Vastly improved, if coming at it from a different direction.
Good seems to equate to experienced, in this case; as a point of reference, it might be a more useful word than the deeply subjective "good".
Not challenging, but I would like a citation for the 6 session bit. historically, research on gamers sets it at around 9 to 12 (which places my entire last 40 years as a massive outlier that skews the mean), so if WotC has different data, I am curious to see it. Totally understand if you don't recall or have it handy.
We hear these statements all the time and while I don't want to cast doubt as this information must come from somewhere, which is claimed to include directly from Wizards of the Coasts in interviews, to the best of my knowledge the actual results of the Player Activity surveys are and never have been published.
Unless there is a directly evidenced reason to doubt veracity, I am generally inclined to accept a statement from WotC at face value on good faith. So an interview where that is said would be acceptable -- it is going to involve context as well and I'm sure there will be other information of value or interest to me.
But also, it wasn't a challenge. If the info is handy, great; if not, also great. Won't change the basis of my response or the value of previous arguments -- it was general curiosity.
Nor do I fault them for keeping it under wraps, lol. GIven how much effort goes into the usual research project from outside the company, and what one has to go through to get peer reviewed (unless it is something like PLOS one or ASB), the cost alone would justify keeping it that way -- and they don't go to near the amount of effort that researchers do.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Most games cease because DMs don't know to remove glaives from their campaign settings in favor of guisarmes. We're getting wildly off topic here.
If we were to accept that people want their casters to be busted, but that people also want their martial characters to "keep up," then it follows that people want martial characters to be busted. Yes? If this thread wants to "fix" them, then this thread wants to break them.
Hey, breaking stuff is easy.
Weapons deal a number of damage dice equal to your proficiency bonus. Barbarian Rage doubles their STR score, no upper limit. Rogue gets to teleport once on their turn for free. Monk can fly and use Deflect Missiles on melee attacks and spells, even saving throw spells if they deal damage. Fighter can use the mechanics for Counterspell on anything that's not a spell.
Most games cease because DMs don't know to remove glaives from their campaign settings in favor of guisarmes. We're getting wildly off topic here.
The fools!
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
There are other ways to limit the power of casters, which relatively speaking buffs martials. One way is to state that every caster needs 15 min/spell level to recover a spell. Does not matter of it is via prayer, meditation, communing with nature, reading their spell book. The nerf is geometric, which works nicely against the geometric progression of their power.
A 3rd level char with four 1st and two 2nd level spell slots needs 4*15 + 2*30 minutes = 120 minutes recovery time. A char with 4/3/3 spell slots needs 285 minutes. At that point, after a long rest, a caster has to make choices regarding what spell slots to recover, and resource management becomes an important part of the game, as it should be.
Unless the campaign is running on a very tight clock, in-universe, this is merely an illusion of a balance patch that has no actual effect on gameplay.
There are other ways to limit the power of casters, which relatively speaking buffs martials. One way is to state that every caster needs 15 min/spell level to recover a spell. Does not matter of it is via prayer, meditation, communing with nature, reading their spell book. The nerf is geometric, which works nicely against the geometric progression of their power.
A 3rd level char with four 1st and two 2nd level spell slots needs 4*15 + 2*30 minutes = 120 minutes recovery time. A char with 4/3/3 spell slots needs 285 minutes. At that point, after a long rest, a caster has to make choices regarding what spell slots to recover, and resource management becomes an important part of the game, as it should be.
Unless the campaign is running on a very tight clock, in-universe, this is merely an illusion of a balance patch that has no actual effect on gameplay.
It has a huge effect. Run the math. For a 6th level caster, say in a dungeon crawl, or a wilderness setting, you think a group has 4 hours., 45 minutes to sit around while a caster fully recharges on spells? You think the wandering monsters are going to patiently wait while the group sits around?
Try the same thing at 8th or 9th level. A single 4th level spell slot = 60 minutes of restore time.
So, sorry to be a bummer, but I need to point out that the flaw in your suggestion is the same flaw in my suggestion: it doesn't address the OP's needs or point.
Nice little aside and all, but both are seen (perception impacts reality) as Nerfs (and neither are supported in 5e rules) and we are explicitly asked not to nerf casters.
So it isn't a viable solution.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
5E to me seems to have turned the fighter class in general into the "red shirts" of D&D.
They were not nerfed they were just forgotten about and eventually turned expendable. As all the sub classes and partial casters came out the fighter had to deal with getting the second hand special abilities to keep up. In my opinion many if not most of the sub classes could have been equally handled by magic items and weapons. Something 5E moved away from.
There should be better mechanisms for a group of fighters to help each other on the battle field both in attack and defense.
The trained Roman solder for example was never beaten except by his own idiot commander or shear numbers. No group of trained solders or fighters should ever be beaten by the same number of barbarians, who are great one on one but never worked together.
And there is no more need to nerf casters to make it equal. It will never be equal. Casters will always have the power of the universe at their command.
A lot of the disparity between caster and martials was equaled by the different amount of experience they needed to level.Which has since been removed. A DM could bring back something like that to make things more even at their table.
I also think 5E has been trying to squeeze far to many abilities, feats and skills into a fixed 20 level limit. remove the limit and reduce the amount of "gifts" given as the character gains levels. Have a list of gifts for each class and or race and only give them out every so many levels. Yes this would mean reworking the whole system including the encounter system but monsters have been incredibly nerfed in 5E. An adult dragon should be a real challenge to 100+ levels of party members.
5E to me seems to have turned the fighter class in general into the "red shirts" of D&D.
A ridiculous claim, especially given your immediate self-contradiction about complaining that they've got too many powers now.
They were not nerfed they were just forgotten about and eventually turned expendable. As all the sub classes and partial casters came out the fighter had to deal with getting the second hand special abilities to keep up. In my opinion many if not most of the sub classes could have been equally handled by magic items and weapons. Something 5E moved away from.
Because a class's utility should not be dependent on the GM giving them loot.
There should be better mechanisms for a group of fighters to help each other on the battle field both in attack and defense.
The trained Roman solder for example was never beaten except by his own idiot commander or shear numbers. No group of trained solders or fighters should ever be beaten by the same number of barbarians, who are great one on one but never worked together.
Ridiculous Roman Empire propaganda. "Barbarian" was just a pejorative the Greeks used on anyone who wasn't Greek because as far as they were concerned they were the only civilization in the world. Plenty of "barbarians" were just as sophisticated militarily as the Romans were and beat them through strategy while a considerable amount of Roman victories were achieved only via having sufficient numbers to grind their opponents down through attrition.
And there is no more need to nerf casters to make it equal. It will never be equal. Casters will always have the power of the universe at their command.
A lot of the disparity between caster and martials was equaled by the different amount of experience they needed to level.Which has since been removed. A DM could bring back something like that to make things more even at their table.
I also think 5E has been trying to squeeze far to many abilities, feats and skills into a fixed 20 level limit. remove the limit and reduce the amount of "gifts" given as the character gains levels. Have a list of gifts for each class and or race and only give them out every so many levels.
A completely terrible idea. If the only thing a character gets from leveling up is some hit points and a slightly improved chance of succeeding on an attack roll, there was no point in leveling up. That was a massive flaw in older editions and 5th Edition is well rid of it.
Yes this would mean reworking the whole system including the encounter system but monsters have been incredibly nerfed in 5E. An adult dragon should be a real challenge to 100+ levels of party members.
But heck I actually know what "red shirt" means.
A true "red shirt" class is one that doesn't have special abilities, just an HP pool to soak up damage that would have otherwise gone to a useful character.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
You know conversations about the fighter have always been in this strange space in which we discuss the fighter while covering our eyes and ears about the core game mechanics and the method by which the game is balanced. The design of the fighter is seen as unbalanced, but it's because WE (the gaming community) in general are playing the game wrong and ignoring the method by which the core mechanical balance is derived.
