IMO I think that min/max has always been a problem as far back as 1e. Back then there were restrictions on how high non-humans can level up, so they could never optimize fully. Humans were worse off because they could only dual class. Which means if a 7th level Cleric decided to become a fighter. He would leave his spell casting behind and start adventuring as a 1st level fighter and only gain xp as a Fighter. If he were to use any Clerical ability or spells, he would not get any XP (and probably no treasure from the DM) for doing so.
5e just threw all of that out the window and said "let what will be, be" and now you have these optimized class doing 100 points of damage in one round. Granted they may not be much after that round after. Heck I have heard some "builds" that allow you to get 20+ attacks.
The developers need to come up with a no-stacking rule. That would cut the Optimizer/min-maxers off at the kneecaps.
Given there are now some 100+ subclasses, and what, at least 50 races, (in fact, an infinite amount), the combinations and permutations are staggering.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
How exactly did Tasha's "encourage cheating"? Last I checked there's still no way to get a score above 17 with point buy, for one.
Custom lineage, take a level 1 half-feat. Which you'll note isn't possible in UA because all of the half-feats require level 4+.
That’s not even Tasha’s really, that’s just since half-feats came out. Just go Vhuman with a 1/2 feat. I don’t think you were arguing, as much as informing, I’m just saying it’s even easier than that.
Im with Ace of Rogues. It’s no big deal. An extra +1 doesn’t really make any difference in play, there’s lots of people out there with rolled stats and wildly different stat lines sitting next to each other and still having plenty of fun. Also, I giggled at the term codifed cheating. Once something has been codified, it by definition, can’t be cheating anymore. You are literally obeying the rules.
Right, I am sure the players that managed to roll the super high stats, optiimized PC"s that pull in features and spells from 4 different books, are having a grand old time. The other players, and DM...not so much.
And just how often have you actually encountered such heinous individuals? Obviously some do exist, but they're generally the personality type that will tend to rub others wrong some way or other in the game regardless of what exact kit they patch together, and I've been in quite a few groups over something like 10 years and don't recall ever having to deal with someone "lording it over the table" with their hyper-optimized build.
LOL...I sit beside a guy, every week, that has such a build. I sit across the table in the same game from another. The DM shut down one of these guy's builds after one session.
Given there are now some 100+ subclasses, and what, at least 50 races, (in fact, an infinite amount), the combinations and permutations are staggering.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
Yup....and I know many DM's that have banned/neutered that Feat. Same for Lucky, Elven Advantage (XGTE), and others. At the same time, we all know that many of the Feats in the PHB are awful. Imagine, if you will, some exec at wotc, say in 2022, who actually played and loved the game, called in the senior designers and said" "Look, we know that there are some really broken Feats and spells, and on the flip side, a whole bunch that are useless. In the next edition, we are going to roll out rebalancing for ALL this. We are going to make Keen Mind as viable an option as Polearm Master, and that is going to mean not only improving Keen Mind, but NERFING Polearm Master. And if we can't fix either, we will remove both from the game."
Imagine a game where Tiny Hut loses the Ritual Tag, Guidance is now a 1st level spell, and Lucky is gone from the game, officially. Imagine a game where if you want to MC, not only do all subclasses not kick in until 3rd level, but you need a minimum score of 16 in the main attribute for the next class you take. And this one (oh boy, I can hear the screams now): Only certain races can MC into certain classes, and many of them are severely limited in caps on levels. And yes, Variant Human is bye bye. No more "I get a Feat at 1st level", for any PC.
IMO I think that min/max has always been a problem as far back as 1e. Back then there were restrictions on how high non-humans can level up, so they could never optimize fully. Humans were were off because they could only dual class. Which means if a 7th level Cleric decided to become a fighter. He would leave his spell casting behind and start adventuring as a 1st level fighter and only gain xp as a Fighter. If he were to use any Clerical ability or spells, he would not get any XP (and probably no treasure from the DM) for doing so.
2e and before had limits on multiclassing, yes. They were dumb, silly, inconsistent, limits, but they were limits. It had plenty of other limits as well, many of which hinged on gating the good stuff by your random stat rolls. And classes also had less interesting stuff to try to synergize with.
And people still min-maxed. If you give people options, they're going to try to figure out the best ones. I'm sure there were people out there saying that everyone should take one or two levels of fighter before you dual-class into wizard, because 1st-level wizards are useless and have no hp.
