That is the problem with EN Worlds 5.5e; it is balanced against its self. A character using 5.5e rules and one using 5th edition would be different in power level. This isn't an easy problem to fix, because more complexity often results in more power. If Wizards ever hypothetically made a 5.5e, they stated that it would be backward compatible.
It's not that hard to fix, it just means your new class can't only add, it has to subtract as well.
The problem with making an actually balanced document, however, is that it's much easier to get people to want new rules if the rules seem to give them a power boost.
I was thinking about this for a while. For a class to be balanced, it has to provide the same amount of power as another class. This power could be broken up into bunches of little abilities, or one large one. The third choice is to have negative abilities with a class. This doesn't work very well for several reasons: if the negative ability is situational, the class isn't going to feel balanced. It is going to be really good at some times and terrible at others. We see this all the time when people make homebrew playable vampire characters.
The problem with trying to make a complex system is that there needs to be a purpose to complexity. A reason that you spend time trying to learn the quirks of the system so you can truly make your character tick. If a 5.5e character is on the same balance level as a 5e character, than it will likely have to have many more small features to keep the complexity high. Ultimately, a 5.5e character would feel like a lot of work and not a lot of reward.
This is an interesting quandary. I'd like to see someone else's opinion on this problem.
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A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
One way could be to add more choice but not more power. As is in classic 5e you only chose very few things as most things are fixed because of you subclass choice, which in my eyes is the only really meaningful choice you ever have.
of course you can take a feat instead of an ASI but that’s about it.
So for more choice you would need equally powerful things at each levels and they would need to be equally strong/cool/interesting or it would lead to less choices again.
Some barbarian subclasses do that in a minor way with the totems and the auras.
The choices should also make your character distinct from the same character who took another choice.
A system like in diablo 2 where had skill trees and made choices that changed your character in a meaningful way. Do I put all my points into bows or maybe into spear? Do I take guided arrow or seeking arrow? These choices had great impact on how a character would feel in play.
I think 5e kind of did that with a master class and skill trees are the subclasses but with nearly no real choices to make.
Unfortunately most players of 5e seem to be enjoying this kind of “simple” system. I still cannot understand why human fighter without feats is the most played class. At my tables we have many players with feats and a lot of different classes and sometimes even triple multiclassing. Nearly no one plays humans.
in our Wildemount game we have a Minotaur barb, a deep gnome wizard, a drow bard, a ravenite fighter, a dwarf celestial warlock and a wood elf fighter-rogue player.
in the Eberron game there are two shifters, a cleric and a ranger. Two humans, eldritch knight and moon Druid. And a Vedalken Artificer.
That is true but that has been no problem at our table so far even if the power levels are quite different.
We have a variant human fighter with sharpshooter, fighting style archery and crossbow expert using a hand crossbow. I checked all the rules several times to see if her build was legit and as far as I can say it is.
She attacks 3 times beginning with level 5 and does about 50 to 60 damage a round when she hits. Her dex is maxed out and her attack bonus is normally a plus 10, now at level 9 it went up to 11. With sharpshooter it is still a plus 6 which is enough to hit most monsters.
I wouldn’t call her min-maxer at all but this character is dishing out damage that is insane. I just got haste as my Paladin spell if cast on her she will get one more attack on top. She does not have any special gear, so no magic weapon. Then add action surge on top of that and she does up to 150 to 160 damage in a good round.
This is a single class in regular 5e with no effort on min-maxing.
If that is possible now I don’t fear that some more options break the game.
I think it is important to give players meaningful choices that make their characters distinct from others of the same class.
I think WotC tries that by putting out this massive number of subclasses in Tasha’s and keeping it simple for most players at the same time. You still only have 1 major choice to make - what is my subclass.
Maybe the class feature variants open it up a bit but I first want to see the final version in the book before I judge it.
Variant human fighters with crossbow expert and sharpshooter is actually a very common min-max. It isn't totally optimized, but what you describe is min-maxing.
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A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
For me personally min-maxing is intentionally planning a character to be stronger than the game thinks you should be. In this case the player just made good choices for her character which is a marine in the army whose job is to shoot things as good as possible.
A sniper character, basically. I wouldn’t say that it breaks the game for us and we really need her damage output to survive in the game. We faced a storm giant quintessential at level 5... and survived.
