Tag: gaming

In D&D, martial fighters and spell casters have vastly different powersets. In any game with choices that affect a character’s power, there will always be power differential between the presented options. One will always be the strongest, most efficient way to damage or control your foes – and one will always be the weakest, least valuable option. When it comes to the fandom at large, there’s a widespread conception that martial characters (fighters, monks, barbarians: those who do not have access to spells) are inherently weaker and more restricted than their spell casting counterparts.

This is a bit of a strange topic for me.

In my decade and more of running D&D, I’ve never had someone play a martial character at my table and be upset about the power differential. This is not at all to imply that it doesn’t exist or isn’t as bad as the math makes it out to be. A wizard throwing a fireball into a packed room is overpowered by design, and of course it does more damage for that action than the fighter can manage with two swings of their sword.

Design-wise, Wizards thought that the best way to address the differential would be in limiting the number of fireballs that wizard can throw. At fifth level, the wizard gets two spell slots of the requisite level, and the ability to get another one back on a short rest once a day. In the books, Wizards listed their ideal adventuring day to consist of seven to eight encounters, so the wizard wouldn’t be able to fireball every battle, while the fighter’s steady ability to attack twice in a round would never lose value throughout the day.

But I don’t know anyone who has ever had consistent adventuring days with that encounter volume. D&D has evolved a lot over the years, and it isn’t just a string of dungeon crawls with a half dozen encounters between each long rest. At my table, I generally only run somewhere between three and five encounters in a day, but I ratchet them up in difficulty: almost every one of them would qualify as a “deadly” encounter by the game’s rules, and once the party starts getting magic items, they ramp up even further. Yet, despite that jump in difficulty, I still haven’t had my players complain that their fighter isn’t able to clear a room like the wizard can. In my own limited opportunities to be a player at someone else’s table, I’ve usually chosen martial characters and never felt disadvantaged by the differential.

So, I want to try and nail that down. Here’s some factors I’ve had on my mind since I discussed this with a few friends. Let’s see if we can parse something out.

Choice in D&D

One piece of this discussion I haven’t touched on yet is the versatility of spells. Wizards and clerics have a lot of different things they can accomplish with their magic, both in and out of combat. It trends toward the belief that fighters and barbarians need more things they can do outside of combat, more abilities and tools that can be used so they’re more valuable on the whole. In Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, they added some optional features to barbarians that trended this way: giving them more skill proficiencies and the ability to cast Speak with Animals as a ritual.

I’m not sure that’s the right direction for them to move, though. A friend of mine is beginning a new game in a few weeks, and I’ve actually settled on a fighter for my newest PC. I’m incredibly excited about my character, who I’ve built to be a normal freaking guy. I specifically don’t want him to gain innate magic in any way during the game – from an item? Sure, that’s fine. But he is just a normal dwarf.

I don’t worry at all that I’m going to be lacking choices with him. Not in combat or out of it. Every piece of every turn is a choice – where I’ll move, who I choose to attack, how I might spend an action if no one is in reach of my weapons. A wizard or cleric might have the same decision points and a few more when it comes to their long list of spells and different levels at which to cast them, but in the grand scheme of the game, I don’t think it’s really that many more.

Because character creation is the most amount of choices anyone makes in D&D, and the moments between combat are nearly just as freeform as that. I think the standard volume of decision points that every character has access to is so high by default, that the additional decisions provided by access to spellcasting is negligible overall.

And maybe it’s really an implicit understanding that fuels this. Anyone who chooses to play a fighter knows that they won’t have spells (with the exception of one subclass). Understanding that intrinsically might be why none of my players have ever broached the topic.

Wizards Do Not Cast Spells in a Vacuum

As I mentioned before, fireball is by design the most effective tool to clear a packed room. It is intentionally a spike of power that breaks the more linear advancement of spells. Burning Hands is the most near-equivalent spell at 1st level, and it is only 3d6 in a 15-foot cone originating from you. Fireball is a 20-foot radius sphere that you can place anywhere within 150 feet that deals 8d6 damage. It is safer, larger, and more damaging. Casting Burning Hands at 3rd level only deals a measly 5d6. The value between the two isn’t even close.

