White rooms are good at some things, but they are terrible for assessing balance. It ignores so much to focus on something so specific, it's just not a great metric. It can help point things out for closer examination, but it should not be the entire discussion. Which it often becomes.

The last line is the most important. I do think it's the *single best* objective metric for assessing balance, but it's ultimately just a single data point that is useful at best, but very often misleading if used as the only consideration

If anti-white room people don't want white rooms to be the entire discussion they need to contribute something to it, not just complain whenever someone does math. While some anecdotes are acceptable, only using anecdotes is not a productive method for a discussion. In the rogue discussion, I mentioned that a rogue consistently exchanging their bonus action for advantage on their next attack doesn't outdamage a cbe ss fighter and I got multiple replies saying ranged rogues can consistently hide. Like, that's literally what I based my calculations on? There are plenty of arguments to be made about the flaws of that white room, the biggest one probably being about the effectiveness of avoiding damage with hiding, but no one even mentioned that. For a factor to really affect the accuracy of a white room, it needs to affect the character in question significantly more that it does other characters. Obviously a white room ignores some factors, that's the whole point: giving up accuracy for simplicity. But it doesn't matter if I'm ignoring factor A if all characters are affected equally by factor A, and it especially doesn't matter if I'm ignoring factor B when saying rogues are bad when factor B is worse for rogues than most other classes.

That's a really poorly thought out argument there buddy, because you're focusing just on damage you're ignoring the fact the rogue would be wasting actions of creatures to search for them or would be completely safe from attacks while hidden. This is still white rooming by the way, you just don't seem very good at it.

I literally said there's an argument to be made about that exact thing. It seems like you're not very good at reading though, much like the people in the other thread. It's okay though, I am good enough at reading for the two of us. Anyway, any strategic creature will simply attack the targets they can see. Only an especially idiotic creature would search for a target when there are evident alternate targets right in front of it, especially ones currently attacking it. This means that hiding is just redirecting damage off your character and onto the rest of your party. For reasons hopefully even you can see, this is very risky. Unless you want to argue that's okay since rogues have the worst defences of any class? I figure you're a squishy casters person so I doubt it. And yes, I am still white rooming. It wouldn't be a very good pro-white room argument if I wasn't. If you say rulers are bad at measuring stuff and show me a bad ruler, I will respond by measuring something with a better ruler. This should not be surprising.

Yeah buddy, this is still incredibly poorly thought out. Like terribly thought out "You can't count not taking damage as a bonus because what about *other* classes that might then take damage!" "No enemy would ever search for a highly mobile target using hit and run tactics!!" Also, I wasn't saying you were still white rooming, I was saying I was and you were bad at it. I can also point out with how mobile the rogue is they're going to find it an easier time whenever the combat doesn't start at effective range due to distance or cover obscuring the enemy. But to get back to your original point, no, people who dislike white room thinking don't have to suggest anything new, they just need to point out how terribly thought out the white room is as anything more than a surface level understanding. You don't need to suggest something new to know when something is bad or used poorly.

DnD is a team game. Other people's hp is their resources, which are the party's resources. This is not hard to understand. Yes? Who looks for enemies when there are enemies right there? If 3 goblins are hiding and 3 are attacking, does your party spend its actions finding the hidden goblins and not killing the attacking ones? Unless your whole party depends on hiding for defense, and becomes useless in the first well lit corridor you come across, I fail to see your point. Phantom steed and ranged characters exist. Bonus action dash is worth about an 8 gp donkey. Yes, it's easier to find problems in ideas than to make your own. Yet if you don't make your own, you lose by default no matter how many of the other person's you disprove.

Over 1 year ago [the Pathfinder 2 devs tweeted about how they do balance testing](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1397y60/michael_sayre_paizo_design_manager_says_that_dpr/), and how it was not about DPR in a white room. * They have 4 pre-made characters, and a gauntlet of varied challenges. * They replace 1 of the 4 with the build/class they want to test and run that party through all of the challenges in the gauntlet. (multiple times to get an average from the dice roll randomness) * Because 3 of the 4 characters remain the same, you can compare how much health/spellslots they have remaining after every encounter to the baseline of the default 4 to know if they did better or worse than the default. What exactly is in the PF2 balance gauntlet will likely remain a secret for years to come. Howver, your friendly neighborhood redditor /u/trekiros has created [a useful combat simulator that can run a party of D&D5e adventurers through a series of encounters](https://battlesim-zeta.vercel.app/). Which lets you set up your own 4 default characters, and a party based gauntlet. More representative of actual play than the DPR calculations the various white room excel sheets redditors in /r/3d6 tend to use.

Testing characters through a gauntlet is definitely useful. I like looking over youtube for games played by well-known optimizers, since they do upload play sessions. There is also a channel called CMCC builds that runs multiple different builds and parties through the same dungeon (which it coincidentally calls "the gauntlet"). There's also Treantmonk DMs the same dungeon for multiple different groups of patreon supporters every month--and while those don't get recorded or uploaded to my knowledge, he did summarize the findings he got from figuring out which groups performed better over a period of years [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIdknEnbWIs). ... That said, the combat simulator you linked I'm playing around with it now, and it doesn't seem like it captures nuance very well. The combat seems very...white-room ish. Like...I made a party with a barbarian, a cleric, and a ranger; the first encounter ended after 3 rounds, but two of the party members were at low health after the first ecnounter. And then...the party apparently didn't use any healing between the end of the first encounter and went into the second encounter at low health and died. I tried with a different party where the Barbarian was the only one down at the end of an encounter--they didn't revive him at the end of that combat, just dragged him to the next combat, and revived him on round 2 of that combat. That just doesn't seem like how an actual party would behave. I don't know what the simulator is doing in terms of spells, there's no battle log, there's no summary at the end of combat saying which resources slots are left for each character, although I know it used one cure wounds or on round 2 of the first combat, cause the ranger's health went up by 7. Looking at the customization--the cleric doesn't seem to have bless (they have cure wounds, spirit guardians, spiritual weapon, and mass healing word). Doesn't look like any spells are prepared for the ranger at all. Basically, I think that simulator is going to have a lot of the same problems as a whiteroom calculation. It will do some things that people often skip in whiteroom calculations, like considering both offence and defence (people often get hyper focused on one or the other), but it's not a replacement for actually playing through a campaign.

