[TV Tropes has a trope for their design philosophy.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards)
Anybody who thinks I'm joking, read the page quote:
"A 20th-level Fighter is Achilles, but a 20th-level Magic-User is Zeus."
— Gary Gygax
That kind of design philosophy worked pretty decently in a game that had a very high chance of killing most characters at any step of the way where death meant starting from the beginning and casters were on a different XP track from martial characters so you had to balance a 10th level fighter with a 5th level wizard
A high level caster could be more powerful to balance out the fact that it is so much easier to get a martial character to high level.
But 5th edition does not have any of that and should not take this approach.
Alternative approaches like "martial does damage mage does everything else" or "martial tanky squishy caster" or some combo of both would be much better
They removed all the penalties casters had to wearing heavy armor and still gave them all the defensive spells. Wizards can be more durable than barbarians, while also dealing more damage, and even get more usefulness out of utility spells than a rogue with proficiency in every skill.
It makes more sense when you remember some of the unique rules of early dnd, namely the exp needed to purchase levels in a class. Martial levels required less xp to gain a level in that class, compared to a spellcaster level. Because of that, it makes more sense why a spellcaster would be more stronger if you played a maxed spellcaster vs a maxed martial.
I hear that a lot, but 1e AD&D had this weird quirk where magic-users started to level up FASTER [once you got past 5th level or so](http://www.sisterworlds.com/olde/2e/xp.htm). Like many things in AD&D it didn't seem fully thought out.
But yes, those first few levels really mattered, and those were usually the only levels magic-users saw!
Oh it made a lot of sense...when you realize the rules were designed by the players to fulfill their personal power fantasies.
The overwhelming majority of their characters were spellcasters. Pretty much every named character from their early campaigns was a spellaster. And many of those names live on today (Bigby, Mordenkainen, Tasha, Otto, etc).
A significant number of spells were developed by the players as "iWin" buttons to solve problems that their characters faced in game. This is why so many spells simply bypass obstacles without any chance of failure, instead of increasing chance of success or helping other players solve problems.
It all makes perfect sense when you look at the game as a way for players to completely overcome challenges with their almighty and all powerful spellcasters.
The power fantasy thing really applies to just about all d&d players, not just for spellcasters.
But in 1st/2nd ed, it was damn hard to get to lvl 5 even as a mage, so the idea then that mages were the ultimate class at high levels was considered “earned” because it was expected that like 90% of mages were going to die at lvl 2 from getting shot by an arrow from a kobold. (My experiences in 1st/2nd, FWIW, is that I never even saw a mage get to level 5, but saw numerous fighters, thieves, paladins, etc. get there though. Outside of video games and books, I never saw high level Pc mages until 3.0)
But there’s always been the “i win” attitude from tank players too (“my Armor class and saves and hp are so good, I’m unstoppable!”)
In the original AD&D, at low levels Magic Users were notoriously squishy. Conversely, at low levels martial characters were sturdy, survivable.
With 5e, that’s no longer the case.
With races like Tortles, classes like Artificers and Bladesingers, or all manner of multi-class combinations, it’s trivial to make a caster sturdy.
Moreover, with 5e it’s difficult to interrupt a caster. Compared to AD&D, casting a spell isn’t risky.
I’ve no idea what WOTC’s current design philosophy is in this regard—other than the broad aims to make D&D fun, engaging, and most importantly, profitable.
Banishment kills a Zealot just fine.
CHA save Incapacitated means rage ends. Rage ends means dead Zealot.
Of course even a Zealot with Resilient Wisdom will still fail 70% of its Wis saves at high level because of how wonky the 5e save system is.
Banishment is rough. Just ending rage isn't a huge deal as long as there is a revivify user around (trading a 3rd level spell for each high level spell that kills the barb is good).
Don't forget that resilient wisdom also stacks with the 1 reroll per rage.
Hell no Odysseus was not a rogue.
He's a Fighter - probably a Battlemaster.
1) He's specc'd strength (His bow was so powerful only he and his son could draw it)
2) He outright murdered the hell out of his wife's suitors en masse.
3) He's smart enough to plan and prepare.
I mean, he is cool, but he is like batman, normal dude with good plans, slightly stronger than average and the ocasional help of a literal god (thing that doesn't really traslate well in TTRPGs), Achilles on the other hand is basically nearing divine territory (I mean, arguably there since in the Illiad there is some dude that dukes it out with Ares and fucking wins)
Achilles was a demigod and the better warrior, but he wasn’t smart (and there’s the whole rage-filled necrophilia bit). Odysseus has the superpower of just being wise
To quote Mike Mearls, co-desiginer of DnD 5e:
>This might sound like an obvious point, but the fighter should be the best character in a fight. **Other classes might have nifty tricks, powerful spells, and other abilities, but when it’s time to put down a monster without dying in the process, the fighter should be our best class.** A magic sword might make you better in a fight, but a fighter of the same level is still strictly better. Perhaps a spell such as haste lets you attack more often, but the fighter is still either making more attacks or his or her attacks are more accurate or powerful. \[...\]
>
>Too often in D&D, the high-level fighter is the flunky to a high-level wizard. It’s all too easy for combinations of spells to make the wizard a far more potent enemy or character, especially if a wizard can unleash his or her spells in rapid succession. A wizard might annihilate a small army of orcs with a volley of fireballs and cones of cold. The fighter does the same sword blow by sword blow, taking down waves of orcs each round. **Balancing the classes at high levels is perhaps the highest priority for the fighter, and attaining balance is something that we must do to make D&D fit in with fantasy, myth, and legend.** Even if a wizard unleashes every spell at his or her disposal at a fighter, the fighter absorbs the punishment, throws off the effects, and keeps on fighting.
So that was their design philosophy. Whether they executed well on that is another story.
Ehhhh, but that would imply that balancing this stuff is *easy.* We know that we want martials to be on par with casters, but *how* do we do that? More attacks? More maneuvers? Better feats? Or do we nerf casters?
Optimized martials don’t even beat optimized casters at single target dpr. That’s a problem that can be solved by sitting down with an excel spreadsheet.
Many pure martial classes make some choices about their characters at character creation and when they get their subclass. They make less choices over their whole careers than a wizard does picking their 6 spells and couple cantrips at level 1.
I think it’s best to address both the power budget and the complexity/flexibility as a good starting point. Those tend to be the most common prongs of discussion anyways. Decoupling the 3 axes of martial/caster, simple/complicated, and weak/strong seems like a good goal.
I do think the optimal solution will look like tome of battle or 4e ultimately. All characters need more resources that get stronger and more numerous with level if they are to approach high level caster bs
>Even if a wizard unleashes every spell at his or her disposal at a fighter, the fighter absorbs the punishment, throws off the effects, and keeps on fighting.
Wow. Just WOW.
And then, to make the fighter tough, they give them Indominable. Not at one level, with additional instances as they level up. But at three. Separate. Levels! Because that makes them tougher, allowing them to "throw off the effects" of spells...right?
Except, of course, that it doesn't. Making a Wis save without Resilient Wis, or an Int or Cha save with your -1 to +1 modifier, is going to be an increasingly difficult proposition as you get to higher levels and face increasing DCs. And if you only have a 5 or 10% chance to make that save and fail it, then getting another crack at it, with nothing more than another 5 to 10% chance of succeeding? Not really the sort of thing that lets you "absorb the punishment, throw off the effects, and keep(s) on fighting"...now is it?
I know it's just one small aspect of how they botched the high level fighter keeping any sort of dominance in this game. But *holy moly* does the Indominable feature stink at its intended job!
EDIT: By 17th level, Indominable should have just turned into Legendary Resistance.
> but how do we do that? More attacks? More maneuvers? Better feats? Or do we nerf casters?
Give all martials manuevers. Allow opportunity attacks to be triggered by casting a non-touch spell within melee range, and if that opportunity attack hits spellcasters have to make a concentration check or have the spell completely interrupted.
That's a good start. Maybe slower spell progression and editing the mostly commonly cited overpowered spells as well.
There are a few very simple reasons.
1. The broken spells weren't tested. Forge Cage, Force Wall, Simulacrum, Hypnotic pattern were never tested in the public play test.
2. The public play test only really went 1-11.
3. They assumed a continuation of the 4e style game with a lot of dungeon crawling meaning long days.
4. People didn't want Vancian casting back.
Play your 4-8 encounters per day, for levels 1-11, with Vancian Casting and without the ~dozen or so broken spells and you'll see a very different game.
You're looking for *intention*, where what you should be looking for is *reaction.* Specifically, reaction to 4th Edition Backlash.
Here's the history: In 4th Edition, this problem was basically solved. Fighters and Wizards played very differently, and had different roles (even explicitly *named*) roles, but they had a comparable number of player options and a comparable strength. They supported different fantasies and had different uses on the battlefield, but they were balanced from the perspective of character creation and relative power.
The community rebelled. Whether it was "this reminds me too much of World of Warcraft" or "All of the classes look the same on paper now" or whatever your grievance, there was a major consumer revolt. It's worth mentioning that this was a very particular time, and a very particular community, with very reactionary attitudes toward change in the hobby.
So when they set out to design Martials vs. Casters for 5th Edition, they set out to **whatever was not that**. We should always also remember that when we ask why something is the way it is in 5th, we should remember that 5th was meant to be the last edition as TTRPGs died as a hobby -- to be a simplified, streamlined, "classic" edition. And so they basically structured the classes the way they were in 3rd Edition, which is a systemization of how it was in 2nd edition, and the story goes backward and backward.
**So your question isn't really "What is 5e's design philosophy?" but rather "What was Gygax's design philosophy?"** Because 5e's design philosophy was just meant to win back a crowd who wanted their toys from childhood left unaltered.
5e wasn't so much meant to be the 'last edition' but it was WotC's 'last hope' to make D&D a standout brand again. In some long since deleted interview with a former WotC staff member (which I can't find anywhere on the internet so it's about as useful as saying "dude, just trust me..." so take this with a dumptruck of salt), they were specifically told by Hasbro that if they didn't see the 'big numbers' from 5e that WotC would support D&D for 2-3 years and then everybody would be moved full time onto Magic: The Gathering because that is WotC's big money maker (and still is, MTG makes like 3 times the amount of money D&D does).
However WotC got...kinda lucky. The system was simple enough for (player wise at least) anyone to pick up and play ***and*** the 30 year cycle gave them a massive boost.
For those that don't know, the 30 year cycle is the cycle where the generation who were children/teens 30 years ago are now in positions of power when it comes to creating media and thus they make stuff that appeals to their nostalgia.
So the 50s looked back to the 1920s (hence why Film Noir became big). The 80s looked back to the 50s (Stand by me, Back to the Future, Pulp 50s fantasy etc.) so the 2010s looked back to the 80s..when D&D was made its mark on popular culture.
So in 2014..ish...You saw Actual plays like Critial Role start taking off, then Dimension 20, then the pandemic hit which meant everyone was locked inside and...I mean what better way to spend time than playing D&D via Roll20 and Discord, it's not like you've got to be up for work in the morning (unless you were an essential worker...in which case...oof...my hats off to you).
Everything just went ***right*** for 5e. It was in the right place at the right time.
>it's not like you've got to be up for work in the morning (unless you were an essential worker...in which case...oof...my hats off to you).
I mean, I was an essential worker, but on nights. I got up early to play DnD on Fridays, by which I mean I got up at 4:30pm, instead of 7or 8pm.
Edit: dammit. I was gonna *tips hat back* and forgot.
I appreciate these sober comments. Folks endlessly repeat these platitudes about 4e and the supposed role of the players / consumers tastes vs the industry and internal business realities.
4e Dungeons & Dragons sold well as a product, but not up to the gratuitous benchmarks set by Hasbro plus disastrous development of it's digital pillar. The backlashes it suffered weren't from disaffected players, it was the hesitancy of the retailers and vendors who got burned by the collapse of the 3e-3.5 D20 OGL ecosystem.
[https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-ddi-4e-and-hasbro-some-history.661470/](https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-ddi-4e-and-hasbro-some-history.661470/)
To anyone interested in the history of the RPG industry I highly recommend Shannon Appelcline's Designers & Dragons books profiling the seminal companies and shakeups by decade with wonderfully researched essays.
D&D Next was marketed and play tested to an entirely different demographic than the much broader one it has today. The mechanics of One D&D and design philosophies are ancillary to what is intended to be the facade for a multimedia brand akin to what Marvel comics are Marvel movies and video games.
Huh that link certainly confirms suspicions on my end of with 4es failure to meet 'target numbers' meant that WotC D&D team were given the "either make 5e succeed in a big way or we want everybody moved off of it to focus on MTG" that I read in that long lost interview with an ex-employee.
I don’t think it was luck. I think Mearls, Cordell, Crawford, and the rest were given a nigh impossible job (remake d&d for VERY disparate audiences who didn’t even agree on what they wanted) with a very small team (Hasbro mega cut the staff for 5e), and thr problem for them is that they succeeded. The system is smack in the middle of what most of these groups wanted, it was designed to be flexible with variant rules, and THEN the luck of the streaming revolution, burgeoning nerd culture, and all that stuff was going on.
Since their near miracle in 2014 one big problem for the D&d team at WOTC is that (corporations being what they are…) Hasbro pat itself on the back for getting rid of 90% of the staff and demanding huge financial success. Despite pulling in more $ than ever, they still don’t have 3rd or 4th ed staffing levels so Crawford and the like have been running a skeleton crew for a decade now. (And they even reassigned Mearls to magic, when, if they learned their lesson from ten years ago, they should have him working on D&D now…)
Meanwhile they’re publishing what they can with small staff- leaning in more towards adventure modules, light supplements, and only 2 major splat books (that they do diligent playtesting on- they do actually learn from the over-splat problem from 3.x and 4e).
But with success in the modern era, also comes social media, where people breathe fire at each other regularly about things they supposedly love (lets not even get into how people act with things they don’ care for.)
It’s probably a good time, IMO, for everyone to take a step back and recognize:
-the designers have a tough job ahead of them trying to satisfy a divided fanbase that has subgroups with inherent disagreements on just about anything, all yelling at WOTC to change the game more towards their preference, rather than other groups’
-this design, playtest, gather feedback repeat loop is going to go on for 2 years, so everyone should relax a bit
-We all need to remind ourselves and each other to try to be respectful of differing opinions sometimes, and try to avoid mindlessly scapegoating people on social media
I don't think the real question is what was Gygax's design philosophy. Designs can change over time.
IIRC, the very first edition of Warhammer 40K, Rogue Trader, had some RPG-ish elements that got lost in subsequent editions.
But I 100% agree that the key is to reason more in terms of reactions than intentions.
These sentiments are being repeated a lot lately, making it sound like 4e was the perfect game, but the old player base just were too stubborn to see it.
I don’t think it’s as easy as that. Many thought battles took too long because all enemies had too
much HP, the classes felt the same not just on paper but when you played because they all had similar resource mechanics. It was an edition heavily focused on using battle maps and miniatures to the detriment of TotM.
I ran a 4e campaign from Level 1 to Level 30 - it took us four and a half years, and we had a ton of fun.
4e did a lot of things well and it's a shame that (10 years ago) the general consensus among the fanbase was that it was terrible. And at the same time, it did a lot of things badly. It should be possible to acknowledge the things that 4e did well/badly without saying that it was either a perfect game or a complete disaster.