It obviously does more damage on cast than a fighter can manage as long as there’s multiple targets. In a formless void of grey sludge, the wizard can destroy more of that sludge per round with his spells than the fighter can manage.

But no combat plays out like that.

If there are three enemy martial characters in a battle that the party’s fighter is keeping from chasing down the wizard, and, safe from repercussions, that wizard casts a spell that changes the texture of the battle? I believe it’s fair to say the fighter contributed to that spell’s casting. Battlefield control isn’t something that only spells accomplish – every square of movement affects how the enemies will act on their turn, and their actions affect the party’s decisions. Hold Person is an excellent tool to lock an enemy down, but it gets its best value when a martial can capitalize on the critical strikes it confers. The best way to remove an enemy from the fight is to reduce their hitpoints to 0, after all. Hold Person itself doesn’t do any damage, and the enemies can save out of the effect at the end of each of their turns.

A Point of Philosophy

All this boils down to D&D being first and foremost a game about teamwork and camaraderie. When I play a fighter and see a wizard cast Fireball and clear a room of mooks, I never think, “Man. As a fighter, I can’t do anything like that.” I think instead, “Wow, incredible! Thank goodness one of my allies can do something like that.“

I’ve never sat at a table where the characters that killed the most enemies got bonus experience – when the encounter ends, everyone gets the same amount. That’s how I’ve always run it. That’s how Wizards intended it to be run with 5th edition, because no matter whatever differential in power exists, every encounter is affected by every member of the party.

And, again, I am not at all claiming that the differential isn’t there – it is. But I do think it’s become a bit overblown of late. With the OneD&D information on a slow drip, people are wondering what, if anything, might be done to address it. Will Wizards back pedal to 5th edition’s play test and give every fighter some maneuvers? (I think that would be great.) With the nerfs to Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master, people are curious if the gap is going to widen. I’m not worried–because if things don’t shake out, I’ll just keep running 5th edition.

Maybe the differential is felt more keenly for your players, or even for you. If that’s the case, the best thing to do is to talk to your DM or the table and find out if there’s something to be done for it or change tack. Keep presenting interesting arenas and scenarios that cause variation in the value of a spell – Spirit Guardians on an armored cleric is a great tool to deal damage to a thick mob of enemies, but when there’s only a few, spread out spell casters and bowmen, it’s not the end-all answer any longer.

As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast dropped their second set of playtest materials for the upcoming OneD&D featuring the rules for Rogues, Rangers, and Bards, the new spell list divisions, a wide selection of feats, and some updates to the glossary. Overall? I find myself immensely impressed – not only with the rules themselves, but with Wizards’ commitment to trying new ideas and responding to community feedback.

So, here’s some of the highlights.

General Rules Changes

One of the best changes Wizards has settled on so far is to normalize subclass feature acquisition. Everyone in this UA gets those bonuses at the same levels, and it sounds like they want that to be the case for everyone. They’ve also moved the “Capstone” feature for each class down to level 18, which makes them much more attainable for the normal game group, and you’ll actually get to have them for some time before the game reaches its end. (I’ve yet to have a game reach level 20, but I don’t imagine it would go much further beyond that anyway.)

Dual-wielding got a massive change to make it much more viable. Now, attacking with an off-hand weapon is part of your Attack action, instead of costing your bonus action. For rogues and rangers, this change is massive. Cunning action and adjusting hunter’s mark just got a lot less painful if you wanted to fight with two swords.

They’re testing out some new stuff with Natural 20s and 1s. They’ve struck the line about an automatic success on a Natural 20 after the community reception, but they want to test having a Natural 1 grant your character advantage when it’s the result of a skill check. I think it takes the sting out of a one, certainly, but it mostly just moves that pain point onto rolling a 2. I talked in my last blog about enjoying the momentum of inspiring each other on Natural 20s, so it’s likely that I’d choose that rule over this one.

Feats of at least 4th level all appear to have an ability score bump added to them now, which is great! My players and I have been talking about adjusting some rules for our next campaign, and one thing we’ve been considering is a much lower budget for point buy, but gaining more power on each ASI/Feat level to accentuate a power curve. Some feats got a bit better than they were before, others had some power stripped down. Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter both lost the drop 5 from your attack roll for 10 additional damage, and I’m in favor. Those two feats presented so much power it was nearly impossible to justify anything else if you cared even a little about optimization. Polearm Master also had its reaction attack changed to no longer be specified as an Attack of Opportunity, which makes its combination with Sentinel much less frustrating.