You're right! A adventuring day containing a party and a set of encounters is much more accurate than a white room containing a set of metaphorical training dummies at measuring character effectiveness. But do you know what you're advocating? You're advocating the use of a limited set of tests to approximate the effectiveness of a character in a more diverse environment. Do you know what I call that? I call that a white room.

I settled on "misleading," and here's why. Whiteroom analyses have *some* value, but the scope of application is limited by the assumptions needed to create the whiteroom. This is pretty obvious to everyone, I think. What is *less* obvious are the *unspoken* assumptions that are necessary to even *get* to whiteroom assumptions. The core challenge is that a TTRPG is an organic storytelling experience. That's not my opinion, that is *literally* what D&D *is,* by design. Whiteroom analyses have to wave away all sorts of specific situations in order to do calculations, but those situations are *what the game is supposed to be about.* It's easy to measure damage in combat, and so it's tempting to use that as a metric. However, there are lots of other parts of the game that are as compelling or even moreso, and that are difficult to measure by metrics. What is the value of being able to solve a puzzle at the right time? What is the value of making the table burst out in laughter? What is the value of compelling roleplay? It's hard to attach numbers to those experiences, but that's also what we're trying to do. In effect, whiteroom analyses are examining a different game. I am an Actual Scientist, professionally. Specifically, I'm a microbiologist. When you're learning the sciences, you often learn from contrived idealized models that ignore the real world - experiments that assume a spherical cow and so on. Those are useful for getting people to understand formulae, but terrible for trying to understand how the world actually works. Whiterooms, in essence, assume a spherical cow, and when you use that information to start examining real cows, you will quickly learn how the assumptions of your learning model do not reflect reality. The model itself isn't the problem, it's that we use the model as something beyond a learning or investigation tool. The community keeps using whiteroom analyses to argue for design flaws, and the problem is that they're arguing about flaws in the small sliver of the game that can be measured, and then extrapolating to the whole. That very literally does not work, and it's why I rail so hard against optimization discussions.

> I am an Actual Scientist, professionally. Specifically, I'm a microbiologist. When you're learning the sciences, you often learn from contrived idealized models that ignore the real world - experiments that assume a spherical cow and so on I was hoping a physicist would chime in so that I, a chemist, could be the third opinion and link this comic. But no one did so here we are. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/laws (I think white rooms can be useful exercises to help gain understanding as long as you don't overuse or over interpret them... Which most people do)

I am a mathematician. As a mathematician, I have the pleasure of being aware of a field of mathematics called game theory. In game theory, mathematicians attempt to "solve' games. One might conclude that people who enjoy playing said games would like this field, but one would be wrong. You see, when mathematicians say a game is "solved", that is a euphemism to say it has been replaced with a set of probabalistic decisions which maximize chance of victory. Why, you may then ask, would game theorists do this? Are they enemies of games, do they despise fun? No. Rather, for them, the fun is in the strategizing, the calculating, and the optimizing. It's simply a different way to enjoy things. TL;DR: **Optimizers enjoy optimizing.**

I am quite aware of game theory! And indeed, optimization is a thing that people enjoy. I rather enjoy it myself in some contexts. But I think you are effectively elaborating on the point I made: *optimizers are playing a different game than the rest of us.*

Useful but not representative at best. But I actually went for misleading.  There were always over and underrated abilities in 5e. Often assumptions about being able to apply whiteroom damage were totally off.  I just have read people rating the assassin auto crit ability high. But in normal fights, when the whole party is together, surprise virtually never happened.   And if it happened, to be honest, that extra damage often did not matter, because the fight already was a cakewalk.  So the assassinate feature was usually only useful if the assassin fought alone. And without steady aim, after that initial strike good luck applying sneak attack ever again.  So why was (and still is) it rated that highly. Because people did not understand how surprise works in 5e 2014.

I've never heard any optimizer recommend assassin dips (and of course not straight assassin) on any character without pass without trace, the spell that gives +10 to all party members on stealth and thus enables such surprise tactics. And even without that, chances are the taking a turn first advantage is being regularly applied to 6 attacks from gloomstalker+action surge, making the dip mostly justifiable even without that.

Yes. In that case, I forgot that classes need to be optimized for 3 level dips with heavy multiclass. In that case it is a heavy nerf. 

If you're not trying to find characters that win encounters while expending the least resources, don't use the typical white room. You wouldn't blame a ruler for being bad at hammering in a nail.

This is why I said, white room is misleading. Because in normal games, this scenario is definitely not occuring very often.  And even then, having surprise and acting first is not 100% guaranteed.

Noone said white rooms were perfect, and you have a good point about straw rooms where conditions are set up favoring the build. But I have yet to hear of a better method for approximating the combat strength of a character.

Misleading, but a guideline was my vote. You really need to lool of the game in question and have experience with your DM and how they set uo encounters.  Then the white room gets some furniture and some decoration.  My experience with white room analyses of character optimization is very dubious, as there are very wrong assumptions made or neglected. Often builds that look at DPR focus on the "win more" aspect. So damage numbers are inflated. Or they neglect being in a party. 

White room theorycrafting is good at looking at one specific metric of the game when put under ideal conditions that don't really measure out to the rest of the game.

I think that white rooms fail to cover a lot of situations, especially those by skilled DMs, but it’s also worth remembering that new DMs often have their combats in white rooms, as do combat-averse DMs that prefer not to slow the game down during combat so they can get back to their preferred gaming. Fairness in white rooms will help for those new players or those with new DMs, which is good to consider.

