Ok, so the fighter and Barbarian have features that they can regain with a short rest and are equivalent to a 2nd/3rd level spell at level one, while casters get nothing.
However, as levels increase, Fighters gain not much else just a couple of abilities equivalent to 3rd/4th level spells, while casters and bending reality.
Why not balance the game like this:
Level 1:
Casters have four level 1 spells, but are limited by spells slots.
Martials have one class feature that is equivalent to level 1 spells, but the less amount of abilities is compenseted by the fact they don't rely on limited uses.
Level 3:
Casters have four level 2 spells, but are limited by spells slots.
Martials have one class feature that is equivalent to level 2 spells, but the less amount of abilities is compenseted by the fact they don't rely on limited uses.
And so on for levels 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 and 20.
Edit: OK, that link seems not to work right for some reason. It's to Drive Through RPG's digital editions of D&D 4e.
OK, it's not exactly what you're asking for, but it's a genuinely good system within its limitations, and those limitations also illustrate the bounds of the sort of thing you are asking for.
Fundamentally, balance in a game like D&D is not possible. Even theoretically simple things, like the balance within 1st-level wizard spells, ends up being based on vibes. Is find familiar balanced against magic missile? Who knows! And the balance changes as the characters level up.
When you start introducing different classes, with different roles in the game, it gets harder and harder.
And then, you start having to deal with actual play, where all your balance assumptions get tested against what players actually do. Infamously, 5e was built around the assumption that parties would have 6-8 encounters between long rests, with a couple of short rests somewhere in there. A class, let's call it Wizard, whose abilities are balanced on that assumption, so it has to manage its resource pool to not run out through the adventuring day, is going to play completely differently if there's only 1-2 encounters per day, so it can burn spell slots with mad abandon.
There are things you can balance for, to a degree, but they're mostly simple calculations like damage per turn, where you don't want anyone to get too high or too low. But even then, there's burst vs. sustained, long-term staying power, etc.
Edit: OK, that link seems not to work right for some reason. It's to Drive Through RPG's digital editions of D&D 4e.
OK, it's not exactly what you're asking for, but it's a genuinely good system within its limitations, and those limitations also illustrate the bounds of the sort of thing you are asking for.
Fundamentally, balance in a game like D&D is not possible. Even theoretically simple things, like the balance within 1st-level wizard spells, ends up being based on vibes. Is find familiar balanced against magic missile? Who knows! And the balance changes as the characters level up.
When you start introducing different classes, with different roles in the game, it gets harder and harder.
And then, you start having to deal with actual play, where all your balance assumptions get tested against what players actually do. Infamously, 5e was built around the assumption that parties would have 6-8 encounters between long rests, with a couple of short rests somewhere in there. A class, let's call it Wizard, whose abilities are balanced on that assumption, so it has to manage its resource pool to not run out through the adventuring day, is going to play completely differently if there's only 1-2 encounters per day, so it can burn spell slots with mad abandon.
There are things you can balance for, to a degree, but they're mostly simple calculations like damage per turn, where you don't want anyone to get too high or too low. But even then, there's burst vs. sustained, long-term staying power, etc.
Of course balancing is hard, but they could at least try. Like, balancing on feels and vibes? There are players out there that can create balanced homebrew with detailed excel worksheet average calculations type sht and a million dollar company cannot do that? Like, how can they forecast demand and gain profit in millions, but can't work on the math of a silly fantasy game?
Of course balancing is hard, but they could at least try. Like, balancing on feels and vibes? There are players out there that can create balanced homebrew with detailed excel worksheet average calculations type sht and a million dollar company cannot do that? Like, how can they forecast demand and gain profit in millions, but can't work on the math of a silly fantasy game?
Because it is a silly fantasy game. D&D 5e is not designed to be balanced, it isn't designed to be challenging. It is designed to enable whacky shenanigans to happen because that's fun, as well as enable people to act out whatever fantasy they want, if breaking the game and being completely OP is your jam you can do that in 5e, if being a regular dude with a sword & shield that can be swallowed whole by a giant worm is your thing you can do that in 5e. If you want a well balanced fantasy game I recommend D&D 4e or Pathfinder 2e.