5e just threw all of that out the window and said "let what will be, be" and now you have these optimized class doing 100 points of damage in one round. Granted they may not be much after that round after. Heck I have heard some "builds" that allow you to get 20+ attacks.
That's not new with 5e. You're ignoring everything in between, as well as the games in your golden age of balance. 3/3.5 were full of it; multiclassing into special classes improve your build was something the vast majority of players did. I'm sure 4e had plenty going on, though the relatively constrained build paths may have been one of the things that sent some players off to Pathfinder, where I'm sure they had more flexible options to try to get the most plusses.
Do these builds exist? Sure, probably.
But they're stunts. They're the D&D equivalent of the people who play Super Mario Brothers in five minutes. Some people just enjoy pushing systems to their limits. They require a lot of specific conditions, including a lot of levels.
Do people try to play them in normal games? I dunno. Maybe. Do they work before you get all the pieces in place? Again: I dunno. I also don't care.
D&D is a social game. There are extra-mechanical correctives available if somebody's actually ruining everyone else's fun. (As opposed to just being somewhat better at killing things, which happens all the time in the perfectly normal groups where nobody's trying hard to optimize. (Which is most of them.))
Does JustaFarmer's hyperbolic situation of inexperienced/weak DMs (read: everyone who disagrees with him) being browbeaten by evil munchkins into letting them break the game exist? Probably, but that dynamic's going to go sour even if they're playing Idealized Magic Super-Balanced D&D. (Which sounds like some weird RPG-based magical girl anime.) It's certainly not the norm, and the problem there is not the character creation mechanics.
The developers need to come up with a no-stacking rule. That would cut the Optimizer/min-maxers off at the kneecaps.
I don't even know what you mean by that, but I can assure you that it will not. If you change the rules, you change the optimizations. Meanwhile, you're probably making a bunch of other things that were just fine bad. D&D is not Magic the Gathering. There's no Pro tour requiring careful balancing of the metagame.
Also, since people are bringing up Strixhaven as an example of the severe power creep: those backgrounds are balanced. For a Strixhaven game, where everybody presumably has one of the bloody things. Are they balanced with respect to the rest of D&D? Who cares? They exist within their can, and anybody who wants to open the box and let them out into a different world where there's no Strixhaven can be assumed to know what they're doing. And if you're going to bring up Silvery Barbs, don't. It's one spell, and even if they screwed up there, it is not indicative of the rest of the book. The horse has also been beaten into a paste so fine that Raise Dead can no longer be used.
Given there are now some 100+ subclasses, and what, at least 50 races, (in fact, an infinite amount), the combinations and permutations are staggering.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
Yup....and I know many DM's that have banned/neutered that Feat. Same for Lucky, Elven Advantage (XGTE), and others. At the same time, we all know that many of the Feats in the PHB are awful. Imagine, if you will, some exec at wotc, say in 2022, who actually played and loved the game, called in the senior designers and said" "Look, we know that there are some really broken Feats and spells, and on the flip side, a whole bunch that are useless. In the next edition, we are going to roll out rebalancing for ALL this. We are going to make Keen Mind as viable an option as Polearm Master, and that is going to mean not only improving Keen Mind, but NERFING Polearm Master. And if we can't fix either, we will remove both from the game."
Imagine a game where Tiny Hut loses the Ritual Tag, Guidance is now a 1st level spell, and Lucky is gone from the game, officially. Imagine a game where if you want to MC, not only do all subclasses not kick in until 3rd level, but you need a minimum score of 16 in the main attribute for the next class you take. And this one (oh boy, I can hear the screams now): Only certain races can MC into certain classes, and many of them are severely limited in caps on levels. And yes, Variant Human is bye bye. No more "I get a Feat at 1st level", for any PC.
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
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unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: providefeedback!
LOL...I sit beside a guy, every week, that has such a build. I sit across the table in the same game from another. The DM shut down one of these guy's builds after one session.
...So because one guy at one of your tables doesn't know how to optimize in line with his group's power level, the rest of us don't get new character options? Respectfully, hell no.