Yeah, min-maxing in itself isn't evil, but when it effects the enjoyment of the whole group than it isn't a good thing. It also isn't necessarily contrary to roleplaying; check out any of the throwdowns (particularly Yurei's entry's) and you will see that a min-maxed character can have an interesting back story.
That is true but that has been no problem at our table so far even if the power levels are quite different.
We have a variant human fighter with sharpshooter, fighting style archery and crossbow expert using a hand crossbow. I checked all the rules several times to see if her build was legit and as far as I can say it is.
She attacks 3 times beginning with level 5 and does about 50 to 60 damage a round when she hits. Her dex is maxed out and her attack bonus is normally a plus 10, now at level 9 it went up to 11. With sharpshooter it is still a plus 6 which is enough to hit most monsters.
I wouldn’t call her min-maxer at all but this character is dishing out damage that is insane. I just got haste as my Paladin spell if cast on her she will get one more attack on top. She does not have any special gear, so no magic weapon. Then add action surge on top of that and she does up to 150 to 160 damage in a good round.
This is a single class in regular 5e with no effort on min-maxing.
If that is possible now I don’t fear that some more options break the game.
I think it is important to give players meaningful choices that make their characters distinct from others of the same class.
I think WotC tries that by putting out this massive number of subclasses in Tasha’s and keeping it simple for most players at the same time. You still only have 1 major choice to make - what is my subclass.
Maybe the class feature variants open it up a bit but I first want to see the final version in the book before I judge it.
OK for the build I might have to call Shenanigan's...
Assuming Point Buy your level 5 V. Human Crossbow Expert/Sharpshooter Fighter is at best a 16 DEX (They used first ASI to get sharpshooter feat).
So assuming that:
Per Attack To hit: +3 DEX +3 Proficency +2 Archery Style = +8 to hit---> -5 to hit with SS = +3 to hit.
+3 to hit (1d6+13 damage = 49.5 damage average for three attacks)
You will see the average damage vs a 15 AC is actually just 22.8 due to the low to hit unless you get advantage.
This is my problem with people assuming damage and what is "overpowered". The math actually works out to average this if you consider all factors.
Granted this fighter could go Battlemaster and use precision die which would up their damage to 33 on those attacks they can apply the d8 to the attack. However, this will only work for 1 round as they would burn through all their dice.
Compare this to a wizard who can just cast fireball and do an average of 28 (8 minimum) damage to as many things as you can fit into a 20ft radius its less glaring.
This is just my personal experience in our group of course and we all don’t really care about these things and role play a lot but also enjoy good fights.
For this group we rolled stats and she was lucky and she also is a battle master with precision strike...
The average damage in a calculated is one thing and objectively a lot more precise but More important is the feeling at the table for the rest of the group I’d say.
We tease her a bit when she has a streak but it is all in good fun. She also tends to roll really high.
This is just my personal experience in our group of course and we all don’t really care about these things and role play a lot but also enjoy good fights.
For this group we rolled stats and she was lucky and she also is a battle master with precision strike...
The average damage in a calculated is one thing and objectively a lot more precise but More important is the feeling at the table for the rest of the group I’d say.
We tease her a bit when she has a streak but it is all in good fun. She also tends to roll really high.
Ah yeah this is why I generally suggest against rolled stats.
Nothing creates an immediate and lasting imbalance more than unequal stats. Generally when I hear stories about "broken" builds 9 out of 10 times rolled stats are part of the story.
Generally wizards will always have a leg up on martials and honestly any buff to the combat system can only help.
I feel the same and will go for point buy or standard array next campaign.
In my Eberron game I told the players to reduce the highest roll to a 17 and they had to have 1 eight or lower. That went relatively well so far but I will go point buy/standard array next time and probably use Tasha's new options if they are to our liking....
Really not a fan of rolled stats. A player rolling badly can really hurt their enjoyment for the entire rest of the campaign as they end up with a non functional character.
Then again point buy has raised the expectation of 16 or nothing in the primary stat and fuelled the opinion of certain species being completely unsuited for certain classes.
That’s why I use rolled stats, but they can default to standard array if they don’t like their roll.
I respect this but also just wonder whenever I hear this.....
Why not just do a more heroic array or increased point buy? At least then everyone gets a boost and its more even.