In order to test whether the fighter is balanced you must have 6-8 consecutive fights without a long rest. This is fundamental to the game's core balance, if you are not doing that, you are objectively running the game wrong as this is the basis for how the game is balanced by the rules.
Now I will grant you, this is a really stupid way to balance a game and I imagine virtually no one has ever run the game this way. The only way to actually have a setup in which you can reasonably ever do this is to use the Gritty Realism rules, which is why I suggested them.
Regardless this is how the game is in fact balanced and by extension how both the fighter and the casters are balanced against each other, one having no limits on resources, the other having very restricted resources.
The way the game is actually played you might as well remove spell slots and limits on spell casting per day and instead assume all spell slots and limits can be cast amount of time in an encounter and then base the balance of the game on that. This would be a more accurate reflection of how the game is executed by the overwhelming majority of players.
If you do that, Casters are super OP there is absolutely no disputing it, you must base their balance on the most powerful spell they can cast at any given level and fighters are way underpowered because beyond a certain level 3-4, a fighter can't even come close to the sort of damage and effects casters can produce.
Now I don't know exactly how much of this they have addressed and to what extent in the UA, but so far as 5e goes, I don't think there is any good method of fixing the fighter without heavily altering either the games core balance (CR system) or the classes. The most effective way is to simply accept how the game is designed and execute it according to that design which again is most easily done by simply implementing the Gritty Realism rules that turns the concept of the adventuring day into a 7 day affair so that you can reasonably squeeze those 6-8 fights into the game forcing casters to have to contend with the resource limits.
People often say that in the old school days casters were "too limited" at low levels and became "super OP" at high levels, but the truth is that they were quite balanced because at any level, casters had pretty extreme resource limits. But like today, people don't execute the mechanic as intended. Meaning players would have 1 fight and then return to camp and rest, which DM's allowed but were instructed by the DMG not to. In a sense we have the same problem today, people are not following the instructions of the DMG so of course the balance will be off.
Just stop thinking of casters as a resource-based class concept. Their power level is not related to the number of times they can do their spells. That'll make it a lot clearer how you can buff non-casters to match them.
Ex: Barbarians get a d12 hit die, which is great when taking short rests because you can recover more HP. That doesn't matter. This isn't a factor on which anything is balanced. You could make it so casters recover no HP on short rests and martials recover all their HP and it would change nothing.
Instead, consider that a caster who takes the chance can potentially eliminate one or more targets in a single turn without having to get through their HP first. Meanwhile a Barbarian can't do that, but also doesn't have any all-or-nothing options like that. He only has "attack" and "attack harder." The Berserker actually does have something sort of similar to a control spell, but nobody uses it because it's really really bad.
Similarly, most casters can blast a bunch of targets with damage at the same time. Martials can't do that either. The Hunter gets something sort of similar to an AoE blast spell, but nobody uses it because it's really really bad.
Casters can target different defenses. They don't all have perfect freedom here, but if AC is hard to hit, they can go after WIS, for example. Martials can't do that.
Casters can take spells that do cool things outside of combat, like ally with beasts, lay traps around a building, open a lock, help their friends sneak around properly, or set up a secure camp. They can do such wild fantastical things as call up allied creatures, talk to people better, lock a door, read, or even speak another language. I've even heard of casters who can jump. Am I cherry picking to only show the craziest, most outlandish spells? Maybe.
Just stop thinking of casters as a resource-based class concept. Their power level is not related to the number of times they can do their spells. That'll make it a lot clearer how you can buff non-casters to match them.
The entire design of encounter balance in 5th edition D&D is exclusively built around the concept of resources.
Ex: Barbarians get a d12 hit die, which is great when taking short rests because you can recover more HP. That doesn't matter. This isn't a factor on which anything is balanced. You could make it so casters recover no HP on short rests and martials recover all their HP and it would change nothing.
Actually, it does change it a lot, if the hit die didn't matter all classes would have the same hit die. It's a resource that is used as part of the balance of the class.
Instead, consider that a caster who takes the chance can potentially eliminate one or more targets in a single turn without having to get through their HP first. Meanwhile a Barbarian can't do that, but also doesn't have any all-or-nothing options like that. He only has "attack" and "attack harder." The Berserker actually does have something sort of similar to a control spell, but nobody uses it because it's really really bad.
I'm not really sure I understand what you are saying here to be honest or what point you are trying to make.
Similarly, most casters can blast a bunch of targets with damage at the same time. Martials can't do that either. The Hunter gets something sort of similar to an AoE blast spell, but nobody uses it because it's really really bad.
Yes casters can blast a bunch of targets with damage at the same time.. but you are missing a critical component which is they can only do it a limited amount of times. You have to remember you are going to have 6-8 fights per day, aka, between long rests. So if you do it twice in the first fight, once in the second fight, now for 3 to 8 fights you can't do it.
Casters can target different defenses. They don't all have perfect freedom here, but if AC is hard to hit, they can go after WIS, for example. Martials can't do that.
Yes they can, a limited amount of times per adventuring day.. see above.
Casters can take spells that do cool things outside of combat, like ally with beasts, lay traps around a building, open a lock, help their friends sneak around properly, or set up a secure camp. They can do such wild fantastical things as call up allied creatures, talk to people better, lock a door, read, or even speak another language. I've even heard of casters who can jump. Am I cherry picking to only show the craziest, most outlandish spells? Maybe.
Yes they can, if they trade off those out-of-combat spells for spells that they could have used in combat. Again, they have limited resources, ally with a beast and lay a magical trap.. now you have 2 less spells to blast people in combat with.
I don't think you are cherry-picking spells, but you are working under the assumption that casters have unlimited resources which is incorrect.
The basics of CR encounter balance is that you must have 6-8 fights per day to attain balance in the game. I will say again, I concede that this is a really stupid way to balance a game, but that is objectively how 5e D&D is balanced.
To ignore that requirement and then complain that the game is unbalanced, is essentially like pitting 1st level characters against a Black Dragon and then proclaiming that the Black Dragon is unbalanced. If you're not going to follow the rules of the game, you can't expect the game to be balanced.
This brings me to kind of the main point which is that the reason 5e games don't last is that people generally don't play using the game as designed, realize that it's pretty bork and don't do what most good DM's do which is fix it themselves and effectively give up. Like I'm sure in your game, casters are borked, probably because you are not having 6-8 fights per day, probably for the same none of us do that, it would ... well be stupid... So yeah, we are all with you here, I'm not actually fully disagreeing with you, something must be done... but.....I do disagree on one specific point
The problem is not martial classes, the problem is the resource balancing of casters.
First there are too many of them. Second they gain too many spell slots. Third the spells are too reliable.
They work fine and are quite balanced if you follow the 6-8 fights per day requirement, but since no one does this, you have to fix the casters not the martial classes. Casters are way too powerful in the game when they don't have to contend with resource shortages, they are exclusively the reason CR math doesn't work.
You can try this yourself. Make a party of 4 martial classes of 5th level and pit them against an normal CR encounter. It will be a tough fight, no matter who is running them. Do the same with 4 casters and they will easily be able to take on fights double, even triple the CR difficulty in the hands of experienced players. Casters are 2-3 times more powerful than martials at low levels and 4-6 times more powerful at higher levels.... again.. if and only IF you are not following the CR encounter balancing rules of having 6-8 fights a day. This core rule is the great equalizer between martial and caster classes.
Alright, let me boil this down to the absolute basics. Here are the points on which I think we agree.
1. There's an imbalance between casters and martials at the majority of tables.
2. The majority of tables don't use rests the way the designers intended.
3. If these tables DID use rests the way the designers intended, the imbalance would be reduced. (You say eliminated entirely, I say reduced by something like 75%, but whatever.)
Now here's where you lose me:
4. The majority of players WANT to be challenged on their resources, the way the designers intended.
I think that what players want is the power level they have even they don't rest "properly," but with a little badge that says "don't worry, Jeremy Crawford said it's balanced." Let's dive into that a little.