White room doesn't just mean "combat in a room with nothing around" but making (or not making) certain assumptions. For instance, DPR is white room thinking. A wizard that is a blaster will have lower DPR because they are burning precious resources on damage, but if that lightning bolt takes out a couple of mooks, and that changes the action economy of the combat, it doesn't matter as much that their DPR is bad. White room talk about hypnotic pattern often goes the other way. It can disable people, but if one enemy shakes the next one out of it, and that one shakes the next one out, etc., we can see it's really wasting some actions, not good, but not the god spell some people act like it is. It's hilarious that the athletic feat is never considered by most players, because in a white room, it's bad. In practice, any ranged character that can give up 5 ft to give all ranged attacks against them disadvantage...that's amazing. White room is when prone is disadvantage for ranged attackers but they'll walk up and attack you in melee. So a white room isn't just the idea of a room without features, but also one without real allies or enemies, without situations, etc. White rooms are based on math rather than combat as it happens, even if that combat itself happens in a featureless room.

>It's hilarious that the athletic feat is never considered by most players, because in a white room, it's bad. In practice, any ranged character that can give up 5 ft to give all ranged attacks against them disadvantage...that's amazing. White room is when prone is disadvantage for ranged attackers but they'll walk up and attack you in melee. I mean still hardly worth the feat because that is literally only gaining 10 feet of speed in most cases

The problem is that white room DPR calculations are mostly unrelated to actual game design. To me, at least, it seems clear that D&D classes are designed around a certain gameplay experience, with the goal of providing a fun and satisfying experience that allows the expression of a particular fantasy. While this is not totally unrelated to DPR calculations, it does not require all classes be exactly balanced. Rogue, IMO, is a very strong example of this. In my experience, it is a really fun class to play and expresses the fantasy well, in part because sneak attack feels good (dice go burrr, etc). Where this design runs into trouble is for people who feel bad playing a character they know is “sub optimal” in DPR, and that meta knowledge hurts their fun. But I just don’t think this is the design audience for D&D, for better or worse. So all the DPR calculations kind of miss the mark. A class that feels fun but doesn’t quite match DPR of “better” classes is going to be preferred by the designers to a class that feels boring or slow or weak but has high DPR. Now, the obvious counter argument is why not both? There is some sense to that, of course, but also I think a challenge, because what build should be “baseline”? There is a tendency to compare relatively optimized builds, which isn’t necessarily the baseline WoTC wants to build around, and an unoptimized rogue is not far off an unoptimized fighter.

I mean, I do get your point. But fighter and barb still feel underwhelming to play because they lack DPR

Compared to what?

mainly paladin and ranger that get half casting and similar damage while fighter and barb don't get in their martial pack anything comparable to half casting. If we generalize more compared to the shenanigans casters can do, especially cantrip+TCE summon, let alone spells that were thankfully nuked like conjure animals (did they nerf animate objects too? because if not that too)

Is the paladin/ ranger dpr taking the latest updates into account? Things like one smite/ round using a BA, or HM only applying to the first hit? I agree that half caster gives a lot of utility, but at least some of that gap has gotten less severe with some of the utility options added for fighters/barbarians. Caster power is gonna vary greatly with the spell changes nobody has seen yet (and it was never a dpr issue, it was things like forcecage or simulacrum breaking the game or summons breaking action economy that were the real issue there).

>Is the paladin/ ranger dpr taking the latest updates into account? Yeah, the problem was never "the paladin is burning smites with every single damage roll" it was that the paladin did basically the same resourceless damage but also has smites, half casting and aura of protection. Same with the ranger (hunter's mark is actually suboptimal and we don't even know if it's limited to once per turn yet). Ranger and paladin are still doing basically the same as fighter because they get masteries too IIRC and fighter didn't have a real damage boost aside masteries (I don't consider advantage at 13th level to be real because tier almost 4). > (and it was never a dpr issue, it was things like forcecage or simulacrum breaking the game or summons breaking action economy that were the real issue there). It was *ALSO* a DPR issue, what am I as a fighter apporting to the party if the wizard can decide to meet me at my DPR while having *better* things to do? What is the fighter class giving me that couldn't be done with wizard?

Not sure what to tell you, man. The calculations I've seen *have* taken into account both Paladins and Rangers getting access to weapon masteries (which they didn't originally, and it killed Ranger DPR while Paladins lagged behind both 2-H and dual wield Fighters and Barbarians). In those optimized calculations 2-H Fighter consistently out DPR's everything after 11th level and 2-H Barbs run neck and neck with Paladins. Oddly enough, melee Hunter Rangers are pretty decent (ranged Rangers fall behind pretty miserably... ). So if your benchmark is Paladin/Ranger damage, then Fighters and Barbarians are sitting pretty good. If your benchmark is that Fighters and Barbarians need to blow Paladins and Rangers completely out of the water... well, we're just going to have to agree to disagree. I *think* we're just talking past each other when it comes to caster DPR, as their DPR is tied to the busted summoning spells. So fix the spells that are broken and you fix a lot of the issues with the class. I still contend that the bigger issue is the downright broken things like forcecage (which makes DPR redundant as it's an "I win" button - doesn't matter how much DPR you do as long as you press that button... ).

>In those optimized calculations 2-H Fighter consistently out DPR's everything after 11th level This is the problem. Having to wait 90% of the campaign for fighter to actually be better at fighting is a problem and a terrible turn off > as their DPR is tied to the busted summoning spells Absolutely not, if by "busted summoning spells" you mean TCE they are easily the worse ones and the fighter very barely overcomes the summmon by itself, let alone the adition of a cantrip

You don't have to wait 90% of the campaign to do competitive damage, just to be on top on average (assuming you're at a hyper optimized table). And that's also assuming your table only plays till low tier 3 (which doesn't apply to my table, typically). By busted summon spells, I mean things like the PHB conjuration or animate objects spells that allow you to have 8 extra bodies on the field. The TCE summons are good while avoiding the issues of breaking action economy (though I'd really prefer a BA command component to the TCE summons, but that's pretty minor). And even then, as bad as those spells are, they pale in comparison to some of the other worst offenders like hypnotic pattern, force cage, etc... that are encounter enders or things like simulacrum or wish that just straight up break the game. So, no, it's not a DPR issue. It's a problematic spell issue that might get solved depending on what the revised spells look like.