Rolling but offering the array if bad is still creates the potential for unequal stats as someone could roll really well and the person who rolled poorly is left with the array.
Basically the "randomness" only serves to potentially make them better which seems odd to leave to chance but I understand the sentiment.
Whelp. Back to this thread, after some Involuntary Nap Time.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: complexity is the currency with which a game developer buys depth.
Depth - that is to say, the interaction between mechanics that creates new and interesting game spaces, and the ability of a game to continue surprising its players time after time with new emergent behaviors based on interactions in the game's mechanics - is what keeps a game exciting to play past one's first run-through. A shallow game is one the players can fully explore with only a few games played. A deep one is a game where every time you go back to it, you find something new you didn't expect to see.
Many games with 'simple but deep' gameplay, which is what a certain type of nimrod (note: "a certain type of nimrod" is referring to a general class of player, not anyone specific. [REDACTED]) demands 5e is and should be, are not actually deep in and of themselves. Once you've played one hand of poker, you've basically played poker. Similarly, chess is often heralded as "learn in ten minutes, take a lifetime to master'. What people fail to realize is that these "simple but deep" games rely on human competition for their depth. The interactions that make the game deep come from a human opponent who is doing everything in their power to foil your efforts, which is not the case in a collaborative roleplaying game like D&D, or in fact any other respectable TTRPG. No matter how adversarial the DM may be in your game, it's not actually their specific job to try and beat you unless you're playing a very weird game.
As such, TTRPGs can't take the shortcut of asking player-versus-player competitiveness and a competitive metagame to substitute for mechanical depth the way a purely PvP game can. Because this shortcut is denied to a TTRPG, the game must instead buy depth the old-fashioned way - with complexity. This is not to say that complexity is inherently good. Quite the opposite - complexity, in and of itself, is bad. Complexity increases a game's cognitive load, heightens barriers to entry, and generally pisses people off as most players only have so much cognition to spare. However. Without any complexity, and with no competitive metagame to drive depth, a TTRPG just ends up with no depth at all, period. See: Overlight, Fate, or any rules-ultralight 'Narrative Experience' games played nigh-exclusively by bohemians, posers, and coffeehouse philosopher dipshits. These games have a lot of trouble retaining players because they just don't have anything to grab a player with. They refused to spend any complexity at all, seeing it as an unnecessary bar to both storytelling and new players, and as such there's not really anything to play in such games. People sit around a table and unleash their inner thespian, using occasional die rolls as storytelling prompts rather than gameplay resolution. Some folks love that, but you can't really call it a game.
Complexity must be spent in a TTRPG that is attempting to stick to the "Game" descriptor in Role Playing Game. It can be spent poorly. Oh gods, can it be spent poorly. Everyone says that 4e spent its complexity very poorly. Pathfinder spends complexity profligately, adding complexity everywhere it can out of a nostalgic desire to be more 3.5-y and snub the folks who chafe at 5e's unwillingness to spend complexity, and as a result it doesn't buy enough depth for the amount of complexity it spends. That's a mistake, and I imagine Paizo's gonna pay for it in a big way. I distinctly recall Angry GM, who is a bright sort even if he chafes the britches sometimes, describing the PF22e public playtest as being written by two distinct groups of people - the "Chasing D&D" people and the "But Pathfinder" people. Which is why Pathfinder can end up hitting upon brilliant bits of design like their three-action turn economy and their smooth and delightful character building engine, only to screw up so bloody hard elsewhere.
D&D 5e has a different problem. 5e's problem is that its developers are mortally, morbidly, pathologicaly terrified of complexity. They absolutely refuse to spend any amount of complexity they can find the remotest way to avoid, because the default assumption from Wizards of the Coast is that the average D&D 5e player is an absolute shrieking moron who's completely and utterly unable to tolerate anything more complex than a game of Go Fish. Sadly, this has proven a financially successful model for them, a fact which never fails to depress me because it means 5e has serious problems with depth. The game is very low res; the only time you get the sort of cool emergent behaviors that make a TTRPG both deep and memorable is when the DM decides to muck with the system herself and spend the complexity the game developers were too terrified to do for her.
Is EN World the company that should be spending that complexity? No. It's Wizards' job; EN World is only doing it because Wizards is shirking their job. Is EN World spending their complexity properly? Who knows. We'll have to see the final game documents before we can tell.