Given there are now some 100+ subclasses, and what, at least 50 races, (in fact, an infinite amount), the combinations and permutations are staggering.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
Yup....and I know many DM's that have banned/neutered that Feat. Same for Lucky, Elven Advantage (XGTE), and others. At the same time, we all know that many of the Feats in the PHB are awful. Imagine, if you will, some exec at wotc, say in 2022, who actually played and loved the game, called in the senior designers and said" "Look, we know that there are some really broken Feats and spells, and on the flip side, a whole bunch that are useless. In the next edition, we are going to roll out rebalancing for ALL this. We are going to make Keen Mind as viable an option as Polearm Master, and that is going to mean not only improving Keen Mind, but NERFING Polearm Master. And if we can't fix either, we will remove both from the game."
Imagine a game where Tiny Hut loses the Ritual Tag, Guidance is now a 1st level spell, and Lucky is gone from the game, officially. Imagine a game where if you want to MC, not only do all subclasses not kick in until 3rd level, but you need a minimum score of 16 in the main attribute for the next class you take. And this one (oh boy, I can hear the screams now): Only certain races can MC into certain classes, and many of them are severely limited in caps on levels. And yes, Variant Human is bye bye. No more "I get a Feat at 1st level", for any PC.
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
Personally, I don't play 5e nearly as much as I used to. I DM at this particular table, when the current DM can't make it, where I typically run 1-2 session "one-shots". That being said, I also run a 1e AD&D game, play in a Basic Fantasy game, play in Pathfinder 2e game, play in an Every Day Heroes game, and 2 Fridays ago, a Stars without Number one-shot. I play games, a LOT, and many different systems. Some things 5e does better than other systems, but not much. The 5e table I am still at is more force of habit that anything else. I am one of two of the original members left, and we started years ago. And why do we play 5e? Because even though I am able to play/run in multiple game systems, I am very very lucky. Sadly, 5e is still the 400 pound gorilla in the room. If people want to play a RPG, chances are they start with 5e.
I don't even know what you mean by that, but I can assure you that it will not. If you change the rules, you change the optimizations.
While this is true, the concept of 'bounded accuracy' would work better if you had bonus stacking rules like 3e and 4e, though likely with fewer bonus types.
Not that bounded accuracy was ever really a good idea, it's based on a false premise, but flattening the DC curve does have merits. To make it work, though, you have to actually flatten it.
Given there are now some 100+ subclasses, and what, at least 50 races, (in fact, an infinite amount), the combinations and permutations are staggering.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
Yup....and I know many DM's that have banned/neutered that Feat. Same for Lucky, Elven Advantage (XGTE), and others. At the same time, we all know that many of the Feats in the PHB are awful. Imagine, if you will, some exec at wotc, say in 2022, who actually played and loved the game, called in the senior designers and said" "Look, we know that there are some really broken Feats and spells, and on the flip side, a whole bunch that are useless. In the next edition, we are going to roll out rebalancing for ALL this. We are going to make Keen Mind as viable an option as Polearm Master, and that is going to mean not only improving Keen Mind, but NERFING Polearm Master. And if we can't fix either, we will remove both from the game."
Imagine a game where Tiny Hut loses the Ritual Tag, Guidance is now a 1st level spell, and Lucky is gone from the game, officially. Imagine a game where if you want to MC, not only do all subclasses not kick in until 3rd level, but you need a minimum score of 16 in the main attribute for the next class you take. And this one (oh boy, I can hear the screams now): Only certain races can MC into certain classes, and many of them are severely limited in caps on levels. And yes, Variant Human is bye bye. No more "I get a Feat at 1st level", for any PC.
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
I know this question is not directed at me, but I would agree with Justafarmer that 5e is easily the game that is easiest to find players for because of its popularity and because consequently there are so many YT videos that teach you not only the base rules, but also make recommendations of all kinds. It's very hard to find that easy "buy-in" with most other RPGs unless your friend group already consists of people who have played RPGs for many years. Do I like the direction that WotC is going with 5E? Not really. But scheduling in-person games is already difficult enough with a system as popular as 5E. Try going with something obscure and it's very hard to find large enough group of people to game with. The fact that a lot of people on this forum take familiarity with more than one RPG rules system for granted...well, that just is not reflective of the larger population as whole, even among people who consider themselves "geeky" or "nerdy".
IMO I think that min/max has always been a problem as far back as 1e. Back then there were restrictions on how high non-humans can level up, so they could never optimize fully. Humans were worse off because they could only dual class. Which means if a 7th level Cleric decided to become a fighter. He would leave his spell casting behind and start adventuring as a 1st level fighter and only gain xp as a Fighter. If he were to use any Clerical ability or spells, he would not get any XP (and probably no treasure from the DM) for doing so.