Fundamentally, balance in a game like D&D is not possible. Even theoretically simple things, like the balance within 1st-level wizard spells, ends up being based on vibes. Is find familiar balanced against magic missile? Who knows! And the balance changes as the characters level up.
When you start introducing different classes, with different roles in the game, it gets harder and harder.
And then, you start having to deal with actual play, where all your balance assumptions get tested against what players actually do. Infamously, 5e was built around the assumption that parties would have 6-8 encounters between long rests, with a couple of short rests somewhere in there. A class, let's call it Wizard, whose abilities are balanced on that assumption, so it has to manage its resource pool to not run out through the adventuring day, is going to play completely differently if there's only 1-2 encounters per day, so it can burn spell slots with mad abandon.
There are things you can balance for, to a degree, but they're mostly simple calculations like damage per turn, where you don't want anyone to get too high or too low. But even then, there's burst vs. sustained, long-term staying power, etc.
Of course balancing is hard, but they could at least try.
It's not hard. It is literally impossible.
Like, balancing on feels and vibes? There are players out there that can create balanced homebrew with detailed excel worksheet average calculations type sht and a million dollar company cannot do that? Like, how can they forecast demand and gain profit in millions, but can't work on the math of a silly fantasy game?
Correct. The multimillion-dollar company cannot do that.
But neither can those players with their excel spreadsheets.
Yes, if you crunch your numbers hard enough, you can create combat-damage balance. If you're creative, you can probably do it without making everything boring.
Or rather, you can create combat-damage balance for a specific set of assumptions. As soon as your game gets out into the wild, people will break your assumptions and your balance calculations start to fray.
And then you have non-damage abilities, and you no longer have any numbers to plug into your spreadsheet. The paladin gets aura of protection at 6th level. How many DPR is that worth? How about the Bard's Jack of All Trades, which isn't mostly used in combat? You're making up values to balance with, and then when your assumptions are violated, your balance doesn't fray, it shatters.
WotC have plenty of designers with lots and lots of experience working on a game that needs good balance, and they can't do it reliably either. And that's a game with constrained options. In the even more constrained world of board games, it's impossible to make sure that different paths to victory are balanced. Even symmetric, full-information, zero-luck strategy games aren't 100% balanceable.
In a game like D&D, where players and DMs can pretty much do anything they want, balance is an illusion. The best you can do is try to make sure that, in games where people aren't trying to break things, nobody feels too dominant or too irrelevant in or out of combat. And that's good enough, because D&D isn't a game that you can win, either.
And it's extra-impossible in D&D, because there are some baked-in assumptions about how things work that pretty much force balance problems like the martial-caster divide. If you try to eliminate those, it's going to end up being "not D&D" to a chunk of the player base. (See 4e, though that's not the only possible path.)
Yes, if you crunch your numbers hard enough, you can create combat-damage balance. If you're creative, you can probably do it without making everything boring.
It depends on your definition of 'boring' but as I've started playing other TTRPGs there is definitely a clear trade-off between power and balance. To make a game that is mathematically balanced things have to be much more predictable - so you can actually make the spreadsheets work for you - which means what you can do must be much more constrained. You can't have spells that let you turn a giant into a kitten in a balanced game because that introduces far too much variability in outcome - one roll of the dice makes the difference between a combat being challenging or being a cake walk.
This is why all the people claiming "just make martials more powerful" are nuts. Making martials more powerful will only make the game even less balanced, because it just increases the number of characters that have a random chance to completely change the difficulty of an encounter with a single action. The problem with D&D5e game balance is that spells are too powerful, the only way to balance the game is to massively nerf spells. But you can't do that because D&D is a high-fantasy, high-magic game and loads of the players want game-breaking magic powers.
Yes, if you crunch your numbers hard enough, you can create combat-damage balance. If you're creative, you can probably do it without making everything boring.