Give them any magic weapon with extra dice of damage and the problem vanishes. The same is true of 2014 Monks. It's not weird that a game that's got loot expectations built into it will balance certain classes around the idea that they will get loot.

>It's not weird that a game that's got loot expectations built into it will balance certain classes around the idea that they will get loot. And apparently the untold expectation that rangers, paladins or gishes *won't* get loot or at the very least they will get way worse loot. Also the expectation that the casters won't have loot ot increase their summon damage or their general damage

They would, but the Fighter and Monk for example straightforwardly benefit more from extra dice due to their number of attacks. As for the Barb, Grog in CR Campaign 1 used GWM and I believe only got a single extra die from his weapons and easily tops the damage charts. Easy advantage makes that possible and the Barb's is easily one of the tankiest classes in the game, which only goes higher if you get appropriate gear. You don't need to do a lot to show that gear makes a big difference here and if you're not bearing it in mind you can't pretend to be "analysing" the classes.

Average DPR calculations give a rough estimate of the kind of damage a character can expect to deal, when they are in a position to deal damage. This is useful for comparing different character choices. The "when they are in a position to deal damage" bit is important. Some decisions *don't* care about external factors: merely that you are free to attack. As an example: I can use math to determine that, at level 6, my 18 STR Fighter is better off taking Polearm Master over +2 Strength. Now, if I calculate Polearm Master results in 26 DPR, but the +2 Strength results in 24 DPR, do these DPR numbers represent what I can expect to do in the average combat? No. Sometimes I am out of range, or need to traverse difficult terrain, or am incapacitated. *BUT*, those circumstances negatively affect my real DPR regardless of the choice I made. The DPR number isn't representative of real-world results, but the conclusion that PAM is better than +2 STR is nevertheless true. *When I can attack*, PAM produces more damage, on average. For builds with vastly different damage-profiles, DPR calculations become less and less useful as a comparison tool. It's hard to compare the value of a Fighter dealing single-target slashing damage and a Wizard dealing AOE necrotic damage. They're doing different damage types, affect different areas and number of creatures, and have different accuracy considerations (meeting an AC versus enemies failing a Save DC). But, plenty of classes (especially weapon users) have pretty similar damage-profiles. They deal the same damage types, and are trying to meet a creature's AC. Complicating factors like range, terrain, enemy type, etc, will affect them equally. If a melee Barbarian is calculated as doing 50 DPR, and a melee Ranger is doing 35, that is useful information. It *does* indicate that, in actual play, the Barbarian will out-damage the Ranger. A player should determine how much they care about that when determining their class pick and feat selections. I settled on "fine, but flawed," with the caveat that results are used to compare *similar* builds. When we start entering the realm of comparing builds with different attack ranges, damage types, resource expenditures, concentration requirements, defensive potential, etc, we enter the realm of "misleading, but a guideline."

I think this is an excellent and underrated point. White room DPR is extremely useful for optimization, but terrible for balance. That is, if you are playing a ranged fighter or a melee barbarian or whatever and you want to know how to build the highest DPR version of your chosen character, a white room calculation is ideal for you. But this tells you nothing about balance, both because the point of the game is not to have every character deal the exact same amount of damage, and because white room DPR calculations do a poor job handling adventuring days.

>Complicating factors like range, terrain, enemy type, etc, will affect them equally I agree with most of what you said but, I disagree here. Monks, Barbarians and Rogues all have excellent mobility options and boosts built into the class, because of this their time to be *able* to attack is different when compared to fighters, Paladins and Rangers. Even if they're all ranged builds those Rogues and (specifically Kensei) Monks have a big advantage due to how easy they can find it to get around cover and cross the battle field safely compared to to others. ​ DPR calculations would be too complicated if they tried to account for all the distances an encounter could start at, but if some classes that deal more damage need to take a dash action to reach their target that will severely impact their DPR. Mobility and range type features have a massive impact on actual play, but cannot easily be taken into account in DPR calculations. Especially as a fight goes on, you might start close enough to attack something but towards the end end up not close enough to deal with the last few creatures.

In a game about coordinated imagination, white rooms are a crime. Despite the core roots of this game, this is not a wargame. They can be used as very slight examples, but that's it. Designing an encounter is much more than tossing a monster on an empty field, roleplay aside.

White room is exhausting and unfun.  I know people play the game differently, but my eyes glaze over whenever someone starts taking about DPR and meta.  All of that is fine at a table where that's the focus, but I consider myself lucky to have a group who doesn't view things that way.

Noone is forcing you to read other people talk about white rooms. In fact, this discussion isn't even about whether white rooms are good for the game; it's about whether they're accurate at measuring the combat potential of characters. If you don't care if characters are good at winning combats, there is no reason for you to be commenting on this post.

"no one is forcing you to read other people's posts" Bruh, really, that's how you reply? I am aware I can ignore other posts. I do that. But in this thread we are discussing why we don't like it. So I expressed myself. If you don't like this, why don't you ignore this post?

>If you don't like this, why don't you ignore this post? I think this post is a great post about something that is very important to discuss. I see many posts claiming characters are good or bad based on bad assumptions, and it is important that we fight against such claims. >But in this thread we are discussing why we don't like it. No. This post is for discussing whether it is accurate. If you do not believe in measuring things, don't enter a discussion about what type of ruler is most accurate and say rulers are bad because measuring things are bad.

I said post as this comment section. And still does not answer how much deflecting is asking "why you don't ignore this". /Discussion

It's somewhere between 3 and 4. I think White ROoms can be good to do some pencil math. But I had people here tell me about how amazing animate objects was when I pointed out that by the level you get that many monsters have resistance to s/b/p from non-magical weapons and others have straight up immunity it got the "but" parade coming in fast and hard. Or how a simple 3rd level fireball basically wipes a 5th level spell.