5e just threw all of that out the window and said "let what will be, be" and now you have these optimized class doing 100 points of damage in one round. Granted they may not be much after that round after. Heck I have heard some "builds" that allow you to get 20+ attacks.
The developers need to come up with a no-stacking rule. That would cut the Optimizer/min-maxers off at the kneecaps.
I’m not sure why you think cutting me off at the kneecaps would help. I could still sit at a table.
Gating multiclassing behind races is a terrible idea and just creates a cookie cutter problem.
A hundred points of damage is also.. not that good. For a normal table yeah.. but if you built around damage (and it was allowed at your table obviously) that’s level 8-9 nova damage. Also, 20+ attacks is really not realistic. At all. Those kind of numbers REQUIRE - there’s not another way to get 20+ attacks - high level upcast scorching ray and action surge. That is the only way to get higher than 12 (which also is just three eldritch blasts at seventeenth level). It sounds like you just picked a number to scaremonger, to be honest.
And there is a no-stacking rule. Effects with the same name don’t stack.
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
I know this question is not directed at me, but I would agree with Justafarmer that 5e is easily the game that is easiest to find players for because of its popularity and because consequently there are so many YT videos that teach you not only the base rules, but also make recommendations of all kinds. It's very hard to find that easy "buy-in" with most other RPGs unless your friend group already consists of people who have played RPGs for many years. Do I like the direction that WotC is going with 5E? Not really. But scheduling in-person games is already difficult enough with a system as popular as 5E. Try going with something obscure and it's very hard to find large enough group of people to game with. The fact that a lot of people on this forum take familiarity with more than one RPG rules system for granted...well, that just is not reflective of the larger population as whole, even among people who consider themselves "geeky" or "nerdy".
If you already have a regular group, it's much easier to get them to try something new. Especially in the situation where they already agree vigorously with you about the fundamental flaws of 5e, which we are told JustaFarmer's circles do.
If you don't have a regular group, yes, it's much harder, especially if you're not a GM. But it's still possible, especially now, in the age of online play; it just requires way more work.
How exactly did Tasha's "encourage cheating"? Last I checked there's still no way to get a score above 17 with point buy, for one.
Custom lineage, take a level 1 half-feat. Which you'll note isn't possible in UA because all of the half-feats require level 4+.
That’s not even Tasha’s really, that’s just since half-feats came out. Just go Vhuman with a 1/2 feat. I don’t think you were arguing, as much as informing, I’m just saying it’s even easier than that.
Im with Ace of Rogues. It’s no big deal. An extra +1 doesn’t really make any difference in play, there’s lots of people out there with rolled stats and wildly different stat lines sitting next to each other and still having plenty of fun. Also, I giggled at the term codifed cheating. Once something has been codified, it by definition, can’t be cheating anymore. You are literally obeying the rules.
Right, I am sure the players that managed to roll the super high stats, optiimized PC"s that pull in features and spells from 4 different books, are having a grand old time. The other players, and DM...not so much.
And just how often have you actually encountered such heinous individuals? Obviously some do exist, but they're generally the personality type that will tend to rub others wrong some way or other in the game regardless of what exact kit they patch together, and I've been in quite a few groups over something like 10 years and don't recall ever having to deal with someone "lording it over the table" with their hyper-optimized build.
LOL...I sit beside a guy, every week, that has such a build. I sit across the table in the same game from another. The DM shut down one of these guy's builds after one session.
Given your description of how terrible we people who minmax are, why would you play with such people? And what even are the builds?
EDIT: If your only experience is with powergamers and Mary Sues you’re obviously going to have a hyperbolic impression and reaction to the game as a whole.
Given there are now some 100+ subclasses, and what, at least 50 races, (in fact, an infinite amount), the combinations and permutations are staggering.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
Yup....and I know many DM's that have banned/neutered that Feat. Same for Lucky, Elven Advantage (XGTE), and others. At the same time, we all know that many of the Feats in the PHB are awful. Imagine, if you will, some exec at wotc, say in 2022, who actually played and loved the game, called in the senior designers and said" "Look, we know that there are some really broken Feats and spells, and on the flip side, a whole bunch that are useless. In the next edition, we are going to roll out rebalancing for ALL this. We are going to make Keen Mind as viable an option as Polearm Master, and that is going to mean not only improving Keen Mind, but NERFING Polearm Master. And if we can't fix either, we will remove both from the game."