I think there are two main "versions" of 5e. D&D&D, which is to say, Dungeons and Dragons and the Designers, is the version that works as intended, with a whole bunch of fights that don't involve any PC's long-lost father figures. Long, grueling days. Having to be careful where and when you rest. In D&D&D, casters are still a little stronger than martials, but since they're more complicated to play optimally, in practice they're pretty even. Spell slots limit your power output, and they force you to make choices that are interesting. Meanwhile, DnD -- Dungeons 'n' Dragons -- is narratively beholden. Players of DnD don't take rests on schedule, because it doesn't seem like they should, in the story. They want their battles to be against important characters only, and they feel cheated, DM and player alike, if an important battle starts with one side at a disadvantage from having used up resources. In DnD, martials suck, because every fight is deadly or super-deadly (gotta provide the same challenge/XP, just on a shorter time scale!), and you usually have all your resources when it starts. In DnD, spell slots don't provide balance, nor do they provide interesting gameplay choices with meaningful risk/reward. Those choices exist, mind you, but they're not coming from the spell slots. No, what the spell slots provide -- listen -- the reason people like them!! -- is permission. It's okay for you to have the cool toy, because it costs a spell slot. That's what spell slots are for in DnD. Permission to have fun guilt-free.
DnD players want to play DnD. They don't want to switch over to D&D&D. The problems they're having with imbalance come from the fact that they're using too many D&D&D rules -- not too few.
That can be fixed though. That's my goal here. Not to complain, but to accurately identify the problem and propose solutions.
So.
If you're able to entertain such a notion, then I ask you: What do you propose?
There are other ways to limit the power of casters, which relatively speaking buffs martials. One way is to state that every caster needs 15 min/spell level to recover a spell. Does not matter of it is via prayer, meditation, communing with nature, reading their spell book. The nerf is geometric, which works nicely against the geometric progression of their power.
A 3rd level char with four 1st and two 2nd level spell slots needs 4*15 + 2*30 minutes = 120 minutes recovery time. A char with 4/3/3 spell slots needs 285 minutes. At that point, after a long rest, a caster has to make choices regarding what spell slots to recover, and resource management becomes an important part of the game, as it should be.
Unless the campaign is running on a very tight clock, in-universe, this is merely an illusion of a balance patch that has no actual effect on gameplay.
It has a huge effect. Run the math. For a 6th level caster, say in a dungeon crawl, or a wilderness setting, you think a group has 4 hours., 45 minutes to sit around while a caster fully recharges on spells? You think the wandering monsters are going to patiently wait while the group sits around?
Try the same thing at 8th or 9th level. A single 4th level spell slot = 60 minutes of restore time.
So, sorry to be a bummer, but I need to point out that the flaw in your suggestion is the same flaw in my suggestion: it doesn't address the OP's needs or point.
Nice little aside and all, but both are seen (perception impacts reality) as Nerfs (and neither are supported in 5e rules) and we are explicitly asked not to nerf casters.
So it isn't a viable solution.
The main problem with the intent of the OP is he is asking for the impossible, or rather something that makes the game far worse. Nerfing casters is far superior to buffing martials, which leads to the never-ending arms race. A martial's abilities should be endless, aka swinging a sword, while a caster's abilities, ESPECIALLY when they become very powerful, have to be equally as scarce as the power. OSRever is right. There is no way to nerf a caster, which relatively buffs a martial, if the party has essentially one fight, and gets to retreat, recharge, and regroup. Even implementing the AD&D solution is not enough if it is one fight and done. The game was NEVER designed that way.
The OP is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by saying "Don't nerf casters". The simplest solution IS to nerf casters. If DM's and players are not willing to endure multiple encounters to draw down resources, then casters' resources have to be nerfed in some other manner.
OP's ask is impossible. OP's ask makes the game worse. OP's ask leads to a never ending arms race. Game is designed to work this way. Only solution is to ignore OP ask.
Just a question -- have you been active in any of the UA threads? If not head over there and dive in, lol.
Not a zing or a ding. They are tackling a ton of this right now.
I'm going to point out that really, the Fighter is pretty evenly balanced against most of the Caster classes. The ones that mix more of the fighting abilities in have much less magic than those who don't, because the big thing a lot of us have done is look at the classes in comparison terms to how effective they are at clearing a field of opponents.
Clerics are a bit more of a problem, but clerics literally have god on their side, so meh.
The balance isn't in the classes. Indeed, the classes have never been balanced. Right now there is an enormous thread that is basically torn between folks who say the Monk class is a kind of fighter and those who say the Monk class is more like a Rogue. I bring this up because if one is going to compare a Fighter to anything, it is to people who are not casters.
Casters should be compared to each other.
Part of the reason i say this is that the archetype basis by which the game operates doesn't seek balance of capability, but rather balance of operation. A rather blunt example of that kind of balance of operation is how everything we are saying to do impacts the game operationally in order to impact the class' capabilities. Or how you argue directly above that in order to improve the Fighter mechanically you have to nerf casters mechanically.
Even I do it -- my approach looked at the game and opted to change the game operationally in order to create a change in capabilities. I can confess that I wasn't seeking to do that, but in practice it was a consequence and so I suggested it here. For Capability, I did in fact buff the hell out of martials. My underlying mechanic for a lot of it was the same as I use throughout the revisions I've had to do for house rules: learning and personal growth.
But I also wasn't operating in the constraint of Earthly Archetypes, and I wasn't limited to the class structure used in 5e on DDB as a baseline, so much of what I have wouldn't work for a lot of the stuf.
An example of one thing is that right now in 5e, *weapons* have properties, people don't have skills. While some properties could rightfully belong to a weapon (e.g. light), for the most part, a lot of those properties are something that reflects a skill or talent or practised capability of the person who uses them. They even play with this idea in the nature of the Brawler subclass pretty heavily.
I buffed them by giving them a series of "sword skills", using a common convention in a certain kind of entertainment: capabilities which are seemingly magical and drawn from the inner fighting spirit of the warrior who has learned them. (and I totally said that in a funny voice in my head).
However, that shift in capabilities, again, came because I made in a shift in operations.
Which is not to say that I needed to -- 5e has several sword skill like things going on already. A direct shift so that they simply become additional capabilities of a fighter is fairly easy.
Operationally, a Mage gets potentially two attacks per turn at higher levels -- two spells. At lower levels, they get a single attack. Not so fighters. At lower levels, before the really fun powerful spells kick in, the fighter is the big "DPR DUDE" (they have shirts made with that on the front and MIN MAX on the back). They are, however, Soldiers. Even the PHB says it right up front. These are the grizzled veterans of a thousand bloody battles, the ones who really don't give a damn if the Wizard is more powerful as long as they can throw that fireball where the fighter needs it to go when they need it to go there.
That's the archetype, though. Not everyone plays by the archetype -- a profound disappointment to me, but I shall survive. Archetype wise, what the OP wants strikes me as closer to a Barb. Shadowed, massively muscled brawn over brain types with a big ole weapon cleaving their way through a throng of sycophants to crush the skull of Thulsa Doom beside their frazetta versioning battle buddy.
That is operationally distinct, that is how the systems is designed to operate -- the idea of somehow balancing casters with martials is not impossible, it is simply not a core concept of the game, and so yes, it requires changing the game.
It is why there are sixteen gajillion subclasses that combine fighting and magic.
And if, operationally, we are going to look at something and say "how does the fighter balance against a caster in capability" we have to look at them as our real challenge, because it is in all those places that we see the balance being struck.
Fighters and Wizards are not supposed to be balanced against each other. They are the Poles. Clerics are the center of the axis. Rogues are on a different axis that connects to bards -- and in the current set up, they are the poles of that axis.
In between lie all the variants.
Long winded way to say that in some ways you are right -- it is "impossible" because it isn't supposed to be that way. Hell, if you ask me, I'll tell you that I don't think "balance" is a feature of the game around the notion of Class Comparisons. I don' t think the classes are meant to be balanced *against each other*.
