).

To a certain extent, Aragorn as written was (1) a little bit Marty Stew and (2) had some plot armor, but within the context of the world building Tolkien did Aragorn worked as a version of the Sorcerer King trope and the Divine Right of Kings theme, and a couple of other themes that I'll not mention due to forum rules. (See also various variations of the Fisher King, Arthur, etc).

But would a level 11 Ranger in D&D 5e run from a Balor leading a large force (company to battalion sized, roughly) or orcs/goblins? Maybe, and maybe not, but since his primary mission was to escort this fragile little hobbit and his mates Over The Hills And Far Away, rather than harvest XP from Balor/Balrog slaying, he might just as well in a D&D scenario allow the wizard/lorebard/celestial to sacrifice himself so that he can get the escorted party the heck out of that dangerous situation.

Because that was the freaking mission. (Random, are you still with me?). The mission of Aragorn wasn't to show how awesome his Optimized Ranger was by kicking a Balor's butt, the Mission was "get Frodo to that place (Lorien) safely at all costs."

And he did that.

[RandomPeasant]

Yeah. And hit location rules as well as just expanding the skill system (including giving tables) doesn't actually improve balance. Casters have just as much access or more to these default systems than martials do, plus ways to avoid them if necessary.

Sure it does. If smacking a hit location is better than making a regular attack and martials spend significant amounts of time smacking hit locations, balance has been improved. It doesn't matter if casters can also smack hit locations, because if they do that they're doing the same thing martials are, which is necessarily balanced.

That's why limits on magic are important--to set some things that casters can't do. Because if casters can do everything martials can do plus more, balance is impossible. And that's the case in 3e and in high op 5e play.

I disagree with almost ever part of this.

On a mechanical level, balance by strong niche protect doesn't tend to work very well or make people very happy. "Someone has to play the Cleric" results in people playing characters they don't want, and that's bad. Sometimes you will get a group of four people who all want to play casters, or who all want to play non-casters, or who all want to play partial casters. The game needs to work for those groups, and you can't really square that with "there are some things casters just can't do". Because that means either A) including those things is optional (and you haven't balanced the game at all) or B) those things are always a part of the game (and the all-caster party is hosed).

Conceptually, it doesn't matter what the limits on magic are. Unless all forms of magic are strictly net-negative for the user, it will always be possible to do more things with "magic + non-magical capabilities" than "non-magical capabilities". It may be that an individual person has specialized to the degree that their non-magical capabilities have been limited in favor of their magical ones, but that happening doesn't require any particular laws of magic.

And I disagree that you need limits on magic for balance at all. After all, anything magic can do is, by definition, something magic can do. And it is nevertheless the case that spellcasters manage to remain relatively balanced with respect to each other, despite the total lack of any laws regarding what Clerics or Sorcerers or Psions or Dread Necromancers or Sha'ir can do relative to one another. The only reason you need laws of magic to achieve balance is if you are also constraining your self with "laws of martiality", which I find to be not just superfluous, but actively hostile to modeling the range of martial characters that exist.

Laws of Magic are a cool setting element. The fact that Hermione can rattle off the fundamental limits of Transfiguration adds something to her character and the world. But whatever the laws of magic are, the vast majority of games are going to happen at power levels where there are options on the table for any given spellcaster to select that don't violate them. Hermione may not be able to conjure food, but she can travel through time, control people's minds, change her form, teleport, and kill with a word (she can do most of those things in multiple ways, even). So her limitation in the area of making lunch is cold comfort for Dudley's prospects at getting chosen to come along for an adventure.

Yes, I would say it's a pretty wide range in 5e too. Smaller than in 3e in some areas, but still wide.

It's also worth examining why the range is narrower in 5e. Is it because martials have been brought up? Is it because certain caster abilities don't exist? Is it a mix? Doesn't directly implicate 5e, but those questions are worth asking for the overall question of balance in general.

To be fair, the actual beating of Hela is pretty McGuffin-based, even if the lightning bought Thor some time. (That said, I've completely lost track of how this part of the discussion has anything to do with anything, so I should probably stay out of it. )

I don't really understand the argument either. Apparently Thor isn't martial because he also has lightning powers? Something about how controlling the weather is an inherently non-martial activity, and how giving people your power means you're not a martial. The latter is especially confusing because the mechanism by which Thor does this is giving people magic items, which would presumably make the Aragorn archetype inherently non-martial, as whatever artifact sword you have can simply be handed to someone else (and if it can't, wouldn't that make your inherent affinity with your own magical sword some sort of magical ability?). It's confusing and self-contradictory, and the evidence for it is apparently that if you cut the parts where Thor uses non-lightning powers out, you can show scenes where Thor uses only lightning powers.