Imagine a game where Tiny Hut loses the Ritual Tag, Guidance is now a 1st level spell, and Lucky is gone from the game, officially. Imagine a game where if you want to MC, not only do all subclasses not kick in until 3rd level, but you need a minimum score of 16 in the main attribute for the next class you take. And this one (oh boy, I can hear the screams now): Only certain races can MC into certain classes, and many of them are severely limited in caps on levels. And yes, Variant Human is bye bye. No more "I get a Feat at 1st level", for any PC.
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
Personally, I don't play 5e nearly as much as I used to. I DM at this particular table, when the current DM can't make it, where I typically run 1-2 session "one-shots". That being said, I also run a 1e AD&D game, play in a Basic Fantasy game, play in Pathfinder 2e game, play in an Every Day Heroes game, and 2 Fridays ago, a Stars without Number one-shot. I play games, a LOT, and many different systems. Some things 5e does better than other systems, but not much. The 5e table I am still at is more force of habit that anything else. I am one of two of the original members left, and we started years ago. And why do we play 5e? Because even though I am able to play/run in multiple game systems, I am very very lucky. Sadly, 5e is still the 400 pound gorilla in the room. If people want to play a RPG, chances are they start with 5e.
Also, you play Pathfinder 2e and you don’t like number crunchers and minmaxing optimisers?
PF2 "solved" minmaxing by making the math so tight it's pretty much impossible to be overpowered (or underpowered unless you're deliberately trying to make something useless.) And I have nothing against that approach, I'm glad it exists for those who lack self-control want a powergamer-proof system, but I'm equally glad that D&D* is not that.
PF2 "solved" minmaxing by making the math so tight it's pretty much impossible to be overpowered (or underpowered unless you're deliberately trying to make something useless.) And I have nothing against that approach, I'm glad it exists for those who lack self-control want a powergamer-proof system, but I'm equally glad that D&D* is not that.
*other than 4e
4e absolutely allowed power gaming - with hundreds of feats available and a drastic disparity between classes, the dedicated optimizer could make something that vastly outstripped the vast majority of player options. Though the system held the greatest potential for balance of any iteration of D&D, the lack of implementation of that potential led to some vast power disparities.
Which, again, is fine. D&D’s biggest strength has always been options - I would much rather my players play what they want, and, if I have to rebalance encounters or have some conversations with over/under performing players, I not only am fine with that, I find the additional design challenge makes DMing more interesting.
PF2 "solved" minmaxing by making the math so tight it's pretty much impossible to be overpowered
Eh, I can trivially find articles about PF2e CharOp online. The reality of balancing is that it's inordinately different to have both balance and distinctive play styles, it's a significant accomplishment if you can even manage with three options (e.g. Starcraft), let alone a dozen. MTG has five and already has issues with preserving color identity.
However, the converse of this is that balance is not a binary thing. RPGs do not need the level of balance you get from competitive games, but it's still useful to try to lop off the most obvious offenders.
PF2 "solved" minmaxing by making the math so tight it's pretty much impossible to be overpowered
Eh, I can trivially find articles about PF2e CharOp online. The reality of balancing is that it's inordinately different to have both balance and distinctive play styles, it's a significant accomplishment if you can even manage with three options (e.g. Starcraft), let alone a dozen. MTG has five and already has issues with preserving color identity.
Rather than "difficult" I'd say, "entirely impossible". Even SC, if it's actually balanced, was done only after endless rounds of iteration, and it's only going to hold for specific levels of play, probably high-level.
And that's in a controlled environment. Human-run RPGs change the conditions in a variety of ways. Just the number of encounters per day radically upends the balance between classes based on how limited their resources are. (Fighters can do this all day. Warlocks run out of spell slots really fast.)
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
I know this question is not directed at me, but I would agree with Justafarmer that 5e is easily the game that is easiest to find players for because of its popularity and because consequently there are so many YT videos that teach you not only the base rules, but also make recommendations of all kinds. It's very hard to find that easy "buy-in" with most other RPGs unless your friend group already consists of people who have played RPGs for many years. Do I like the direction that WotC is going with 5E? Not really. But scheduling in-person games is already difficult enough with a system as popular as 5E. Try going with something obscure and it's very hard to find large enough group of people to game with. The fact that a lot of people on this forum take familiarity with more than one RPG rules system for granted...well, that just is not reflective of the larger population as whole, even among people who consider themselves "geeky" or "nerdy".