I think they are meant to be balanced against monsters.
WHich leads us back to the issue that actually seemed to underline the OP's challenges: the DM. THe DM needs to design an encounter that doesn't leave a player feeling like they were worthless. That's a big lift, really. While more experienced DMs may be able to do it more easily, even they have to give thought to the way 5e is structured to not be a "single creature fight" but rather a boss and minions fight (a la video games and comic books) whereas early editions tended to focus more on a single monster and the struggle to overcome it (a la Books and novels that inspired the game).
Operationally, that's the point where the balance comes into play -- and if there is fault in design there, it would be fault around the area of encounter design (not in the sense of make better monsters, but in the sense of have more of them).
THis is why the comparison between magic items and special abilities comes up all the time. The special abilities are the magic items. Operationally, those are meant to help balance the PCs against the monsters.
in other words, the goal of an operational system is to provide for the capability system. And in that since, it isn't impossible to balance casters against fighters.
Because they already are.
A lot of the rules that you and OSR have brought up are from older editions, but I want to note that by and large those rules are not popular rules. They are not the rules that were often used (hell, in 1e days they didn't even pay attention to components or memorization in the official, strictly by the books convention games). Yes they were there, nd yes, soe people did use them.
But not the vast majority. Also, the OP isn't the DM. None of those changes are things that the OP can do. Odds are good they were looking for a way to create a character with more potential and useful ness for what they wanted to do.
but it still came back to the DM because encounter design.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
1. There's an imbalance between casters and martials at the majority of tables.
2. The majority of tables don't use rests the way the designers intended.
3. If these tables DID use rests the way the designers intended, the imbalance would be reduced. (You say eliminated entirely, I say reduced by something like 75%, but whatever.)
I'm not sure that everyone would agree with you on point 1 if asked, but if we set KPI's to measure mathematical balance and we were able to go around and measure those KPI's, I'm 100% certain we could objectively prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt with analytical data. So I totally agree with you. That said the root cause of point 1, is caused by point 2.
We could argue point 3, but sure, I would venture to guess that the majority of encounter balance issues would be solved. I can say with 100% certainty that I achieved perfect balance using the Gritty Realism rules where an adventure day is spread over 7 days in my own game. Not empirical evidence but, I did go out of my way to try and break it and I could not.
Now here's where you lose me:
4. The majority of players WANT to be challenged on their resources, the way the designers intended.
Well this is where you lost me because I never actually said that. I do think players want to be challenged and I know for a fact that the designers intended the CR system to be balanced based on resource management and the 6-8 encounter day because this is how they designed the game. I also think players want a balanced game but they are unwilling to have 6-8 encounters to get it with which I also agree, that is kind of crazy.
I think that what players want is the power level they have even they don't rest "properly," but with a little badge that says "don't worry, Jeremy Crawford said it's balanced." Let's dive into that a little.
What players want and how the game is designed is incompatible.
I think there are two main "versions" of 5e. D&D&D, which is to say, Dungeons and Dragons and the Designers, is the version that works as intended, with a whole bunch of fights that don't involve any PC's long-lost father figures. Long, grueling days. Having to be careful where and when you rest. In D&D&D, casters are still a little stronger than martials, but since they're more complicated to play optimally, in practice they're pretty even. Spell slots limit your power output, and they force you to make choices that are interesting. Meanwhile, DnD -- Dungeons 'n' Dragons -- is narratively beholden. Players of DnD don't take rests on schedule, because it doesn't seem like they should, in the story. They want their battles to be against important characters only, and they feel cheated, DM and player alike, if an important battle starts with one side at a disadvantage from having used up resources. In DnD, martials suck, because every fight is deadly or super-deadly (gotta provide the same challenge/XP, just on a shorter time scale!), and you usually have all your resources when it starts. In DnD, spell slots don't provide balance, nor do they provide interesting gameplay choices with meaningful risk/reward. Those choices exist, mind you, but they're not coming from the spell slots. No, what the spell slots provide -- listen -- the reason people like them!! -- is permission. It's okay for you to have the cool toy, because it costs a spell slot. That's what spell slots are for in DnD. Permission to have fun guilt-free.
Again, what players want and how the game is designed are incompatible. I'm not arguing the point about what players want, I'm sure at least for some percentage of players this is all true, but it doesn't change anything about the games design so you are still left in the same situation. A game balanced the way players want vs. the game balanced that we have, which, are generally not the same thing and I would make the claim are completely incompatible.
That can be fixed though. That's my goal here. Not to complain, but to accurately identify the problem and propose solutions.
So.
If you're able to entertain such a notion, then I ask you: What do you propose?
If you think you can fix, for the love of god man please do and post your solution. This game has been out for a decade, I have tried more times than I can count, I have watched countless come before and after me try and fail and to date I have never seen or heard of any such success. I have heard people claim to have success, but when push came to shove, I have never seen any proof.
The only solution which I already provided I have seen work is to simply use the design as intended. 6-8 battles in an adventuring day. That balances CR encounters. As such the best solution I have seen to date is Gritty Realism.
If you got something better, I'm all ears m8, I'm sure the OP is as well.
They have optional rest rules to tweak play, maybe they also need optional narrative play rules that reduces spell slots to X slots per adventure day. If you want a one fight per day style narrative maybe casters need something like 3-4 slots that grow in max level as the character levels instead of ending up with dozens of slots available to use each short day which eliminates the purpose of slots to begin with (enforced rationing of power).
It's like nobody is listening. This is a homebrew thread!! Read the OP!!
Read the OP!!
You can read my suggestions HERE. And here are a few more! Every +1 DEX bonus gives you another opportunity attack! Bludgeoning weapons knock targets prone automatically! Everyone gets a magic weapon at level 3! Magic ammunition isn't used up! Killing a monster with a weapon gives you one cumulative use of Legendary Resistance! The entire weapon actions system from Baldur's Gate 3!
There should be something, anything, that the martial can do that a caster can't do just as well or better.
Fighters should be able to control the flow of battles
Fighters should be able to wade thru hordes.
Fighters lack as much rule support as casters.
Fighters should be better at taking damage than casters.
Fighters should have equal or more single attack damage output.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Fighters and other martial classes are hard hitters, especially at low levels. At high levels they can't compete with big hitting spells like Fireball. But against single targets they still do a solid job keeping up with burst and ongoing damage.
One of the massive misunderstanding of DMs, including the professionals who write the official 5e modules is the number of encounters per long rest. It's supposed to be 5-10 encounters per rest with ten being more common than five. Running an average of say 8 encounters per long rest brings much better class balance as pure casters are mostly using cantrips that at best match a great axe in damage until level 5. With between 2-5 spell slots for a low level caster, they need to pick and choose when to shine.
At higher levels, or in a campaign with one fight per long rest, I like to hand out magical items for martial classes to help balance out the power of spells when a caster can confidently use their most powerful spells during the two rounds of fighting between long rests.
In a "deadly" campaign, the survivability of the fighter starts to shine. High AC at low levels, high HP always makes it harder to knock them out of a fight than a caster with much lower abilities to survive a fight. Add in enemies intentionally targeting the squishy spell casters when they have enough intelligence to do so and your group will want the fighter to pick up a cleric level of carry a huge stockpile of healing potions.
Generally speaking fighters aren't supposed to be AOE damage dealers or crowd control characters, that is the job of casters. The fighter move into direct contact with the hard hitting enemy and punishes them for targeting others.
Fighters and other martial classes are hard hitters, especially at low levels. At high levels they can't compete with big hitting spells like Fireball. But against single targets they still do a solid job keeping up with burst and ongoing damage.
One of the massive misunderstanding of DMs, including the professionals who write the official 5e modules is the number of encounters per long rest. It's supposed to be 5-10 encounters per rest with ten being more common than five. Running an average of say 8 encounters per long rest brings much better class balance as pure casters are mostly using cantrips that at best match a great axe in damage until level 5. With between 2-5 spell slots for a low level caster, they need to pick and choose when to shine.