It depends on your definition of 'boring' but as I've started playing other TTRPGs there is definitely a clear trade-off between power and balance. To make a game that is mathematically balanced things have to be much more predictable - so you can actually make the spreadsheets work for you - which means what you can do must be much more constrained. You can't have spells that let you turn a giant into a kitten in a balanced game because that introduces far too much variability in outcome - one roll of the dice makes the difference between a combat being challenging or being a cake walk.
It's less power than mechanical variety of options. In FATE (which I've only played a little, and not recently, so I may be somewhat mischaracterizing), while powers are narratively free-form, the mechanical penalties you can inflict with an action are quite limited. If you were trying to magically turn that giant into a kitten, it'd get played the same as if you were trying to stab it to death, but using a different stress track where the giant's probably a lot weaker. You're trying to achieve the same goal -- take out the giant -- so you use the same mechanics.
Similarly, 4e made class powers more similar and achieved more balance. I'm sure it frayed more and more at higher power levels, but it was just an inherently more balanced design.
Meanwhile, GURPS, despite its complicated point-based build system, isn't inherently balanced at all well, even at low power levels. Whatever sort of game you're playing, there are better and worse ways to build your characters to achieve what you want. There are just too many options, and they have to be priced for the general case. And that's just basic stuff. It's way worse when you add the power systems.
This is why all the people claiming "just make martials more powerful" are nuts. Making martials more powerful will only make the game even less balanced, because it just increases the number of characters that have a random chance to completely change the difficulty of an encounter with a single action. The problem with D&D5e game balance is that spells are too powerful, the only way to balance the game is to massively nerf spells. But you can't do that because D&D is a high-fantasy, high-magic game and loads of the players want game-breaking magic powers.
Depends what you mean by "balance". If you're working toward "everybody feels effective, and nobody dominates the game consistently", you can achieve it at every power level. But there, it's fine if the wizard has their once-a-day nuke spell, as long as the fighter gets to be spectacular sometimes as well, even if their spectacularness is, on paper, nothing like as powerful as the nuke.
If you're working toward "everybody feels effective, and nobody dominates the game consistently", you can achieve it at every power level.
No, I don't think you can. You have only a few options for high-power abilities:
make them generally usable - in which case everybody ends up competing to be "the one" to use their high-power ability to end this particular encounter, and in any game were there aren't sufficient encounters to exhaust everyone's high-power ability then some people will get left out. But moreover nobody feels special because everyone can do essentially the same thing.
make them situational - in this case different characters get to be "the one" with the high-power ability in different situations, but depending on the design of the game some players may get to be "the one" more often than others because their situations come up more often. e.g. Destroy Undead is awesome but if you're in a campaign with no undead in it, it is useless.
But beyond that I think this is a very poor definition of "game balance" because it completely ignores the other half of the encounter - the challenge needing to be overcome. Because what is the point of some flashy high power ability, if the party was easily going to overcome the challenge without it? Do people really gain satisfaction from making a super jump 20 ft in the air to get over a 6ft tall fence? I dunno maybe it's just me, but doing a epic smackdown to kill some feral pigs seems embarrassingly-over-the-top.
High power, limited use, or limited success abilities inherently make designing balanced encounters impossible because you don't know whether the ability will be used effectively or not, and those two options have massive consequences for the difficulty of an encounter. As a simple example take Wall of Force, in a dungeon it's easy to use Wall of Force to cut a room in half and split one encounter into two separate encounters each with half as many enemies in it. But if the wizard chooses not to use it, or if the wizard loses concentration on it suddenly it is back to one encounter with double the enemy forces. Either you design the encounter such that each half of it is still a challenge in which case the full force is incredibly deadly, or you design the encounter such that the full force is a challenging but survivable encounter and it becomes trivially easy if they do use Wall of Force. Sure you could balance the game from the player perspective and give every class some version of Wall of Force - e.g. Clerics/Paladins get divine barrier, Druids get ice wall, Barbarians/Fighters get split earth, Rogues/Rangers get poisoned snare, Bards get mental prison - but it's impossible to know if it will get used appropriately or not.