If you already have a regular group, it's much easier to get them to try something new. Especially in the situation where they already agree vigorously with you about the fundamental flaws of 5e, which we are told JustaFarmer's circles do.
If you don't have a regular group, yes, it's much harder, especially if you're not a GM. But it's still possible, especially now, in the age of online play; it just requires way more work.
LOL. Running a regular group was easier before Covid. I am a GM, but that doesn't mean it's easy to find a group that all agrees on what the flaws of 5E are. Let's face it: you have a group of 10 people, you're going to get at least 4 or 5 sets of opinions, at least, about what the strengths and weaknesses of 5E are, assuming that people even bother to put those kinds of things into words. Most people who play the game just play the game. They aren't dedicated enthusiasts who parse the rules, nor are they game designers who pay much attention to what makes one RPG run differently from another.
Online play is easier to find a random sampling of players, but I've noticed that it doesn't actually help much with finding the kind of players who want to play a campaign that isn't mostly like what they see on poplar YT "influencer" RPG videos, which, as you know, is mostly 5E and some Pathfinder. Another example. There's an organized group of Chronicles of Darkness gamers in my area, but on-going campaigns with slots for new players are difficult to find after Covid, even if you're running the most popular "brands" like Vampire or Mage. Everything else is relegated to a One-shot.
Eh, I can trivially find articles about PF2e CharOp online.
Sure, but the delta between a character that optimizes and one that is just picking stuff that sounds cool without intentionally trying to gimp themselves is far, far narrower than in 5e, never mind other editions.
However, the converse of this is that balance is not a binary thing. RPGs do not need the level of balance you get from competitive games, but it's still useful to try to lop off the most obvious offenders.
I don't think I ever implied otherwise? 5e does in fact do this, like their recent push to nerf races that get armor proficiencies, and limit half-feats to 4th level or higher.
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IMO I think that min/max has always been a problem as far back as 1e. Back then there were restrictions on how high non-humans can level up, so they could never optimize fully. Humans were worse off because they could only dual class. Which means if a 7th level Cleric decided to become a fighter. He would leave his spell casting behind and start adventuring as a 1st level fighter and only gain xp as a Fighter. If he were to use any Clerical ability or spells, he would not get any XP (and probably no treasure from the DM) for doing so.
5e just threw all of that out the window and said "let what will be, be" and now you have these optimized class doing 100 points of damage in one round. Granted they may not be much after that round after. Heck I have heard some "builds" that allow you to get 20+ attacks.
The developers need to come up with a no-stacking rule. That would cut the Optimizer/min-maxers off at the kneecaps.
Most of the broken stuff in 5e is not subtle. You don't need any extra mechanics to make something like polearm mastery overpowered.
LOL...I sit beside a guy, every week, that has such a build. I sit across the table in the same game from another. The DM shut down one of these guy's builds after one session.
Yup....and I know many DM's that have banned/neutered that Feat. Same for Lucky, Elven Advantage (XGTE), and others. At the same time, we all know that many of the Feats in the PHB are awful. Imagine, if you will, some exec at wotc, say in 2022, who actually played and loved the game, called in the senior designers and said" "Look, we know that there are some really broken Feats and spells, and on the flip side, a whole bunch that are useless. In the next edition, we are going to roll out rebalancing for ALL this. We are going to make Keen Mind as viable an option as Polearm Master, and that is going to mean not only improving Keen Mind, but NERFING Polearm Master. And if we can't fix either, we will remove both from the game."
Imagine a game where Tiny Hut loses the Ritual Tag, Guidance is now a 1st level spell, and Lucky is gone from the game, officially. Imagine a game where if you want to MC, not only do all subclasses not kick in until 3rd level, but you need a minimum score of 16 in the main attribute for the next class you take. And this one (oh boy, I can hear the screams now): Only certain races can MC into certain classes, and many of them are severely limited in caps on levels. And yes, Variant Human is bye bye. No more "I get a Feat at 1st level", for any PC.
2e and before had limits on multiclassing, yes. They were dumb, silly, inconsistent, limits, but they were limits. It had plenty of other limits as well, many of which hinged on gating the good stuff by your random stat rolls. And classes also had less interesting stuff to try to synergize with.