Is Wizards going to have to get over its knee-jerk phobic fear of complexity if it wants D&D to live for longer than a month or two after Critical Role stops playing their system? You bet your bottom dollar they are. I guarantee you that if the CR crew announced their third campaign was going to be played with the Savage Worlds ruleset they've already used a few times? There would be an office-wide rampaging panic attack at Wizards HQ, and the CR team would start receiving a lot of offers with a large number of zeroes in them to change their minds and go back to 5e. This game sure ain't selling itself on its own merits, after all.
D&D 5e has a different problem. 5e's problem is that its developers are mortally, morbidly, pathologicaly terrified of complexity. They absolutely refuse to spend any amount of complexity they can find the remotest way to avoid, because the default assumption from Wizards of the Coast is that the average D&D 5e player is an absolute shrieking moron who's completely and utterly unable to tolerate anything more complex than a game of Go Fish. Sadly, this has proven a financially successful model for them, a fact which never fails to depress me because it means 5e has serious problems with depth. The game is very low res; the only time you get the sort of cool emergent behaviors that make a TTRPG both deep and memorable is when the DM decides to muck with the system herself and spend the complexity the game developers were too terrified to do for her.
I legit laughed out loud at this...could not be more true.
Because of this I think that they spent their complexity capital on the spells of 5e. There are a bunch that offer some very very unique and interesting combinations. They spend the vast majority of the budget on this.
Where they spend about as much as a Costco hotdog: Martials.
Martials can be fun if the RP side is engaged well but in combat they are about as exciting as watching paint dry. Where I would invest most of the complexity capital would be focusing on making martial characters more interesting in combat. Not more powerful mind you....just more options on what to do with your action.
PF2E does a great job of this and I feel that you have a much wider variety of things to do in combat compared to 5e.
The thing about adding choices is that a default setup usually includes some features that aren't useful to some characters, so if you have a choice when optimizing you drop that feature and take something else (we see this in races -- for example, almost all characters who would actually want dwarven weapon proficiencies already have those proficiencies from another source. It's slightly less true for elves because rogues and monks actually have uses for longbow skill).
What this means is that a customized class or race builder, to be balanced, must be unable to afford the standard version.
The thing about adding choices is that a default setup usually includes some features that aren't useful to some characters, so if you have a choice when optimizing you drop that feature and take something else (we see this in races -- for example, almost all characters who would actually want dwarven weapon proficiencies already have those proficiencies from another source. It's slightly less true for elves because rogues and monks actually have uses for longbow skill).
What this means is that a customized class or race builder, to be balanced, must be unable to afford the standard version.
Funny thing is that those weapon proficiencies are going to become much more important with Tasha's optional rules on race ability scores. Dwarf wizards/monks/rogues etc...are going to get additional choices for their character and the ASI will now be able to match their class better.
but your example tracks...options without careful thought on what they could do for the character does seem to produce anti-synergy with the classes the race is best suited for.
Goblins with Nimble Escape and Cunning Action for example....goblins would make great rogues but the anti-synergy with the racial feat makes it tough to want to pick them.
Overall the choices have to enhance and not just complicate as Yueri has suggested.
That’s why I use rolled stats, but they can default to standard array if they don’t like their roll.
I respect this but also just wonder whenever I hear this.....
Why not just do a more heroic array or increased point buy? At least then everyone gets a boost and its more even.
Rolling but offering the array if bad is still creates the potential for unequal stats as someone could roll really well and the person who rolled poorly is left with the array.
Basically the "randomness" only serves to potentially make them better which seems odd to leave to chance but I understand the sentiment.
Ahh, but you see, I don’t care about equal/unequal stats. That is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. On a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest priority I can assign something and 1 is the lowest, I give “equal stats” a 0.
This is D&D. It isn’t about stats, it’s about story, teamwork, and overcoming challenges. Everyone having the same starting array of stats is not necessary for any of those things. And as a DM, I can compensate for any stats on any character in a multitude of ways if necessary.
If a PC dies and the player tolls a new character, they also don’t start with the same XP as the rest of the party. The start with the bare minimum necessary for them to be at the same level as the lowest leveled member of the party.
You have to understand something, when I started playing there was neither a Standard Array, nor a Point Buy option. When we rolled stats there was no 4d6 and drop the lowest, it was just a flat 3d6. And we rolled stats in order. And each class had their own XP chart. And there were no such things as ASIs, the stats you rolled at 1st level we’re your stats for the entire game unless you got a Wish or a Magic Item to alter them.
