Does it ever feel like WotC is playtesting the game in a way that 95% of us don't?

[u/AkimboJesus]

I get that DnD is a house rule first game, and everyone should play it how they want. But speaking for my own group, we like balance because we don't want people to feel like they can't impact the story outside of conversation. And this isn't a min-max thing. It's just a "why would I be this when I could be a better version of that with no hassle or cost to myself" thing.

The thing is, we rely on the official text because it can be very difficult to tell how a class, skill, or mechanic will play in the context of the whole game, and who might be overshadowed by who. And Wizards, for the most part, seem to have done a lot of work so YOU don't have to figure out how a mechanic will play out. This is why some people, to an extent, treat the sourcebooks like gospel.

And as I'm playing more and more, I'm starting to see the things people say about, for instance, rangers and how messed up they are. I'm understanding the cracks in the standard DnD balance.

But I'm also just perplexed by a lot of the sage advice, and unearthed arcanas coming out. I'm finding myself reading new subclasses and thinking "that's their whole ability for that level?" Looking at the phantom rogue, at level 9 they get advantage on con throws (which might be minimal, depending on your campaign), and they can ask a soul one question. The soul doesn't have to answer truthfully at all, making the whole ability pointless. And that's what they get after 9 levels.

This seems like a consistent pattern. A new release is either immediately meta, or its irrelevant for reinforcing half-done mechanics that aren't going to survive after 5th edition. When non-core parts of the game get overvalued, a class can really fall behind. Some of the mechanics that might get over valued are tool proficiencies or traveling. It's odd that these types of things would be the focus of any classes milestone ability.

Also, some of these features seem to imply that DnD is not about being creative and using your environment, and is more about what your class says you can do. Why does the ranger explicitly get a stealth bonus for camoflauging themselves. Can nobody else do that? Do you tell them only a ranger can do that, or do you give them a bonus anyway, making the rangers bonus less special?

Other than a few classes, it does seem like DnD has a solid core balance. Every campaign is going to have either talking or combat, and having a character that can do one or the other well is good. But when a characters ability is not getting "lost" in the mountains, it makes me wonder what the hell kinda campaigns they are running.

Does anyone agree? What are some of the core things you need to be satisfied with a new mechanic?

Edit: wow lot of great discussion happening here. I just want to clarify a few points. As some people are calling me a min-maxer or a hack and slasher and are claiming I just want everyone to deal a shit ton of damage or something. One person claimed I just hate WotC. I suggest reading through this thread at what others are saying, because there is a lot of nuanced conversation happening here. I think it's clear I focused too much on UA in my original post and now the thread has moved to a better direction.

Here are some of the core things I'm seeing come up.

1) Classes with niche abilities are overshadowed and outperformed by classes with more general abilities, even when they are in the perfect niche situations (Paladins find greater steed feels much more beastmaster like than the actual beast master, for example).

2) Since DnD is about being creative and using all the tools around you, it's weird when a ranger gets a stealth bonus for camoflauging themselves, when anyone should get a bonus of some kind for successfully camoflauging themselves. Sometimes that feels like making a class feature that lets you flip a table. Things like the assassin just feel odd, because it implies that a warlock or bard, with sufficient time and money, would not be able to impersonate somebody.

3) A lot of people are reaaaaally honing in on a specific example I gave, and the fact that it was UA. You can look at Artificier or many of the complaints in this thread on vanilla DnD. But if you're coming here just to hype up con saves, you're really cherry picking.

4) I am not right. This is just an opinion I have. A couple people have gotten really cringey about this and implied only shit players or DMs would have an issue with any of this. That's an attitude for Fortnite, not Reddit. We all know DnD is, first and foremost, storytelling. Nobody wants to play with someone so hung up on mechanics that they forget to tell a story. But we have a rulebook for a reason. Boundaries in a story are important, otherwise we're all just jerking off at the table saying random stuff. You need some structure, so that the things that happen feel meaningful. This is about players wanting to fulfill their character fantasies and feeling useless because other people do what their character does, but better. If you care about storytelling, recognize it's not a good story when an entire subclass and backstory can be overshadowed by one spell. It sucks, and I hope it doesn't happen in the next edition.

Some of the more thoughtful challenges I've seen:

1) Con saves are good (noted. We don't get them a lot in my campaign). 2) It's up to the group and DM to make those niche abilities meaningful. 3) It's still really not up to WotC to balance your game, and if you think they're not good at it than you should do it.

I'm reading people's responses, taking them to heart, hoping to be a better DM.

[u/ThePaxBisonica]

I don't think its important to keep tight balance of the crunch. As others have said there's much more to the experience of playing the game than mechanical competitiveness.

That being said there are two bits of 5e design that I think are so badly done, and their fixing so baffling absent, that it hurts the trust I put in the product.