And people still min-maxed. If you give people options, they're going to try to figure out the best ones. I'm sure there were people out there saying that everyone should take one or two levels of fighter before you dual-class into wizard, because 1st-level wizards are useless and have no hp.
That's not new with 5e. You're ignoring everything in between, as well as the games in your golden age of balance. 3/3.5 were full of it; multiclassing into special classes improve your build was something the vast majority of players did. I'm sure 4e had plenty going on, though the relatively constrained build paths may have been one of the things that sent some players off to Pathfinder, where I'm sure they had more flexible options to try to get the most plusses.
Do these builds exist? Sure, probably.
But they're stunts. They're the D&D equivalent of the people who play Super Mario Brothers in five minutes. Some people just enjoy pushing systems to their limits. They require a lot of specific conditions, including a lot of levels.
Do people try to play them in normal games? I dunno. Maybe. Do they work before you get all the pieces in place? Again: I dunno. I also don't care.
D&D is a social game. There are extra-mechanical correctives available if somebody's actually ruining everyone else's fun. (As opposed to just being somewhat better at killing things, which happens all the time in the perfectly normal groups where nobody's trying hard to optimize. (Which is most of them.))
Does JustaFarmer's hyperbolic situation of inexperienced/weak DMs (read: everyone who disagrees with him) being browbeaten by evil munchkins into letting them break the game exist? Probably, but that dynamic's going to go sour even if they're playing Idealized Magic Super-Balanced D&D. (Which sounds like some weird RPG-based magical girl anime.) It's certainly not the norm, and the problem there is not the character creation mechanics.
I don't even know what you mean by that, but I can assure you that it will not. If you change the rules, you change the optimizations. Meanwhile, you're probably making a bunch of other things that were just fine bad. D&D is not Magic the Gathering. There's no Pro tour requiring careful balancing of the metagame.
Also, since people are bringing up Strixhaven as an example of the severe power creep: those backgrounds are balanced. For a Strixhaven game, where everybody presumably has one of the bloody things. Are they balanced with respect to the rest of D&D? Who cares? They exist within their can, and anybody who wants to open the box and let them out into a different world where there's no Strixhaven can be assumed to know what they're doing. And if you're going to bring up Silvery Barbs, don't. It's one spell, and even if they screwed up there, it is not indicative of the rest of the book. The horse has also been beaten into a paste so fine that Raise Dead can no longer be used.
no offense (and maybe this should be a direct message to better ensure that), but why does your group play 5e? what do you like about it that keeps you coming back?
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
...So because one guy at one of your tables doesn't know how to optimize in line with his group's power level, the rest of us don't get new character options? Respectfully, hell no.
Personally, I don't play 5e nearly as much as I used to. I DM at this particular table, when the current DM can't make it, where I typically run 1-2 session "one-shots". That being said, I also run a 1e AD&D game, play in a Basic Fantasy game, play in Pathfinder 2e game, play in an Every Day Heroes game, and 2 Fridays ago, a Stars without Number one-shot. I play games, a LOT, and many different systems. Some things 5e does better than other systems, but not much. The 5e table I am still at is more force of habit that anything else. I am one of two of the original members left, and we started years ago. And why do we play 5e? Because even though I am able to play/run in multiple game systems, I am very very lucky. Sadly, 5e is still the 400 pound gorilla in the room. If people want to play a RPG, chances are they start with 5e.
While this is true, the concept of 'bounded accuracy' would work better if you had bonus stacking rules like 3e and 4e, though likely with fewer bonus types.
Not that bounded accuracy was ever really a good idea, it's based on a false premise, but flattening the DC curve does have merits. To make it work, though, you have to actually flatten it.
I know this question is not directed at me, but I would agree with Justafarmer that 5e is easily the game that is easiest to find players for because of its popularity and because consequently there are so many YT videos that teach you not only the base rules, but also make recommendations of all kinds. It's very hard to find that easy "buy-in" with most other RPGs unless your friend group already consists of people who have played RPGs for many years. Do I like the direction that WotC is going with 5E? Not really. But scheduling in-person games is already difficult enough with a system as popular as 5E. Try going with something obscure and it's very hard to find large enough group of people to game with. The fact that a lot of people on this forum take familiarity with more than one RPG rules system for granted...well, that just is not reflective of the larger population as whole, even among people who consider themselves "geeky" or "nerdy".
I’m not sure why you think cutting me off at the kneecaps would help. I could still sit at a table.
