Tag: 5.5e

Can’t see the forest for the trees

5.5e Player’s Handbook is out and some folks are going through it. Treantmonk has a video exploring the updated version of the Ranger, and while he goes through all the features and analyzes them decently – including comparisons with the Ranger variants from 5e and the 5.5e playtest for context – he still seems perplexed by people not liking this new version. I think he’s too lost in the details to see the big picture.

Conceptually, Rangers are supposed to be wilderness specialists. Specifically, they’re supposed to specialize in ranging (travelling across a wide area) – that’s why back in 1e, Rangers weren’t allowed to own more than they could carry. That specialization just isn’t meaningful in 5.x D&D – it’s not that you can’t be good at it, but rather that the game just doesn’t care about it. In fact, it actively avoids engaging with anything like logistical concerns: encumbrance; ability to forage for supplies or even the need to do so (q.v. Goodberry); ability to replace scarce resources like ammunition (you can tell the game doesn’t care about this because if it did, spellcasters using damaging cantrips would be seen as having a significant advantage over characters using thrown and projectile weapons); travel challenges like environmental hazards and getting lost; etc. All this means the Ranger’s core concept doesn’t have any real place in 5.x D&D.

Another issue he seems to gloss over is the move to make the Ranger more of a spellcaster. This is another systemic issue in 5.x D&D: the transition to make basically every character intrinsically magical in some way, even if they aren’t a spellcaster per se. Yes, Rangers learned to cast spells back in TSR-era D&D: starting at 8th level (Paladins started gaining their spells at 9th). You know what else happened around that level? Fighters and Clerics started to gain their strongholds, with Thieves and Magic-Users not far behind. Characters in that level range were transitioning away from the life of itinerant dungeon-delving and starting to embed themselves in the world in a larger context. In the language of 5e, they were moving to a different tier of play*. Rangers and Paladins should start off as spellcasters – they should have other points of interest to their classes to distinguish them from Fighters without needing spellcasting, ideally until at least 5th level, and preferably until 9th**. But because 5.x doesn’t care about the Ranger’s core activities, it mechanics it can use to help provide a distinct identity without falling back on spellcasting.

Is there anything we can do about this? I don’t see a lot of options: either we have to houserule 5.x to care about what Rangers do and then redesign 5.x Rangers to actually do that; or we have to reduce Rangers’ design space in the game (perhaps demoting them to be a mere Fighter subclass, at which point they only need as much distinctiveness as an Eldritch Knight); or we give up and just accept a lot of feel will continue to see them as a bad class***.

* Except that none of the tiers identified in 5e or 5.5e really match up with this – the 5.x descriptions of tier 3 (almost identical between 5e and 5.5e) say things like “Other characters gain features that allow them to make more attacks or to do more impressive things with those attacks. These adventurers often confront threats to whole regions.” (emphasis added; 5.5e PHB page 43).

** I like using 9th level as a tier breakpoint because it’s when Clerics – and thus PC parties – gain the ability to revive the dead under their own power. 5.x blurs the line a bit with the 3rd-level Revivify spell, but even so I think gaining the ability to Raise Dead is a real turning point in PC power, and should be recognized in how it can transform play. A similar concern applies to Teleport in earlier editions, or Teleport Circle in 5.5e – the ability to bail out of locations without having to traverse obstacles is transformational. Assuming the group and the game care about challenges like these, of course.

*** A bad class isn’t necessarily a weak class – you could give Rangers + 10*Ranger level to all rolls, and it would make them much more powerful. It still wouldn’t make them feel like much of anything except overpowered.

Posted on by azabaro 0

A quick test to see if a class change is overpowered

If you’re thinking of making changes to a class, you’re probably concerned about doing something that makes the class too powerful – I believe the current term is “overtuned”? There’s a quick heuristic you can use in strongly class-based games like D&D.

First, pick a benchmark class – this is a class seen as one of the more powerful ones for the game, if not the most powerful. Let’s assume we’re looking at 5e, and the benchmark class is wizard.

Second, you ask these questions:

1. Is the class I’m modifying at least as powerful as the wizard before making these changes?

2. Will the change make the class I’m modifying more powerful than the wizard?

3. Am I doing anything to reduce the power of the wizard?

If the answer to all 3 of these is no, the change probably doesn’t make the class overpowered. We can’t be too certain – a change may not make a class too powerful on its own, but may do so in concert with various build choices like feats or multiclassing combinations. But this is a good first approximation.

Incidentally, this suggests that any improvement to your benchmark class is a bridge too far, at least if that class really is the most powerful class already. For 5e, that means don’t buff wizards. Well, I’m sure the designers of 5.5e already know that…

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So, they’re teasing the new edition of D&D 

Wizards of the Coast is providing teaser videos, giving out advance text or even whole print copies to various influencers, who then go on to make their own videos. Speaking as someone who started playing in the mid 80s, I’d suggest people keep a few things in mind.