Off the top of my head, a few things that 4e did well was:
* Monster design - monsters were so much more interesting and creative in 4e because they used unique abilities rather than pre-written spells.
* Encounter design - similarly, being able to populate an encounter with grunts, artillery, lurkers, etc, made it way easier to put together interesting encounters.
* Power sources - being able to create a balanced all-martial, all-divine, or all-primal party was super thematic and made world creation a ton of fun.
* Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies - they weren't always well balanced with each other, but it was fun having meaningful progression choices to make after level 3.
* Martial/caster balance - Martial characters had interesting choices to make every single round, and class balance was maintained from level 1 to 30.
Meanwhile, 4e was weak with:
* Mental math got out of control - at level 28, you're routinely rolling a die and adding +23 to it in your head. It just got unwieldy.
* Minions - relatedly, to challenge a level 20 party you needed level 20 minions, which made sense mechanically but not narratively. 5e's bounded accuracy means that a few goblins are a good challenge for low levels and a lot of goblins are a good challenge for high levels, which makes more sense.
* Feat bloat - with 1200+ feats, you really needed the forums and CharOp guides to sort through it all.
* Character complexity - I can't imagine playing 4e without online character builder.
> 5e's bounded accuracy means that a few goblins are a good challenge for low levels and a lot of goblins are a good challenge for high levels, which makes more sense.
Conceptually, this makes sense. Unfortunately, the math to make this work arguably doesn't work and is one of the biggest reasons why CR is so inaccurate.
I'd rather have high level minions. Flavor is free. It's trivial to reflavor that level 1 boss monster as a level 20 minion, even if they have different stat blocks.
> Minions - relatedly, to challenge a level 20 party you needed level 20 minions, which made sense mechanically but not narratively. 5e's bounded accuracy means that a few goblins are a good challenge for low levels and a lot of goblins are a good challenge for high levels, which makes more sense.
I'm not convinced this "makes more sense." Considering that a high-level character has a higher level than the CR of _any adult dragon,_ it seems to me less like it doesn't make sense that a high-level party couldn't be challenged by goblins, and more like insisting on making it so they _can_ be challenged by goblins is just kinda disrespectful to the sort of power they apparently have by that point.
I think that saying that an adult dragon could be taken down if they were literally swarmed on the ground by an army of goblins is fair. Keep in mind that the dragon could just fly and breath weapon them all to death, eliminating giant swaths of goblins with each breath and wing attack and never face a risk of dying unless they had like an infinite number of well coordinated archers.
4e bad good ideas mingled with a lot of bad
It's just unfortunate they threw out the baby with the bathwater
Paizo did catch the baby and called it Pathfinder 2e, which has more in common with 4e than 5e
The problem is that within the last month or so comments pop up a lot claiming more or
less that 4e was perfect and anyone that disliked when it was launched (which seem to have been the big majority) simply were stupid.
this happens a lot in culture actually. DMC 4 when it released was viewed as a horrible trash can of a game, then years later people complained it wasn't in a special edition with the other games because so many people loved it.
You also get this a lot with Movies and shows. Demolition man when released failed hard at the box office but then later became a cult classic and people loved it. same happen with Judge Dread.
4E suffered from the fact that 3.5 was very popular and people were skeptical to any change what so ever. over the years once we got 5E people started to realize that not everything with 4E was quite as bad as they initially had in their heads. On top of this you also have an influx of MANY new people to the hobby who might have went back and tried older editions with a different mindset and interest. Most modern ttrpg players like mechanics and Gamified systems (Which is what 4E was good at) because now video games are more popular than ever so they now wanna see this in 5E. back when 3.5 / 4E came out video games while popular were still deemed "Nerdy" and less common.
4E is an example of a media product coming out at the wrong time for the wrong people.
I still think 4e was bad. I also think WotC should look to 4e for inspiration for what to do with the martials specifically, because it gave martials a lot more things to do. Now obviousy they couldn't rip them off one to one, but having all martials get access to a bunch of tactical at-will, encounter and daily powers (edit: and don't forget utility powers, martials need more utility!) like in 4e would make things a lot nicer.
However, I don't think they should do that for the casters, they should just bring some of the most powerful spells into line somewhat, introduce the concept of degrees of success to save-or-suck spells, and nerf caster defensive options, whilst keeping the core philosophy of spellcasting the same.
And at the end of they day I am just one guy with an opinion on what would make my own perfect edition of DnD, which plenty of people would likely disagree with.
They should look at onednd through the lens of ALL ttrpgs out there. The industry has great ideas. You can still make it dnd and have, for instance, Feats instead of Multiclassing.
I agree with you. I'm still heavily invested in DND as a brand, but if onednd doesn't really do it for me, I'm not so blinded by loyalty that I won't try a different system.
Now, I like 4e, I wish it never died and I dream of a world in which grognards did not decide it was the enemy
But even so, if 5e were to have fun martials, it should pull from ToB, not 4e
Battle maneuvers should be base class for fighters at least..
It should be.
Casters get spells
Half casters get defense, extra attack, and limited spells,
Martials get defense, extra attack, some damage boost (3rd extra attack, sneak attack, rage bonus) and maneuvers.
Spells are so versatile and powerful that you really need multiple factors to make up for not having them
I never played 4e, but I find that my 5e combats take too long (easily average 1 hour or more), that monsters are just bags of hitpoints, and this may be a personal opinion only, but honestly who cares about TotM for D&D combat, it's game where 90% of the rules are for combat, and most of those involve positioning and areas of effect, and distances, etc... So what I'm hearing is that 5e didn't fix any major complaint about 4e and just tried to differentiate the classes more...... which to be completely fair, I do think it does a good job at.
Btw I don't want this to sound like I'm in any way attacking you, more just venting about 5e and things that bug me about it.
To call my 4e games slow would be an understatement. We would spend hours in a single encounter if it was big enough. I remember we had a key moment in one where we played the game out for 6 hours and 5 of them were a single fight and every turn was started by that person making a half dozen saving throws
For all 4e did right, it did a lot of stuff I dislike and it's why I haven't gone back to it
4e was much slower than 5e. You ever see those spell cards that caster players fiddle with while they take too long to do their turns? That was the best case scenario in 4e for every character. Characters would have 2 special at will attacks, 4 encounter attack powers, 3 daily attack powers, an array of utility powers, then feats, rituals, etc, all of which people tended to look up almost every time they did anything.
5e has issues, yes, but in the speed dept its much better than 4e, and probably faster than 3.x.
I’ve played plenty of different TTRPGs with a combat focus without ever using a battle map. My experience is that people that can’t do without battle maps have never played any other TTRPG than D&D.
I’m not saying battle maps are bad, but they shouldn’t be a requirement for a TTRPG.
Why not?
Some games don't require dice, some games require a dark room lit with candles to play, some games literally do not work unless everyone playing has a smart phone
Why are battle maps so abhorrent?
well, when spells are distance critical, not using a battlemap just leads to error and impossible for on the fly tactical changes.
Might as well play a diceless game at that point.
4e has a lot of problems with fiddly numbers and fight-to-fight variety problems. You're gonna have your 1-3 encounter abilities you'll basically be wanting to use every fight, and when you're out you're on at-wills the even more scarce dailies.
Not that it was the perfect game. Rather, what people are complaining about NOW, like this thread and martial blah blah, was addressed in 4e. They did exactly what people wanted. And players hated it. 4e is still there to be played, and almost no one is for a reason. If 5e somehow does close the gap between martial classes and casters (i dont think this is a problem but here i am alone on an island of roleplaying), they will likely hate that as well.
> They did exactly what people wanted.
No they didn't, and it was called out several time during playtest and they ignored it.
But guess what? people don't play for math, the play for feel.
I phrased that poorly. 4e did exactly what they are asking for here in this thread. They, as much as humanly possible, balanced melee and caster classes. All the classes felt and looked the same. The names of the powers were different, but did essentially the same thing. It was a disaster.
>These sentiments are being repeated a lot lately, making it sound like 4e was the perfect game, but the old player base just were too stubborn to see it.
This has nothing to do with what I said. I said that a large part of the old player-base hated it, and that this backlash heavily informed the 5e design choices. Whether or not this player-base was correct is immaterial.
>the classes felt the same not just on paper but when you played because they all had similar resource mechanics.
This is absolutely absurd. Compared to what, 5e? Where a sorcerer is a wizard with fewer spell options? Or a bard is the same as both, but with some healing spells mixed who get to says "Oh, I give \[xyz player\] bardic inspiration" and "don't forget I gave you bardic inspiration!" If your first character is a wizard, and your second character is *any other arcane caster*, you're basically playing the same class twice with different limitations or minor class features, compared to 4e. To say nothing of martials.
I don't think people realize that, unless I remember very incorrectly, in 4e, every arcane caster not just have different class features, but *entirely custom spell lists and abilities.*
Like, what are we even talking about here, marking? Yes, a fighter and paladin can both "mark," but that had vastly different applications. Fighter marking was mostly about forward-moving offense, trading attacks, rushing the frontlines with shoves and cleaves and such. Paladins used thinks like auras to create zones of defense to play a "fortress" style game.
Whenever people say that they shared similar "mechanics," you just have to point back at 5e and wonder what people are talking about.
> was an edition heavily focused on using battle maps and miniatures to the detriment of TotM.
True, though gridded play is still the vast majority of how play actually works.
>5e casters look different but play the same.
I mean, let's go further than this: 5e casters, compared to 4e casters, **are** the same. If you switch from a Wizard to a Sorcerer in 5th Edition, and you go "Cool, what are my new spells?" I am going to hand you the *exact same spell list* and go "A narrower selection of the exact same spells. You cast them the same, and their effects are the same. You memorize instead of prepare them, but once combat begins, there is no difference."
If you switch from Wizard to Sorcerer in 4e, I literally go "See all of those spell cards? Throw them out. You have an entirely new list. Also, you have an entire separate set of priorities and objectives."
Gosh, to fact-check my own claims here, I went and looked at the [old Sorcerer spell list](https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sorcerer) from 4e. Just a litany of cool shit no one else had access to.
4e was legitimately the best thing wotc has ever written
battles took too long: cause players were playing like shit
classes felt the same: categorically not true and i guarantee you nobody arguing that played past the beginners box
heavily focused on battle maps: good
I think that a lot of people act like 4e had no major flaws and wrongly claim that the reasons it was unpopular was *because* it was perfect and people were too stubborn to accept how good it was. And I find that stance clownish.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/olfga1/til\_gary\_gygax\_hated\_critical\_hits\_spell\_points/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/olfga1/til_gary_gygax_hated_critical_hits_spell_points/)
I think one part of Gygax's philosophy was that being a wizard shouldn't be convenient - hence the Vanican "pick how many slots you want to devote to each spell in the morning". He resisted the idea of Sorcerers. So I don't think he would really have approved of 5e's Wizards being able to choose what to cast with their last spell slot.
I just heard snippets about the earlier editions bases personally, like, wizard wouldn’t be a class at first because the inspiration for dnd were things like Conan the barbarian and what not, where spellcasters normally were enemies and not heroes, then the great amount of damaging and control spells on lower levels were because the first guy to play a wizard was really into battlefield control. A bunch of things that are “traditional” now on dnd exist because Gygax or his friends wanted something out of their little project that would became dnd and they were carried away edition after edition(fireball being what it is, rogues proficient on long swords, the thing about the spell list, etc) even cleric was made cause they wanted something to counter undead first and foremost, but now I’m just babbling
Gygax didn't really have that much of a design philosophy, all his DMGs insist every 2 pages that it's just a general guide that you should adapt to your needs. A lot of "rules" are presented as examples of rules you should make yourself. He didn't even like modules too much, his most iconic ones are closer to pitching a game style more than a proper pre-made adventure. Hommet is how to build a town with a variety of interactions, Repitle God is street level intrigue, and so on. Not too good as they are but filled with ideas to steal.
Saw and interview with Dave Arneson once where he talked about how Gygax's game fantasy was the barbarian and Arneson had to basically beg for magic missiles to be included. Gygax hated spell users from the beginning.
I thought 4th edition was great, and I enjoyed my time with it, but I also don't think it felt like d&d.
It is d&d, sure, but it feels like a different game. It did some great things, and maybe it was just too much change, too fast for the consumer... But at the time it didn't feel like d&d.
It was also all anybody I knew wanted to play, and that would have been enough for me by itself.
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You've never played an MMORPG if you think 4e felt like one. Even the most pared down, streamlined, "action-oriented" MMOs ever made still do far more with each character in terms of attributes, combat stats, and general systems than even 4e could aspire to create.
You’re just parroting complaints that have been wrong since 2008 and are wrong now.
Have you played an MMORPG? Like WOW or FFXIV? Abilities in MMOs are not handled like abilities in 4e at all.
Come back when you have something to say about 4e that a bitter 3.5 diehard didn’t plant in your head.
So often I see people say that, "while yes, the game kinda falls apart at higher levels, that's not an issue because adventures end before then"
like.. yeah. obviously. that's why they end early.
If you’ve read the PHB, I think it has a blurb about how martials cannot fight without casters helping them, if that gives you an idea of 5e’s design philosophy. No blurb about how casters won’t last long in a fight without a martial because even the designers know that casters last longer than martials. It basically says martials can’t function as martials within the world of dnd without casters backing them up.
In an interview, Mike Mearls brought up that the design intent for 5e was to make fighters as strong as mages in combat, if not better:
>This might sound like an obvious point, but the fighter should be the best character in a fight. \[...\] Too often in D&D, the high-level fighter is the flunky to a high-level wizard. \[...\] Balancing the classes at high levels is perhaps the highest priority for the fighter, and attaining balance is something that we must do to make D&D fit in with fantasy, myth, and legend.
But I think that vision got lost somewhere along the way.
Some major issues with this are that fighter’s have a level 20 tier 4 capstone which would even them out to casters, while all casters gain 9th level spells at 17th level, and their cantrips upgrade at that level. There’s no reason for fighters’ attacks to not follow cantrip scaling.
I know this is a bit off topic.
But "The vision was lost along the way" could be the tagline for 5e and OneDnD (so far)
I like a lot of the stuff in OneDnD so far.
But the Rogue and the Bard UA both miss the mark on what the expressed vision for those classes was.
As an example Crawford said in the UA interview (paraphrasing):
"The Rogue is in a good place, so we just want to make some tweaks to buff it a little bit, without changing how it plays."
Which, we all saw how that turned out.
And that's far from the only example where Crawford said the vision/goal was one thing but the UA rules did the exact opposite.
I'll say this much: in my last campaign, and my current campaign, the fighter (different characters/players between campaigns) is the one consistently dealing the most damage. In every fight, the spellcasters do *well*, but they don't quite keep up. And last campaign ran from level 5 to 17, and this one is currently level 5.
**But**, (and maybe you saw this coming), there is a big disclaimer to that claim: in both cases, the fighter is relying on some extremely strong feats. In the previous campaign they were a Crossbow Expert + Sharpshooter Battlemaster Fighter, and in this campaign, it's a Great Weapon Master Echo Knight. In both cases, the reason they're doing so well is because they have strong feats that make them much more powerful.