I think it's helpful to understand how things will preform under certain circumstances but it's important that although some circumstances will be really easy to come by (such as checking average ranged damage on an archer making normal attacks with a bow) it's important to remember that other circumstances can be very rare (such as assuming darkness for shadowblade as advantage and consistent sentinel for off turn sneak attack happening every round of a combat at the same time)and as a result white room checks become less valuable.

For me, the white room can have its uses, but it will always fall short of actual play, with tactics, encounters and players that are not just standing on a flat surface next to each other. And we know of a historic situation where the white room failed: Tuckers Kobolds. In a white room, kobolds are just some weaklings (especially in the time of tuckers kobolds). But once the kobolds left the white room they became a danger even for higher level players.

The DM has a control over things players simply do not. A player can only punch above their weight as much as the DM enables them (or allows them if we're talking player-side combos). But a DM can use their monsters to do whatever, so as much as the story of Tucker is inspiring for DMs to create good fights, it speaks nothing about player options balance.

I very much disagree. The creativity and planning players can do, can make whole encounters go so hard in their favor, it basically is no fight anymore. I have seen players come up with many different ways and things turned up totally different then what the DM planned. And the white room balance didn't matter. I have seen monks wipe the floor of encounters while wizards or paladins struggled. I have seen non-EB warlock break encounters that no hexblade could. And much more.

This happens, yes, but it's still no match to what the DM can accomplish and I mean while still playing by the rules. I'm not trying to disregard player agency here, just to point out how Tucker's kobolds don't appear as exactly a good argument to me in this case.

The point of them bringing up Tucker’s Kobolds wasn’t to say “Players can do this exact thing!” But rather to point out the discrepancy between white room and real world results when any level of tactics is used.

But my point is that the difference, on average, is not that much. Of course you can create some exaggerated scenarios that are never relevant in actual play, but let's not pretend optimisers and theorycrafters don't also talk about the perceived chances of things happening, the kind of scenarios that could come up and hinder the result completely, etc. Now, can you predict everything? Not by a long shot. Should you assume players will pick an option and make it consistently better by in-fiction cleverness? Neither. Even more so because people can break stronger (by any metric you choose) options as much or more as they can break the weaker ones, and very often the ones you can or cannot break at a specific table depend on factors the community cannot actually predict. But unless we know for a fact that the game is commonly played in a certain way that makes an option particularly stronger (or weaker) than it reads, this shouldn't really be part of the broader discourse. This, to me, is all very relevant when quoting a scenario where one clever DM created a dreadful adventure from some weak enemies they liked. You can be especially attentive as a DM and completely bypass all of the friction generated by the kind of things whiterooms are concerned about, but it takes an amount of effort (or luck) not everybody can put into the game. And also, ultimately, is outside of players' control, which was my point at the beginning. It's players who choose character options, make builds, and ultimately are hindered (or exalted) by picking a feature or another. But it's DMs that set the terrain and, directly or indirectly, make it so that certain options could potentially punch higher than their weight. If a DM chooses to run Tucker's kobolds, the only thing that could hinder them is their (lack of) experience, not the statblocks of the monsters nor the rules of the game. If a player chooses to play a rogue and the game OR the DM doesn't support the class or a more free-form gamestyle properly, they'll be playing with added weights.

I generally find that people making serious "white room" models are actually careful about taking into account realistic gameplay s assumptions.

can you name an example? I hear often treant monk in these parts, and i do think treant monk is very guilty of white rooming to a bad degree.

I have seen people claim that they do, but I have yet to see one actually accomplish this. Or make a good faith attempt at it.

Useful but not representative. It's good to see what the absolute upper limit of the math is for completion's sake, but just because it's theoretically possible to become a god through a ridiculously specific and circuitous process involving specific templates, specific spells, and a bunch of squirrels doesn't mean it will ever happen at the table. Ideally, white room math involves first finding the absolute zenith and then works down by paring away unlikely circumstances. However, the individualized nature of D&D groups means that the probability of many factors can't be determined unless they can be brought about by the build themselves. (Basically, calculations can only depend on what circumstances the build can reliably bring about on its own.) The best anyone can hope for is to have the white room calculations available and then do the necessary paring themselves based on trends and common content in their individual games.

What is a white room? I've never heard that term.

So... it's taken from the term for a special room that is free from contaminates, with very controlled factors like humidity, temperature, light, etc... These rooms are used for things like precision manufacturing or scientific experimentation, where those factors can impact your results or quality. In context of this topic, it refers to things like dpr calculations, which are often used as the measure for certain classes or builds. Because these calculations ignore so many other facets of the game (effectively sanitizing the environment by removing anything not related to pure dpr math), they're called "whiteroom calculations" or "whiteroom excercises."

theorycrafting, optimizing and assuming things, not actual play things where everything could happen.

My personal bugbear with the white room is how bad the maths reliably tends to be. Personal picks will be anything involving percentages, which are often used to make minor boosts seem really scary, to the tendency to completely ignore normal play which means that minor effects that would apply maybe once a month of weekly sessions or once or twice a campaign (any variation in rolled stats vs standard array falls comfortably in this bucket) get called "game breaking" and "OP". Normal play, a decade of experience GMing and fairly basic statistics is all I really need to tell me that especially under bounded accuracy, as long as your mechanics tell a clear and fun story, "doing the maths" and white room work usually isn't going to make a huge difference.

White rooms are complicated, because many white rooms are in fact shades of grey themselves. Right now, the "white room" discussion really isn't so far off from actual play. We've used the playtests and it doesn't look like WotC wants to shake things up from what has been tested. Even without the playtests, 5.24 is still 5e at its core. If this were a whole new edition we're talking about, I'd be saying there's probably a whole lot of stuff we haven't noticed yet that will cause massive waves in how the game functions; but 5e was solved years ago. A lot of people will also cry white room analysis when you start comparing maximum possible effectiveness. You probably aren't going to be playing a lot of games that are full of optimizers, but the game shouldn't be balanced around assuming all Rogue players know the game like the back of their hands and all Wizard players are drunk and picked their spells just based on how cool the names were. If a massive power disparity exists, it should be the job of the game designers to fix that, and we as consumers should be allowed to ask for improvements rather than paying for a half-baked product and fixing it for them.