Agreed but if I understand the point of some of the observations and discussions is that the large majority of tables, arguably nearly all of them, do not run the adventuring day including 6-8 combat encounters. As such the expected element of this balance (having lots of fights) which drains caster resources in practice, does not actually apply to the balance of how games are executed again in practice.
I think everyone understands the intended balance of the game as designed, but since the practical execution is quite different the games martial classes are left in the dust because a caster is as powerful as their most powerful spells, and resource management, effectively, is not part of the game.
In a "deadly" campaign, the survivability of the fighter starts to shine. High AC at low levels, high HP always makes it harder to knock them out of a fight than a caster with much lower abilities to survive a fight. Add in enemies intentionally targeting the squishy spell casters when they have enough intelligence to do so and your group will want the fighter to pick up a cleric level of carry a huge stockpile of healing potions.
While I agree with you, you are now not speaking to the mechanical balance of the game, but the method of execution. Targeting spell casters for example is a DM decision, a method of executing combat to increase the difficulty on casters specifically. Consider what that means. You are effectively admitting there is a balance issue and are solving it by isolating specific classes and targeting during combats to balance it out. While I agree this can and actually does work, as a whole its not a solution to either the lower power levels and utility of the fighter nor does it address the alpha strike capabilities of the casters.
As a whole, this is a more fundamental question of the game's core mechanical premise and I think there is a clear consensus that running 6-8 combat per day is an unreasonable demand from the game to make for a typical table of gamers, no one wants to play the game this way so they are left with the consequences of that which is that Fighters and Casters have a very real equilibrium problem resulting in complaints like the OP has which I would call a very common complaint about the game. In fact, I would put "Fighters suck" in the top 3 of most common complaints you hear about 5e D&D.
All that said I still thing the most practical solution is to simply use Gritty Realism rules and simply lean into the defined balance as designed. I say this only because every solution I have seen over the last 10 years, while sometimes solving this issue, usually creates a whole slew of other problems. Im yet to see one that actually works and all of these solutions require heavy alterations to the game which are untested, based on theorycrafting. We can theorycraft until the cows come home but what I think players and DM's both want is a game that works as written and with this official optional rule implemented, it does in fact result in the game working as intended and as written. Your players handbook is as written and you don't need pages of house rules to fix the game.
There should be something, anything, that the martial can do that a caster can't do just as well or better.
Excellent breakdown. I'll propose a methodical change and a rules change for each of these. Method: Tell martials monster weaknesses (rare anyway), armor types (call it out every time), and when there's something weird going on in a fight (legendary monsters BEFORE triggering a resistance or legendary action, give them heavy clues about shapechangers they're fighting, tell them if the enemy carries spell components). Rule: Nonlethal damage has a big benefit now -- enemies will fight for you, for 1 round, in the next fight. Then they'll run off and you won't see them again.
Fighters should be able to control the flow of battles
Method: Provoke opportunity attacks freely and often. Rule: NPC combatants are controlled by Fighter players.
Fighters should be able to wade thru hordes.
Method: Use "minions" (4e jargon, monsters with 1 HP and Evasion). Rule: Spillover damage based on type. Piercing: The guy behind your target. Slashing: Next to your target. Bludgeoning: Behind you.
Fighters lack as much rule support as casters.
Method: Enforce encumbrance and cover? Rule: Literally take the entire weapon actions system from BG3 and just put it in your game. Also the jump mechanics.
Fighters should be better at taking damage than casters.
Method: Break the gentlemen's agreement that says you'll only attack the tanks. See previous note about opportunity attacks. Provide time and clues for short rests. Rule: Spend hit dice reactively to reduce damage by the amount rolled plus CON modifier? Reduce the time needed for short rests.
Fighters should have equal or more single attack damage output.
Method: Give them magic weapons. Specifically, ones with bonus damage like Flame Tongue. Rule: At least take the Tenacity feature from BG3 (if you miss, you still deal damage equal to your STR bonus, but it's still a miss so you don't add extras like Sneak Attack).
Phew. That was a lot of bold text, just because that's how it formatted it by default and I'm on mobile and can't be bothered to fix it.
I feel like part of the issue is DMs not giving adventurers an "aventuring day". I'm guilty of it - it doesn't always fit to have that many encounters in so short a space of time.
One thing I see is people saying that casters can use powerful spells to do huge damage and so are better than fighters, but people often forget that fighters have better AC, more HP, and multiple attacks which have multiple chances to hit. I have a level 8 bugbear echo knight artificer who can pull off 7 attacks in one turn, dealing 2d6+1d8+int damage with each one. He can teleport with the echo, attack from two places at once, and generally cause things to die. Without expending resources, he can attack 3 times in a round, with +8 to hit, 1d8+4 thunder damage on a hit. He's powerful.
Compare to a level 8 wizard who can use cantrips without expending resources, doing 2d10 fire damage with fireball, but only one roll to hit, so it could go wrong, and only one chance to crit.
Now factor in that my fighter has an AC of 18, vs the wizards likely max of 16 with mage armour. And that he has over 80hp, and the wizard dies to a stomach cramp.
It's also worth noting a lot of monsters are melee based, so back-of-the-group casters can catch a break. The issue may be more in the game not encouraging combats which challenge everyone equally, rather than everyone not being equal.
Unless there is a directly evidenced reason to doubt veracity, I am generally inclined to accept a statement from WotC at face value on good faith. So an interview where that is said would be acceptable -- it is going to involve context as well and I'm sure there will be other information of value or interest to me.
But also, it wasn't a challenge. If the info is handy, great; if not, also great. Won't change the basis of my response or the value of previous arguments -- it was general curiosity.
Nor do I fault them for keeping it under wraps, lol. GIven how much effort goes into the usual research project from outside the company, and what one has to go through to get peer reviewed (unless it is something like PLOS one or ASB), the cost alone would justify keeping it that way -- and they don't go to near the amount of effort that researchers do.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
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Most games cease because DMs don't know to remove glaives from their campaign settings in favor of guisarmes. We're getting wildly off topic here.
If we were to accept that people want their casters to be busted, but that people also want their martial characters to "keep up," then it follows that people want martial characters to be busted. Yes? If this thread wants to "fix" them, then this thread wants to break them.
Hey, breaking stuff is easy.
Weapons deal a number of damage dice equal to your proficiency bonus. Barbarian Rage doubles their STR score, no upper limit. Rogue gets to teleport once on their turn for free. Monk can fly and use Deflect Missiles on melee attacks and spells, even saving throw spells if they deal damage. Fighter can use the mechanics for Counterspell on anything that's not a spell.
Give that a try and let me know how it goes.
The fools!
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Unless the campaign is running on a very tight clock, in-universe, this is merely an illusion of a balance patch that has no actual effect on gameplay.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
So, sorry to be a bummer, but I need to point out that the flaw in your suggestion is the same flaw in my suggestion: it doesn't address the OP's needs or point.
Nice little aside and all, but both are seen (perception impacts reality) as Nerfs (and neither are supported in 5e rules) and we are explicitly asked not to nerf casters.
So it isn't a viable solution.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
5E to me seems to have turned the fighter class in general into the "red shirts" of D&D.
They were not nerfed they were just forgotten about and eventually turned expendable.
As all the sub classes and partial casters came out the fighter had to deal with getting the second hand special abilities to keep up.
In my opinion many if not most of the sub classes could have been equally handled by magic items and weapons. Something 5E moved away from.
There should be better mechanisms for a group of fighters to help each other on the battle field both in attack and defense.
The trained Roman solder for example was never beaten except by his own idiot commander or shear numbers. No group of trained solders or fighters should ever be beaten by the same number of barbarians, who are great one on one but never worked together.
And there is no more need to nerf casters to make it equal. It will never be equal. Casters will always have the power of the universe at their command.