Rogues

Rogue is, in my opinion, one of 5th edition’s best designed classes, perhaps the best. It has a clear mechanical throughline during combat: you get one big hit, so ensure you’re set up to land it. Its subclasses have all added unique flavor and power without utterly invalidating the others as they’ve been released. I haven’t been a player often throughout 5th edition’s lifetime, but when it comes to characters I made for anything longer than a one-shot, I’ve run rogues more than anything else. My current PC is a rogue that is adventuring in the Sword Coast in some homebrew content post-Rime of the Frostmaiden. My first 5th edition character was a rogue.

Wizards themselves knew they’d done a great job with the class, and so it’s seen relatively few changes here. Most of their features are intact, just shifted a bit in their acquisition. Evasion has dropped to a 9th-level feature instead of 7th, but that truly feels more in-line with its power and it makes room for earlier acquisition of subclass features – which definitely came in a bit too late before. The rogue picked their subclass, like most, at 3rd level, then didn’t get their follow-up features until 9th, 13th, and 17th level. The majority of Wizards’ published adventures end around 12th level, so most had a 6 level gap between their subclass features, then their games were close to finishing.

Slippery Mind at 15th level now gives proficiency in Wisdom and Charisma saving throws, to make rogues even harder to nail down. (That’s four out of six saving throw proficiencies in the base class!) Subtle Strikes is the one new feature for the base rogue, replacing Blindsense, which is a massive trade-up in power at the loss of being able to detect invisible creatures within a mere 10 feet.

Then there’s the Thief. In the interview with Jeremy Crawford, they talked a lot about just letting the thief cheat and break the rules, and boy did they mean it. Thieves gaining a climb speed flat out is an elegant adjustment toward using more concise rules language than before. Allowing them to use their Dexterity for the new jump calculation is great. Permanent advantage on stealth checks so long as they’re not wearing medium or heavy armor? Few rogues do that, anyway. And then they gain an additional item attunement, a chance to save their item’s charges, an ability to use any scroll they find (and with expertise, a way to guarantee they can use whatever scrolls they want), and then, finally, to occasionally get TWO bonus actions? I think this is a huge improvement for the subclass. Two bonus actions might be less powerful than getting two turns in the first round of a battle, but it’s much more game-friendly, and usable throughout an encounter rather than just at the beginning of one.

Rangers

I think the ranger here looks better than ever. Despite some decent updates and subclasses throughout 5th edition, the class never managed to entirely shake off its underpowered reputation from its reception. I’m a fan of them becoming a Prepared caster instead of a Memorized one, giving them the ability to cast Hunter’s Mark without concentration is great, since that spell iconic for their class. Allowing them to take Fighting Styles as feats even though they aren’t of the “Warrior” class group is great. I love roving giving them 40 feet of movement and a climb and swim speed. Rangers picking up Expertise is great, I think Tireless is awesome, and it looks like they nabbed the rogue’s blindsight feature and improved it, going as far as 30 feet of blindsight.

Hunter’s features are interesting, too. They’ve removed the Colossus Slayer / Giant Killer / Horde Breaker choice, and made Colossus Slayer baseline, which I believe to be a good adjustment. They’ve changed the second feature to grant Hunter’s Mark the ability to reveal immunities, resistances, and vulnerabilities. And their last feature is like a rogue’s uncanny dodge, but it hurts someone else? I love it.

Bards

Bards are also becoming a prepared caster (and I think it’s even better for them than it is for rangers), but their spell choice limitation survives in allowing them to access the Arcane list, but only choose spells that are Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, or Transmutation. There’s a lot of good spells there I can recall from the top of my head, however. Haste, Hold Person, Catapult, Blur, Hideous Laughter. The biggest thing here is that their Magical Secrets feature is also spells the prepare! So each day they’ll get to pick a few spells from the list they chose without limitation once they get that feature.

Bardic Inspiration is also so much cooler as a reaction, so you know it’s getting used and might change the result. Also, it can be used to heal now, which is incredible. At 1st level, a bard can heal you for 1d6 as a reaction after you suffer damage within 60 feet. It’s the best healing on the market!