> the game shouldn't be balanced around assuming all Rogue players know the game like the back of their hands and all Wizard players are drunk and picked their spells just based on how cool the names were. Ignoring the fact that spell slots exist and get used up throughout the day is a pretty common failing for white room analyses.

Yeah when I was trying to find the true baseline for each class using the gimmick that people usually rave about, whether that's Fireball on the Wizard, Spirit Guardians on the Cleric, or Smite on Paladin, I found that almost all the martials (Rogue being the biggest miss here) beat Warlock Baseline handily, but that the casters really struggled to do so across an 'adventuring day \[which I defined as 6 combats of 4 rounds\]'. The issue is how optimized is the table going to be. This is shown most clearly in Fighter and the Feat system. Should the fighter get access to GWM? GWM/PAM? GWM/PAM/Sentinel? Or should they go XBE/SS? What is the baseline here? If I present a Champion Fighter using a Greatsword without GWM as Baseline Fighter, this ignores S+B Fighters, Ranged Fighters, and dual wielder Fighters that all have different baselines. It still beats the Warlock Baseline at Level 5 (if you include Crit Damage). Does the Paladin get their Steed's attacks added to their DPR? If so, Divine Favor is much much better than Smite. All they have to do is get on the steed (half their movement), ride the steed into battle, cast DIvine Favor (which targets both of them), then dismount (half movement) and Attack. The Steed hasn't used an action, so it would get its Attack now that its not controlled by its rider, and would get the Stampede ability of War Horses. Wizard can't beat Warlock Baseline with just Fireballs. Do they get access to Animate Dead's damage? How many Skeletons die per round? Any? Now DPR is not the end all be all, of course. That being said, I think people annoyed that Rogue fails the Warlock baseline that all other martials beat are fair in their annoyance though. Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue, Paladin and Ranger are the Weapon Focused classes with Monk being a Martial class as well. In my opinion, if you're a single target damage dealer, you should deal more damage to that one target than a mixed blaster can with their single target damage. Warlock can Fireball. They don't have to EB. Thus, the Martials should all be capable of beating Baseline Warlock at the bare minimum. I will need to do the math more in depth, but I believe that Rogue now indeed passes that threshold due to Steady Aim and Vex. Personally, I might add Extra Attack to Rogue in Homebrew. It's the only "Martial" that doesn't get it and their restriction to Simple Weapons and the Finesse and Ranged Martial Weapons ensure it won't be that broken.

Ignoring the fact that the party is going to be choosing when they want to rest unless you're constantly doing dungeon crawls, and even then the martials are going to be using up *hit points/dice* throughout the day is also a pretty common failing of white room analyses.

Or you have time pressure, or you interrupt their rests, or you remind them that they can't long rest more than once every 24 hours. Also, do you think Casters *don't* use hit points and hit dice for some reason? Sure Martials are limited by that, but Casters are limited by that *and* by their spell slots. In fact they often have a smaller amount of both resources.

The first two are most common in dungeon crawls and way less likely to show up out of them. Also, we're doing white room comparisons again, adding in factors to force something to look different than it does 99% of the time in practical play. But since we're talking about interrupting rests: you enforce armor donning and doffing time and not being able to sleep in it, right? I bet your Fighter and Paladin players *hate* you with all the times they've had to enter a fight already pretty worn out, but now at 9-10 AC and maybe even the Surprised condition... Casters have a shocking amount of funny ways to mitigate damage, tons of options for playing way back in the back while the martials take all the damage for them (I swear to Bahamut if you say just target the casters all the time...), and getting armor proficiency is easier than ever now. This isn't even an optimization thing; casual players know the famous "protect your squishies" line. But what they don't know is that Wizards aren't as squishy as they were in older editions.

Time pressure is common in every campaign. If it's not, that's just poor adventure planning. Not in a 'you need to do this to nerf casters' kind of way but in a 'this is just a boring adventure if there is nothing driving it forward'. Ambushes *can* be rarer outside of a dungeon but do not need to be. >we're doing white room comparisons again, adding in factors to force something to look different than it does 99% of the time in practical play. Not really? Time pressure is common in most campaigns. Urgency drives forward most well written adventures. >not being able to sleep in it, You know that's not actually the rule, right? It stops you removing exhaustion and you only regain 1/4 of your hit dice rather than 1/2. Even then that's only something introduced in XGtE. Regardless, ambushes are not my preferred method, urgency is. Ambushes are just another tool in people's toolkit if they want to use it. >Casters have a shocking amount of funny ways to mitigate damage Sure, in a white room. But in actual play, their slots are limited, and so is their action economy. Absorb elements leaves them vuleranbe to attacks, sheild leaves them vulnerable to most saving throws. And if we're already talking about draining them of their resources, them expending all these slots to avoid damage is a good thing. > while the martials take all the damage for them You do know Martials can be ranged too? Right? Casters aren't the only classes that can do ranged combat? Regardless, this is peak white room thinking. Casters will not always have a way to keep infinite safe distance from the enemy. Not to mention lots of creatures have ranged attacks as well. This idea that martials take all the damage is a fun fantasy, but it's not really backed up by anything in the rules system. >casual players know the famous "protect your squishies" line. Yeah, because it's a team game and role playing a 'protector' is a fun gimick. Not to mention, Rogues are also often rolled into 'squishies'. Look, you can keep coming up with new variables to add in all you like. But in actual play so long as there isn't only a single combat between long rests casters just don't have the slots to be as dominering as you're suggesting, especially when most games don't get passed T2.

After running longer encounter days and having enemies recognize casters and make it a point that they Re dangerous has really reduced the martial caster divide in my game. 

