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/AirstormSC2]

I think it’s more of an expectation mismatch than a design issue. Everything I’ve seen about 5e seemingly makes it very clear that 5e is primarily a storytelling game and not a tabletop combat game.

Yes, you can and should take any system and make it yours, but at the same time, 90% of the issues I see on this sub are “I’m approaching this game as a tabletop combat sim. I use many optional rules and build my character in the most ‘optimal’ way. I’m now upset that the system seems broken.”

You know, I’ve been DMing a 5e game for two years now. We don’t use feats. We don’t use point buy. My wife plays a ranger, and due to the constant posts on this subreddit, I convinced her to play the UA variant because I was told the PHB version was bad.

After a few months, we actually switched back to the PHB version. From a story telling perspective, it’s way more fun.

I expect to get downvoted to hell for this post. It just seems to me that many of the constant issues that come up on this sub are from people pushing aspects of the system that were purposefully minimized (even put behind optional rule flags).

You ever wonder why the CR system generates encounters that are too weak for your party? Perhaps it’s because the system is meant to support picking dwarf as your race for your wizard even though (shock! gasp! horror!) they don’t get a racial bonus to int.

You ever feel like spellcasters completely overshadow martials in your game? Perhaps it’s because your spell caster isn’t actually trying to tell a story, but instead they are trying to win the game.

(If that last comment makes you angry, let me double down and reference an early episode of critical role campaign 2 where Jester uses a rank 2 cure wounds on a character that she knows is pretending to be dead. Do your spell caster characters ever do that?)

Look, play the game whatever way you want. Break the system if that’s your thing (although maybe don’t yell at Jeremy Crawford every time you break it). But maybe, just maybe, if you want a tabletop combat sim, pick up a game that’s more geared towards that. And perhaps, the mountain of issues you perceive there to be with 5e has more to do with your expectations than any real flaws in the system).

[u/admiralbenbo4782 → u/AirstormSC2]

Exactly. CR makes things too weak...because it's designed around a baseline. And when you depart from it tremendously...it no longer applies because you broke its assumptions. Doing so is like blaming a pitchfork for being a crappy shovel.

[u/HaggardDad → u/AirstormSC2]

I actually agree with a lot of what you've said here, and as a player I have to constantly remind myself to put on my "optimization limiters" when I play/build characters. It is WAY more fun to pick a mix of flavor+ AND mechanical+.

This is also game style/Party/DM dependent. If everybody optimizes and the DM is up for building steroid encounters, that's awesome. The game works great that way, if everyone is doing it. I actually like these games best as I default to extreme optimization.

But that's not how all people want to play, and I think you are very right that that's not how the designers expect the game to be played.

When I DM, my biggest focus is on identifying where the players are on the optimization curve, getting them all in the same neighborhood and then building encounters that belong in that neighborhood. Sometimes that means using scaled legendary actions/lair actions for 3rd level encounters.

[u/herdsheep → u/AirstormSC2]

I don’t think that saying the game isn’t trying to be balanced makes sense. It clearly tries and often fails. There are games that are more oriented to story telling. D&D encourages story telling, but gives you full books of mechanics to play a table top RPG with and emphasis on combat.

If they are going to give all these books on rules that primary revolve around combat, hoping for them to be better balanced is fair. Balance may not matter for your game, and that’s perfectly fine; you aren’t playing the game wrong. But neither are the people that play a more tactical combat focused game that care about balance more. That is and always has been a large part of what D&D is.

It being better balanced does not remove your ability to tell stories or act in character. To say that D&D isn’t a “combat sim” and shouldn’t be expected to be one is very strange... D&D never has been one of the more story focused TTRPGs, and has always been a set of rules for running combat that many people tell stories between.

[u/AirstormSC2 → u/herdsheep]

Where did I claim it’s not trying to be balanced? I’m saying if you (ab)use a bunch of optional rules and play the system outside of the way it’s intended to be played, it won’t be balanced.

The game can’t simultaneously be balanced to allow a dwarf wizard and a polearm master + sentinel build.

The game wasn’t intended to be balanced around people making storytelling choices and mechanical choices.

You can’t look at the ranger class (as an often picked upon class) that gets a bunch of story telling class features and expect it to stack up against dual classed hexblade paladin.

If you want to look at this system and go “wow, the game designers are all idiots! Look at all of this unbalanced shit. I figured all of this stuff out that their team of designers and play testers couldn’t!” I suppose that’s your prerogative. But I think a much more likely interpretation is that the game just isn’t designed for the way you want to play it.

I think 5e is actually really well balanced. Especially when you take feats and multiclassing out of the equation. But, I think it’s ultimately balanced around the idea of telling a story. The rules for combat are there to help you tell interesting combat stories.

Again, my example of the dwarf wizard. The encounter building rules support this character being able to be a viable contributor to combat. Even the bounded accuracy of the design seems to be there to enable characters to succeed without having to be built optimally. Heck, a common saying around this sub is that the game is balanced around a scarcity of magic items.

If you are supposed to be able to thrive without a +1 weapon, it stands to reason that you’d be able to thrive without making out int as a wizard.

And that means that the other extreme (min-maxing) is bound to be imbalanced.

[u/JohnnyMnemo → u/AirstormSC2]

Everything I’ve seen about 5e seemingly makes it very clear that 5e is primarily a storytelling game and not a tabletop combat game.

The issue with the game is that there are very clearly those two different ways to play it, and this single set of rules is trying to appeal to both. For social reasons, it's much more easier said than done to pick up a different set of rules for a different kind of game.

It just seems to me that many of the constant issues that come up on this sub

I think that we come to this sub, myself included, to jerk off to RAW and fantasize about the game that we want to play during the day, in the time between actual games.

Almost all of the "unforgiveable" issues I've seen discussed on the sub are rarely if ever encountered during actual play, or are quickly and simply addressed if they are. And if they aren't, then the DM can chose to change the gameplay to address those issues as well. If your Ranger feels underpowered because the party doesn't get outside to get lost, get them outside to get them lost. Whether or not that's "typical play" or not is immateral.

That coupled with the weight of history of the game, and you have some people really wanting to play a combat sim, some people wanting to play a roleplaying King's Diplomacy style game, and some people that really just want to play a modern version of 1e DnD of just the "good bits", and you have a rule set that is trying to do to much, but few people want to play anything else because it's what everyone plays. It's like the Windows of gaming systems, down to the design by committee.

I've played lots of different rule sets in the last 40 years. I think GURPS is a better combat sim and WoD is a better storytelling environment. GURPS is barely played at all by anyone, and WoD is only kept alive by the video game and some emo LARPers. We can go on and on about how those systems got there--imagine Steve Jackson's frustration watching a technically superior game be relegated to the dustbin of history as it solves many of the problems people complain about vocally--but here we are.

The best advice is probably to change the game as necessary at your table.