A lot of the disparity between caster and martials was equaled by the different amount of experience they needed to level.Which has since been removed.
A DM could bring back something like that to make things more even at their table.
I also think 5E has been trying to squeeze far to many abilities, feats and skills into a fixed 20 level limit. remove the limit and reduce the amount of "gifts" given as the character gains levels.
Have a list of gifts for each class and or race and only give them out every so many levels.
Yes this would mean reworking the whole system including the encounter system but monsters have been incredibly nerfed in 5E. An adult dragon should be a real challenge to 100+ levels of party members.
But heck I actually know what "red shirt" means.
A ridiculous claim, especially given your immediate self-contradiction about complaining that they've got too many powers now.
Because a class's utility should not be dependent on the GM giving them loot.
Ridiculous Roman Empire propaganda. "Barbarian" was just a pejorative the Greeks used on anyone who wasn't Greek because as far as they were concerned they were the only civilization in the world. Plenty of "barbarians" were just as sophisticated militarily as the Romans were and beat them through strategy while a considerable amount of Roman victories were achieved only via having sufficient numbers to grind their opponents down through attrition.
A completely terrible idea. If the only thing a character gets from leveling up is some hit points and a slightly improved chance of succeeding on an attack roll, there was no point in leveling up. That was a massive flaw in older editions and 5th Edition is well rid of it.
A true "red shirt" class is one that doesn't have special abilities, just an HP pool to soak up damage that would have otherwise gone to a useful character.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
In order to test whether the fighter is balanced you must have 6-8 consecutive fights without a long rest. This is fundamental to the game's core balance, if you are not doing that, you are objectively running the game wrong as this is the basis for how the game is balanced by the rules.
Now I will grant you, this is a really stupid way to balance a game and I imagine virtually no one has ever run the game this way. The only way to actually have a setup in which you can reasonably ever do this is to use the Gritty Realism rules, which is why I suggested them.
Regardless this is how the game is in fact balanced and by extension how both the fighter and the casters are balanced against each other, one having no limits on resources, the other having very restricted resources.
The way the game is actually played you might as well remove spell slots and limits on spell casting per day and instead assume all spell slots and limits can be cast amount of time in an encounter and then base the balance of the game on that. This would be a more accurate reflection of how the game is executed by the overwhelming majority of players.
If you do that, Casters are super OP there is absolutely no disputing it, you must base their balance on the most powerful spell they can cast at any given level and fighters are way underpowered because beyond a certain level 3-4, a fighter can't even come close to the sort of damage and effects casters can produce.
Now I don't know exactly how much of this they have addressed and to what extent in the UA, but so far as 5e goes, I don't think there is any good method of fixing the fighter without heavily altering either the games core balance (CR system) or the classes. The most effective way is to simply accept how the game is designed and execute it according to that design which again is most easily done by simply implementing the Gritty Realism rules that turns the concept of the adventuring day into a 7 day affair so that you can reasonably squeeze those 6-8 fights into the game forcing casters to have to contend with the resource limits.
People often say that in the old school days casters were "too limited" at low levels and became "super OP" at high levels, but the truth is that they were quite balanced because at any level, casters had pretty extreme resource limits. But like today, people don't execute the mechanic as intended. Meaning players would have 1 fight and then return to camp and rest, which DM's allowed but were instructed by the DMG not to. In a sense we have the same problem today, people are not following the instructions of the DMG so of course the balance will be off.
Just stop thinking of casters as a resource-based class concept. Their power level is not related to the number of times they can do their spells. That'll make it a lot clearer how you can buff non-casters to match them.
Ex: Barbarians get a d12 hit die, which is great when taking short rests because you can recover more HP. That doesn't matter. This isn't a factor on which anything is balanced. You could make it so casters recover no HP on short rests and martials recover all their HP and it would change nothing.
Instead, consider that a caster who takes the chance can potentially eliminate one or more targets in a single turn without having to get through their HP first. Meanwhile a Barbarian can't do that, but also doesn't have any all-or-nothing options like that. He only has "attack" and "attack harder." The Berserker actually does have something sort of similar to a control spell, but nobody uses it because it's really really bad.
Similarly, most casters can blast a bunch of targets with damage at the same time. Martials can't do that either. The Hunter gets something sort of similar to an AoE blast spell, but nobody uses it because it's really really bad.
Casters can target different defenses. They don't all have perfect freedom here, but if AC is hard to hit, they can go after WIS, for example. Martials can't do that.
Casters can take spells that do cool things outside of combat, like ally with beasts, lay traps around a building, open a lock, help their friends sneak around properly, or set up a secure camp. They can do such wild fantastical things as call up allied creatures, talk to people better, lock a door, read, or even speak another language. I've even heard of casters who can jump. Am I cherry picking to only show the craziest, most outlandish spells? Maybe.
The entire design of encounter balance in 5th edition D&D is exclusively built around the concept of resources.
Actually, it does change it a lot, if the hit die didn't matter all classes would have the same hit die. It's a resource that is used as part of the balance of the class.
I'm not really sure I understand what you are saying here to be honest or what point you are trying to make.
Yes casters can blast a bunch of targets with damage at the same time.. but you are missing a critical component which is they can only do it a limited amount of times. You have to remember you are going to have 6-8 fights per day, aka, between long rests. So if you do it twice in the first fight, once in the second fight, now for 3 to 8 fights you can't do it.
Yes they can, a limited amount of times per adventuring day.. see above.
Yes they can, if they trade off those out-of-combat spells for spells that they could have used in combat. Again, they have limited resources, ally with a beast and lay a magical trap.. now you have 2 less spells to blast people in combat with.
I don't think you are cherry-picking spells, but you are working under the assumption that casters have unlimited resources which is incorrect.
The basics of CR encounter balance is that you must have 6-8 fights per day to attain balance in the game. I will say again, I concede that this is a really stupid way to balance a game, but that is objectively how 5e D&D is balanced.
To ignore that requirement and then complain that the game is unbalanced, is essentially like pitting 1st level characters against a Black Dragon and then proclaiming that the Black Dragon is unbalanced. If you're not going to follow the rules of the game, you can't expect the game to be balanced.
This brings me to kind of the main point which is that the reason 5e games don't last is that people generally don't play using the game as designed, realize that it's pretty bork and don't do what most good DM's do which is fix it themselves and effectively give up. Like I'm sure in your game, casters are borked, probably because you are not having 6-8 fights per day, probably for the same none of us do that, it would ... well be stupid... So yeah, we are all with you here, I'm not actually fully disagreeing with you, something must be done... but.....I do disagree on one specific point
The problem is not martial classes, the problem is the resource balancing of casters.
First there are too many of them. Second they gain too many spell slots. Third the spells are too reliable.
They work fine and are quite balanced if you follow the 6-8 fights per day requirement, but since no one does this, you have to fix the casters not the martial classes. Casters are way too powerful in the game when they don't have to contend with resource shortages, they are exclusively the reason CR math doesn't work.
You can try this yourself. Make a party of 4 martial classes of 5th level and pit them against an normal CR encounter. It will be a tough fight, no matter who is running them. Do the same with 4 casters and they will easily be able to take on fights double, even triple the CR difficulty in the hands of experienced players. Casters are 2-3 times more powerful than martials at low levels and 4-6 times more powerful at higher levels.... again.. if and only IF you are not following the CR encounter balancing rules of having 6-8 fights a day. This core rule is the great equalizer between martial and caster classes.
Alright, let me boil this down to the absolute basics. Here are the points on which I think we agree.
1. There's an imbalance between casters and martials at the majority of tables.
2. The majority of tables don't use rests the way the designers intended.
3. If these tables DID use rests the way the designers intended, the imbalance would be reduced. (You say eliminated entirely, I say reduced by something like 75%, but whatever.)
Now here's where you lose me:
4. The majority of players WANT to be challenged on their resources, the way the designers intended.
I think that what players want is the power level they have even they don't rest "properly," but with a little badge that says "don't worry, Jeremy Crawford said it's balanced." Let's dive into that a little.