If you're working toward "everybody feels effective, and nobody dominates the game consistently", you can achieve it at every power level.
No, I don't think you can. You have only a few options for high-power abilities:
make them generally usable - in which case everybody ends up competing to be "the one" to use their high-power ability to end this particular encounter, and in any game were there aren't sufficient encounters to exhaust everyone's high-power ability then some people will get left out. But moreover nobody feels special because everyone can do essentially the same thing.
make them situational - in this case different characters get to be "the one" with the high-power ability in different situations, but depending on the design of the game some players may get to be "the one" more often than others because their situations come up more often. e.g. Destroy Undead is awesome but if you're in a campaign with no undead in it, it is useless.
1: They don't have to be the same thing to be generally useful. Meteor Swarm is great for taking out large numbers of medium foes (or a small army), but it shouldn't be the ability of choice against a single target.
2: If a GM can't mix things up to give their players a chance in the spotlight, the game's balance is beside the point.
Also, you can create encounters that are big enough to require more than one thing.
The problem is when the big, epic abilities are all coming from the same subset of the players. Fighters may do more damage over the course of an entire adventuring day, but when they know they're only dealing with the bulk of this encounter because the wizards don't want to break out the big guns, it doesn't feel good.
But beyond that I think this is a very poor definition of "game balance" because it completely ignores the other half of the encounter - the challenge needing to be overcome. Because what is the point of some flashy high power ability, if the party was easily going to overcome the challenge without it? Do people really gain satisfaction from making a super jump 20 ft in the air to get over a 6ft tall fence? I dunno maybe it's just me, but doing a epic smackdown to kill some feral pigs seems embarrassingly-over-the-top.
High power, limited use, or limited success abilities inherently make designing balanced encounters impossible because you don't know whether the ability will be used effectively or not, and those two options have massive consequences for the difficulty of an encounter. As a simple example take Wall of Force, in a dungeon it's easy to use Wall of Force to cut a room in half and split one encounter into two separate encounters each with half as many enemies in it. But if the wizard chooses not to use it, or if the wizard loses concentration on it suddenly it is back to one encounter with double the enemy forces. Either you design the encounter such that each half of it is still a challenge in which case the full force is incredibly deadly, or you design the encounter such that the full force is a challenging but survivable encounter and it becomes trivially easy if they do use Wall of Force. Sure you could balance the game from the player perspective and give every class some version of Wall of Force - e.g. Clerics/Paladins get divine barrier, Druids get ice wall, Barbarians/Fighters get split earth, Rogues/Rangers get poisoned snare, Bards get mental prison - but it's impossible to know if it will get used appropriately or not.
I don't think you should be trying to build high-level encounters as a puzzle box with one expected solution. Present a threat great enough to require the players to expend serious resources, and they'll do what seems right at the time. They'll burn one or more high-level powers, or more medium-levels, or underestimate it and try to win on the cheap, successfully or not. If they use their powers cleverly and efficiently, maybe the day's adventure will feel easy, and you can calibrate better in the future. Maybe it'll be tough, but winnable. Maybe they'll use them poorly, or their spell load out won't mesh well with the challenges before them, and it'll be dangerous. Maybe they'll even lose.
Calibrating is the problem, if higher level PCs just did more damage and had more health calibration would be easy, but world-bending abilities are near impossible to balance for.
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Ok, so the fighter and Barbarian have features that they can regain with a short rest and are equivalent to a 2nd/3rd level spell at level one, while casters get nothing.
However, as levels increase, Fighters gain not much else just a couple of abilities equivalent to 3rd/4th level spells, while casters and bending reality.
Why not balance the game like this:
Level 1:
Level 3:
And so on for levels 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 and 20.
Have I got a D&D edition for you
Edit: OK, that link seems not to work right for some reason. It's to Drive Through RPG's digital editions of D&D 4e.
OK, it's not exactly what you're asking for, but it's a genuinely good system within its limitations, and those limitations also illustrate the bounds of the sort of thing you are asking for.