  1. If you’ve been having fun with the version of the game you’re currently playing, there’s no rush to get the new version, or to adopt it once you have it.
  2. If you haven’t been having a good time with the current version of the game, there still isn’t a big rush to get the new version. Everything we saw previewed in the playtests was fairly conservative in terms of design – changes more on par with the transition from 1st edition to 2nd edition than from 2nd to 3rd, or even from 3rd to 3.5 – which means the significant restructuring needed to deal with most people’s more serious issues probably isn’t in the cards.
    1. Need something a little more concrete? Consider all the talk about the lack of DMs for 5e. Now consider that all of the playtest material we saw was player-facing; there were literally no changes in them to give us a reason to believe the burden on existing DMs will be lessened, or that the path to creating new DMs will be improved. Similarly, the player-facing changes showed little interest in providing lower-complexity play options – feats were assumed to be mandatory and a significant part of even character creation. We haven’t been given any reason to believe the new version will do anything significant to accommodate people who it was previously pushing away.
  3. The talk of backward compatibility – the ability to keep using your old characters with the new version – is designer optimism at best. They don’t know how you’re playing the game because it’s almost impossible for them to figure out how the broader player base is even understanding their rules texts; that’s one of the problems with keeping things secret up to the moment of release. Go ahead and be hopeful it works out, but don’t be surprised if you need to rebuild your characters under the new system to have them work right.
  4. Sometimes the best thing a new version of the game gives you are things you can steal and bring back to an older version, or inspiration for other ways you might handle things. Or even just insight into design patterns you hate!
  5. Nobody’s analysis of the game text is the final word at this stage. Nobody’s. A lot of the online discussion like the story of the blind men and the elephant, with trying to extrapolate the whole of the situation from the tiny part they can perceive. But even the people who have access to the complete text of the rules don’t know how all this stuff is actually going to work when it hits the larger player base, at least partly because that’s the first time the whole thing will get a real playtest done at scale – across millions of players and months of play. Before then it’s all guesses, and the more gets changed in a new version, the more likely those guesses will be off the mark.
  6. All you can get for a few months to the better part of a year is speculation and a sense of discontent with what you already have. That’s the product of marketing, after all – unfulfilled desire. It’s probably better not to engage with all that if your goal is to enjoy gaming.
Posted on by azabaro 0

More thoughts on D&D 5.5e playtest packets

These notes are from the 1st playtest packet, concerning character origins and the first revision of the glossary (which includes redefining some core game mechanical terms). At the point I was writing this (September 2022), I was still writing as if I intended to submit comments as part of the feedback process, and thus addressing Wizards of the Coast designers as “you”.