They’ve also given bards a selection of healing spells to have prepared for free, to really emphasize their support role.

All of this to say, these new playtest rules have provided some very welcome context to the way Wizards of the Coast is considering the rules for OneD&D. If we can expect more drops like this, the next evolution of the game is looking very bright. I can’t think of a single piece of this set of rules I didn’t like, so I’m excited to see more. I think the biggest hurdle is going to be a fear that Wizards has a good idea that is shot down by the community for being too powerful or good: like the Battlemaster maneuvers of Fighter were originally intended to be a class feature, and not just a subclass, which would’ve been a much more interesting design space. I’d hate to see something like that get watered down again, but I’m feeling really hopeful for now.

As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

In my Running Dragons blog, I briefly mentioned the danger of an imbalance in the “action economy” during a boss encounter. A lot players coming into D&D might have their expectations for boss fights shaped by video games, where one extremely strong enemy takes on the party despite a numerical disadvantage. For your bosses in D&D, this is suicide.

Even the game’s own mechanics for making this more available fall short. “Legendary actions” (special moves the boss monsters may take at the end of other creature’s turns) only go so far: a lone dragon with only the legendary actions listed in the official statblock will be destroyed by an appropriate level party without a problem. Hell, the two dragon encounters I’ve run in my current game both featured clusters of minions, and they were a tier above the players – at level 8, they fought an adult black dragon (a CR 14 monster), and just a few weeks ago, at level 14, they battled an ancient black dragon (a CR 21 monster). The party slayed both dragons with only one casualty between the two encounters (during the latter, and easily reversed with a Revivify).

Part of that is because of some of the shortcomings that exist in the Challenge Rating (CR) system that we’ll get into in a moment. My table also consists of a lot of bona fide gamers that work hard to conserve resources and adequately prepare. They knew well ahead of time what kind of dragon lair they were walking into, and both times obtained some tools to mitigate the damage it could deal with its breath attack. All this to say that my advice here will not be good advice for every table: it could be that where I see failure in challenge ratings, they’ll be perfectly workable for your table. A crew of careful, calculating players, however, might want for a bit more difficulty when they roll for initiative.

Here’s some tips to give them that.

Reexamining Challenge Rating

The first things to take to heart when trying to make a more challenging encounter for D&D is to take CR less seriously. It can be very useful for determining whether a creature is an accessible foe for your players at their level, but it doesn’t mean it can hold its own without allies. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide example of this, they mention a Rakshasa (CR 13) being something that might prove more difficult than you think against a party with its limited magic immunity trait, but with its low pool of hit points, any well-balanced group will annihilate one of these fiends no problem. I think the Rakshasa works best as a late tier 2 antagonist, for a party of 8th to 11th level, despite the spellcasters at this level having no ability whatsoever to damage the creature without some kind of physical weapon.

And! With minions included in an encounter with a Rakshasa, your spellcaster players will have a valuable task to undertake once they know of its magic immunity while the more martial characters deal with the fiend himself.

Perhaps the worst problem the challenge rating values suffer is how hard they crash the second your players obtain combat-oriented magic items. That fighter finding a +1 shield? Your barbarian getting a +1 greataxe? Your wizard finding a wand of the war mage? Banded accuracy is thrown out of a window.

Your fighter is suddenly much, much more difficult for CR-appropriate creatures to strike. Your barbarian and wizard are both now landing their attacks much more often than the game was balanced around. Consider this: the scaling component included in the player characters’ power, their proficiency bonus, scales one point every four levels. An item granting them a +1 bonus accelerates them that much further ahead.

Now, I’m not advocating for holding these items back from the party. Magic items are a lot of fun to have – especially homebrew items that are on the cusp of breaking the game. It’s just another factor that contributes to CR faltering in the mid-to-late stages of the game.

Ultimately, I think bosses can comfortably sit a tier above a party playing strategically in combat and provide a healthy challenge. There’s a few cases that can cause that to fall short – spells that will pancake the player characters or attacks that deal an amount of damage they won’t be able to play around, but I think it’s easier to adjust those outliers than to try and scale a numerically-appropriate monster up to boss viability. I suppose that brings up another question …

How Powerful Should the Minions Be?