I think there are two main "versions" of 5e. D&D&D, which is to say, Dungeons and Dragons and the Designers, is the version that works as intended, with a whole bunch of fights that don't involve any PC's long-lost father figures. Long, grueling days. Having to be careful where and when you rest. In D&D&D, casters are still a little stronger than martials, but since they're more complicated to play optimally, in practice they're pretty even. Spell slots limit your power output, and they force you to make choices that are interesting. Meanwhile, DnD -- Dungeons 'n' Dragons -- is narratively beholden. Players of DnD don't take rests on schedule, because it doesn't seem like they should, in the story. They want their battles to be against important characters only, and they feel cheated, DM and player alike, if an important battle starts with one side at a disadvantage from having used up resources. In DnD, martials suck, because every fight is deadly or super-deadly (gotta provide the same challenge/XP, just on a shorter time scale!), and you usually have all your resources when it starts. In DnD, spell slots don't provide balance, nor do they provide interesting gameplay choices with meaningful risk/reward. Those choices exist, mind you, but they're not coming from the spell slots. No, what the spell slots provide -- listen -- the reason people like them!! -- is permission. It's okay for you to have the cool toy, because it costs a spell slot. That's what spell slots are for in DnD. Permission to have fun guilt-free.
DnD players want to play DnD. They don't want to switch over to D&D&D. The problems they're having with imbalance come from the fact that they're using too many D&D&D rules -- not too few.
That can be fixed though. That's my goal here. Not to complain, but to accurately identify the problem and propose solutions.
So.
If you're able to entertain such a notion, then I ask you: What do you propose?
OP's ask is impossible.
OP's ask makes the game worse.
OP's ask leads to a never ending arms race.
Game is designed to work this way.
Only solution is to ignore OP ask.
Just a question -- have you been active in any of the UA threads? If not head over there and dive in, lol.
Not a zing or a ding. They are tackling a ton of this right now.
I'm going to point out that really, the Fighter is pretty evenly balanced against most of the Caster classes. The ones that mix more of the fighting abilities in have much less magic than those who don't, because the big thing a lot of us have done is look at the classes in comparison terms to how effective they are at clearing a field of opponents.
Clerics are a bit more of a problem, but clerics literally have god on their side, so meh.
The balance isn't in the classes. Indeed, the classes have never been balanced. Right now there is an enormous thread that is basically torn between folks who say the Monk class is a kind of fighter and those who say the Monk class is more like a Rogue. I bring this up because if one is going to compare a Fighter to anything, it is to people who are not casters.
Casters should be compared to each other.
Part of the reason i say this is that the archetype basis by which the game operates doesn't seek balance of capability, but rather balance of operation. A rather blunt example of that kind of balance of operation is how everything we are saying to do impacts the game operationally in order to impact the class' capabilities. Or how you argue directly above that in order to improve the Fighter mechanically you have to nerf casters mechanically.
Even I do it -- my approach looked at the game and opted to change the game operationally in order to create a change in capabilities. I can confess that I wasn't seeking to do that, but in practice it was a consequence and so I suggested it here. For Capability, I did in fact buff the hell out of martials. My underlying mechanic for a lot of it was the same as I use throughout the revisions I've had to do for house rules: learning and personal growth.
But I also wasn't operating in the constraint of Earthly Archetypes, and I wasn't limited to the class structure used in 5e on DDB as a baseline, so much of what I have wouldn't work for a lot of the stuf.
An example of one thing is that right now in 5e, *weapons* have properties, people don't have skills. While some properties could rightfully belong to a weapon (e.g. light), for the most part, a lot of those properties are something that reflects a skill or talent or practised capability of the person who uses them. They even play with this idea in the nature of the Brawler subclass pretty heavily.
I buffed them by giving them a series of "sword skills", using a common convention in a certain kind of entertainment: capabilities which are seemingly magical and drawn from the inner fighting spirit of the warrior who has learned them. (and I totally said that in a funny voice in my head).
However, that shift in capabilities, again, came because I made in a shift in operations.
Which is not to say that I needed to -- 5e has several sword skill like things going on already. A direct shift so that they simply become additional capabilities of a fighter is fairly easy.
Operationally, a Mage gets potentially two attacks per turn at higher levels -- two spells. At lower levels, they get a single attack. Not so fighters. At lower levels, before the really fun powerful spells kick in, the fighter is the big "DPR DUDE" (they have shirts made with that on the front and MIN MAX on the back). They are, however, Soldiers. Even the PHB says it right up front. These are the grizzled veterans of a thousand bloody battles, the ones who really don't give a damn if the Wizard is more powerful as long as they can throw that fireball where the fighter needs it to go when they need it to go there.
That's the archetype, though. Not everyone plays by the archetype -- a profound disappointment to me, but I shall survive. Archetype wise, what the OP wants strikes me as closer to a Barb. Shadowed, massively muscled brawn over brain types with a big ole weapon cleaving their way through a throng of sycophants to crush the skull of Thulsa Doom beside their frazetta versioning battle buddy.
That is operationally distinct, that is how the systems is designed to operate -- the idea of somehow balancing casters with martials is not impossible, it is simply not a core concept of the game, and so yes, it requires changing the game.
It is why there are sixteen gajillion subclasses that combine fighting and magic.
And if, operationally, we are going to look at something and say "how does the fighter balance against a caster in capability" we have to look at them as our real challenge, because it is in all those places that we see the balance being struck.
Fighters and Wizards are not supposed to be balanced against each other. They are the Poles. Clerics are the center of the axis. Rogues are on a different axis that connects to bards -- and in the current set up, they are the poles of that axis.
In between lie all the variants.
Long winded way to say that in some ways you are right -- it is "impossible" because it isn't supposed to be that way. Hell, if you ask me, I'll tell you that I don't think "balance" is a feature of the game around the notion of Class Comparisons. I don' t think the classes are meant to be balanced *against each other*.
I think they are meant to be balanced against monsters.
WHich leads us back to the issue that actually seemed to underline the OP's challenges: the DM. THe DM needs to design an encounter that doesn't leave a player feeling like they were worthless. That's a big lift, really. While more experienced DMs may be able to do it more easily, even they have to give thought to the way 5e is structured to not be a "single creature fight" but rather a boss and minions fight (a la video games and comic books) whereas early editions tended to focus more on a single monster and the struggle to overcome it (a la Books and novels that inspired the game).
Operationally, that's the point where the balance comes into play -- and if there is fault in design there, it would be fault around the area of encounter design (not in the sense of make better monsters, but in the sense of have more of them).
THis is why the comparison between magic items and special abilities comes up all the time. The special abilities are the magic items. Operationally, those are meant to help balance the PCs against the monsters.
in other words, the goal of an operational system is to provide for the capability system. And in that since, it isn't impossible to balance casters against fighters.
Because they already are.
A lot of the rules that you and OSR have brought up are from older editions, but I want to note that by and large those rules are not popular rules. They are not the rules that were often used (hell, in 1e days they didn't even pay attention to components or memorization in the official, strictly by the books convention games). Yes they were there, nd yes, soe people did use them.
But not the vast majority. Also, the OP isn't the DM. None of those changes are things that the OP can do. Odds are good they were looking for a way to create a character with more potential and useful ness for what they wanted to do.
but it still came back to the DM because encounter design.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
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I'm not sure that everyone would agree with you on point 1 if asked, but if we set KPI's to measure mathematical balance and we were able to go around and measure those KPI's, I'm 100% certain we could objectively prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt with analytical data. So I totally agree with you. That said the root cause of point 1, is caused by point 2.
We could argue point 3, but sure, I would venture to guess that the majority of encounter balance issues would be solved. I can say with 100% certainty that I achieved perfect balance using the Gritty Realism rules where an adventure day is spread over 7 days in my own game. Not empirical evidence but, I did go out of my way to try and break it and I could not.