I’m not saying that things should still be that way by any means. Things change, and that’s fine. What I am saying is that we learned that having everything be “even” was unnecessary to our enjoyment of the game. We expected things to be uneven, and we found ways to make it work anyway. That was part of the fun for us, was figuring out how to make it work.
That’s why I use rolled stats, but they can default to standard array if they don’t like their roll.
I respect this but also just wonder whenever I hear this.....
Why not just do a more heroic array or increased point buy? At least then everyone gets a boost and its more even.
Rolling but offering the array if bad is still creates the potential for unequal stats as someone could roll really well and the person who rolled poorly is left with the array.
Basically the "randomness" only serves to potentially make them better which seems odd to leave to chance but I understand the sentiment.
Ahh, but you see, I don’t care about equal/unequal stats. That is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. On a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest priority I can assign something and 1 is the lowest, I give “equal stats” a 0.
This is D&D. It isn’t about stats, it’s about story, teamwork, and overcoming challenges. Everyone having the same starting array of stats is not necessary for any of those things. And as a DM, I can compensate for any stats on any character in a multitude of ways if necessary.
If a PC dies and the player tolls a new character, they also don’t start with the same XP as the rest of the party. The start with the bare minimum necessary for them to be at the same level as the lowest leveled member of the party.
You have to understand something, when I started playing there was neither a Standard Array, nor a Point Buy option. When we rolled stats there was no 4d6 and drop the lowest, it was just a flat 3d6. And we rolled stats in order. And each class had their own XP chart. And there were no such things as ASIs, the stats you rolled at 1st level we’re your stats for the entire game unless you got a Wish or a Magic Item to alter them.
I’m not saying that things should still be that way by any means. Things change, and that’s fine. What I am saying is that we learned that having everything be “even” was unnecessary to our enjoyment of the game. We expected things to be uneven, and we found ways to make it work anyway. That was part of the fun for us, was figuring out how to make it work.
Equal stats would be a 10 for me.... as a team game having one team member being a lame duck while the other is a walking demi-god is at least highly distracting or at worst game ending.
Standard array and point buy are probably the best solutions to this as it sets a good baseline for ability and its truly character choice that determines your efficacy. So your choices are really what made the difference not just random chance.
However to each their own but I would honestly never even consider a game where 3d6 down the line was the option. That just sounds outright terrible.
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I was thinking about this for a while. For a class to be balanced, it has to provide the same amount of power as another class. This power could be broken up into bunches of little abilities, or one large one. The third choice is to have negative abilities with a class. This doesn't work very well for several reasons: if the negative ability is situational, the class isn't going to feel balanced. It is going to be really good at some times and terrible at others. We see this all the time when people make homebrew playable vampire characters.
The problem with trying to make a complex system is that there needs to be a purpose to complexity. A reason that you spend time trying to learn the quirks of the system so you can truly make your character tick. If a 5.5e character is on the same balance level as a 5e character, than it will likely have to have many more small features to keep the complexity high. Ultimately, a 5.5e character would feel like a lot of work and not a lot of reward.
This is an interesting quandary. I'd like to see someone else's opinion on this problem.
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
My Improved Lineage System
One way could be to add more choice but not more power. As is in classic 5e you only chose very few things as most things are fixed because of you subclass choice, which in my eyes is the only really meaningful choice you ever have.
of course you can take a feat instead of an ASI but that’s about it.
So for more choice you would need equally powerful things at each levels and they would need to be equally strong/cool/interesting or it would lead to less choices again.
Some barbarian subclasses do that in a minor way with the totems and the auras.
The choices should also make your character distinct from the same character who took another choice.
A system like in diablo 2 where had skill trees and made choices that changed your character in a meaningful way. Do I put all my points into bows or maybe into spear? Do I take guided arrow or seeking arrow? These choices had great impact on how a character would feel in play.
I think 5e kind of did that with a master class and skill trees are the subclasses but with nearly no real choices to make.