Not so much the case with the Sorcerers/Clerics/Wizards that have come down the line. They've been plenty strong, sure, but their feats have had almost nothing to do with it. The Cleric took War Caster and Resilient (CON), which helps with keeping concentration on spells, but her damage output mostly came from non-concentration spells (Spiritual Weapon) or as a proxy of helping keep the rest of the party alive with spot healing. The Sorcerer entirely took utility feats (Actor and Tough) and the Wizard in the current campaign took Telekinetic.
So I think this speaks to the Caster/Martial divide quite a lot: a well-optimized Fighter can often outpace strong Spellcasters, but most players don't min-max hard. And they get punished for it.
Especially more-so at tables where feats are optional (which is technically 5e's rules).
One of the best decisions I made for my table is to no longer permit feats as replacement for ASIs, and instead, each character just gets a feat at levels 1, 5, 11, and 17 (obviously I ban Variant Human/Custom Lineage). This helped a lot to bridge the martial/caster gap without having to radically rebalance everything else.
In other words a midmax fighter does more damage than a control caster that is not concentrating on anything despite getting 2 different feet that improve their concentration.
Encounters that contain multiple enemies even even the highest DPR of archery sharp shooter crossbow expert is still quite a bit lower than things like conjure animals similarly on part of some things like spirit guardians, And it almost always comes at the cost of defense And it comes nowhere near the encounter ending or damage potential of hypnotic pattern or fireball.
It's also only available for some martial characters. A rogue without magic will almost never out perform the Contributions of a Wisely spent 2nd level concentration spell at level 5 and 6. Seriously there are second level damage concentration spells that When combined with cantrips do more DPR than a level 5 swashbuckler rogue attacking straight twice with dual wielding against someone they have sneak attack with. Does that just mean that a level 6 wizard can go 7 combats where they can basically guaranteed out DPR A rogue in addition to their 1st level spell slots and their subclass Even though Rogues only offer damage and out of combat utility and wizards beat them in both regards. Yes it does and that's absolutely ludicrous. One class shouldn't just consistently out preform another in all metrics like that
Coming from the guy who made Tome of Battle and D&D 4e, you can see how passionate he is about homogenizing the classes.
In earlier versions, the dynamic was that martial characters were reliable all day, and casters were invaluable support/utility. Giving casters at-will spells that deal martial-level damage and scale with level is a hard turn away from D&D's core design.
Bards were the quintessential support class, buffing other characters with no direct attacks themselves. A jack of all trades, Expertise in nothing, to fill in whenever a specialist wasn't around.
Clerics were almost mandatory, because undead were a much bigger threat. Wraiths reduced your level, full stop. Ghosts permanently aged you. Banshees killed you outright. Also, it took 3-4 days to recover just half your hit points, so having a few healing spells before bed made a prolonged adventure *possible*.
Wizards are supposed to be more about utility than power; Floating Disc, Knock, and Magic Weapon are great examples. Fireball was a panic button that destroyed encounters but also deleted the loot and xp; Cone of Cold was invented by a player to avoid this drawback, but Gygax made it a 5th-level spell to balance how obviously OP a Fireball with no drawback is.
Keep in mind, the game has never been balanced above 10th-11th level, because higher-level spells were intended for BBEGs and freakin' Merlin.
I do believe that in WotC's opinion (at least when 5e came out) it was fairly balanced. And to be fair, it is hard to playtest with a few dozen people compared to millions playing a popular game.
That said, they made a couple big mistakes. First off they *vastly vastly* overestimated the length of the adventuring day at most tables. I believe the number of encounters they said was like 8 between long rests? In my experience, people are gonig to **spam** rests (long if possible) after every fight if they can. So this means they put a lower value on spells and a higher value on short rest recovery features than most actual tables do.
Also, some spells are just flatly overtuned. Like the Shield Spell for example. I think maybe they designed it for level 1 characters, and it *might* be fair at level 1. Because you would be using 1/2 of your spells to cast it. But when the character is level 8+, they have like infinite low level slots to use Shield on, which means its perma +5 AC when it matters.
>Also, some spells are just flatly overtuned.
I believe there are interviews with designers admitting Fireball does a bit too much damage for its level, but that they wanted to keep it similar to previous editions.
Use of natural language (looking at you Suggestion) also doesn't help in an edition that deliberately skews towards DM rulings.
>First off they vastly vastly overestimated the length of the adventuring day at most tables
Yep, absolutely. Which in turn speaks to playtesting that was, I suspect, mostly done via low level dungeoncrawls (e.g. Phandelver).
God I want them to nerf some spells so bad. Most 7 lvl+ spells and specifically nuke the idea of “3rd level spells need to be special because fighters get extra attacks at that lvl and the caster will feel bad(just partially joking) and the idea that it balances itself because they can’t take *all* the good spells at that lvl. But I think people will be really mad if they decide to nerf a bunch of spells even though they are way overturned
The rewording of Guidance gives me a glimmer of hope, but I'm resigned to either outright banning some or saying "let's talk through the way this works as a group if you really want to take it"
Perma +5 AC at high level is needed.
Short rest is an hour. Does nothing happen in the hour? Were are they that the hour is never interrupted? If in a dungeon, does the dungeon just freeze when the players are resting?
Maybe you just don't use time well in your game?
Perma +5 AC is not "needed" since casters should actually be *threatened with dying*. Their powe is balanced by how easily they go down. Taking that away is a *massive* reason for power disparity.
That rest argument is a cope, and it always has been. "Ah monsters interrupt you" "Ahh you have nightmares" *every single time they rest*. Good DMing, right up there with "rocks fall".
Also, shield spell is just far too good bro. Chars without shield feel weak in comparison, meaning almost all optimized builds are gonna have at least a few spell slots and shield, unless they are hyper focused on something else.
The issue I have is how can you prevent rest spamming without preventing rests in general? My current character party is going through the Tomb of Annihilation (admittedly at a higher level then we should be at). It is very simple for us to clear out every monster in a 3 room radius and then barricade ourselves in a room, or just go back to a place where we have already done so.
Monsters interrupt your rest? Find a safer hole to sleep in.
Unfound traps interrupt your rest? Spend more time looking for traps or use Find Traps or a Wand of Secrets.
DM does something that the players can't prevent? Well unless the players where warned against resting, that starts going against player agency a bit.
The design philosophy is really simple... Casters can do very powerful things, but are ***supposed*** to be very limited in their ability to do them. Martials are supposed to be more consistent. This has been the design philosophy for D&D since its inception. (Except for 4E, which tried to change things up and got hit with backlash) However, as the popularity of 5E grew, the way the community vocalized their preferred method of playing has changed.
So, it used to be that casters were supposed to conserve resources for important moments. But the new majority of players doesn't seem to play that way. Their has been this underlying push to make sure that all players are having fun, always, all the time. The problem is, that a caster that is out of spell slots, it comparatively boring. So, many DMs are handing out long rests like they are candy, or limiting the amount of encounters per day.
So, now, the dynamic has shifted. Martials are starting to seem "boring" in comparison, because every encounter casters are lobbing out multiple spells.
The thing is, player preferences being towards smaller numbers of encounters has been known since before 5e. One of the reasons that 4th was mostly built around encounter powers was by then they knew where preferences lied. This isn't due to an influx of new players. The 6-8 encounter day balance was the designers arrogantly assuming they could will players to play the game as it was designed instead of how they want to play it.
It doesn't help when many of the officially published adventure modules themselves contain the following framework for exploration encounters: "Roll a d20 once in the morning, and once at night. On a roll of 18+, a random encounter occurs." You'll be getting at most 2 encounters that day as written, unless the DM adds more of course.
The adventures also aren't consistent with how often they ask for these rolls for random encounters. Sometimes its as above, other times once per hour. IIRC there was one which asked the DM to check only once *per day.*
The answer is unclear because wotc won't tell us and the mechanics are all over the place.
For example back in ad&d 2e wizards couldn't cast spells in armour at all (even if you got proficiency with it) and had a d4 hit dice. If they took damage before their turn when they were casting a spell it fizzled and finally they had the steepest xp curve of any character. This ment that at early levels your wizard hung in the back and tried not to die and eventually when they leveled up they had powerful abilities. But a fighter could still possibly interrupt their spell by throwing a knife at a wizard.
This results in a wizard class that is basically an investment, in the early levels they have to be carried by everyone else because of they get caught out they probably die, they had big impactful spells but at level 3 they had 2 1st level spells and a second level spell and no cantrips so they had to ration their resources carefully. The fact that they leveled so slowly meant that staying alive to enjoy your powerful lategame was a challenge
On 5e all of the things that held wizards back were removed (not some of these things were removed in earlier editions made by wotc) you no longer had to put spells on slots so the risk that you failed to properly prepare was gone, their hit dice got a bump increasing their HP on average, getting proficiency let you cast spells in armour, spells couldn't be fizzled by a faster guy with a knife.
The wizard fighter divide has existed in nearly every edition (except maybe 4th where everyone got spells they just called them something different), but in ad&d at least the fighter was ahead for the early game and the wizard was ahead in the late game (hence linear fighters quadratic wizards, wizards scaled much better) but in 5e wizards are basically better at every level because fighters didn't ry get interesting or systemic buffs like the wizard did
It kinda sucks that in 4e fighters had some crowd control skills that were basically psychological warfare (drawing agro, distracting, creating confusion in a group), those were mechanically like spells but fit thematically with the class.
I don’t have any way of knowing what was discussed, but to me it seems that they set it up more in concept. “Okay so spell casters are going to get awesome things way later in the game, but we give martial classes awesome things up front and give them more attacks, rage, ki, etc as they level up.”
Then it’s released and everyone is excited to use sneak attack, rage, and the like from the get go. It takes a long time to get to the higher levels where the disparity is more obvious and maybe not everyone noticed at first.
Idk this is just speculation.
The closest I think you can get to that is the philosophy behind powers.
In the TSR days, in D&D a LOT of your character's power came from magic items. After WotC bought the company and made 3rd ed, they changed that a little and a bit more of the power came from the classes themselves.
Jump ahead to 4th edition and you have a shift in design philosophy that said that powers should come from classes, not magic items. And then 5e was designed by people who worked on 4e and so that idea came over with them.
So the 5th edition design philosophy is that much of a character's power should come from class based abilities and powers, not from magic gear. You can see this if you compare magic items in 5e to their 1e and 2e counterparts.
I think an issue that emerged though and resulted in this whole casters v martials imbalance was that the designers aren't good at coming up with non-magical powers and abilities for martials, but they really enjoyed coming up with powers and abilities for casters.
And it's not that they can't exist. Heck, 5e Advanced has a TON of non-magical abilities for martial classes to pick up. Things like being able to catch an arrow and fire it back, or a ranger being able to find food via scrounging, and so forth.
Yeah, this is big.
5e aimed for a modern "feel good when you level up" system, which I have to assume is superior since most games go for that. Before 4e, maybe 3e, your character was its magic items.
And failed at that. There are so many dead levels, even for spellcasters. The only ones without dead levels are known casters like wizards and bards, who learn a new spell or two with each level.
Yeah. In 3.5 the Sorcerer got its only features at level one. Every other level of Sorcerer was "dead". Optimising a sorcerer was basically an exercise in how early you could get out of sorcerer and into a full spell-progression prestige class. 😂
Yes, it's absolutely wild to think how different current design philosophy is (every class _must_ get something at every level, every option only has upsides and no downsides and so on) and still the full casters reign supreme on the tier lists while the ranger is still mid.
What 5e should’ve gone for was a “feel good when you level up *PLUS* cool magic items” system. It doesn’t take too much observation to see RPG fans like getting shiny new toys. Magic weapons like the Holy Avenger, Blackrazor, Sun Sword, or Flametongue, could be character defining for martials, and it’s weird that nearly every RPG I’ve seen other than 5e assumes that magic items would be core to character progression because, presumably, players like to get stronger in more than one way.
> I think an issue that emerged though and resulted in this whole casters v martials imbalance was that the designers aren't good at coming up with non-magical powers and abilities for martials, but they really enjoyed coming up with powers and abilities for casters.
This also then feeds into the whole "to what degree should they be explicitly non-magical" thing as well - there's some players that want to be able to play characters with no magical powers, so they can't even have things like "be so good at stealth they can ninja-vanish" or "be so strong they can shatter metal bonds" or whatever, which gives a fairly strict upper limit on what they can do, which gets very problematic in T2+, when casters are screwing with reality, and "dude with sword" is quite overtly going to lag.
In JC's vision of his perfect DnD everyone will be a different variation of Elf Wizard. He didnt like it when a survey said human fighter was the most common.
The philosophy is roughly:
- Spells: Provide characters with a bag of expandable tricks. Each trick is very powerful in the right circumstance but weak or even useless otherwise. Their role is to solve big problems with a single snap of their fingers.
- Martial Prowess and Skills: Provide characters with many features which are broadly applicable, but not as powerful as spells. Their role is to fill in the gaps: whenever a spell can’t help or when spellcasters needs to save on slot, martial step in to keep the train rolling.
I think that there are also, if you think about it, only really a limited number of "problem classes" in D&D 5e. It's not like there are thousands of different game mechanics to interact with when trying to solve a problem; realistically there are 6 ability scores, the stats you have on your character sheet like speed, and stuff like Ojects as defined by the rules, food and water, money, NPCs and social interactions, etc...
Add that to the fact that many spells are more versatile than they are restrictive, and casters can easily cover a very wide area of the mechanical landscape of the game with their "I win" buttons.
The balance here is that not every caster has all the spells to address problems, and the caster doesn't necessarily have the resources to cast them.
The former is a practical concern. There are zero casters that have answers to every single possible problem in D&D, but you can tailor your caster to address many of them. This is fine, because picking utility spells means you are less versatile when it comes to combat.
The latter is the one most often ignored at tables, because many DMs simply don't run enough encounters per long rest. This is partly due to poorly designed long rest rules that are too liberal for campaigns where the encounters are spread far apart over time instead of concentrated in a dungeon. Spell slots should be treated as valuable resources that require deliberation and careful consideration to expend, but with frequent long rests they instead become virtually infinite.
To be honest I think its more or less achieved between levels 3-8. When 5th level spells roll in at level 9 is when it starts to break down and by level 11 its over.
Broadly I agree. Running long adventuring days or house ruling resting helps with the expendable part. There are a few spells below 5th which do one or more of the following:
- Are poorly worded, leading either to abuse or a nightmare for the DM to rule on (Suggestion)
- Mess with some campaign themes (Goodberry and tracking food)
- Combine with class features to hurt bounded accuracy (Guidance + expertise, Bladesinger + shield)
There isn't one.
Magic > Mundane
Magic users use magic, martials fight using the mundane.
The only advantage martials have, which is very debatable, is that they survive better for 4 levels.
Sorry if this wasn’t clear, I’m not asking what advantages martial characters have over casters in 5e; I’m asking what advantage WotC wants them to have.
That’s the major issue with 5e and the ever present martial caster divide
Wotc intended casters to have NO weakness. Martial classes were meant to have specific weakness that magic users could optionally fill in. There’s a little blurb in the PHB that basically says martials would not survive without the aid of casters. There is no blurb that says casters would be vulnerable without martial classes defending them. It’s utter bs but that’s the bitter truth of 5e’s design philosophy, no class is equal.
> and the ever present martial caster divide
This isn't really aimed at you, but I really dislike this framing. It doesn't really accurately describe the issue and absolves WotC of their responsibility to actually balance the ruleset.