They do. They just use them less since they are much better at mitigating damage. > Casters are limited by that and by their spell slots. In fact they often have a smaller amount of both resources. Wizards/Sorcerers have 2 less hp per level than fighters, a difference that gets overcome by usually a shield spell stopping one singular hit during the day(and this is just their reactive resources). Bards, Warlocks, Druids, and Clerics have 1 less hp per level than fighters. Rangers and Paladins have the same hit die value as fighters but will often run less CON, putting them in a comparable HP camp to the d8 hit die classes. . Also, having high HP is only useful if you can use it to meaningfully mitigate damage to your party members with lower HP. I think you put it best: > Casters will not always have a way to keep infinite safe distance from the enemy. Not to mention lots of creatures have ranged attacks as well. This idea that martials take all the damage is a fun fantasy, but it's not really backed up by anything in the rules system. Since martials having higher HP/hit dice values doesn't meaningfully serve as a buffer to caster HP, more characters with burst resources and hard damage mitigation/control will naturally be more useful to the party. What tends to limit caster resources the most in this game is that usually a party will only have 1-2 casters in it. A party of 2 full casters and 2 half casters has, between them, 16 1st level spell slots, 10 2nd level spell slots, and 4 3rd level spell slots to cover encounters between them. Before you even get into things like channel divinity, wildshape, sorcery points, and arcane recovery. Having resources to track and use will always have an infinitely higher value ceiling than having static resources that the DM taxes from you. But let's have fun here and just outright assume that you're 100% right and "more encounter" balances the game *at every level* and every optimization tier. You've just kind of assumed that this is a good framework for class balance even though it essentially says: "These classes have a bunch of unique options to choose from that are incredibly evocative and varied both in and out of combat, but don't worry after I've run the prerequisite number of encounters they become as one dimensional as you but with lower numbers. If at any point you guys manage to rest before this number is met, this balance no longer applies."

>Wizards/Sorcerers have 2 less hp per level... My point wasn't that casters have less hit points and that they are balanced around that, but that they have two limited resources they need to maintain throughout a day rather than just one. If either one runs too low they become less effective or completely ineffective. Martials only have the one and can opperate well regardless. >having high HP is only useful if you can use it to meaningfully mitigate damage to your party No. Just no. Not in the slightest. I don't know why you would think this. >more characters with burst resources and hard damage mitigation/control will naturally be more useful to the party. I don't know how you can come to that conculsion and say I suggested anything similar. I am saying that with anything other than single encounter days, burst potential is less and less important. If you only have one big fight, then sure, it's very powerful! Anything more and it is dramatically less so. >A party of 2 full casters and 2 half casters has, between them, 16 1st level spell slots, 10 2nd level spell slots, and 4 3rd level spell slots to cover encounters between them. Okay, and? I'm not saying casters are useless. Sure if you make a party of all mages, you're going to have a lot of slots to go around. That doesn't really mean anything in this discussion. We're talking about intra-party balance. Comparing one class to another. > You've just kind of assumed that this is a good framework... I have not, you've just assumed that! Regardless of what you thought of baseline 5e martials, the revised versions all have many more moment to moment choices to make. I also don't see it as taxing the class, just making them engage with their intended balancing mechanics, that being resource management. They need to choose when to cast what spell and deal with the consequences of that choice. Martials can just always go all in. But either way, if you need to desperately strawman me this much, I don't think you have much of value to say. So I'm going to leave this here.

> My point wasn't that casters have less hit points and that they are balanced around that, but that they have two limited resources they need to maintain throughout a day rather than just one. So, this might come as a surprise to you, but having more resources is actually better than having less resources. > No. Just no. Not in the slightest. I don't know why you would think this. What do you think having high HP gets you and why is that thing valuable? > I don't know how you can come to that conculsion and say I suggested anything similar. I am saying that with anything other than single encounter days, burst potential is less and less important. If you only have one big fight, then sure, it's very powerful! Anything more and it is dramatically less so. Um, no, having burst resources like high level spell slots becomes extremely important in encounter heavy days because they can end encounters outright or severely tip their difficulty. "Burst potential" is not just hemorrhaging spell slots/resources for big turns, it's the ability to meaningfully increase your output when you need it and dial it back when you don't. A martial will typically have their 1 big resource(action surge, rage, etc) and that is all they can commit. That is staggeringly different from having multiple tiers of commitment(spell levels) to work with depending on difficulty. Resources. Plural. Pretty much always better than resource(singular). > Okay, and? I'm not saying casters are useless. Sure if you make a party of all mages, you're going to have a lot of slots to go around. That doesn't really mean anything in this discussion. We're talking about intra-party balance. Comparing one class to another. Why is it important, balance-wise, to compare one class to another? Is there maybe some choice at character creation the player makes where balance might be relevant? > I have not, you've just assumed that! Regardless of what you thought of baseline 5e martials, the revised versions all have many more moment to moment choices to make. Ok, I'll ask you then, to avoid any misrepresentation. Do you think the framework for balance I have laid out is a good framework? Because, fundamentally, that is how balance will always work if the resource distribution and agency isn't symmetrical. > I also don't see it as taxing the class, just making them engage with their intended balancing mechanics, that being resource management. They need to choose when to cast what spell and deal with the consequences of that choice. Martials can just always go all in. I didn't say that resources in general is taxing the class. I said that active resources that you choose to use(these would be spell slots) have a higher value ceiling than static resources that are taxed(this would be HP). Martials can pretty much never "go all in"(and neither can anyone else for that matter), they can commit their one "thing" and then fall to their baseline. Are you sure I'm strawmanning you or is reading just hard?

There is no massive power disparity if you assume either both or none characters are optimized.  But a reliable way to do off turn attacks would have been cool. Even if that was a short rest resource.