Fundamentally, balance in a game like D&D is not possible. Even theoretically simple things, like the balance within 1st-level wizard spells, ends up being based on vibes. Is find familiar balanced against magic missile? Who knows! And the balance changes as the characters level up.
When you start introducing different classes, with different roles in the game, it gets harder and harder.
And then, you start having to deal with actual play, where all your balance assumptions get tested against what players actually do. Infamously, 5e was built around the assumption that parties would have 6-8 encounters between long rests, with a couple of short rests somewhere in there. A class, let's call it Wizard, whose abilities are balanced on that assumption, so it has to manage its resource pool to not run out through the adventuring day, is going to play completely differently if there's only 1-2 encounters per day, so it can burn spell slots with mad abandon.
There are things you can balance for, to a degree, but they're mostly simple calculations like damage per turn, where you don't want anyone to get too high or too low. But even then, there's burst vs. sustained, long-term staying power, etc.
Of course balancing is hard, but they could at least try. Like, balancing on feels and vibes? There are players out there that can create balanced homebrew with detailed excel worksheet average calculations type sht and a million dollar company cannot do that? Like, how can they forecast demand and gain profit in millions, but can't work on the math of a silly fantasy game?
Because it is a silly fantasy game. D&D 5e is not designed to be balanced, it isn't designed to be challenging. It is designed to enable whacky shenanigans to happen because that's fun, as well as enable people to act out whatever fantasy they want, if breaking the game and being completely OP is your jam you can do that in 5e, if being a regular dude with a sword & shield that can be swallowed whole by a giant worm is your thing you can do that in 5e. If you want a well balanced fantasy game I recommend D&D 4e or Pathfinder 2e.
It's not hard. It is literally impossible.
Correct. The multimillion-dollar company cannot do that.
But neither can those players with their excel spreadsheets.
Yes, if you crunch your numbers hard enough, you can create combat-damage balance. If you're creative, you can probably do it without making everything boring.
Or rather, you can create combat-damage balance for a specific set of assumptions. As soon as your game gets out into the wild, people will break your assumptions and your balance calculations start to fray.
And then you have non-damage abilities, and you no longer have any numbers to plug into your spreadsheet. The paladin gets aura of protection at 6th level. How many DPR is that worth? How about the Bard's Jack of All Trades, which isn't mostly used in combat? You're making up values to balance with, and then when your assumptions are violated, your balance doesn't fray, it shatters.
WotC have plenty of designers with lots and lots of experience working on a game that needs good balance, and they can't do it reliably either. And that's a game with constrained options. In the even more constrained world of board games, it's impossible to make sure that different paths to victory are balanced. Even symmetric, full-information, zero-luck strategy games aren't 100% balanceable.
In a game like D&D, where players and DMs can pretty much do anything they want, balance is an illusion. The best you can do is try to make sure that, in games where people aren't trying to break things, nobody feels too dominant or too irrelevant in or out of combat. And that's good enough, because D&D isn't a game that you can win, either.
And it's extra-impossible in D&D, because there are some baked-in assumptions about how things work that pretty much force balance problems like the martial-caster divide. If you try to eliminate those, it's going to end up being "not D&D" to a chunk of the player base. (See 4e, though that's not the only possible path.)
It depends on your definition of 'boring' but as I've started playing other TTRPGs there is definitely a clear trade-off between power and balance. To make a game that is mathematically balanced things have to be much more predictable - so you can actually make the spreadsheets work for you - which means what you can do must be much more constrained. You can't have spells that let you turn a giant into a kitten in a balanced game because that introduces far too much variability in outcome - one roll of the dice makes the difference between a combat being challenging or being a cake walk.
This is why all the people claiming "just make martials more powerful" are nuts. Making martials more powerful will only make the game even less balanced, because it just increases the number of characters that have a random chance to completely change the difficulty of an encounter with a single action. The problem with D&D5e game balance is that spells are too powerful, the only way to balance the game is to massively nerf spells. But you can't do that because D&D is a high-fantasy, high-magic game and loads of the players want game-breaking magic powers.