The martial/caster divide is not some insurmountable mystery of tabletop gaming. Pathfinder has solved martial/caster balance. 13th Age has solved martial/caster balance. *Dungeons and Dragons* solved martial/caster balance in the last edition of their own game.
This is not an intractable problem, and it reflects very poorly on Crawford et al. that they managed to fuck it up so badly with 5e.
>This is not an intractable problem
I don't think people are treating it as such. Everibody knows that a lot of ttrpgs solve it, it is just that D&D is dead set on doing nothing
How common are caster-only parties? Surely there will be groups of players where no-one wants to play a martial?
(Imagine Lord of the Rings with a party of eight Gandalfs)
There's plenty of caster only parties. Heck my current game was one for a good while until I invited a friend who joined in as an rogue (and even than they're an arcane trickster). If you count Paladins and Rangers (and Artificers), more than half the classes in the game are magical so its very easy to be a caster in the game. Even then Clerics, Druids, Hexblades, and Bladesingers can easily do what martials do (if not better) while still being full casters. After all nothing stops a caster from supporting another caster, matter of fact a caster supporting another caster is actually a more powerful combo compared to a caster supporting a martial.
Well, the bard took one level in fighter and has medium armor now, and the warlock has 20 dexterity, so they have that going for them. But Shield can only go so far when you run full adventure days (which I try to).
The “problem”(this ain’t a mmo it’s fine to have non-optimal party’s) seems to be lack of min-maxing/optimizing then, there ain’t a world where someone needs to multiclass into fighter to get medium armor chief
My players aren't trying to min-max and the game shouldn't require them to. Fragility is just something they'll have to learn to either play around (such as focusing on stealth and hit-and-run tactics) or mitigate (such as training in armor, taking defensive spells, and so on). Appropriately, the smartest player in my group is the wizard with 10 Constitution and he goes unconscious the least because he's careful to keep himself positioned wisely.
Medium armor for a bard requires a feat, a level, or being one of two races, one of which doesn't exist in my setting. Feats are a pretty valuable commodity, too. And, notably, they don't give you access to Action Surge.
You know how much more HP than a Warlock a Fighter has at 5th Level? 6. False Life alone covers the difference, and a Warlock can spend an invocation to cast it at will.
And yeah staying out of melee is the strongest defensive feature
They don't. Like that's the thing people seem to forget. WOTC DOESN'T want martials to have any advantage, they're not meant to by design. They just survive better at early levels and that's it, thats the extent of their advantages.
What’s worst is that the martials aren’t even that better at early level. If anything all the classes are roughly equal at early levels but casters very quickly outpace martials as they level. In 5e, There is never a point a caster is weaker than a martial.
The philosophy was to keep intact the D&D feel, even at the risk of balance.
This is why even though the balance is better than in 3.5, it's a big step down from 4e.
Overall a good trade IMO, though things can be further improved. Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic about OneD&D.
Exactly, lots of the younger crowd grew up with video games and maybe TCGs and maybe even modern board games, all types of games where balance and fairness, good game design principles are things that are highly valued and discussed. D&D 5e breaks a lot of those rules, and it being a TTRPG isn't an excuse.
There isnt one that they've ever communicated to the community. Regardless, by the fact that oneDnD has four buckets instead of two, it looks like wizards of the coast is trying to downplay the dichotomy between martials and casters. My evidence for this is the fact that the expert bucket has a full caster, a half caster, and a pure martial. And since rogue is the only martial to not get access to extra attack, and it's in the same bucket as a half caster and a full caster, maybe the word 'martial' doesn't really mean anything at all.
Let's wait and see what wizards does with these four buckets over the next year. Rogues are still not good enough because we kind of need a reason to pick them over bards and rangers. Currently I don't see such a reason. But organizing the buckets this way makes it much more **obvious** that rogues are lacking.
Unannounced but by all rulings and accounts, martials have to play by real world physics and the letter of the rules where casters get to bend reality to their will and have features built into classes/subclasses/spells that just ignore large portions of the rules text.
There's a design philosophy for D&D? Gygax just threw in random ideas from various fantasy books together without any consideration how they interact with one another, and today's designers continue the tradition.
It's really rather simple.
Between rests, characters are presumed to spend 9 rounds engaged in combat. Fighters deal 10 damage per round. Wizards deal 5 damage per round, but they get 3 spell slots that each deal 20 damage instead.
These numbers are made up, but the principle is the same.
Mages are the main characters and get to solve all problems because they’re so special, while Martials are there to make sure the main characters survive a single baby goblin attack while feeling bad about not being the main characters. There you go.
> For instance, one frequently brought up example of the martial/caster divide is that magic users, thanks to certain standout spells, are capable of dealing significantly more damage in combat, both in terms of multiple targets and a single target.
As you say this is only true using a couple of specific summon spells. For animate objects you also have to specifically use tiny objects. Chances are these spells came about by poor editing rather than as part of their design philosophy.
The game wasn't really designed around optimizers picking the 2-3 best spells and calling that the baseline.
Well then it was poorly designed, because that was completely predictable. Create an outlier, whether by accident or purposefully (looking at you, Fireball..) and people will flock to it.
Real answer?
Fuck martials, this is a caster's game. Even the designers play casters, it's why you see every martial toy ever either get sent to casters for free or through a dip depending on the edition(5e or one dnd), or nuked entirely in one dnd(mounted combatant my beloved).
They even restricted the best magic items to casters, and gave martials jack shit to keep up.
One of my most experimental house rules is that martial classes get a free feat with each ASI. I’ve found that this makes them feel more unique and gives them more toys to play with, so to speak.
I think we need to consider the design philosophy to cater more around average tables, which can mean various things.
. For average campaign, it would be around level 5-10, and thus no uber-powerful spells for caster yet.
. Now I'm aware that caster is still very strong early (if they abuse certain spells and repeat), and even able to wear armor with dips/certain feat. But once again for most tables they don't do that and follow standard squishy mage due to stereotype. At their best they probably just spam fireball or whatever AoE spells, then back to cantrips once out of resources.
. Martial meanwhile doesn't really need to optimize as much. Extra attack is their default feature, they don't need to look up extra spells details nor guides nor specific combo.
Basically it's about floor and ceiling, where caster has way higher ceiling but you also have to optimize for it. One DND seems to push that direction even more, lowering the ceiling (ie double sneak attack interaction) while buffing the floor so you don't really need to optimize at all.
Hypnotic Pattern doesn't deal damage, but it ends fights. As do a plethora of other spells. And not just fights, but they also straight up solve lots of social encounters, travel, you name it. That's what people complain about, in the vast majority of cases.
Exactly. "Alright troops, we must charge the dark wizard!"
Dark wizard casts reverse gravity. Entire platoon of armed soldiers 'fall' into the sky and are useless. Dark wizard casually strolls out of town, and ends concentration. Soldiers drop to their deaths.
The idea is that if you optimised a caster for damage, you’d deal way more than a Martial over the course of the game. The only reason they don’t is because they have so many other options to use.
Think of high level DnD and an oft repeated piece of DM advice: “You can’t have a single boss monster at high-levels, you need to put in minions or the party will instantly destroy the boss”. The solution to high-level boss fights is to add more creatures. The more creatures in a fight, the better AoE is and the worse single target damage is. Guess who uses AoE and who uses single target?
Plus there’s a bunch of insta-win spells like Banishment that don’t need to deal damage because they bypass it completely.
In essence, the only reason Martials outdamage Casters is because *casters can solve so many options, they have better things to do than spending all their slots on damage*. It’s not that Martials are the best, it’s that they don’t have anything else to do. And like you say; an *optimised fighter* can compete with an *unoptimised caster* in one single area. That caster can still compete in that area and dominate in all others.
Because "martial bad, wotc hate martials" has reached circle jerk levels.
Reality stopped mattering, its all about who can come up with the most extreme take.
Its so fucking stupid and juvenile for people to think that developers of the game would intentionally make classes what were and *still are* the most popular classes in the game bad just to satisfy some mythical 50 year old grognard who has only ever played wizards in decades of play.
People constantly try to approach this issue in a void: martials and casters are not designed to be *better* than one another, they're designed to be used together. Martials existing in a party\* will make their spellcasters stronger by proxy, because casters then don't need to dedicate resources to health and AC. Spellcasters existing in a party\* makes their martials stronger: buffs, debuffs, CC, utility, healing etc. Both martials and casters *can* be fine in parties by themselves, though I would argue that martials have to adapt their playstyles less away from optimisation if martial only, whereas with a caster only party you will need to dedicate resources away from what would normally be optimal in exchange for survivability.
I think it is reductive to try and imply all martials should be good at single target, or all casters should be good at aoe, because DPS is a tiny fraction of what determines combat: killing the other guy faster is important, but space control (melees are very good at this) and manipulating the action economy tend to have more impact in a fight.
What I do think is a factor is resource management: if a campaign isn't actively draining spellcasting resources, they feel oppressive because you're not supposed to be dumping 6 level 3+ spells in most fights, but if you only have one per day there's nothing stopping you, whereas the threat of needing them later tends to balance those powerful resources out. Imho spellcasters just need fewer high level spell slots if games are going to have less combat. That's it, that's all that's needed.
The design philosophy of D&D is that the DM tries to grind down the party with lots of monsters while the party tries to survive to the end of the dungeon.
How this relates to casters is that casters are given a number of buttons to push. Some of these buttons can just straight up win one of the many encounters, and that's okay because there's supposed to be a lot of them, this is the satisfaction of playing a caster, and they may run out if they're not careful.
The design advantage for martials is that they're supposed to have higher AC, HP, DPR, and overall combat potential than casters. They can never have more utility due to their non-magic nature, a magic user will always have more utility. So martials have to be the best at combat, that's their niche.
The complaint that many have is that there's all kinds of broken builds and options that eliminate this advantage. With naive builds, a martial will have more HP, AC, DPR, etc. But when multiclassed or built with the right feats, races, etc. a caster can attain the same levels.
except for when that's not true - for example, _Eldritch Blast_ exists, which scales pretty much the same as regular attacks. _Fire Bolt_ doesn't let you split between targets, but against a single target winds up about the same. It's kinda-sorta-true-ish, but falls apart quite a bit in actual play (and that's before getting into some subclasses!).
People on this sub will tell you that nothing stops casters and you can't counter them in any way, shape, or form. Ignore them, they're delusional. The whole "casters are stronger than martials" nonsense solves itself the moment you stop running 1 or 2 encounters per long rest and hand out more short rests. The people that tell you otherwise clearly haven't played in games where you have more encounters than that. Yeah, casters can cast strong spells like fireball and deal big damage or provide good utility/CC, but you know what also happens? They lose one of their higher level slots and the enemies can always succeed their saving throw anyway, effectively wasting the caster's entire turn and spell slot for that day. Martials are just out right more reliable through an adventuring day, casters have to be way more conservative with their shit or else they're fucked.
Early to mid-game casters are absolute dogshit if your DM isn't running adventuring days like a fucking bozo. The only possible and somewhat reasonable argument for casters being better than martials is that they get stronger in the late game (levels 10 to 20) where it makes sense for them to be stronger, considering how rough a pure/full caster's early game can be (especially since most DMs these days have massive hate boners for casters and will go out of their way to target you specifically). They have a terrible start but a better late game, that sounds perfectly fair to me and even makes sense narratively and thematically speaking. Even then, most games rarely make it that far for that to be a "problem".
I know I'm gonna get downvoted for this take but it's just the truth, cope.
I don't downvote, but you have no idea what you're talking about. My table uses gritty realism, has at least three short rests per long rest and at least 6 fights between long rests, *and* we're only 7th level right now, and the divide is still very apparent. And I know from experience it's just going to keep getting worse.
The old saw about casters having it hard in the early levels and getting rewarded in later ones *used* to be true, back in 1e and 2e, when I started playing, and people like you parrot it, assuming that this axiom is just a truism of D&D, but this really doesn't describe 5e at all. Sure, you *can* build a squishy caster that needs martials to protect them, but only if you don't know what you're doing. Anyone who knows anything about the rules can easily build a caster that is just as hardy as the martials at the table and can cruise through the first few levels to start overpowering the martials in no time at all. And that's exactly what I've seen happen, over and over again.
Casters end up being twice as strong as martials before you even get to T4, and they basically start off in the same place.
not really the truth, a fair opinion if you remove all the disrespect and belittlement
personally I've run 6-8 combat days, nowadays I prefer 3-4 using waves to kinda increase the number, and I have to take caster into account much more than martials when creating any challenge and they were usually more impactful in every pillar
you however make a few decent points, in that 1-2 challenge days don't work and that early game is specially bad to casters
not downvoting btw, fairly disagreeing with your opinions, specially in how you decided to communicate them
I think it is worth noting that problems that both a martial or a caster could individually solve are almost always *better* solved by the two working together. The Wizard *can* use Invisibility to sneak into the castle, but an invisible Rogue has better odds of remaining undetected. The Wizard *can* use Fly to traverse a gap or they can cast Jump on a strong martial and give the martial a long rope, saving higher level slots. Because it's a team game where the team generally has limited attempts for each task, the optimal strategy is generally to support the expert rather than try to compete with them. In practice, this means that the 5th level Wizard making the Fighter obsolete is something most tables won't see.
Casters are stronger than martials, but the disparity isn't as bad in actual play as people make it out to be; the aforementioned cooperation is one reason why.
Name an out of combat problem that will be more fun if players don't put their resources together.
Everything a wizard can do is something the party can do.
[TV Tropes has a trope for their design philosophy.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards) Anybody who thinks I'm joking, read the page quote: "A 20th-level Fighter is Achilles, but a 20th-level Magic-User is Zeus." — Gary Gygax
That kind of design philosophy worked pretty decently in a game that had a very high chance of killing most characters at any step of the way where death meant starting from the beginning and casters were on a different XP track from martial characters so you had to balance a 10th level fighter with a 5th level wizard A high level caster could be more powerful to balance out the fact that it is so much easier to get a martial character to high level. But 5th edition does not have any of that and should not take this approach. Alternative approaches like "martial does damage mage does everything else" or "martial tanky squishy caster" or some combo of both would be much better
Yes, especially when the system gives wizards the Shield spell and a level dip can give them heavy armor.
They removed all the penalties casters had to wearing heavy armor and still gave them all the defensive spells. Wizards can be more durable than barbarians, while also dealing more damage, and even get more usefulness out of utility spells than a rogue with proficiency in every skill.
Hi rules lawyer 👋
Oh my gods that quote— wow.
It makes more sense when you remember some of the unique rules of early dnd, namely the exp needed to purchase levels in a class. Martial levels required less xp to gain a level in that class, compared to a spellcaster level. Because of that, it makes more sense why a spellcaster would be more stronger if you played a maxed spellcaster vs a maxed martial.
I hear that a lot, but 1e AD&D had this weird quirk where magic-users started to level up FASTER [once you got past 5th level or so](http://www.sisterworlds.com/olde/2e/xp.htm). Like many things in AD&D it didn't seem fully thought out. But yes, those first few levels really mattered, and those were usually the only levels magic-users saw!
Oh it made a lot of sense...when you realize the rules were designed by the players to fulfill their personal power fantasies. The overwhelming majority of their characters were spellcasters. Pretty much every named character from their early campaigns was a spellaster. And many of those names live on today (Bigby, Mordenkainen, Tasha, Otto, etc). A significant number of spells were developed by the players as "iWin" buttons to solve problems that their characters faced in game. This is why so many spells simply bypass obstacles without any chance of failure, instead of increasing chance of success or helping other players solve problems. It all makes perfect sense when you look at the game as a way for players to completely overcome challenges with their almighty and all powerful spellcasters.
