Hate to share from the site we definitely don’t think about anymore, but I think this is too interesting to miss. If true, it’s a big insight into the design of the game. All credit to that OP of course.
Summary is that WotC’s balancing decisions seem to make sense if they balance the classes like they balance monsters, using max damage output over a three-round fight. Basically they overvalue that, especially for certain nova classes (the OP suggests those classes are Fighter/Wizard/Sorcerer) and undervalue utility.
TLDR. WoTC seems to value Single Target Guaranteed DPR in a Nova over 3 rounds, and balances the game around that not too dissimilar to how they calculate the power of CR. And that seems to reflect every design decision and choice they have made when viewed this way, and what they gauge class power around. The core resource management of the game is about novaing now or later, and how can classes recover their novas.
Based on the way they’ve reigned in nova damage with 1D&D but have left utility spells basically untouched, I think the theory has merit.
This is exactly what they do, and what they did also for 5e.
The thing people are not understanding regarding utility is that players are better to argue about it with spells than they are about normal things. The second problem is the vision people can have about the game: for some people, a class has to have special things it can do in every area of the game. I call this a video game mindset. The actual mindset of the game is that a class simply defines abilities and it’s up to players to leverage their abilities.
The fantasy is different between these considerations : many people want martials to be anime characters. The game original fantasy is more about how a Odysseus will fight a sorceress or a giant with his wits and martial prowess. The game suppose that a martial will go on a quest to get a mighty artifact or seek the help of an archmage to do what he can’t. Players argue that a wizard pc can simply do these things by itself, without asking the dm, but it’s wrong. It’s just a culture that players built on Internet to weaponize the rules to do what they want. And in this game, the more special rules you have, the more you can leverage them against the dm.
I digress a bit. In short there is a divergent view about the rules, the dm role, the fantasy, and the kind of rpg people want to play. Utility can’t really be balanced anyway.
I’m not sure I concur here.
Perfect balance is impossible, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to make classes feel at least roughly equal with no obvious winners and losers. What’s the benefit of having a class that people agree on is bad? For a long time that was Ranger, and it was clear that they didn’t want Rangers to be bad because they tried to fix the Ranger in UA like four times before Tasha’s finally did a solid job with it. And most of the Ranger fixes aren’t straight combat buffs either, so they definitely do care about out of combat ability to some extent.
It’s not “anime” to give martials more power or more things to do. You say it’s wrong that a caster can do stuff without asking the DM that a martial has to rely on DM fiat for… but how so? That sounds completely accurate to me.
People usually forgo their own creativity and the mundane ways to do things. If you want to open a door, the lock spell can open it, but a portable ram also, or some tools to weaken it, and if you have a proficiency with the tools, even better.
Usually it’s technology that’s more or less easy to get depending on its low or high tech nature and the place you are in. Explosives, or grenades and poisons of all sorts. Mundane work will do almost all the things magic can do. You can built a fort for the night with enough manpower. You usually don’t need to fly when you have ropes and nails. That sort of stuff. Traps can also be very elaborate. You can also hire people for some jobs.
But for some people, their class should have a unique thing it can do, and what they do should be written on their character sheet. This is what I call a video game mindset. To me this is a video game or board game mindset. It’s a fine way to play, but 5e is not the best for that. 3e and 4e for example were closer from this mindset as far as I know.
I think you’re misrepresenting the position a bit. No amount of creativity can make up the gap in utility power between high-level — or even mid-level — spells and the abilities that martials get. It’s not a video game mindset to ask for more things to do that are clearly defined, like casters already have.
It can and it does.
You don’t need to know how a phone or a computer work to use them. You don’t need to know how to make a car to use one. You don’t need to know how to cook to get a meal everyday. You merely need to know someone who will do it for you, or who will provide you with a tool to do it.
That’s how most stories work btw: the protagonist at some point or another will need a tool or the help of someone.
So do you think that the utility of spells should be nerfed, so that the party has to rely on finding someone else to do the things for them?
I read a quote a while back that I really liked: “The game is inherently a series of problems wrapped up in a narrative. The easier it is for you to solve those problems, the better you are at the game.” And I feel like the answer to “Which classes have an easier time solving problems in the game?” is pretty obvious and hard to argue. Even if you do think it’s possible for a martial to find a creative solution to accomplish the same thing as a caster, it’s clearly far more difficult and less straightforward for them to do so compared to just casting the “fix the problem spell” that usually exists, right?
I firmly disagree with that. It’s less obvious how you fight magic, but most importantly I think most people feature a work inherently skewed in favour of players. By this I mean that players with a spellcaster (or several) in the world will have an easier time using magic than their enemies or actually anyone who doesn’t wield magic by itself. This is a bias, some kind of “magic is exceptional, but somehow your party has more spellcaster than a duke can find”.
I feel like most people expect their party to be way over levelled relative to the actual adventure tier. In fact, most people seem to think in a Tier2 adventure context against a tier3 party. Or tier 1 context vs a Tier2 party.
Look at most movies, and you’ll see heroes with no powers do heroic things.
I’m not really sure what you mean you disagree with. I think we’re talking at cross purposes here, because I’m not quite getting where you’re going with what you’re saying.
The thing about movies and other pieces of narrative fiction is that the writers can and very often do arrange the narrative so that the main characters are more able to evenly contribute, despite having wildly different capabilities. Like how Vision got stabbed at the beginning of Infinity War and was weakened for the whole movie, or how Dr. Strange got stuck holding back water during the final fight in Endgame, or how characters like Superman and the Flash constantly job and forget powers they have or that they’re also geniuses, or half the enemies inexplicably have a supply of Kryptonite, so that Batman has something to do. And even then, there are clear differences in what they achieve: Thor’s arrival in Infinity War was a “the day is saved!” moment, no one reacts to Hawkeye like that. Superman gets movies about him saving the world by himself, while Batman on his own usually just saves Gotham.
When you put these characters together in the same game for players to pick from, you have to make them more balanced, that’s why games like Injustice have plot points where some characters get powers or Superman is weakened by Kryptonite or they just hand-wave things and put characters on roughly the same level. And D&D tries to do that too, they just do something of a half-baked job at it, as the OP is showing. Because if you try to address it narratively like a movie does, the caster players will rightfully feel unfairly targeted: “Wow, this enemy also knows countermagic/has an antimagic item/has magic resistance?”