It's less power than mechanical variety of options. In FATE (which I've only played a little, and not recently, so I may be somewhat mischaracterizing), while powers are narratively free-form, the mechanical penalties you can inflict with an action are quite limited. If you were trying to magically turn that giant into a kitten, it'd get played the same as if you were trying to stab it to death, but using a different stress track where the giant's probably a lot weaker. You're trying to achieve the same goal -- take out the giant -- so you use the same mechanics.
Similarly, 4e made class powers more similar and achieved more balance. I'm sure it frayed more and more at higher power levels, but it was just an inherently more balanced design.
Meanwhile, GURPS, despite its complicated point-based build system, isn't inherently balanced at all well, even at low power levels. Whatever sort of game you're playing, there are better and worse ways to build your characters to achieve what you want. There are just too many options, and they have to be priced for the general case. And that's just basic stuff. It's way worse when you add the power systems.
Depends what you mean by "balance". If you're working toward "everybody feels effective, and nobody dominates the game consistently", you can achieve it at every power level. But there, it's fine if the wizard has their once-a-day nuke spell, as long as the fighter gets to be spectacular sometimes as well, even if their spectacularness is, on paper, nothing like as powerful as the nuke.
No, I don't think you can. You have only a few options for high-power abilities:
But beyond that I think this is a very poor definition of "game balance" because it completely ignores the other half of the encounter - the challenge needing to be overcome. Because what is the point of some flashy high power ability, if the party was easily going to overcome the challenge without it? Do people really gain satisfaction from making a super jump 20 ft in the air to get over a 6ft tall fence? I dunno maybe it's just me, but doing a epic smackdown to kill some feral pigs seems embarrassingly-over-the-top.
High power, limited use, or limited success abilities inherently make designing balanced encounters impossible because you don't know whether the ability will be used effectively or not, and those two options have massive consequences for the difficulty of an encounter. As a simple example take Wall of Force, in a dungeon it's easy to use Wall of Force to cut a room in half and split one encounter into two separate encounters each with half as many enemies in it. But if the wizard chooses not to use it, or if the wizard loses concentration on it suddenly it is back to one encounter with double the enemy forces. Either you design the encounter such that each half of it is still a challenge in which case the full force is incredibly deadly, or you design the encounter such that the full force is a challenging but survivable encounter and it becomes trivially easy if they do use Wall of Force. Sure you could balance the game from the player perspective and give every class some version of Wall of Force - e.g. Clerics/Paladins get divine barrier, Druids get ice wall, Barbarians/Fighters get split earth, Rogues/Rangers get poisoned snare, Bards get mental prison - but it's impossible to know if it will get used appropriately or not.
1: They don't have to be the same thing to be generally useful. Meteor Swarm is great for taking out large numbers of medium foes (or a small army), but it shouldn't be the ability of choice against a single target.
2: If a GM can't mix things up to give their players a chance in the spotlight, the game's balance is beside the point.
Also, you can create encounters that are big enough to require more than one thing.
The problem is when the big, epic abilities are all coming from the same subset of the players. Fighters may do more damage over the course of an entire adventuring day, but when they know they're only dealing with the bulk of this encounter because the wizards don't want to break out the big guns, it doesn't feel good.
I don't think you should be trying to build high-level encounters as a puzzle box with one expected solution. Present a threat great enough to require the players to expend serious resources, and they'll do what seems right at the time. They'll burn one or more high-level powers, or more medium-levels, or underestimate it and try to win on the cheap, successfully or not. If they use their powers cleverly and efficiently, maybe the day's adventure will feel easy, and you can calibrate better in the future. Maybe it'll be tough, but winnable. Maybe they'll use them poorly, or their spell load out won't mesh well with the challenges before them, and it'll be dangerous. Maybe they'll even lose.
Calibrating is the problem, if higher level PCs just did more damage and had more health calibration would be easy, but world-bending abilities are near impossible to balance for.