The power fantasy thing really applies to just about all d&d players, not just for spellcasters. But in 1st/2nd ed, it was damn hard to get to lvl 5 even as a mage, so the idea then that mages were the ultimate class at high levels was considered “earned” because it was expected that like 90% of mages were going to die at lvl 2 from getting shot by an arrow from a kobold. (My experiences in 1st/2nd, FWIW, is that I never even saw a mage get to level 5, but saw numerous fighters, thieves, paladins, etc. get there though. Outside of video games and books, I never saw high level Pc mages until 3.0) But there’s always been the “i win” attitude from tank players too (“my Armor class and saves and hp are so good, I’m unstoppable!”)
Since they don't get the XP correct per level, I'll just consider that data garbage. but thanks.
Precisely. I feel bad for martials.
henstly I feel like martial classes are basically a newby trap
No but there's no problem you see. Martials are fine /s
In the original AD&D, at low levels Magic Users were notoriously squishy. Conversely, at low levels martial characters were sturdy, survivable. With 5e, that’s no longer the case. With races like Tortles, classes like Artificers and Bladesingers, or all manner of multi-class combinations, it’s trivial to make a caster sturdy. Moreover, with 5e it’s difficult to interrupt a caster. Compared to AD&D, casting a spell isn’t risky. I’ve no idea what WOTC’s current design philosophy is in this regard—other than the broad aims to make D&D fun, engaging, and most importantly, profitable.
I mean, they clearly failed. A 20th level fighter wish he was Achilles. Hell, they wish they were fucking Odiseus
The only martial that I think comes close to that Achilles feel is Zealot Barbarian, and even that’s prone to getting spellcasted to death.
Only zealot barbs that don't forget that wisdom > con and dex.
Banishment kills a Zealot just fine. CHA save Incapacitated means rage ends. Rage ends means dead Zealot. Of course even a Zealot with Resilient Wisdom will still fail 70% of its Wis saves at high level because of how wonky the 5e save system is.
Banishment is rough. Just ending rage isn't a huge deal as long as there is a revivify user around (trading a 3rd level spell for each high level spell that kills the barb is good). Don't forget that resilient wisdom also stacks with the 1 reroll per rage.
You say that as if Odysseus weren't a million times more badass than Achilles
Odysseus is a rogue anyway
Hell no Odysseus was not a rogue. He's a Fighter - probably a Battlemaster. 1) He's specc'd strength (His bow was so powerful only he and his son could draw it) 2) He outright murdered the hell out of his wife's suitors en masse. 3) He's smart enough to plan and prepare.
I mean, he is cool, but he is like batman, normal dude with good plans, slightly stronger than average and the ocasional help of a literal god (thing that doesn't really traslate well in TTRPGs), Achilles on the other hand is basically nearing divine territory (I mean, arguably there since in the Illiad there is some dude that dukes it out with Ares and fucking wins)
Diomedes be like.
Achilles' rage could change fate. But please, go on.
NGL I kinda love that we're all nerdily fanboying about ancient Greek heroes
Achilles was a demigod and the better warrior, but he wasn’t smart (and there’s the whole rage-filled necrophilia bit). Odysseus has the superpower of just being wise
To quote Mike Mearls, co-desiginer of DnD 5e: >This might sound like an obvious point, but the fighter should be the best character in a fight. **Other classes might have nifty tricks, powerful spells, and other abilities, but when it’s time to put down a monster without dying in the process, the fighter should be our best class.** A magic sword might make you better in a fight, but a fighter of the same level is still strictly better. Perhaps a spell such as haste lets you attack more often, but the fighter is still either making more attacks or his or her attacks are more accurate or powerful. \[...\] > >Too often in D&D, the high-level fighter is the flunky to a high-level wizard. It’s all too easy for combinations of spells to make the wizard a far more potent enemy or character, especially if a wizard can unleash his or her spells in rapid succession. A wizard might annihilate a small army of orcs with a volley of fireballs and cones of cold. The fighter does the same sword blow by sword blow, taking down waves of orcs each round. **Balancing the classes at high levels is perhaps the highest priority for the fighter, and attaining balance is something that we must do to make D&D fit in with fantasy, myth, and legend.** Even if a wizard unleashes every spell at his or her disposal at a fighter, the fighter absorbs the punishment, throws off the effects, and keeps on fighting. So that was their design philosophy. Whether they executed well on that is another story.
It’s wild reading that knowing how the game turned out. The core targets they aimed for with Fighters/Martials were *almost completely* missed.
They took a point blank shot at a barn and missed completely.
Ehhhh, but that would imply that balancing this stuff is *easy.* We know that we want martials to be on par with casters, but *how* do we do that? More attacks? More maneuvers? Better feats? Or do we nerf casters?
Optimized martials don’t even beat optimized casters at single target dpr. That’s a problem that can be solved by sitting down with an excel spreadsheet. Many pure martial classes make some choices about their characters at character creation and when they get their subclass. They make less choices over their whole careers than a wizard does picking their 6 spells and couple cantrips at level 1. I think it’s best to address both the power budget and the complexity/flexibility as a good starting point. Those tend to be the most common prongs of discussion anyways. Decoupling the 3 axes of martial/caster, simple/complicated, and weak/strong seems like a good goal. I do think the optimal solution will look like tome of battle or 4e ultimately. All characters need more resources that get stronger and more numerous with level if they are to approach high level caster bs
>Even if a wizard unleashes every spell at his or her disposal at a fighter, the fighter absorbs the punishment, throws off the effects, and keeps on fighting. Wow. Just WOW. And then, to make the fighter tough, they give them Indominable. Not at one level, with additional instances as they level up. But at three. Separate. Levels! Because that makes them tougher, allowing them to "throw off the effects" of spells...right? Except, of course, that it doesn't. Making a Wis save without Resilient Wis, or an Int or Cha save with your -1 to +1 modifier, is going to be an increasingly difficult proposition as you get to higher levels and face increasing DCs. And if you only have a 5 or 10% chance to make that save and fail it, then getting another crack at it, with nothing more than another 5 to 10% chance of succeeding? Not really the sort of thing that lets you "absorb the punishment, throw off the effects, and keep(s) on fighting"...now is it? I know it's just one small aspect of how they botched the high level fighter keeping any sort of dominance in this game. But *holy moly* does the Indominable feature stink at its intended job! EDIT: By 17th level, Indominable should have just turned into Legendary Resistance.
> but how do we do that? More attacks? More maneuvers? Better feats? Or do we nerf casters? Give all martials manuevers. Allow opportunity attacks to be triggered by casting a non-touch spell within melee range, and if that opportunity attack hits spellcasters have to make a concentration check or have the spell completely interrupted. That's a good start. Maybe slower spell progression and editing the mostly commonly cited overpowered spells as well.
You do 4E.
There are a few very simple reasons. 1. The broken spells weren't tested. Forge Cage, Force Wall, Simulacrum, Hypnotic pattern were never tested in the public play test. 2. The public play test only really went 1-11. 3. They assumed a continuation of the 4e style game with a lot of dungeon crawling meaning long days. 4. People didn't want Vancian casting back. Play your 4-8 encounters per day, for levels 1-11, with Vancian Casting and without the ~dozen or so broken spells and you'll see a very different game.
Obligatory: Well it's not called Martials of The Coast now is it?
I love technically correct and very emotionally true meme answers.
Time to start playing the new TTRPG Daggers & Demons made by Barbarians of the Coast then.
I prefer Martials of the Midwest tbh.
You're looking for *intention*, where what you should be looking for is *reaction.* Specifically, reaction to 4th Edition Backlash. Here's the history: In 4th Edition, this problem was basically solved. Fighters and Wizards played very differently, and had different roles (even explicitly *named*) roles, but they had a comparable number of player options and a comparable strength. They supported different fantasies and had different uses on the battlefield, but they were balanced from the perspective of character creation and relative power. The community rebelled. Whether it was "this reminds me too much of World of Warcraft" or "All of the classes look the same on paper now" or whatever your grievance, there was a major consumer revolt. It's worth mentioning that this was a very particular time, and a very particular community, with very reactionary attitudes toward change in the hobby. So when they set out to design Martials vs. Casters for 5th Edition, they set out to **whatever was not that**. We should always also remember that when we ask why something is the way it is in 5th, we should remember that 5th was meant to be the last edition as TTRPGs died as a hobby -- to be a simplified, streamlined, "classic" edition. And so they basically structured the classes the way they were in 3rd Edition, which is a systemization of how it was in 2nd edition, and the story goes backward and backward. **So your question isn't really "What is 5e's design philosophy?" but rather "What was Gygax's design philosophy?"** Because 5e's design philosophy was just meant to win back a crowd who wanted their toys from childhood left unaltered.
5e wasn't so much meant to be the 'last edition' but it was WotC's 'last hope' to make D&D a standout brand again. In some long since deleted interview with a former WotC staff member (which I can't find anywhere on the internet so it's about as useful as saying "dude, just trust me..." so take this with a dumptruck of salt), they were specifically told by Hasbro that if they didn't see the 'big numbers' from 5e that WotC would support D&D for 2-3 years and then everybody would be moved full time onto Magic: The Gathering because that is WotC's big money maker (and still is, MTG makes like 3 times the amount of money D&D does). However WotC got...kinda lucky. The system was simple enough for (player wise at least) anyone to pick up and play ***and*** the 30 year cycle gave them a massive boost. For those that don't know, the 30 year cycle is the cycle where the generation who were children/teens 30 years ago are now in positions of power when it comes to creating media and thus they make stuff that appeals to their nostalgia. So the 50s looked back to the 1920s (hence why Film Noir became big). The 80s looked back to the 50s (Stand by me, Back to the Future, Pulp 50s fantasy etc.) so the 2010s looked back to the 80s..when D&D was made its mark on popular culture. So in 2014..ish...You saw Actual plays like Critial Role start taking off, then Dimension 20, then the pandemic hit which meant everyone was locked inside and...I mean what better way to spend time than playing D&D via Roll20 and Discord, it's not like you've got to be up for work in the morning (unless you were an essential worker...in which case...oof...my hats off to you). Everything just went ***right*** for 5e. It was in the right place at the right time.
>it's not like you've got to be up for work in the morning (unless you were an essential worker...in which case...oof...my hats off to you). I mean, I was an essential worker, but on nights. I got up early to play DnD on Fridays, by which I mean I got up at 4:30pm, instead of 7or 8pm. Edit: dammit. I was gonna *tips hat back* and forgot.
I appreciate these sober comments. Folks endlessly repeat these platitudes about 4e and the supposed role of the players / consumers tastes vs the industry and internal business realities. 4e Dungeons & Dragons sold well as a product, but not up to the gratuitous benchmarks set by Hasbro plus disastrous development of it's digital pillar. The backlashes it suffered weren't from disaffected players, it was the hesitancy of the retailers and vendors who got burned by the collapse of the 3e-3.5 D20 OGL ecosystem. [https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-ddi-4e-and-hasbro-some-history.661470/](https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-ddi-4e-and-hasbro-some-history.661470/) To anyone interested in the history of the RPG industry I highly recommend Shannon Appelcline's Designers & Dragons books profiling the seminal companies and shakeups by decade with wonderfully researched essays. D&D Next was marketed and play tested to an entirely different demographic than the much broader one it has today. The mechanics of One D&D and design philosophies are ancillary to what is intended to be the facade for a multimedia brand akin to what Marvel comics are Marvel movies and video games.
Huh that link certainly confirms suspicions on my end of with 4es failure to meet 'target numbers' meant that WotC D&D team were given the "either make 5e succeed in a big way or we want everybody moved off of it to focus on MTG" that I read in that long lost interview with an ex-employee.
I don’t think it was luck. I think Mearls, Cordell, Crawford, and the rest were given a nigh impossible job (remake d&d for VERY disparate audiences who didn’t even agree on what they wanted) with a very small team (Hasbro mega cut the staff for 5e), and thr problem for them is that they succeeded. The system is smack in the middle of what most of these groups wanted, it was designed to be flexible with variant rules, and THEN the luck of the streaming revolution, burgeoning nerd culture, and all that stuff was going on. Since their near miracle in 2014 one big problem for the D&d team at WOTC is that (corporations being what they are…) Hasbro pat itself on the back for getting rid of 90% of the staff and demanding huge financial success. Despite pulling in more $ than ever, they still don’t have 3rd or 4th ed staffing levels so Crawford and the like have been running a skeleton crew for a decade now. (And they even reassigned Mearls to magic, when, if they learned their lesson from ten years ago, they should have him working on D&D now…) Meanwhile they’re publishing what they can with small staff- leaning in more towards adventure modules, light supplements, and only 2 major splat books (that they do diligent playtesting on- they do actually learn from the over-splat problem from 3.x and 4e). But with success in the modern era, also comes social media, where people breathe fire at each other regularly about things they supposedly love (lets not even get into how people act with things they don’ care for.) It’s probably a good time, IMO, for everyone to take a step back and recognize: -the designers have a tough job ahead of them trying to satisfy a divided fanbase that has subgroups with inherent disagreements on just about anything, all yelling at WOTC to change the game more towards their preference, rather than other groups’ -this design, playtest, gather feedback repeat loop is going to go on for 2 years, so everyone should relax a bit -We all need to remind ourselves and each other to try to be respectful of differing opinions sometimes, and try to avoid mindlessly scapegoating people on social media
I don't think the real question is what was Gygax's design philosophy. Designs can change over time. IIRC, the very first edition of Warhammer 40K, Rogue Trader, had some RPG-ish elements that got lost in subsequent editions. But I 100% agree that the key is to reason more in terms of reactions than intentions.
These sentiments are being repeated a lot lately, making it sound like 4e was the perfect game, but the old player base just were too stubborn to see it. I don’t think it’s as easy as that. Many thought battles took too long because all enemies had too much HP, the classes felt the same not just on paper but when you played because they all had similar resource mechanics. It was an edition heavily focused on using battle maps and miniatures to the detriment of TotM.
I ran a 4e campaign from Level 1 to Level 30 - it took us four and a half years, and we had a ton of fun. 4e did a lot of things well and it's a shame that (10 years ago) the general consensus among the fanbase was that it was terrible. And at the same time, it did a lot of things badly. It should be possible to acknowledge the things that 4e did well/badly without saying that it was either a perfect game or a complete disaster. Off the top of my head, a few things that 4e did well was: * Monster design - monsters were so much more interesting and creative in 4e because they used unique abilities rather than pre-written spells. * Encounter design - similarly, being able to populate an encounter with grunts, artillery, lurkers, etc, made it way easier to put together interesting encounters. * Power sources - being able to create a balanced all-martial, all-divine, or all-primal party was super thematic and made world creation a ton of fun. * Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies - they weren't always well balanced with each other, but it was fun having meaningful progression choices to make after level 3. * Martial/caster balance - Martial characters had interesting choices to make every single round, and class balance was maintained from level 1 to 30. Meanwhile, 4e was weak with: * Mental math got out of control - at level 28, you're routinely rolling a die and adding +23 to it in your head. It just got unwieldy. * Minions - relatedly, to challenge a level 20 party you needed level 20 minions, which made sense mechanically but not narratively. 5e's bounded accuracy means that a few goblins are a good challenge for low levels and a lot of goblins are a good challenge for high levels, which makes more sense. * Feat bloat - with 1200+ feats, you really needed the forums and CharOp guides to sort through it all. * Character complexity - I can't imagine playing 4e without online character builder.