Unfortunately most players of 5e seem to be enjoying this kind of “simple” system. I still cannot understand why human fighter without feats is the most played class. At my tables we have many players with feats and a lot of different classes and sometimes even triple multiclassing. Nearly no one plays humans.
in our Wildemount game we have a Minotaur barb, a deep gnome wizard, a drow bard, a ravenite fighter, a dwarf celestial warlock and a wood elf fighter-rogue player.
in the Eberron game there are two shifters, a cleric and a ranger. Two humans, eldritch knight and moon Druid. And a Vedalken Artificer.
That is true but that has been no problem at our table so far even if the power levels are quite different.
We have a variant human fighter with sharpshooter, fighting style archery and crossbow expert using a hand crossbow. I checked all the rules several times to see if her build was legit and as far as I can say it is.
She attacks 3 times beginning with level 5 and does about 50 to 60 damage a round when she hits. Her dex is maxed out and her attack bonus is normally a plus 10, now at level 9 it went up to 11. With sharpshooter it is still a plus 6 which is enough to hit most monsters.
I wouldn’t call her min-maxer at all but this character is dishing out damage that is insane. I just got haste as my Paladin spell if cast on her she will get one more attack on top. She does not have any special gear, so no magic weapon. Then add action surge on top of that and she does up to 150 to 160 damage in a good round.
This is a single class in regular 5e with no effort on min-maxing.
If that is possible now I don’t fear that some more options break the game.
I think it is important to give players meaningful choices that make their characters distinct from others of the same class.
I think WotC tries that by putting out this massive number of subclasses in Tasha’s and keeping it simple for most players at the same time. You still only have 1 major choice to make - what is my subclass.
Maybe the class feature variants open it up a bit but I first want to see the final version in the book before I judge it.
Variant human fighters with crossbow expert and sharpshooter is actually a very common min-max. It isn't totally optimized, but what you describe is min-maxing.
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
My Improved Lineage System
For me personally min-maxing is intentionally planning a character to be stronger than the game thinks you should be. In this case the player just made good choices for her character which is a marine in the army whose job is to shoot things as good as possible.
A sniper character, basically. I wouldn’t say that it breaks the game for us and we really need her damage output to survive in the game. We faced a storm giant quintessential at level 5... and survived.
Yeah, min-maxing in itself isn't evil, but when it effects the enjoyment of the whole group than it isn't a good thing. It also isn't necessarily contrary to roleplaying; check out any of the throwdowns (particularly Yurei's entry's) and you will see that a min-maxed character can have an interesting back story.
A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.
My Improved Lineage System
OK for the build I might have to call Shenanigan's...
Assuming Point Buy your level 5 V. Human Crossbow Expert/Sharpshooter Fighter is at best a 16 DEX (They used first ASI to get sharpshooter feat).
So assuming that:
Per Attack
To hit: +3 DEX +3 Proficency +2 Archery Style = +8 to hit---> -5 to hit with SS = +3 to hit.
+3 to hit (1d6+13 damage = 49.5 damage average for three attacks)
If you actually do a DPR Calculator:
You will see the average damage vs a 15 AC is actually just 22.8 due to the low to hit unless you get advantage.
This is my problem with people assuming damage and what is "overpowered". The math actually works out to average this if you consider all factors.
Granted this fighter could go Battlemaster and use precision die which would up their damage to 33 on those attacks they can apply the d8 to the attack. However, this will only work for 1 round as they would burn through all their dice.
Compare this to a wizard who can just cast fireball and do an average of 28 (8 minimum) damage to as many things as you can fit into a 20ft radius its less glaring.
This is just my personal experience in our group of course and we all don’t really care about these things and role play a lot but also enjoy good fights.
For this group we rolled stats and she was lucky and she also is a battle master with precision strike...
The average damage in a calculated is one thing and objectively a lot more precise but More important is the feeling at the table for the rest of the group I’d say.
We tease her a bit when she has a streak but it is all in good fun. She also tends to roll really high.
Ah yeah this is why I generally suggest against rolled stats.
Nothing creates an immediate and lasting imbalance more than unequal stats. Generally when I hear stories about "broken" builds 9 out of 10 times rolled stats are part of the story.
Generally wizards will always have a leg up on martials and honestly any buff to the combat system can only help.
I feel the same and will go for point buy or standard array next campaign.
In my Eberron game I told the players to reduce the highest roll to a 17 and they had to have 1 eight or lower. That went relatively well so far but I will go point buy/standard array next time and probably use Tasha's new options if they are to our liking....