  1. “Race”. You’re making a good effort to avoid unfortunate implications by associating ability score increases at character generation with background, but retaining “race” as a term for the character’s biological origins means you’re still sending a message to players and potential players that you’re on the same wavelength as the worst sort of people. It’s time to ditch Race as a term – I’d suggest going with Ancestry. It also works with mixed-origin characters, since you can describe them as having multiple Ancestries, while you’d have to be very delicate about calling them multi-racial, or of mixed race.
  1. Mixed origin characters. I think the removal of previous options like the half-elf and half-orc would go down a bit better if the mixed-origin rules included some ability to have mechanical abilities from each ancestry. I realize a complete free-form mix-and-match isn’t viable, but perhaps certain individual features from each ancestry could be marked as minor features, and a character could trade minor ancestries 1-for-1. Examples of minor features would probably be things like Darkvision, an automatic proficiency or language (the halfling’s Stealth, the Dragonborn’s knowledge of Draconic, the Ardling’s very limited flight), but not a lineage or subtype, as seen on Ardlings, Elves, Gnomes, and Tieflings.
    1. Aarakocra are an interesting counter-example to Ardlings – their flight certainly isn’t a minor feature, but their natural attacks are.
  1. Character origin overview says that Size “determines the amount of space the character occupies”, but the Orc’s Powerful Build feature indicates it influences carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift. Size also determines who you can grapple and be grappled by (pages 19-20). If players are going to choose the Size for a character, the text shouldn’t mislead them about the effects of their choice – ideally,  there would be a complete list of what’s affected by Size in one place in the text.
    1. It’s also very strange that (for example) Humans can choose to be Small but Dwarves cannot, and that nobody can choose to be Large. If there’s a reason PCs shouldn’t be allowed to be size Large, the text should address that outright (even if it’s just to say that the option of Large PCs hasn’t been sufficiently playtested at this time).
  1. Ardlings. As a counterpart of Tieflings they seem fine, but at first I was thinking of their limited flight as a headline feature and was pretty disappointed at what is essentially the ability to multi-jump up to 6 times per day. I think calling that out as a minor feature (or at least emphasizing their lineage/spell abilities as their major feature) might help avoid player discontent here.
    1. I’ve seen some discussion of the idea that Ardlings are presented partially as an anthro/furry PC option. I think they’re pretty half-hearted on that front – their animal nature is purely cosmetic. I realize the my preferred approach is unrealistic (I prefer the mutant animal generation rules from Palladium’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, later imported into their After the Bomb game), but I personally would like an anthro option to have a bit more mechanical heft than a permanent Disguise Self – I’d prefer something like the hengeyokai (as presented in earlier editions) for that purpose.
  1. Dragonborn still feel pretty uninspiring. I’m not speaking in terms of power in play; my problem is that they just don’t feel very draconic. I think they could benefit from some additional features, even if those are at the level of what the optimization types refer to as “ribbons”: for example, changing creature type to Dragon, and providing at least some mechanical effect for the scales, teeth, and claws we see in all the art. The scales might give an unarmored AC of 10 + 1/2 proficiency bonus; claws and teeth might give the ability to make unarmed attacks that do proficiency bonus + strength bonus in slashing (claws) or piercing (teeth) damage – hardly the sort of thing that will change the balance of power, but it does let that mouth full of teeth mean something.
  1. I like having multiple options for Tieflings now. I also like that mechanical differences between types of Tieflings, Ardlings, and Elves have been compressed enough to fit in a table so it’s easy to see the different options available. I’m less thrilled about not having options for different types of Dwarves, if only because it might make it harder to add Duergar as a Dwarf lineage later on.
  1. I think that making all types of D20 Tests have the same auto-fail on 1/auto-succeed on 20 behavior is a good idea because so many players were obviously missing that wasn’t the case in 5E. The flipside of this is there are still some features that confuse players by having different mechanics even though they seem like they should be similar. For example, the Lucky feature of Halflings works very differently than Luck and doesn’t involve Luck Points at all. The advantage granted by Luck (can be invoked after the initial dice roll) works differently than the advantage granted by Inspiration (must be invoked before the die is rolled). People are going to get these kinds of fiddly differences mixed up all the time. I suggest you standardize: if you have to spend a metagame resource to get Advantage on a roll, you can spend it after the die roll to get what is effectively a re-roll.
  1. I preferred feats as optional, mostly because I think they’re a bad influence on the way players think about the game, pushing character personalization more towards out-of-game time and away from playtime; sadly that doesn’t seem to be the popular opinion. I like that as long as we have feats there’s a somewhat restricted pool of feats available at 1st level and that everybody gets one – I think 5E’s variant Human was like a character building black hole, drawing in players not only because some they were the only characters who could start with a feat but also because some of the starting feats were so powerful. With that said:
    1. I hope that aren’t a ton of different tiers of feats above 1st level, or prerequisite chains – those both tend to encourage people to spend more time developing their characters as theoretical builds well in advance of what they do in play.
    2. Some of the feats seem to be much better than others. The document says that options will be re-balanced over time, but I still don’t see how you’re going to make Skilled feel nearly as valuable as Magic Initiate, especially since everyone gets a background that gives them 2 skill proficiencies of their choice. Unless perhaps classes are going to be skill-starved? I guess Skilled could give the option of gaining a single Skill Proficiency and Expertise in a skill…
  1. The Musician feat makes me think of Bards, and how weird it was in 5E that it was possible to make a Bard who didn’t have Perform as a skill proficiency. I know the class document isn’t out yet, but I think it’ll be weird if we have that situation again or one like it, where the party’s Druid might be a Musician while the Bard somehow isn’t.
  1. Short rests still take too long. 5 minutes like 4E is fine, 10 minutes (like an old-school dungeon exploration turn) is also good. 1 hour discourages players from taking short rests, which causes intra-party tension if some but not all PCs have short rest refreshes. 
  2. No feats that customize combat proficiencies at 1st level. You can gain all the skills you want, but there’s no way to improve your weapon or armor options, even though there are ways to improve your magical options.
  3. It isn’t clear that custom backgrounds are the default – clearly present examples as examples (attached to characters, with different versions of a same-named background for different characters, or with construction examples)
  4. I don’t know how I feel about power source-based spell lists. I like the idea of the “arcane” part of an arcane caster meaning something, but I’m hesitant to buy into anything that would make Sorcerers less distinct from Wizards than they are now.
  5. Bad: crappy re-roll powers (Savage Attacker, for example)
  6. Critical hits only for weapon dice damage for PCs – seems bad, at least out of context of classes (Sneak Attack dice, Smite dice)
  7. Limit 1 instance of Inspiration per character will tend to cause hoarding for some hypothetical time when it’s really needed (see how CRPG players tend to handle recovery items). Characters should probably be able to have multiple instances – perhaps a number equal to proficiency bonus? I suspect even that won’t be enough to get players to spend Inspiration, but I think they’re more likely to do so if they know they’ll have some left in the tank afterward.
Posted on by azabaro 0