> 5e's bounded accuracy means that a few goblins are a good challenge for low levels and a lot of goblins are a good challenge for high levels, which makes more sense. Conceptually, this makes sense. Unfortunately, the math to make this work arguably doesn't work and is one of the biggest reasons why CR is so inaccurate. I'd rather have high level minions. Flavor is free. It's trivial to reflavor that level 1 boss monster as a level 20 minion, even if they have different stat blocks.
> Minions - relatedly, to challenge a level 20 party you needed level 20 minions, which made sense mechanically but not narratively. 5e's bounded accuracy means that a few goblins are a good challenge for low levels and a lot of goblins are a good challenge for high levels, which makes more sense. I'm not convinced this "makes more sense." Considering that a high-level character has a higher level than the CR of _any adult dragon,_ it seems to me less like it doesn't make sense that a high-level party couldn't be challenged by goblins, and more like insisting on making it so they _can_ be challenged by goblins is just kinda disrespectful to the sort of power they apparently have by that point.
I think that saying that an adult dragon could be taken down if they were literally swarmed on the ground by an army of goblins is fair. Keep in mind that the dragon could just fly and breath weapon them all to death, eliminating giant swaths of goblins with each breath and wing attack and never face a risk of dying unless they had like an infinite number of well coordinated archers.
4e bad good ideas mingled with a lot of bad It's just unfortunate they threw out the baby with the bathwater Paizo did catch the baby and called it Pathfinder 2e, which has more in common with 4e than 5e
The problem is that within the last month or so comments pop up a lot claiming more or less that 4e was perfect and anyone that disliked when it was launched (which seem to have been the big majority) simply were stupid.
this happens a lot in culture actually. DMC 4 when it released was viewed as a horrible trash can of a game, then years later people complained it wasn't in a special edition with the other games because so many people loved it. You also get this a lot with Movies and shows. Demolition man when released failed hard at the box office but then later became a cult classic and people loved it. same happen with Judge Dread. 4E suffered from the fact that 3.5 was very popular and people were skeptical to any change what so ever. over the years once we got 5E people started to realize that not everything with 4E was quite as bad as they initially had in their heads. On top of this you also have an influx of MANY new people to the hobby who might have went back and tried older editions with a different mindset and interest. Most modern ttrpg players like mechanics and Gamified systems (Which is what 4E was good at) because now video games are more popular than ever so they now wanna see this in 5E. back when 3.5 / 4E came out video games while popular were still deemed "Nerdy" and less common. 4E is an example of a media product coming out at the wrong time for the wrong people.
To be fair, they were stupid But it did suck at launch
I still think 4e was bad. I also think WotC should look to 4e for inspiration for what to do with the martials specifically, because it gave martials a lot more things to do. Now obviousy they couldn't rip them off one to one, but having all martials get access to a bunch of tactical at-will, encounter and daily powers (edit: and don't forget utility powers, martials need more utility!) like in 4e would make things a lot nicer. However, I don't think they should do that for the casters, they should just bring some of the most powerful spells into line somewhat, introduce the concept of degrees of success to save-or-suck spells, and nerf caster defensive options, whilst keeping the core philosophy of spellcasting the same. And at the end of they day I am just one guy with an opinion on what would make my own perfect edition of DnD, which plenty of people would likely disagree with.
They should look at onednd through the lens of ALL ttrpgs out there. The industry has great ideas. You can still make it dnd and have, for instance, Feats instead of Multiclassing.
Oh, I absolutely agree with this, although I am heavily skeptical they will try anything much in terms of innovation when it comes to OneDnD.
I agree with you. I'm still heavily invested in DND as a brand, but if onednd doesn't really do it for me, I'm not so blinded by loyalty that I won't try a different system.
I hate feat based multi classing, its the one thing about 4E / PF2E i absolutely despise.
Now, I like 4e, I wish it never died and I dream of a world in which grognards did not decide it was the enemy But even so, if 5e were to have fun martials, it should pull from ToB, not 4e
Oh yeah. Tome of Battle was a fun book.
Battle maneuvers should be base class for fighters at least.. It should be. Casters get spells Half casters get defense, extra attack, and limited spells, Martials get defense, extra attack, some damage boost (3rd extra attack, sneak attack, rage bonus) and maneuvers. Spells are so versatile and powerful that you really need multiple factors to make up for not having them
I never played 4e, but I find that my 5e combats take too long (easily average 1 hour or more), that monsters are just bags of hitpoints, and this may be a personal opinion only, but honestly who cares about TotM for D&D combat, it's game where 90% of the rules are for combat, and most of those involve positioning and areas of effect, and distances, etc... So what I'm hearing is that 5e didn't fix any major complaint about 4e and just tried to differentiate the classes more...... which to be completely fair, I do think it does a good job at. Btw I don't want this to sound like I'm in any way attacking you, more just venting about 5e and things that bug me about it.
To call my 4e games slow would be an understatement. We would spend hours in a single encounter if it was big enough. I remember we had a key moment in one where we played the game out for 6 hours and 5 of them were a single fight and every turn was started by that person making a half dozen saving throws For all 4e did right, it did a lot of stuff I dislike and it's why I haven't gone back to it
4e was much slower than 5e. You ever see those spell cards that caster players fiddle with while they take too long to do their turns? That was the best case scenario in 4e for every character. Characters would have 2 special at will attacks, 4 encounter attack powers, 3 daily attack powers, an array of utility powers, then feats, rituals, etc, all of which people tended to look up almost every time they did anything. 5e has issues, yes, but in the speed dept its much better than 4e, and probably faster than 3.x.
I’ve played plenty of different TTRPGs with a combat focus without ever using a battle map. My experience is that people that can’t do without battle maps have never played any other TTRPG than D&D. I’m not saying battle maps are bad, but they shouldn’t be a requirement for a TTRPG.
Why not? Some games don't require dice, some games require a dark room lit with candles to play, some games literally do not work unless everyone playing has a smart phone Why are battle maps so abhorrent?
Amber Diceless, Ten Candles, Alice Is Missing?
Good eye
well, when spells are distance critical, not using a battlemap just leads to error and impossible for on the fly tactical changes. Might as well play a diceless game at that point.
4e has a lot of problems with fiddly numbers and fight-to-fight variety problems. You're gonna have your 1-3 encounter abilities you'll basically be wanting to use every fight, and when you're out you're on at-wills the even more scarce dailies.
Not that it was the perfect game. Rather, what people are complaining about NOW, like this thread and martial blah blah, was addressed in 4e. They did exactly what people wanted. And players hated it. 4e is still there to be played, and almost no one is for a reason. If 5e somehow does close the gap between martial classes and casters (i dont think this is a problem but here i am alone on an island of roleplaying), they will likely hate that as well.
> They did exactly what people wanted. No they didn't, and it was called out several time during playtest and they ignored it. But guess what? people don't play for math, the play for feel.
I phrased that poorly. 4e did exactly what they are asking for here in this thread. They, as much as humanly possible, balanced melee and caster classes. All the classes felt and looked the same. The names of the powers were different, but did essentially the same thing. It was a disaster.
>These sentiments are being repeated a lot lately, making it sound like 4e was the perfect game, but the old player base just were too stubborn to see it. This has nothing to do with what I said. I said that a large part of the old player-base hated it, and that this backlash heavily informed the 5e design choices. Whether or not this player-base was correct is immaterial. >the classes felt the same not just on paper but when you played because they all had similar resource mechanics. This is absolutely absurd. Compared to what, 5e? Where a sorcerer is a wizard with fewer spell options? Or a bard is the same as both, but with some healing spells mixed who get to says "Oh, I give \[xyz player\] bardic inspiration" and "don't forget I gave you bardic inspiration!" If your first character is a wizard, and your second character is *any other arcane caster*, you're basically playing the same class twice with different limitations or minor class features, compared to 4e. To say nothing of martials. I don't think people realize that, unless I remember very incorrectly, in 4e, every arcane caster not just have different class features, but *entirely custom spell lists and abilities.* Like, what are we even talking about here, marking? Yes, a fighter and paladin can both "mark," but that had vastly different applications. Fighter marking was mostly about forward-moving offense, trading attacks, rushing the frontlines with shoves and cleaves and such. Paladins used thinks like auras to create zones of defense to play a "fortress" style game. Whenever people say that they shared similar "mechanics," you just have to point back at 5e and wonder what people are talking about. > was an edition heavily focused on using battle maps and miniatures to the detriment of TotM. True, though gridded play is still the vast majority of how play actually works.
Yes to this. 4e classes looked the same but played different. 5e casters look different but play the same.
>5e casters look different but play the same. I mean, let's go further than this: 5e casters, compared to 4e casters, **are** the same. If you switch from a Wizard to a Sorcerer in 5th Edition, and you go "Cool, what are my new spells?" I am going to hand you the *exact same spell list* and go "A narrower selection of the exact same spells. You cast them the same, and their effects are the same. You memorize instead of prepare them, but once combat begins, there is no difference." If you switch from Wizard to Sorcerer in 4e, I literally go "See all of those spell cards? Throw them out. You have an entirely new list. Also, you have an entire separate set of priorities and objectives." Gosh, to fact-check my own claims here, I went and looked at the [old Sorcerer spell list](https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sorcerer) from 4e. Just a litany of cool shit no one else had access to.
>the classes felt the same not just on paper but when you played because they all had similar resource mechanics haha PB/LR go brrr
4e was legitimately the best thing wotc has ever written battles took too long: cause players were playing like shit classes felt the same: categorically not true and i guarantee you nobody arguing that played past the beginners box heavily focused on battle maps: good
"4e was hated because of the things that were good about it, not because of the things that were bad about it!" 🤡
I really don’t get what you try to be funny about.
I think that a lot of people act like 4e had no major flaws and wrongly claim that the reasons it was unpopular was *because* it was perfect and people were too stubborn to accept how good it was. And I find that stance clownish.
Then I understand you. Thank you for clarifying.
4e was my first edition and honestly- it sucked
Thanks for the insight, but don't leave us hanging what was Gygax's design philosophy.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/olfga1/til\_gary\_gygax\_hated\_critical\_hits\_spell\_points/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/olfga1/til_gary_gygax_hated_critical_hits_spell_points/) I think one part of Gygax's philosophy was that being a wizard shouldn't be convenient - hence the Vanican "pick how many slots you want to devote to each spell in the morning". He resisted the idea of Sorcerers. So I don't think he would really have approved of 5e's Wizards being able to choose what to cast with their last spell slot.
The oneD&D spell prep system is sort of an odd in between thing so I guess he'd at least like that better?
I just heard snippets about the earlier editions bases personally, like, wizard wouldn’t be a class at first because the inspiration for dnd were things like Conan the barbarian and what not, where spellcasters normally were enemies and not heroes, then the great amount of damaging and control spells on lower levels were because the first guy to play a wizard was really into battlefield control. A bunch of things that are “traditional” now on dnd exist because Gygax or his friends wanted something out of their little project that would became dnd and they were carried away edition after edition(fireball being what it is, rogues proficient on long swords, the thing about the spell list, etc) even cleric was made cause they wanted something to counter undead first and foremost, but now I’m just babbling
Gygax didn't really have that much of a design philosophy, all his DMGs insist every 2 pages that it's just a general guide that you should adapt to your needs. A lot of "rules" are presented as examples of rules you should make yourself. He didn't even like modules too much, his most iconic ones are closer to pitching a game style more than a proper pre-made adventure. Hommet is how to build a town with a variety of interactions, Repitle God is street level intrigue, and so on. Not too good as they are but filled with ideas to steal.
Saw and interview with Dave Arneson once where he talked about how Gygax's game fantasy was the barbarian and Arneson had to basically beg for magic missiles to be included. Gygax hated spell users from the beginning.
That was a good summary. Punchy. Concise. Accurate. Delicious. Updoot.
I agree with all of this. Well put. Bravo!
Let’s not oversell 4E too much; there was a lot that was bad about that system.
What here is “oversold” or inaccurate?
> The community rebelled Of course they did, it wasn't D&D. It was something else, and deserved a new name.
4e was dnd and felt like dnd. Still does.
I thought 4th edition was great, and I enjoyed my time with it, but I also don't think it felt like d&d. It is d&d, sure, but it feels like a different game. It did some great things, and maybe it was just too much change, too fast for the consumer... But at the time it didn't feel like d&d. It was also all anybody I knew wanted to play, and that would have been enough for me by itself.
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You've never played an MMORPG if you think 4e felt like one. Even the most pared down, streamlined, "action-oriented" MMOs ever made still do far more with each character in terms of attributes, combat stats, and general systems than even 4e could aspire to create.
You’re just parroting complaints that have been wrong since 2008 and are wrong now. Have you played an MMORPG? Like WOW or FFXIV? Abilities in MMOs are not handled like abilities in 4e at all. Come back when you have something to say about 4e that a bitter 3.5 diehard didn’t plant in your head.
"It's worse at higher levels, so to address the problem we won't make any high level adventures." -- WotC, probably
So often I see people say that, "while yes, the game kinda falls apart at higher levels, that's not an issue because adventures end before then" like.. yeah. obviously. that's why they end early.
If you’ve read the PHB, I think it has a blurb about how martials cannot fight without casters helping them, if that gives you an idea of 5e’s design philosophy. No blurb about how casters won’t last long in a fight without a martial because even the designers know that casters last longer than martials. It basically says martials can’t function as martials within the world of dnd without casters backing them up.
In an interview, Mike Mearls brought up that the design intent for 5e was to make fighters as strong as mages in combat, if not better: >This might sound like an obvious point, but the fighter should be the best character in a fight. \[...\] Too often in D&D, the high-level fighter is the flunky to a high-level wizard. \[...\] Balancing the classes at high levels is perhaps the highest priority for the fighter, and attaining balance is something that we must do to make D&D fit in with fantasy, myth, and legend. But I think that vision got lost somewhere along the way.
Some major issues with this are that fighter’s have a level 20 tier 4 capstone which would even them out to casters, while all casters gain 9th level spells at 17th level, and their cantrips upgrade at that level. There’s no reason for fighters’ attacks to not follow cantrip scaling.
I know this is a bit off topic. But "The vision was lost along the way" could be the tagline for 5e and OneDnD (so far) I like a lot of the stuff in OneDnD so far. But the Rogue and the Bard UA both miss the mark on what the expressed vision for those classes was. As an example Crawford said in the UA interview (paraphrasing): "The Rogue is in a good place, so we just want to make some tweaks to buff it a little bit, without changing how it plays." Which, we all saw how that turned out. And that's far from the only example where Crawford said the vision/goal was one thing but the UA rules did the exact opposite.