Really not a fan of rolled stats. A player rolling badly can really hurt their enjoyment for the entire rest of the campaign as they end up with a non functional character.
Then again point buy has raised the expectation of 16 or nothing in the primary stat and fuelled the opinion of certain species being completely unsuited for certain classes.
That’s why I use rolled stats, but they can default to standard array if they don’t like their roll.
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I respect this but also just wonder whenever I hear this.....
Why not just do a more heroic array or increased point buy? At least then everyone gets a boost and its more even.
Rolling but offering the array if bad is still creates the potential for unequal stats as someone could roll really well and the person who rolled poorly is left with the array.
Basically the "randomness" only serves to potentially make them better which seems odd to leave to chance but I understand the sentiment.
Whelp. Back to this thread, after some Involuntary Nap Time.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: complexity is the currency with which a game developer buys depth.
Depth - that is to say, the interaction between mechanics that creates new and interesting game spaces, and the ability of a game to continue surprising its players time after time with new emergent behaviors based on interactions in the game's mechanics - is what keeps a game exciting to play past one's first run-through. A shallow game is one the players can fully explore with only a few games played. A deep one is a game where every time you go back to it, you find something new you didn't expect to see.
Many games with 'simple but deep' gameplay, which is what a certain type of nimrod (note: "a certain type of nimrod" is referring to a general class of player, not anyone specific. [REDACTED]) demands 5e is and should be, are not actually deep in and of themselves. Once you've played one hand of poker, you've basically played poker. Similarly, chess is often heralded as "learn in ten minutes, take a lifetime to master'. What people fail to realize is that these "simple but deep" games rely on human competition for their depth. The interactions that make the game deep come from a human opponent who is doing everything in their power to foil your efforts, which is not the case in a collaborative roleplaying game like D&D, or in fact any other respectable TTRPG. No matter how adversarial the DM may be in your game, it's not actually their specific job to try and beat you unless you're playing a very weird game.
As such, TTRPGs can't take the shortcut of asking player-versus-player competitiveness and a competitive metagame to substitute for mechanical depth the way a purely PvP game can. Because this shortcut is denied to a TTRPG, the game must instead buy depth the old-fashioned way - with complexity. This is not to say that complexity is inherently good. Quite the opposite - complexity, in and of itself, is bad. Complexity increases a game's cognitive load, heightens barriers to entry, and generally pisses people off as most players only have so much cognition to spare. However. Without any complexity, and with no competitive metagame to drive depth, a TTRPG just ends up with no depth at all, period. See: Overlight, Fate, or any rules-ultralight 'Narrative Experience' games played nigh-exclusively by bohemians, posers, and coffeehouse philosopher dipshits. These games have a lot of trouble retaining players because they just don't have anything to grab a player with. They refused to spend any complexity at all, seeing it as an unnecessary bar to both storytelling and new players, and as such there's not really anything to play in such games. People sit around a table and unleash their inner thespian, using occasional die rolls as storytelling prompts rather than gameplay resolution. Some folks love that, but you can't really call it a game.
Complexity must be spent in a TTRPG that is attempting to stick to the "Game" descriptor in Role Playing Game. It can be spent poorly. Oh gods, can it be spent poorly. Everyone says that 4e spent its complexity very poorly. Pathfinder spends complexity profligately, adding complexity everywhere it can out of a nostalgic desire to be more 3.5-y and snub the folks who chafe at 5e's unwillingness to spend complexity, and as a result it doesn't buy enough depth for the amount of complexity it spends. That's a mistake, and I imagine Paizo's gonna pay for it in a big way. I distinctly recall Angry GM, who is a bright sort even if he chafes the britches sometimes, describing the PF22e public playtest as being written by two distinct groups of people - the "Chasing D&D" people and the "But Pathfinder" people. Which is why Pathfinder can end up hitting upon brilliant bits of design like their three-action turn economy and their smooth and delightful character building engine, only to screw up so bloody hard elsewhere.
D&D 5e has a different problem. 5e's problem is that its developers are mortally, morbidly, pathologicaly terrified of complexity. They absolutely refuse to spend any amount of complexity they can find the remotest way to avoid, because the default assumption from Wizards of the Coast is that the average D&D 5e player is an absolute shrieking moron who's completely and utterly unable to tolerate anything more complex than a game of Go Fish. Sadly, this has proven a financially successful model for them, a fact which never fails to depress me because it means 5e has serious problems with depth. The game is very low res; the only time you get the sort of cool emergent behaviors that make a TTRPG both deep and memorable is when the DM decides to muck with the system herself and spend the complexity the game developers were too terrified to do for her.