Well this is where you lost me because I never actually said that. I do think players want to be challenged and I know for a fact that the designers intended the CR system to be balanced based on resource management and the 6-8 encounter day because this is how they designed the game. I also think players want a balanced game but they are unwilling to have 6-8 encounters to get it with which I also agree, that is kind of crazy.
What players want and how the game is designed is incompatible.
Again, what players want and how the game is designed are incompatible. I'm not arguing the point about what players want, I'm sure at least for some percentage of players this is all true, but it doesn't change anything about the games design so you are still left in the same situation. A game balanced the way players want vs. the game balanced that we have, which, are generally not the same thing and I would make the claim are completely incompatible.
If you think you can fix, for the love of god man please do and post your solution. This game has been out for a decade, I have tried more times than I can count, I have watched countless come before and after me try and fail and to date I have never seen or heard of any such success. I have heard people claim to have success, but when push came to shove, I have never seen any proof.
The only solution which I already provided I have seen work is to simply use the design as intended. 6-8 battles in an adventuring day. That balances CR encounters. As such the best solution I have seen to date is Gritty Realism.
If you got something better, I'm all ears m8, I'm sure the OP is as well.
They have optional rest rules to tweak play, maybe they also need optional narrative play rules that reduces spell slots to X slots per adventure day. If you want a one fight per day style narrative maybe casters need something like 3-4 slots that grow in max level as the character levels instead of ending up with dozens of slots available to use each short day which eliminates the purpose of slots to begin with (enforced rationing of power).
It's like nobody is listening. This is a homebrew thread!! Read the OP!!
Read the OP!!
You can read my suggestions HERE. And here are a few more! Every +1 DEX bonus gives you another opportunity attack! Bludgeoning weapons knock targets prone automatically! Everyone gets a magic weapon at level 3! Magic ammunition isn't used up! Killing a monster with a weapon gives you one cumulative use of Legendary Resistance! The entire weapon actions system from Baldur's Gate 3!
As a reminder, the Goals of the OP:
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Fighters and other martial classes are hard hitters, especially at low levels. At high levels they can't compete with big hitting spells like Fireball. But against single targets they still do a solid job keeping up with burst and ongoing damage.
One of the massive misunderstanding of DMs, including the professionals who write the official 5e modules is the number of encounters per long rest. It's supposed to be 5-10 encounters per rest with ten being more common than five. Running an average of say 8 encounters per long rest brings much better class balance as pure casters are mostly using cantrips that at best match a great axe in damage until level 5. With between 2-5 spell slots for a low level caster, they need to pick and choose when to shine.
At higher levels, or in a campaign with one fight per long rest, I like to hand out magical items for martial classes to help balance out the power of spells when a caster can confidently use their most powerful spells during the two rounds of fighting between long rests.
In a "deadly" campaign, the survivability of the fighter starts to shine. High AC at low levels, high HP always makes it harder to knock them out of a fight than a caster with much lower abilities to survive a fight. Add in enemies intentionally targeting the squishy spell casters when they have enough intelligence to do so and your group will want the fighter to pick up a cleric level of carry a huge stockpile of healing potions.
Generally speaking fighters aren't supposed to be AOE damage dealers or crowd control characters, that is the job of casters. The fighter move into direct contact with the hard hitting enemy and punishes them for targeting others.
Agreed but if I understand the point of some of the observations and discussions is that the large majority of tables, arguably nearly all of them, do not run the adventuring day including 6-8 combat encounters. As such the expected element of this balance (having lots of fights) which drains caster resources in practice, does not actually apply to the balance of how games are executed again in practice.
I think everyone understands the intended balance of the game as designed, but since the practical execution is quite different the games martial classes are left in the dust because a caster is as powerful as their most powerful spells, and resource management, effectively, is not part of the game.
While I agree with you, you are now not speaking to the mechanical balance of the game, but the method of execution. Targeting spell casters for example is a DM decision, a method of executing combat to increase the difficulty on casters specifically. Consider what that means. You are effectively admitting there is a balance issue and are solving it by isolating specific classes and targeting during combats to balance it out. While I agree this can and actually does work, as a whole its not a solution to either the lower power levels and utility of the fighter nor does it address the alpha strike capabilities of the casters.
As a whole, this is a more fundamental question of the game's core mechanical premise and I think there is a clear consensus that running 6-8 combat per day is an unreasonable demand from the game to make for a typical table of gamers, no one wants to play the game this way so they are left with the consequences of that which is that Fighters and Casters have a very real equilibrium problem resulting in complaints like the OP has which I would call a very common complaint about the game. In fact, I would put "Fighters suck" in the top 3 of most common complaints you hear about 5e D&D.
All that said I still thing the most practical solution is to simply use Gritty Realism rules and simply lean into the defined balance as designed. I say this only because every solution I have seen over the last 10 years, while sometimes solving this issue, usually creates a whole slew of other problems. Im yet to see one that actually works and all of these solutions require heavy alterations to the game which are untested, based on theorycrafting. We can theorycraft until the cows come home but what I think players and DM's both want is a game that works as written and with this official optional rule implemented, it does in fact result in the game working as intended and as written. Your players handbook is as written and you don't need pages of house rules to fix the game.
Excellent breakdown. I'll propose a methodical change and a rules change for each of these. Method: Tell martials monster weaknesses (rare anyway), armor types (call it out every time), and when there's something weird going on in a fight (legendary monsters BEFORE triggering a resistance or legendary action, give them heavy clues about shapechangers they're fighting, tell them if the enemy carries spell components). Rule: Nonlethal damage has a big benefit now -- enemies will fight for you, for 1 round, in the next fight. Then they'll run off and you won't see them again.
Method: Provoke opportunity attacks freely and often. Rule: NPC combatants are controlled by Fighter players.
Method: Use "minions" (4e jargon, monsters with 1 HP and Evasion). Rule: Spillover damage based on type. Piercing: The guy behind your target. Slashing: Next to your target. Bludgeoning: Behind you.
Method: Enforce encumbrance and cover? Rule: Literally take the entire weapon actions system from BG3 and just put it in your game. Also the jump mechanics.
Method: Break the gentlemen's agreement that says you'll only attack the tanks. See previous note about opportunity attacks. Provide time and clues for short rests. Rule: Spend hit dice reactively to reduce damage by the amount rolled plus CON modifier? Reduce the time needed for short rests.
Method: Give them magic weapons. Specifically, ones with bonus damage like Flame Tongue. Rule: At least take the Tenacity feature from BG3 (if you miss, you still deal damage equal to your STR bonus, but it's still a miss so you don't add extras like Sneak Attack).
Phew. That was a lot of bold text, just because that's how it formatted it by default and I'm on mobile and can't be bothered to fix it.
I feel like part of the issue is DMs not giving adventurers an "aventuring day". I'm guilty of it - it doesn't always fit to have that many encounters in so short a space of time.
One thing I see is people saying that casters can use powerful spells to do huge damage and so are better than fighters, but people often forget that fighters have better AC, more HP, and multiple attacks which have multiple chances to hit. I have a level 8 bugbear echo knight artificer who can pull off 7 attacks in one turn, dealing 2d6+1d8+int damage with each one. He can teleport with the echo, attack from two places at once, and generally cause things to die. Without expending resources, he can attack 3 times in a round, with +8 to hit, 1d8+4 thunder damage on a hit. He's powerful.
Compare to a level 8 wizard who can use cantrips without expending resources, doing 2d10 fire damage with fireball, but only one roll to hit, so it could go wrong, and only one chance to crit.
Now factor in that my fighter has an AC of 18, vs the wizards likely max of 16 with mage armour. And that he has over 80hp, and the wizard dies to a stomach cramp.
It's also worth noting a lot of monsters are melee based, so back-of-the-group casters can catch a break. The issue may be more in the game not encouraging combats which challenge everyone equally, rather than everyone not being equal.
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