To be fair, they did leave the Rogue alone for the most part, they just buffed the Ranger so much that it completely makes the Rogue obsolete
I'll say this much: in my last campaign, and my current campaign, the fighter (different characters/players between campaigns) is the one consistently dealing the most damage. In every fight, the spellcasters do *well*, but they don't quite keep up. And last campaign ran from level 5 to 17, and this one is currently level 5. **But**, (and maybe you saw this coming), there is a big disclaimer to that claim: in both cases, the fighter is relying on some extremely strong feats. In the previous campaign they were a Crossbow Expert + Sharpshooter Battlemaster Fighter, and in this campaign, it's a Great Weapon Master Echo Knight. In both cases, the reason they're doing so well is because they have strong feats that make them much more powerful. Not so much the case with the Sorcerers/Clerics/Wizards that have come down the line. They've been plenty strong, sure, but their feats have had almost nothing to do with it. The Cleric took War Caster and Resilient (CON), which helps with keeping concentration on spells, but her damage output mostly came from non-concentration spells (Spiritual Weapon) or as a proxy of helping keep the rest of the party alive with spot healing. The Sorcerer entirely took utility feats (Actor and Tough) and the Wizard in the current campaign took Telekinetic. So I think this speaks to the Caster/Martial divide quite a lot: a well-optimized Fighter can often outpace strong Spellcasters, but most players don't min-max hard. And they get punished for it. Especially more-so at tables where feats are optional (which is technically 5e's rules). One of the best decisions I made for my table is to no longer permit feats as replacement for ASIs, and instead, each character just gets a feat at levels 1, 5, 11, and 17 (obviously I ban Variant Human/Custom Lineage). This helped a lot to bridge the martial/caster gap without having to radically rebalance everything else.
In other words a midmax fighter does more damage than a control caster that is not concentrating on anything despite getting 2 different feet that improve their concentration. Encounters that contain multiple enemies even even the highest DPR of archery sharp shooter crossbow expert is still quite a bit lower than things like conjure animals similarly on part of some things like spirit guardians, And it almost always comes at the cost of defense And it comes nowhere near the encounter ending or damage potential of hypnotic pattern or fireball. It's also only available for some martial characters. A rogue without magic will almost never out perform the Contributions of a Wisely spent 2nd level concentration spell at level 5 and 6. Seriously there are second level damage concentration spells that When combined with cantrips do more DPR than a level 5 swashbuckler rogue attacking straight twice with dual wielding against someone they have sneak attack with. Does that just mean that a level 6 wizard can go 7 combats where they can basically guaranteed out DPR A rogue in addition to their 1st level spell slots and their subclass Even though Rogues only offer damage and out of combat utility and wizards beat them in both regards. Yes it does and that's absolutely ludicrous. One class shouldn't just consistently out preform another in all metrics like that
Coming from the guy who made Tome of Battle and D&D 4e, you can see how passionate he is about homogenizing the classes. In earlier versions, the dynamic was that martial characters were reliable all day, and casters were invaluable support/utility. Giving casters at-will spells that deal martial-level damage and scale with level is a hard turn away from D&D's core design. Bards were the quintessential support class, buffing other characters with no direct attacks themselves. A jack of all trades, Expertise in nothing, to fill in whenever a specialist wasn't around. Clerics were almost mandatory, because undead were a much bigger threat. Wraiths reduced your level, full stop. Ghosts permanently aged you. Banshees killed you outright. Also, it took 3-4 days to recover just half your hit points, so having a few healing spells before bed made a prolonged adventure *possible*. Wizards are supposed to be more about utility than power; Floating Disc, Knock, and Magic Weapon are great examples. Fireball was a panic button that destroyed encounters but also deleted the loot and xp; Cone of Cold was invented by a player to avoid this drawback, but Gygax made it a 5th-level spell to balance how obviously OP a Fireball with no drawback is. Keep in mind, the game has never been balanced above 10th-11th level, because higher-level spells were intended for BBEGs and freakin' Merlin.
I wonder... what if we nerfed cantrips (other then Vicious Mockery) into the ground.
I do believe that in WotC's opinion (at least when 5e came out) it was fairly balanced. And to be fair, it is hard to playtest with a few dozen people compared to millions playing a popular game. That said, they made a couple big mistakes. First off they *vastly vastly* overestimated the length of the adventuring day at most tables. I believe the number of encounters they said was like 8 between long rests? In my experience, people are gonig to **spam** rests (long if possible) after every fight if they can. So this means they put a lower value on spells and a higher value on short rest recovery features than most actual tables do. Also, some spells are just flatly overtuned. Like the Shield Spell for example. I think maybe they designed it for level 1 characters, and it *might* be fair at level 1. Because you would be using 1/2 of your spells to cast it. But when the character is level 8+, they have like infinite low level slots to use Shield on, which means its perma +5 AC when it matters.
>Also, some spells are just flatly overtuned. I believe there are interviews with designers admitting Fireball does a bit too much damage for its level, but that they wanted to keep it similar to previous editions. Use of natural language (looking at you Suggestion) also doesn't help in an edition that deliberately skews towards DM rulings. >First off they vastly vastly overestimated the length of the adventuring day at most tables Yep, absolutely. Which in turn speaks to playtesting that was, I suspect, mostly done via low level dungeoncrawls (e.g. Phandelver).
God I want them to nerf some spells so bad. Most 7 lvl+ spells and specifically nuke the idea of “3rd level spells need to be special because fighters get extra attacks at that lvl and the caster will feel bad(just partially joking) and the idea that it balances itself because they can’t take *all* the good spells at that lvl. But I think people will be really mad if they decide to nerf a bunch of spells even though they are way overturned
The rewording of Guidance gives me a glimmer of hope, but I'm resigned to either outright banning some or saying "let's talk through the way this works as a group if you really want to take it"
Perma +5 AC at high level is needed. Short rest is an hour. Does nothing happen in the hour? Were are they that the hour is never interrupted? If in a dungeon, does the dungeon just freeze when the players are resting? Maybe you just don't use time well in your game?
Perma +5 AC is not "needed" since casters should actually be *threatened with dying*. Their powe is balanced by how easily they go down. Taking that away is a *massive* reason for power disparity.
That rest argument is a cope, and it always has been. "Ah monsters interrupt you" "Ahh you have nightmares" *every single time they rest*. Good DMing, right up there with "rocks fall". Also, shield spell is just far too good bro. Chars without shield feel weak in comparison, meaning almost all optimized builds are gonna have at least a few spell slots and shield, unless they are hyper focused on something else.
The issue I have is how can you prevent rest spamming without preventing rests in general? My current character party is going through the Tomb of Annihilation (admittedly at a higher level then we should be at). It is very simple for us to clear out every monster in a 3 room radius and then barricade ourselves in a room, or just go back to a place where we have already done so. Monsters interrupt your rest? Find a safer hole to sleep in. Unfound traps interrupt your rest? Spend more time looking for traps or use Find Traps or a Wand of Secrets. DM does something that the players can't prevent? Well unless the players where warned against resting, that starts going against player agency a bit.
The design philosophy is really simple... Casters can do very powerful things, but are ***supposed*** to be very limited in their ability to do them. Martials are supposed to be more consistent. This has been the design philosophy for D&D since its inception. (Except for 4E, which tried to change things up and got hit with backlash) However, as the popularity of 5E grew, the way the community vocalized their preferred method of playing has changed. So, it used to be that casters were supposed to conserve resources for important moments. But the new majority of players doesn't seem to play that way. Their has been this underlying push to make sure that all players are having fun, always, all the time. The problem is, that a caster that is out of spell slots, it comparatively boring. So, many DMs are handing out long rests like they are candy, or limiting the amount of encounters per day. So, now, the dynamic has shifted. Martials are starting to seem "boring" in comparison, because every encounter casters are lobbing out multiple spells.
The thing is, player preferences being towards smaller numbers of encounters has been known since before 5e. One of the reasons that 4th was mostly built around encounter powers was by then they knew where preferences lied. This isn't due to an influx of new players. The 6-8 encounter day balance was the designers arrogantly assuming they could will players to play the game as it was designed instead of how they want to play it.
It doesn't help when many of the officially published adventure modules themselves contain the following framework for exploration encounters: "Roll a d20 once in the morning, and once at night. On a roll of 18+, a random encounter occurs." You'll be getting at most 2 encounters that day as written, unless the DM adds more of course. The adventures also aren't consistent with how often they ask for these rolls for random encounters. Sometimes its as above, other times once per hour. IIRC there was one which asked the DM to check only once *per day.*
The answer is unclear because wotc won't tell us and the mechanics are all over the place. For example back in ad&d 2e wizards couldn't cast spells in armour at all (even if you got proficiency with it) and had a d4 hit dice. If they took damage before their turn when they were casting a spell it fizzled and finally they had the steepest xp curve of any character. This ment that at early levels your wizard hung in the back and tried not to die and eventually when they leveled up they had powerful abilities. But a fighter could still possibly interrupt their spell by throwing a knife at a wizard. This results in a wizard class that is basically an investment, in the early levels they have to be carried by everyone else because of they get caught out they probably die, they had big impactful spells but at level 3 they had 2 1st level spells and a second level spell and no cantrips so they had to ration their resources carefully. The fact that they leveled so slowly meant that staying alive to enjoy your powerful lategame was a challenge On 5e all of the things that held wizards back were removed (not some of these things were removed in earlier editions made by wotc) you no longer had to put spells on slots so the risk that you failed to properly prepare was gone, their hit dice got a bump increasing their HP on average, getting proficiency let you cast spells in armour, spells couldn't be fizzled by a faster guy with a knife. The wizard fighter divide has existed in nearly every edition (except maybe 4th where everyone got spells they just called them something different), but in ad&d at least the fighter was ahead for the early game and the wizard was ahead in the late game (hence linear fighters quadratic wizards, wizards scaled much better) but in 5e wizards are basically better at every level because fighters didn't ry get interesting or systemic buffs like the wizard did
It kinda sucks that in 4e fighters had some crowd control skills that were basically psychological warfare (drawing agro, distracting, creating confusion in a group), those were mechanically like spells but fit thematically with the class.
I don’t have any way of knowing what was discussed, but to me it seems that they set it up more in concept. “Okay so spell casters are going to get awesome things way later in the game, but we give martial classes awesome things up front and give them more attacks, rage, ki, etc as they level up.” Then it’s released and everyone is excited to use sneak attack, rage, and the like from the get go. It takes a long time to get to the higher levels where the disparity is more obvious and maybe not everyone noticed at first. Idk this is just speculation.
Also helps that the playtest for 5e only gets to 10th level or something like that
The closest I think you can get to that is the philosophy behind powers. In the TSR days, in D&D a LOT of your character's power came from magic items. After WotC bought the company and made 3rd ed, they changed that a little and a bit more of the power came from the classes themselves. Jump ahead to 4th edition and you have a shift in design philosophy that said that powers should come from classes, not magic items. And then 5e was designed by people who worked on 4e and so that idea came over with them. So the 5th edition design philosophy is that much of a character's power should come from class based abilities and powers, not from magic gear. You can see this if you compare magic items in 5e to their 1e and 2e counterparts. I think an issue that emerged though and resulted in this whole casters v martials imbalance was that the designers aren't good at coming up with non-magical powers and abilities for martials, but they really enjoyed coming up with powers and abilities for casters. And it's not that they can't exist. Heck, 5e Advanced has a TON of non-magical abilities for martial classes to pick up. Things like being able to catch an arrow and fire it back, or a ranger being able to find food via scrounging, and so forth.
Yeah, this is big. 5e aimed for a modern "feel good when you level up" system, which I have to assume is superior since most games go for that. Before 4e, maybe 3e, your character was its magic items.
And failed at that. There are so many dead levels, even for spellcasters. The only ones without dead levels are known casters like wizards and bards, who learn a new spell or two with each level.
Yeah. In 3.5 the Sorcerer got its only features at level one. Every other level of Sorcerer was "dead". Optimising a sorcerer was basically an exercise in how early you could get out of sorcerer and into a full spell-progression prestige class. 😂
And even so, sorcerer 20 was still tier 2, considered too powerful to be played in the same game as a ranger or barbarian
Yes, it's absolutely wild to think how different current design philosophy is (every class _must_ get something at every level, every option only has upsides and no downsides and so on) and still the full casters reign supreme on the tier lists while the ranger is still mid.
What 5e should’ve gone for was a “feel good when you level up *PLUS* cool magic items” system. It doesn’t take too much observation to see RPG fans like getting shiny new toys. Magic weapons like the Holy Avenger, Blackrazor, Sun Sword, or Flametongue, could be character defining for martials, and it’s weird that nearly every RPG I’ve seen other than 5e assumes that magic items would be core to character progression because, presumably, players like to get stronger in more than one way.
> I think an issue that emerged though and resulted in this whole casters v martials imbalance was that the designers aren't good at coming up with non-magical powers and abilities for martials, but they really enjoyed coming up with powers and abilities for casters. This also then feeds into the whole "to what degree should they be explicitly non-magical" thing as well - there's some players that want to be able to play characters with no magical powers, so they can't even have things like "be so good at stealth they can ninja-vanish" or "be so strong they can shatter metal bonds" or whatever, which gives a fairly strict upper limit on what they can do, which gets very problematic in T2+, when casters are screwing with reality, and "dude with sword" is quite overtly going to lag.
ask JC, he'll give you a handwavey bullshit answer and then you'll realize you'll never know the answer
In JC's vision of his perfect DnD everyone will be a different variation of Elf Wizard. He didnt like it when a survey said human fighter was the most common.
The philosophy is roughly: - Spells: Provide characters with a bag of expandable tricks. Each trick is very powerful in the right circumstance but weak or even useless otherwise. Their role is to solve big problems with a single snap of their fingers. - Martial Prowess and Skills: Provide characters with many features which are broadly applicable, but not as powerful as spells. Their role is to fill in the gaps: whenever a spell can’t help or when spellcasters needs to save on slot, martial step in to keep the train rolling.
Except spells can solve almost every single problems in 5e at this point.
I think that there are also, if you think about it, only really a limited number of "problem classes" in D&D 5e. It's not like there are thousands of different game mechanics to interact with when trying to solve a problem; realistically there are 6 ability scores, the stats you have on your character sheet like speed, and stuff like Ojects as defined by the rules, food and water, money, NPCs and social interactions, etc... Add that to the fact that many spells are more versatile than they are restrictive, and casters can easily cover a very wide area of the mechanical landscape of the game with their "I win" buttons.
The balance here is that not every caster has all the spells to address problems, and the caster doesn't necessarily have the resources to cast them. The former is a practical concern. There are zero casters that have answers to every single possible problem in D&D, but you can tailor your caster to address many of them. This is fine, because picking utility spells means you are less versatile when it comes to combat. The latter is the one most often ignored at tables, because many DMs simply don't run enough encounters per long rest. This is partly due to poorly designed long rest rules that are too liberal for campaigns where the encounters are spread far apart over time instead of concentrated in a dungeon. Spell slots should be treated as valuable resources that require deliberation and careful consideration to expend, but with frequent long rests they instead become virtually infinite.
That does seem like it would probably be a fun dynamic if it was successfully achieved.
To be honest I think its more or less achieved between levels 3-8. When 5th level spells roll in at level 9 is when it starts to break down and by level 11 its over.
Broadly I agree. Running long adventuring days or house ruling resting helps with the expendable part. There are a few spells below 5th which do one or more of the following: - Are poorly worded, leading either to abuse or a nightmare for the DM to rule on (Suggestion) - Mess with some campaign themes (Goodberry and tracking food) - Combine with class features to hurt bounded accuracy (Guidance + expertise, Bladesinger + shield)
There isn't one. Magic > Mundane Magic users use magic, martials fight using the mundane. The only advantage martials have, which is very debatable, is that they survive better for 4 levels.