If we presume that D&D world physics roughly approximates RL physics. That was a fair assumption until the idiot ball got inflated in Xanathar's. Yes, good point.

Well, there's yes and there's no to that. At a high level, D&Dland works on similar physical principles to our own so that people's intuitions about physics don't have to be recalibrated and I can make reasonable assumptions about what happens if my character drops something or shoves someone. But on the level of characters, there are obviously all sorts of things that violate physics. Most obviously magic. People in D&Dland can cast spells, and people in the real world can't do that. But beyond that there are all sorts of ways where D&D physics don't match up with our own, and it strikes me as special pleading to say "all the mechanical things I like are mundane in the context of the rules regardless of how they relate to real world reality, but things I don't like aren't". Either "mundane" has a consistent meaning between our physics and D&D's, or it simply means "whatever physics in the universe allows" and can't be used to restrict abilities.

Because that was the freaking mission. (Random, are you still with me?). The mission of Aragorn wasn't to show how awesome his Optimized Ranger was by kicking a Balor's butt, the Mission was "get Frodo to that place (Lorien) safely at all costs."

That might hold water, except that someone does fight the Balrog. And the feats Aragorn shows aren't that impressive either. There's nothing in the text to suggest Aragorn is more than maybe 6th or 8th level. Certainly you could imagine him scaling to 20th level, but based on the ways he scales in the text, it seems like he'd do that with ghost powers, not better magic gear.

[Tanarii]

If you watch movies, the protagonists are a little bit "larger than life" in a lot of them, and in the Superhero genre that just gets steroid injections. Flash. Daredevil. Batman. At least Green Lantern has a magic ring.

Yes, and it's theoretically possible to create games that have power levels "just normal guys" or "larger than life" or "super soldier supers". But there's no requirement that a resolution system be able to handle everything from commoners to <insert upper power limit of the game>. E.g. it's entire possible to have a resolution system that is DM Decides for NPC or Monster actions, and resolution mechanics for PC Godborn on the other.

Back to the Aragorn silliness:

Now I feel like I'm being intentional quoted for non-sequiturs. 😂

[Sneak Dog]

This whole discussion of Marvel and Lord of the Rings characters is why I think no decent balance will be achieved, not over the three pillars 5e set out of exploration, social and combat, without a vision of what a high level character is supposed to be. And I for one have no concrete vision of what a level 15 fighter is supposed to be over a level 5 fighter, nor the same for barbarian/rogue. Wizard/cleric are easier though.

Combat balance can be achieved by balancing numbers. 5e does this I think pretty decently. Exploration balance on the other hand needs some more... openness? Open-ended features. This vision could be achieved by imagining appropriate challenges for each pillar for some reasonable level ranges and working backwards from there, or by imagining cool high-level concepts and figuring out what classes need to have to achieve those when. Either way it'd be tricky business, and it will be controversial as it challenges the current views.

[RandomPeasant]

This vision could be achieved by imagining appropriate challenges for each pillar for some reasonable level ranges and working backwards from there, or by imagining cool high-level concepts and figuring out what classes need to have to achieve those when. Either way it'd be tricky business, and it will be controversial as it challenges the current views.

I think you need to start with the challenges. You're going to have some challenges, whatever they happen to be, and it's much easier to end up with a situation where one (or many) of the classes can't deal with the challenges that exist if you start with the classes first. Classes first is the methodology that produced the 3e Monk, and that class was... not good. But, yes, you're never going to have a game (or minigame) that is well-balanced if your starting point is just "we'll write some stuff" and not "here is a framework for how this is supposed to work, here are abilities that fill in that framework".

But it's not all bad news. Once you have that framework, it becomes much easier to write expansion content that doesn't break the game. If I know that "Exploration" means "wander around the haunted forest" at 5th level and "track the pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts across the planes" at 15th level, I can know that teleport is probably too much for a 5th level character, but not enough for a 15th level character. But you have to have the guidelines, or you'll end up with a situation where the Wizard's high level exploration ability is teleport and the Fighter's is "slightly better at skill checks" (if it is anything at all), as D&D so often has.

[Psyren]

You seem to think you are entitled to a rebuttal of every argument you make,

If you don't want people to call you out on moving the goalposts then stop doing it.