Gating multiclassing behind races is a terrible idea and just creates a cookie cutter problem.
A hundred points of damage is also.. not that good. For a normal table yeah.. but if you built around damage (and it was allowed at your table obviously) that’s level 8-9 nova damage. Also, 20+ attacks is really not realistic. At all. Those kind of numbers REQUIRE - there’s not another way to get 20+ attacks - high level upcast scorching ray and action surge. That is the only way to get higher than 12 (which also is just three eldritch blasts at seventeenth level). It sounds like you just picked a number to scaremonger, to be honest.
And there is a no-stacking rule. Effects with the same name don’t stack.
I can’t remember what’s supposed to go here.
If you already have a regular group, it's much easier to get them to try something new. Especially in the situation where they already agree vigorously with you about the fundamental flaws of 5e, which we are told JustaFarmer's circles do.
If you don't have a regular group, yes, it's much harder, especially if you're not a GM. But it's still possible, especially now, in the age of online play; it just requires way more work.
Given your description of how terrible we people who minmax are, why would you play with such people? And what even are the builds?
EDIT: If your only experience is with powergamers and Mary Sues you’re obviously going to have a hyperbolic impression and reaction to the game as a whole.
I can’t remember what’s supposed to go here.
Also, you play Pathfinder 2e and you don’t like number crunchers and minmaxing optimisers?
I can’t remember what’s supposed to go here.
PF2 "solved" minmaxing by making the math so tight it's pretty much impossible to be overpowered (or underpowered unless you're deliberately trying to make something useless.) And I have nothing against that approach, I'm glad it exists for those who
lack self-controlwant a powergamer-proof system, but I'm equally glad that D&D* is not that.*other than 4e
4e absolutely allowed power gaming - with hundreds of feats available and a drastic disparity between classes, the dedicated optimizer could make something that vastly outstripped the vast majority of player options. Though the system held the greatest potential for balance of any iteration of D&D, the lack of implementation of that potential led to some vast power disparities.
Which, again, is fine. D&D’s biggest strength has always been options - I would much rather my players play what they want, and, if I have to rebalance encounters or have some conversations with over/under performing players, I not only am fine with that, I find the additional design challenge makes DMing more interesting.
Eh, I can trivially find articles about PF2e CharOp online. The reality of balancing is that it's inordinately different to have both balance and distinctive play styles, it's a significant accomplishment if you can even manage with three options (e.g. Starcraft), let alone a dozen. MTG has five and already has issues with preserving color identity.
However, the converse of this is that balance is not a binary thing. RPGs do not need the level of balance you get from competitive games, but it's still useful to try to lop off the most obvious offenders.
Rather than "difficult" I'd say, "entirely impossible". Even SC, if it's actually balanced, was done only after endless rounds of iteration, and it's only going to hold for specific levels of play, probably high-level.
And that's in a controlled environment. Human-run RPGs change the conditions in a variety of ways. Just the number of encounters per day radically upends the balance between classes based on how limited their resources are. (Fighters can do this all day. Warlocks run out of spell slots really fast.)
LOL. Running a regular group was easier before Covid. I am a GM, but that doesn't mean it's easy to find a group that all agrees on what the flaws of 5E are. Let's face it: you have a group of 10 people, you're going to get at least 4 or 5 sets of opinions, at least, about what the strengths and weaknesses of 5E are, assuming that people even bother to put those kinds of things into words. Most people who play the game just play the game. They aren't dedicated enthusiasts who parse the rules, nor are they game designers who pay much attention to what makes one RPG run differently from another.
Online play is easier to find a random sampling of players, but I've noticed that it doesn't actually help much with finding the kind of players who want to play a campaign that isn't mostly like what they see on poplar YT "influencer" RPG videos, which, as you know, is mostly 5E and some Pathfinder. Another example. There's an organized group of Chronicles of Darkness gamers in my area, but on-going campaigns with slots for new players are difficult to find after Covid, even if you're running the most popular "brands" like Vampire or Mage. Everything else is relegated to a One-shot.
Sure, but the delta between a character that optimizes and one that is just picking stuff that sounds cool without intentionally trying to gimp themselves is far, far narrower than in 5e, never mind other editions.
I don't think I ever implied otherwise? 5e does in fact do this, like their recent push to nerf races that get armor proficiencies, and limit half-feats to 4th level or higher.