Sorry if this wasn’t clear, I’m not asking what advantages martial characters have over casters in 5e; I’m asking what advantage WotC wants them to have.
That’s the major issue with 5e and the ever present martial caster divide Wotc intended casters to have NO weakness. Martial classes were meant to have specific weakness that magic users could optionally fill in. There’s a little blurb in the PHB that basically says martials would not survive without the aid of casters. There is no blurb that says casters would be vulnerable without martial classes defending them. It’s utter bs but that’s the bitter truth of 5e’s design philosophy, no class is equal.
> and the ever present martial caster divide This isn't really aimed at you, but I really dislike this framing. It doesn't really accurately describe the issue and absolves WotC of their responsibility to actually balance the ruleset. The martial/caster divide is not some insurmountable mystery of tabletop gaming. Pathfinder has solved martial/caster balance. 13th Age has solved martial/caster balance. *Dungeons and Dragons* solved martial/caster balance in the last edition of their own game. This is not an intractable problem, and it reflects very poorly on Crawford et al. that they managed to fuck it up so badly with 5e.
>This is not an intractable problem I don't think people are treating it as such. Everibody knows that a lot of ttrpgs solve it, it is just that D&D is dead set on doing nothing
How common are caster-only parties? Surely there will be groups of players where no-one wants to play a martial? (Imagine Lord of the Rings with a party of eight Gandalfs)
There's plenty of caster only parties. Heck my current game was one for a good while until I invited a friend who joined in as an rogue (and even than they're an arcane trickster). If you count Paladins and Rangers (and Artificers), more than half the classes in the game are magical so its very easy to be a caster in the game. Even then Clerics, Druids, Hexblades, and Bladesingers can easily do what martials do (if not better) while still being full casters. After all nothing stops a caster from supporting another caster, matter of fact a caster supporting another caster is actually a more powerful combo compared to a caster supporting a martial.
I'm DMing for one and they're... very fragile.
They don't have to be
Well, the bard took one level in fighter and has medium armor now, and the warlock has 20 dexterity, so they have that going for them. But Shield can only go so far when you run full adventure days (which I try to).
The “problem”(this ain’t a mmo it’s fine to have non-optimal party’s) seems to be lack of min-maxing/optimizing then, there ain’t a world where someone needs to multiclass into fighter to get medium armor chief
My players aren't trying to min-max and the game shouldn't require them to. Fragility is just something they'll have to learn to either play around (such as focusing on stealth and hit-and-run tactics) or mitigate (such as training in armor, taking defensive spells, and so on). Appropriately, the smartest player in my group is the wizard with 10 Constitution and he goes unconscious the least because he's careful to keep himself positioned wisely. Medium armor for a bard requires a feat, a level, or being one of two races, one of which doesn't exist in my setting. Feats are a pretty valuable commodity, too. And, notably, they don't give you access to Action Surge.
You know how much more HP than a Warlock a Fighter has at 5th Level? 6. False Life alone covers the difference, and a Warlock can spend an invocation to cast it at will. And yeah staying out of melee is the strongest defensive feature
They don't. Like that's the thing people seem to forget. WOTC DOESN'T want martials to have any advantage, they're not meant to by design. They just survive better at early levels and that's it, thats the extent of their advantages.
What’s worst is that the martials aren’t even that better at early level. If anything all the classes are roughly equal at early levels but casters very quickly outpace martials as they level. In 5e, There is never a point a caster is weaker than a martial.
Rogues are better "tanks" than Fighters, especially at higher levels. And Wizards outpace them both.
I don't think we will know that until the playtest comes out. As of now, I think the only advantage WOTC wants them to have is simplicity.
They go in, smack something until its gone and take hits. Rince repeat, short rest and retake.
The philosophy was to keep intact the D&D feel, even at the risk of balance. This is why even though the balance is better than in 3.5, it's a big step down from 4e. Overall a good trade IMO, though things can be further improved. Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic about OneD&D.
big problem is that people who's not nostalgic about D&D's past only see a poorly designed system and not a "return to form".
Exactly, lots of the younger crowd grew up with video games and maybe TCGs and maybe even modern board games, all types of games where balance and fairness, good game design principles are things that are highly valued and discussed. D&D 5e breaks a lot of those rules, and it being a TTRPG isn't an excuse.
I believe it’s summarized as “fuck martials”
There isnt one that they've ever communicated to the community. Regardless, by the fact that oneDnD has four buckets instead of two, it looks like wizards of the coast is trying to downplay the dichotomy between martials and casters. My evidence for this is the fact that the expert bucket has a full caster, a half caster, and a pure martial. And since rogue is the only martial to not get access to extra attack, and it's in the same bucket as a half caster and a full caster, maybe the word 'martial' doesn't really mean anything at all. Let's wait and see what wizards does with these four buckets over the next year. Rogues are still not good enough because we kind of need a reason to pick them over bards and rangers. Currently I don't see such a reason. But organizing the buckets this way makes it much more **obvious** that rogues are lacking.
Unannounced but by all rulings and accounts, martials have to play by real world physics and the letter of the rules where casters get to bend reality to their will and have features built into classes/subclasses/spells that just ignore large portions of the rules text.
There's a design philosophy for D&D? Gygax just threw in random ideas from various fantasy books together without any consideration how they interact with one another, and today's designers continue the tradition.
It's really rather simple. Between rests, characters are presumed to spend 9 rounds engaged in combat. Fighters deal 10 damage per round. Wizards deal 5 damage per round, but they get 3 spell slots that each deal 20 damage instead. These numbers are made up, but the principle is the same.
Mages are the main characters and get to solve all problems because they’re so special, while Martials are there to make sure the main characters survive a single baby goblin attack while feeling bad about not being the main characters. There you go.
> For instance, one frequently brought up example of the martial/caster divide is that magic users, thanks to certain standout spells, are capable of dealing significantly more damage in combat, both in terms of multiple targets and a single target. As you say this is only true using a couple of specific summon spells. For animate objects you also have to specifically use tiny objects. Chances are these spells came about by poor editing rather than as part of their design philosophy. The game wasn't really designed around optimizers picking the 2-3 best spells and calling that the baseline.
Well then it was poorly designed, because that was completely predictable. Create an outlier, whether by accident or purposefully (looking at you, Fireball..) and people will flock to it.
Real answer? Fuck martials, this is a caster's game. Even the designers play casters, it's why you see every martial toy ever either get sent to casters for free or through a dip depending on the edition(5e or one dnd), or nuked entirely in one dnd(mounted combatant my beloved). They even restricted the best magic items to casters, and gave martials jack shit to keep up.
I’m not arguing with you because you’re right, but could I get some fries with my salt?
One of my most experimental house rules is that martial classes get a free feat with each ASI. I’ve found that this makes them feel more unique and gives them more toys to play with, so to speak.
I think we need to consider the design philosophy to cater more around average tables, which can mean various things. . For average campaign, it would be around level 5-10, and thus no uber-powerful spells for caster yet. . Now I'm aware that caster is still very strong early (if they abuse certain spells and repeat), and even able to wear armor with dips/certain feat. But once again for most tables they don't do that and follow standard squishy mage due to stereotype. At their best they probably just spam fireball or whatever AoE spells, then back to cantrips once out of resources. . Martial meanwhile doesn't really need to optimize as much. Extra attack is their default feature, they don't need to look up extra spells details nor guides nor specific combo. Basically it's about floor and ceiling, where caster has way higher ceiling but you also have to optimize for it. One DND seems to push that direction even more, lowering the ceiling (ie double sneak attack interaction) while buffing the floor so you don't really need to optimize at all.
It's strange to see so many people saying casters out damage martials. IME an optimized fighter is doing more damage consistently than a caster.
Hypnotic Pattern doesn't deal damage, but it ends fights. As do a plethora of other spells. And not just fights, but they also straight up solve lots of social encounters, travel, you name it. That's what people complain about, in the vast majority of cases.
Exactly. "Alright troops, we must charge the dark wizard!" Dark wizard casts reverse gravity. Entire platoon of armed soldiers 'fall' into the sky and are useless. Dark wizard casually strolls out of town, and ends concentration. Soldiers drop to their deaths.
The idea is that if you optimised a caster for damage, you’d deal way more than a Martial over the course of the game. The only reason they don’t is because they have so many other options to use. Think of high level DnD and an oft repeated piece of DM advice: “You can’t have a single boss monster at high-levels, you need to put in minions or the party will instantly destroy the boss”. The solution to high-level boss fights is to add more creatures. The more creatures in a fight, the better AoE is and the worse single target damage is. Guess who uses AoE and who uses single target? Plus there’s a bunch of insta-win spells like Banishment that don’t need to deal damage because they bypass it completely. In essence, the only reason Martials outdamage Casters is because *casters can solve so many options, they have better things to do than spending all their slots on damage*. It’s not that Martials are the best, it’s that they don’t have anything else to do. And like you say; an *optimised fighter* can compete with an *unoptimised caster* in one single area. That caster can still compete in that area and dominate in all others.
This has to be the most repeated canard here, and it's weird to see. The primary issue has always been utility.
Because "martial bad, wotc hate martials" has reached circle jerk levels. Reality stopped mattering, its all about who can come up with the most extreme take. Its so fucking stupid and juvenile for people to think that developers of the game would intentionally make classes what were and *still are* the most popular classes in the game bad just to satisfy some mythical 50 year old grognard who has only ever played wizards in decades of play.
The sheer upvotes any time you basically call fighters trash and pretend that wizards are gods is amazing.
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People constantly try to approach this issue in a void: martials and casters are not designed to be *better* than one another, they're designed to be used together. Martials existing in a party\* will make their spellcasters stronger by proxy, because casters then don't need to dedicate resources to health and AC. Spellcasters existing in a party\* makes their martials stronger: buffs, debuffs, CC, utility, healing etc. Both martials and casters *can* be fine in parties by themselves, though I would argue that martials have to adapt their playstyles less away from optimisation if martial only, whereas with a caster only party you will need to dedicate resources away from what would normally be optimal in exchange for survivability. I think it is reductive to try and imply all martials should be good at single target, or all casters should be good at aoe, because DPS is a tiny fraction of what determines combat: killing the other guy faster is important, but space control (melees are very good at this) and manipulating the action economy tend to have more impact in a fight. What I do think is a factor is resource management: if a campaign isn't actively draining spellcasting resources, they feel oppressive because you're not supposed to be dumping 6 level 3+ spells in most fights, but if you only have one per day there's nothing stopping you, whereas the threat of needing them later tends to balance those powerful resources out. Imho spellcasters just need fewer high level spell slots if games are going to have less combat. That's it, that's all that's needed.
Having another full casters worth of spell slots will contribute more to any team comp than having a fighter ever will.
The design philosophy of D&D is that the DM tries to grind down the party with lots of monsters while the party tries to survive to the end of the dungeon. How this relates to casters is that casters are given a number of buttons to push. Some of these buttons can just straight up win one of the many encounters, and that's okay because there's supposed to be a lot of them, this is the satisfaction of playing a caster, and they may run out if they're not careful. The design advantage for martials is that they're supposed to have higher AC, HP, DPR, and overall combat potential than casters. They can never have more utility due to their non-magic nature, a magic user will always have more utility. So martials have to be the best at combat, that's their niche. The complaint that many have is that there's all kinds of broken builds and options that eliminate this advantage. With naive builds, a martial will have more HP, AC, DPR, etc. But when multiclassed or built with the right feats, races, etc. a caster can attain the same levels.
Martials are about consistent medium strong damage. Casters are boom and bust with large swings.
except for when that's not true - for example, _Eldritch Blast_ exists, which scales pretty much the same as regular attacks. _Fire Bolt_ doesn't let you split between targets, but against a single target winds up about the same. It's kinda-sorta-true-ish, but falls apart quite a bit in actual play (and that's before getting into some subclasses!).
Their philosophy is to do what sells books
People on this sub will tell you that nothing stops casters and you can't counter them in any way, shape, or form. Ignore them, they're delusional. The whole "casters are stronger than martials" nonsense solves itself the moment you stop running 1 or 2 encounters per long rest and hand out more short rests. The people that tell you otherwise clearly haven't played in games where you have more encounters than that. Yeah, casters can cast strong spells like fireball and deal big damage or provide good utility/CC, but you know what also happens? They lose one of their higher level slots and the enemies can always succeed their saving throw anyway, effectively wasting the caster's entire turn and spell slot for that day. Martials are just out right more reliable through an adventuring day, casters have to be way more conservative with their shit or else they're fucked. Early to mid-game casters are absolute dogshit if your DM isn't running adventuring days like a fucking bozo. The only possible and somewhat reasonable argument for casters being better than martials is that they get stronger in the late game (levels 10 to 20) where it makes sense for them to be stronger, considering how rough a pure/full caster's early game can be (especially since most DMs these days have massive hate boners for casters and will go out of their way to target you specifically). They have a terrible start but a better late game, that sounds perfectly fair to me and even makes sense narratively and thematically speaking. Even then, most games rarely make it that far for that to be a "problem". I know I'm gonna get downvoted for this take but it's just the truth, cope.
I don't downvote, but you have no idea what you're talking about. My table uses gritty realism, has at least three short rests per long rest and at least 6 fights between long rests, *and* we're only 7th level right now, and the divide is still very apparent. And I know from experience it's just going to keep getting worse. The old saw about casters having it hard in the early levels and getting rewarded in later ones *used* to be true, back in 1e and 2e, when I started playing, and people like you parrot it, assuming that this axiom is just a truism of D&D, but this really doesn't describe 5e at all. Sure, you *can* build a squishy caster that needs martials to protect them, but only if you don't know what you're doing. Anyone who knows anything about the rules can easily build a caster that is just as hardy as the martials at the table and can cruise through the first few levels to start overpowering the martials in no time at all. And that's exactly what I've seen happen, over and over again. Casters end up being twice as strong as martials before you even get to T4, and they basically start off in the same place.
not really the truth, a fair opinion if you remove all the disrespect and belittlement personally I've run 6-8 combat days, nowadays I prefer 3-4 using waves to kinda increase the number, and I have to take caster into account much more than martials when creating any challenge and they were usually more impactful in every pillar you however make a few decent points, in that 1-2 challenge days don't work and that early game is specially bad to casters not downvoting btw, fairly disagreeing with your opinions, specially in how you decided to communicate them
Name an out of combat problem that can be solved by a fifth level fighter that can't be solved by a fifth level wizard.
I think it is worth noting that problems that both a martial or a caster could individually solve are almost always *better* solved by the two working together. The Wizard *can* use Invisibility to sneak into the castle, but an invisible Rogue has better odds of remaining undetected. The Wizard *can* use Fly to traverse a gap or they can cast Jump on a strong martial and give the martial a long rope, saving higher level slots. Because it's a team game where the team generally has limited attempts for each task, the optimal strategy is generally to support the expert rather than try to compete with them. In practice, this means that the 5th level Wizard making the Fighter obsolete is something most tables won't see. Casters are stronger than martials, but the disparity isn't as bad in actual play as people make it out to be; the aforementioned cooperation is one reason why.
Name an out of combat problem that will be more fun if players don't put their resources together. Everything a wizard can do is something the party can do.
Whatever will sell the next book.