Yes, I would say it's a pretty wide range in 5e too. Smaller than in 3e in some areas, but still wide.

If you consider 5e to be a wide divide then all I can do is direct you to 4e.

To be fair, the actual beating of Hela is pretty McGuffin-based, even if the lightning bought Thor some time. (That said, I've completely lost track of how this part of the discussion has anything to do with anything, so I should probably stay out of it. )

He thinks Thor is a martial because he has a magic hammer and likes to fight in melee. By that "logic", Durkon is a martial too.

[RandomPeasant]

If you don't want people to call you out on moving the goalposts then stop doing it.

It's not moving the goalposts when you give examples that don't prove your point. Your list of characters that A) aren't high level or B) aren't mundane don't suddenly become high level mundanes just because you want them to.

He thinks Thor is a martial because he has a magic hammer and likes to fight in melee. By that "logic", Durkon is a martial too.

And you think Thor is non-martial because you think "martial" and "mundane" are the same word. No wonder you think the only thing that could've balanced D&D was 4e.

[LibraryOgre]

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced Earthdawn did it right.

All PCs are magic. What sets PCs apart from the vast majority of NPCs? They're magic.
Spellcasters are flashy and flexible, but non-spellcasters are amazing in their realms of control. Warriors are good at fighting, picking up skills that it takes mundanes ten times as much work to learn.
Everyone can make magic items. Everyone can weave magic threads. You invest your legend in certain equipment, and that makes the equipment Appropriately Cool.

[KorvinStarmast]

That might hold water, except that someone does fight the Balrog. And the feats Aragorn shows aren't that impressive either. There's nothing in the text to suggest Aragorn is more than maybe 6th or 8th level. Certainly you could imagine him scaling to 20th level, but boased on the ways he scales in the text, it seems like he'd do that with ghost powers, not better magic gear.

They are part of a team. The team mission was "get dude with ring to location X" - and for anyone to presume that a mortal who is not at name level is supposed to be at the same power level as a Celestial puzzles me.

Now I feel like I'm being intentional quoted for non-sequiturs. 😂

Blame multiquote.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced Earthdawn did it right.

All PCs are magic. What sets PCs apart from the vast majority of NPCs? They're magic.
Spellcasters are flashy and flexible, but non-spellcasters are amazing in their realms of control. Warriors are good at fighting, picking up skills that it takes mundanes ten times as much work to learn.
Everyone can make magic items. Everyone can weave magic threads. You invest your legend in certain equipment, and that makes the equipment Appropriately Cool.

Have not played it; only material I have is an unpublished Dragon supplement in pdf form. That the game is built with an explicit setting in mind (13th Age also did this much later, Empire of the Petal Throne was the leader in this approach) strikes me as a decent way to perform a bit of liposuction on the amount of core material needed, but to add a 'gazateer' requirement also.

[King of Nowhere]

late to the party and missing the previous posts, but I can answer the OP that no, d&d will not reach a balance between martials and casters because such a balance is NOT POSSIBLE.

And I say that because the relative power of casters and martials is strongly dependent on player skill. Take a noob player that does not know how to use a caster, he's a squishy glass cannon. he's actually balanced with martials. and noob players are the testing point of the game designers, which is why they released the game as "balanced". The game is actually balanced, for noobs.
At certain levels of noobness, martials even can get more powerful, if the martials learn to use a greatsword and pile some bonuses on it and the wizard is still casting magic missiles and fireballs. I've been in such groups where the casters were weaker because the table didn't have the knowledge to use them properly.

casters become overpowered only for very skilled players - and yes, if you are posting here talking about how wizards are overpowered, then you are a very skilled player. noobs don't even know what their character can do, and they gave up reading the spell list because there's too much stuff. noobs have a fixed spell list which they can never put in enough effort to change, which is why they thought the sorceror was stronger than the wizard.

nerfing the casters so that they are balanced for pros would make them unplayable weak for noobs. so trying to balance is both impossible - because it can't be done across all the spectrum of player skills - and undesirable - because it would make the game unplayable for noobs, or unpalatable for skilled players (which is what they did with 5e, which is why people who like the build optimization minigame still play 3.x)

what you can do is balance to the table, and you can always achieve that. I keep saying, the fact that different tables play at completely different power levels is not a bug, it's a feature. And if you have the skill to break the game with casters, then you also have the skill to balance to the table. noobs don't have that skill, and indeed the game balance was targeted to their level.