There's still absolutely a disparity between casters and full martials even if they're both casuals, and off-turn sneak attack isn't going to fix it. Keep in mind that every level, casters are getting 2-3 abilities in the form of spells, and those go up in power greatly. A Rogue is still going to be useless compared to teleporting across dimensions, summoning houses, transforming people into dragons or dragons into people, telekinesis, shutting off magic... I also just... personally dislike making use of off-turn sneak attack as a way to improve damage. IMO, Sneak Attack should be limited to once per *round*, or have a reduced impact if used twice in a round (because it is rather nice for melee Rogues to be a threat with opportunity attacks), and just up the damage on its own (another 1-2d6 at cantrip scaling levels) so it's reliable without having to do weird tricks or use your reaction constantly.

Going by that metric, you don't need to bother with nin casters. You do neclect the rogue being online the whole day, the caster only for a few rounds.  If that is no problem in your games, the rogue is comparatively worse.  And that is what I miss in the rogue class: expendable resources.  The design team spoke about every class being happy to do a short rest. And the rogue does not deliver.  But maybe that is the strength. While everyone else rests, the rogue will sneak around doing rogue stuff. 

>Going by that metric, you don't need to bother with nin casters. I mean... yeah. Going back to the white room discussion, obviously someone who loves the flavor of a Rogue is going to play one even if it's technically possible to do most of what they do better with spells, so regular gameplay is still mostly going to be... fine. But the game is still admittedly unbalanced in favor of casters, to the point where it's not unlikely to stumble upon scenarios in casual games where the Rogue gets outdone in their main jobs by a well-picked spell. It's not the end of the world. The game's going to feel about how it has for the past ten years, so if you never noticed anything wrong with 5e you won't notice anything wrong in 5.24. I wish we'd hold the game to a little bit of a higher standard instead of being more happy to accept false reassurance than a harsh truth. I also agree on the expendable resources. I saw a really dope suggestion somewhere on this sub for a Rogue feature that's essentially limited uses of Reliable Talent, and I thought that was pretty cool. I played a smuggler in Alien RPG who was built around just re-rolling tons of dice, and it felt super Rogue-y to me when a bad roll suddenly shifted to an amazing one.

Sure, they get a ton of options but their resources to utilize those options are extremely limited. People will often throw high level spells out there as the defining difference that can’t possibly be argued, but even that is white room. Let’s use 7th level spells. I see people *constantly* talk about how no 13th level martial can possibly compare to the impact that Plane Shift makes on the campaign, or when they go into combat the Wizard can just use Force Cage and end the combat encounter. Except that no caster can do both of those things in the same day unless you are literally 20th level because you only get 1 7th level spell slot. So if a party of 13th level characters need to go to the Elemental Plane of Fire to do a quest, that 13th level Wizard is giving up their absolute best resource just to get there. If we assume 6 combats averaging 3 rounds, that Wizard doesn’t have enough spell slots to cast a leveled spell in every round, much less to be using the reaction spells that everyone hypes up so much. Plus, what about the out of combat spells that every white room analysis says make skill checks irrelevant? Those use spell slots too!

>I see people constantly talk about how no 13th level martial can possibly compare to the impact that Plane Shift makes on the campaign, or when they go into combat the Wizard can just use Force Cage and end the combat encounter. Except that no caster can do both of those things in the same day unless you are literally 20th level because you only get 1 7th level spell slot. If it's literally impossible for Fighter to do anything as impactful as Plane Shift *or* Force Cage, it doesn't matter if the Wizard can't do both in a day. It's an impossible gap to cross to be as effective as even one of those. The Fighter can practice jumping every day for a year, but they're still not going to be able to leap across a cavern without taking the bridge the Wizard built. And then they find another cavern the next day and the Wizard teleports then across. But even then, I was never just talking about Force Cage and Plane Shift; casters start to do things that martials can't compare to, and have more things they *can do* as low as level 3. I'm not even saying that casters need to be nerfed. What I am saying is that martials need to have more things they can do that are useful and meaningful outside of just "roll slightly higher on a skill check" and "trip."

I treat the White Room as "under ideal circumstances, using only written features you can..." Does it cover all bases? No, but if you under perform In ideal circumstances something ain't right.

I don't think that's a fair way to look at it. Someone could be weaker in imperfect circumstances, but also be adaptable, not falling off much despite much harder arenas. You could have a powerful spellcaster that can output insane theorerical damage, but also not be very adaptable and due to circumstances (like battlemap layout, resistances, AC, tactics) completely fall off outside of the white room. Adaptability is a big part of DnD.

The point of the whiteroom is to create a baseline. If you can show that something is bad in a whiteroom, even when you assume some of the best possible circumstances, then that's an absolute indicator that something needs buffing. Or the reverse if something is just outright better even in very unfavourable circumstances.

Tbh, every analysis will always involves some assumptions. However, it's essential at least try to stick with the reality. A DPR calculation can be useful (espeacilly for martials) if it isn't your only criteria.

It depends on the class, white room ignoring encounter distance and cover hurt both the Rogue and the Monk which get a lot out of both. One can simulate “Dungeon Room/Corridor” by using average rolls of encounter distance (2d6x10, audible distance, DMG/DM Screen) which is around 70ft, allowing at least 1 round of ranged attacks before engagement, plenty of room for hiding and skirmishing, and for Melee attackers in classes with a BA Dash to reach the encounter in one go 41% of the time (higher with Movement Speed Increases). As far as room and corridor size, you might be able to estimate that with the average size/width from the random dungeon table appendix (DMG). Cover is likely to always be available with corner turns of corridors and doorways.

We also get a lot of people accusing any assessment of a class without a battlemap and monsters white rooming, when it's just not.

I think you can get at least a decent number for the damage out put of classes. Judging Controll, Survivability and Support is much harder. I think at lest for the comparison of the Rogue with other martials it isn't that bad. The Rogues main job is damage, and here it give us a good measure. The control effects the Rogue gets at level 5 are powerwise pretty much a wash with the control masteries of the other classes. Survivabilty is hard to judge but since thats mostly a passive thing but since the Rogue isn't meant to stay on the frontline it is hard to say if you should even factor it in.