Is EN World the company that should be spending that complexity? No. It's Wizards' job; EN World is only doing it because Wizards is shirking their job. Is EN World spending their complexity properly? Who knows. We'll have to see the final game documents before we can tell.
Is Wizards going to have to get over its knee-jerk phobic fear of complexity if it wants D&D to live for longer than a month or two after Critical Role stops playing their system? You bet your bottom dollar they are. I guarantee you that if the CR crew announced their third campaign was going to be played with the Savage Worlds ruleset they've already used a few times? There would be an office-wide rampaging panic attack at Wizards HQ, and the CR team would start receiving a lot of offers with a large number of zeroes in them to change their minds and go back to 5e. This game sure ain't selling itself on its own merits, after all.
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I legit laughed out loud at this...could not be more true.
Because of this I think that they spent their complexity capital on the spells of 5e. There are a bunch that offer some very very unique and interesting combinations. They spend the vast majority of the budget on this.
Where they spend about as much as a Costco hotdog: Martials.
Martials can be fun if the RP side is engaged well but in combat they are about as exciting as watching paint dry. Where I would invest most of the complexity capital would be focusing on making martial characters more interesting in combat. Not more powerful mind you....just more options on what to do with your action.
PF2E does a great job of this and I feel that you have a much wider variety of things to do in combat compared to 5e.
The thing about adding choices is that a default setup usually includes some features that aren't useful to some characters, so if you have a choice when optimizing you drop that feature and take something else (we see this in races -- for example, almost all characters who would actually want dwarven weapon proficiencies already have those proficiencies from another source. It's slightly less true for elves because rogues and monks actually have uses for longbow skill).
What this means is that a customized class or race builder, to be balanced, must be unable to afford the standard version.
Funny thing is that those weapon proficiencies are going to become much more important with Tasha's optional rules on race ability scores. Dwarf wizards/monks/rogues etc...are going to get additional choices for their character and the ASI will now be able to match their class better.
but your example tracks...options without careful thought on what they could do for the character does seem to produce anti-synergy with the classes the race is best suited for.
Goblins with Nimble Escape and Cunning Action for example....goblins would make great rogues but the anti-synergy with the racial feat makes it tough to want to pick them.
Overall the choices have to enhance and not just complicate as Yueri has suggested.
Yes, the simplified way of handling racial abilities in Tasha's will also be a significant power boost for some races.
Ahh, but you see, I don’t care about equal/unequal stats. That is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. On a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest priority I can assign something and 1 is the lowest, I give “equal stats” a 0.
This is D&D. It isn’t about stats, it’s about story, teamwork, and overcoming challenges. Everyone having the same starting array of stats is not necessary for any of those things. And as a DM, I can compensate for any stats on any character in a multitude of ways if necessary.
If a PC dies and the player tolls a new character, they also don’t start with the same XP as the rest of the party. The start with the bare minimum necessary for them to be at the same level as the lowest leveled member of the party.
You have to understand something, when I started playing there was neither a Standard Array, nor a Point Buy option. When we rolled stats there was no 4d6 and drop the lowest, it was just a flat 3d6. And we rolled stats in order. And each class had their own XP chart. And there were no such things as ASIs, the stats you rolled at 1st level we’re your stats for the entire game unless you got a Wish or a Magic Item to alter them.
I’m not saying that things should still be that way by any means. Things change, and that’s fine. What I am saying is that we learned that having everything be “even” was unnecessary to our enjoyment of the game. We expected things to be uneven, and we found ways to make it work anyway. That was part of the fun for us, was figuring out how to make it work.
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Equal stats would be a 10 for me.... as a team game having one team member being a lame duck while the other is a walking demi-god is at least highly distracting or at worst game ending.
Standard array and point buy are probably the best solutions to this as it sets a good baseline for ability and its truly character choice that determines your efficacy. So your choices are really what made the difference not just random chance.
However to each their own but I would honestly never even consider a game where 3d6 down the line was the option. That just sounds outright terrible.