I generally include a creature or two very close to my boss’s listed CR as their lieutenants. In my ancient dragon encounter, I included a Blue Abishai (a CR 17 creature) as the primary lieutenant, with a homebrew dragonborn fighter opponent that I set at CR 11. The dragon and the abishai both began the battle away from the room’s entrance, hidden in the darkness of the cave, so the fighter and a few guard drakes (CR 2 creatures) were present to oppose the party while the big monsters got into position.

The party ended up successfully locking the fighter lieutenant down with a Banishment spell, removing them from the battle until well after everything else had been handled. The abishai used its Greater Invisibility to fight unseen, but the players managed to break his concentration and used a Stunning Strike to keep him grounded long enough for his elimination. Even the additional bonuses I gave my dragon – an antimagic darkness zone lair action, an ability to use an action and legendary actions to heal if it was at its hoard, an immunity to movement speed reduction when using its Wing Attack legendary action – couldn’t make this monster powerful enough to battle the party alone.

Create an array of additional enemies for your boss with a variety in their challenge ratings. Give them some chaff, weak monsters that can be eliminated with well-placed area-of-effect abilities. Give them an ally that’s dangerous, but wouldn’t be a problem without the heavier hitters in the room aiding them. And give them a powerful lieutenant almost as dangerous as the boss themselves to force a division of the party’s attention.

Building Complex Encounters

Another option for adding difficulty to an encounter is to ensure the goal isn’t just reduce all the enemies’ HP pools to zero. If every battle in the game runs that way, it can get stale regardless of the challenge you’re building. One of my most successful encounters in this campaign was earlier on (I believe they were around level 6, it was well over a year ago now). They had infiltrated the compound of an extremist group of zealots bent on using an ancient magic ritual to call radiant fury down on a village the party sought to defend. In that battle, I included a cleric NPC enemy as the boss, and calculated her to be about CR 9, gave her a martial ally based on an adjusted Champion statblock (down to what I thought to be CR 7), and a handful of CR 2 swordsmen and several priests. These priests, however, were first-and-foremost working on the ritual. The party needed to split their focus on interrupting the magic and defeating the dangerous enemies in the battle. Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has several other ideas for diverse encounter goals.

The trick to these kinds of encounters if to ensure there’s a clearly defined win condition for the players – but not necessarily one that you’re responsible to prescribe. Your players can deduce a lot about your encounters on the scant amount of information each dice roll will tell them. They can calculate where the enemy’s AC might lie, they’ll know when a foe is putting out more damage than they can sustain for multiple rounds, and they can react accordingly.

That said, one of the hardest things for newer players to learn is when they should run from an encounter. There are some situations that truly become untenable, and unlike a video game where everything is usually balanced around you being able to overcome it with the tools you have to hand, some battles in D&D might just not be feasible for you to win. I was in a game once where at level 4 we came across an ancient white dragon (CR 20). I had the most experience of all the players at the table, including the DM (who had rolled the encounter from his module’s table) and I immediately knew we needed to split. If it weren’t for a successful saving throw and a ring that conferred resistance to cold damage, one of our party members would’ve been killed outright by the breath weapon. (But we all made it out with the clever use of an illusion and Rope Trick.)

A Never-Ending Education

By the very structure of its rules, D&D is a more combat-oriented tabletop RPG than other contemporary systems. Encounters are something you as a DM will spend a lot of time cobbling together. All of your dungeons, your factions, and your wildernesses will be expected to have their own unique array of enemies to overcome. And designing these battles is a process that will never run out of things to teach you, and not just because every table is different.

At my table, it would be blasphemous were I to on-the-fly adjust an encounter I designed and make it easier. That doesn’t mean that design stops when initiative is rolled for every party. If you had enemies in reserve, but the players are getting thwomped just fine already, maybe they don’t need to show up. Maybe that high level spell slot lingering up their foe’s sleeve got used on something before this battle. My advice in these instances is to keep any of these adjustments under wraps, and whatever you do, don’t begin making tactical blunders that the enemies don’t have a justification to make. Nothing has killed a mood at my tables quicker than them being able to tell when a battle got easier.

Don’t be afraid to try new things with your encounters. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. There will always be another roll.

As always, thanks for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.