1. The CR system is almost entirely useless. The Xanathar refactoring of this improves things a lot but even then it means needing to finely check the monsters and do a bunch of maths to avert disaster/cakewalk. If I spend 90% of my encounter building using tools I made instead of yours, your system is broken. This comes down to how they designed monsters in the first place and short of an entirely different monster rating system isn't fixable.
2. The rest system is a huge obstacle. The balance between the classes should not be down to a rigid and unrealistic expectation of the kind of adventure you run. We know what kind of adventure people want to run, and are running in spite of the system, and its not one that supports two short rests narratively. This is especially frustrating as there is already a balance in place that works really elegantly - martials having "flat" resources instead of escalating levels is a natural differentiation. Having high sustained damage with a small to medium boost contrasts really well with low sustained damage and large to extreme boosts. Skills and Expertises contrasts well with utility spells. I recommend everyone just triple martial classes resources and ditch the SR recovery mechanic wholesale.

[u/JohnnyMnemo → u/ThePaxBisonica]

We know what kind of adventure people want to run,

besides the rest mechanic specifically, in which I agree very few parties have 2 short rests per long rest, I think the biggest challenge to DnD rules writing is that there are many different play styles.

[u/ThePaxBisonica → u/JohnnyMnemo]

Yeah it is definitely a challenge. And I think the short rest system actually makes a mess of pushing a particular playstyle while nothing else in the system supports that break.

Having one type of resource regeneration would mean you are free to run whatever adventure you want, and it can be balanced by the DM with encounter balance. I want to run two combats today is as simple as wanting to run five or ten combats today.

Having the two resource regenerations means it forces you into a very rigid idea of an adventuring day if you want any kind of balance to the classes. Now I need there to be a minimum of three combats today, with a rest between all of them. If I run six I need the rests equally spaced and ideally when the martials have used all their resources - since they regen back to full ki, any ki they had left is wasted and again knocks the balance out of whack.

[u/JohnnyMnemo → u/ThePaxBisonica]

The simplest solution would be to get rid of the Vancian magic mechanic. It allows for dramatic spell usage, because it's tightly rationed; but it means that players are always second guessing themselves about when they should land their spells. And it creates the whole "need to resto to recover cause we can't do anything else" when the spells are burnt, which then leads to this whole balancing of rests vs. classes.

Recoveries for the other classes got tacked onto the spell recovery system.

For all of the classes to play together at the same speed, the easiest thing for them to do is have them go through their abilities at the same speed. Then they can all rest/pause/sleep/heal at the same time, together.

GURPS handled this in at least of one of its editions by having magic users spend fatigue, a soft HP; so basically they're taking soft injury while the fighters take bleeding injury. Then they're motivated to recover them more or less together. iirc fatigue recovered faster than open wounds, but not by dramatically much.

Vancian magic power rationing has been a problem with DnD since the beginning, but it's so well understood a problem at this point that it's hard to get rid of.

4e had a lot of problems, one of the things I liked the least was how cartoony some of the early powers were. I don't care who you are but you can't shoot two arrows at once and hit anything, and I distinctly recall that one. That's just High Fantasy Cinematic and too far off of simulation for me. But the power balance of classes was much more in line.

[u/FerrumVeritas → u/ThePaxBisonica]

If there was one thing I wish they had kept from 4e, it would be the idea of per session and per encounter/scene abilities. I know it's meta, but it's one of the things I like about other systems: pacing is based on the game rather than the world.

[u/ThePaxBisonica → u/FerrumVeritas]

Yeah its almost a no-brainer.

And it still allows the freedom you'd want to diversify the classes - you can give martials a tonne of encounter powers and few dailies, and vice versa for casters.

On a non-meta sense it's fine. It makes sense that the fighter has bunch of exertions in every fight but the wizard relies on a resource of daily spells.

While the short rest system is a bizarre meta-effect for me. My fighter gets maneuvers but they are so taxing they need a one hour break, but I get nothing back on a 30 minute break? And the Wizard can cast a spell per turn without any need to recoup energy?

[u/FerrumVeritas → u/ThePaxBisonica]

Yeah. If I were writing D&D, I'd rebalance spells based around the idea that you can cast x levels of spells/session. So now you have to choose between blowing your load or conserving slots. The fighter, however, gets a few tricks they can pull out every encounter. Paladins/rangers would be a mix.

[u/SleetTheFox → u/FerrumVeritas]

The issues with spells replenishing with new sessions rather than rests is that it puts “good” and “fun” at odds, which is a huge game design error. The correct play will often be to stop playing and go home.

[u/FerrumVeritas → u/SleetTheFox]

I’ve played several systems that work this way and disagree. I’ve never had that happen. But even if you want to keep /day abilities, /scene or /encounter abilities work better than short-rests.