D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

The issue is that '6-8 encounters a day' generally means a dungeon bash. Now I love a good dungeon bash. But particularly as you get to higher levels lots of sessions feature other things, like travel, diplomacy, mystery solving, and so on. So a lot of adventuring days might only feature one or two fights, but they are likely to be bigger ones with large groups of enemies or important plot points. The battle of attrition that 5e is balanced against doesn't come up and play more closely resembles a fantasy novel or movie.

Our last adventuring day featured two encounters (we're at level 16 travelling through the Cairn Hills)

1. A battle against 25 sword wraiths, which was won by the casters spamming area effect spells and turn effects. My fighter did use a wand of lightning bolts to do some damage but I didn't get into melee at all - by the time they were close enough there were so few left that the casters could mop them up with cantrips and there was no benefit to me providing them with a melee target.
2. An ambush from a house by a bunch of crossbow-wielding hobgoblins and two ettins. My fighter get into melee against the ettins, but a lot more damage was done by firestorms, blade barriers, and so on from the casters.

soviet said:

?

I think this is my second post in the thread. Not sure how that's 'endlessly compaining'.

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Sorry, there have been multiple threads going on and on about this with the same attitude of "its broke and can't be fixed." Except it does work for a lot of people.

In any case sorry if I was projecting.

Oofta said:

Sorry, there have been multiple threads going on and on about this with the same attitude of "its broke and can't be fixed." Except it does work for a lot of people.

In any case sorry if I was projecting.

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OK no worries.

I haven't followed the other threads in depth but my impression was that a variety of solutions have been mooted, if pretty loosely. It's not an unsolvable problem.

EzekielRaiden said:

I welcome any corrections the above posters would like to make that disclaim the connection between popularity/sales and quality.

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I stand by what I said.

Oofta said:

Some people perceive an issue. Some do not. Only makes sense to me that perhaps the former should try to emulate the latter if they want to reduce the perceived issues, or at least attempt to emulate what they do to see if it resolves their issues.

Easier to just complain I suppose.

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I think because there is more of the former than the later because WOTC is leaning towards the former's wants.

also popular classes had low satisfaction

pemerton said:

I don't follow this at all.

In 4e D&D, success at skill challenges is often not resource-dependent. But the approach the players take towards their strategic goals might nevertheless reflect what it is that their PCs are good or bad at; what they anticipate will be the knock-on consequences, for doing Y down the track, of doing X now; etc. I find much the same thing is true of RPGs that don't centre resource expenditure in action resolution, such as Classic Traveller, Prince Valiant, and Burning Wheel.

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Okay, we are talking 5e here. But to be fair, I don't play a lot of other TTRPGs, so their can be non ressource based strategic RPGs. But 5e is not one of those. The strategic decisions I thought about are ingame strategic decisions, that are mostly system agnostic (do we go to town x or you, do we ally with a or b?)
Of course there are other ways to determine success or not, but a skill challenge for example is not a strategic player decision. It is just a tactical decision, which is also quite simple (use the (character with the) best skills available to do the challenge). There is no strategy in Skill Challenges. Their impact is short term.
And yes, player creation can be a strategic choice (which skills to pick, which spells to choose, which class to take), but the decision points for that are far and wide inbetween and pretty front loaded. During an adventure your never change your skill proficiency, in actual play I have rarley seen a wizard change hs prepared spells ( usually only after level up).
But 80-90 of of the mechanical strategic core gameplay of D&D 5e is ressource attrition.

Minigiant said:

I think because there is more of the former than the later because WOTC is leaning towards the former's wants.

also popular classes had low satisfaction

View attachment 310731

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Of course, this can't possibly be real; if people play the (sub)class, they obviously like it!

Edit: To be actually serious, wow, some of these numbers are really bad. 29% satisfaction for Berserker and 27% for Ranger? That's impressively bad. Even Champion's 54% is shockingly low, given it's the one subclass readily accessible for Fighter. Having 46% of players dislike the flagship subclass of the most widely-played class in the game is...sure something.

EzekielRaiden said:

Edit: To be actually serious, wow, some of these numbers are really bad. 29% satisfaction for Berserker and 27% for Ranger? That's impressively bad. Even Champion's 54% is shockingly low, given it's the one subclass readily accessible for Fighter. Having 46% of players dislike the flagship subclass of the most widely-played class in the game is...sure something.

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It's not shocking if you believe my theory.

5e's 2013 Survey over-represented the wants and opinions of people who would not end up adopting 5e. So the top lever (classes, races, spells, monsters) ended up not matching the styles of the majority of people who actually play 5e.

Look at the 2014 ranger. It looks like what at 1e/2e 1990s D&D hex-crawl player would want in D&D. But they don't play 5e. They play OSR. So the class was not designed for 73% of the 5e player base. And I'm sure that 27% are either ranger/rogue cheeser or have DMs who know how to make the ranger work.

Same with the Fighter vs Wizard math. It was designed for 25-35 offensive combat rounds (AKA 30 rounds of dealing damage) in a dungeons. But a lot of 5e players prefer 15-25 offensive combat round cinematic romps or at least like mixing up 30 round days with 10 rounder, 20 rounder, 50 rounders, and 5 rounders.

Basically

1. Buy gear in Town
2. Travel to Dungeon via Wilderness
3. Dungeon
4. Travel to Town via Wilderness
5. Sell treasure in Town
6. Repeat

is no longer 90% of D&D play.

Minigiant said:

It's not shocking if your believe my theory.

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Oh, I absolutely do. That's been my going theory since 2013: a specific subgroup of D&D players were over-represented for several reasons (they were the easy-to-reach group; they had grievances they wished to air; they were being actively courted; etc.) and the edition was heavily shaped specifically for their interests.

Then the thing exploded, and a flood of brand-new players came in, whose interests had not been catered to because no one expected D&D to explode like it did. And "catered to" is, IMO, a perfectly valid description, since during the playtest, the minimum acceptability rating was something like 70%--if at least 70% of players didn't like it, it wouldn't be included. That's pretty clearly saying that the target group's interests are the most important thing, and everything else must follow from it.

But the aforementioned explosion increased the player base something like tenfold, if not more. Any data collected during the playtest is no longer representative, not because WotC necessarily did anything wrong,* but simply because the population is radically different from what it was back then. It is on average much younger, more diverse in both gender and ethnicity, less TTRPG-experienced, more narrative-focused, etc., etc. Even if it coincidentally turned out that they'd stumbled into the correct choices for both the original target and the new audience, their 2011-14 data would be completely inadequate to tell them that.

But it's still pretty bad to have the satisfaction ratings so low. It means that dissatisfaction has only gotten worse with several things they put in, knowing they weren't as good as they could've been. E.g., they've always known the Ranger wasn't in a good spot, they'd just hoped they could address it with spells, subclasses, feats, etc. It seems that that is...not the case.

Kinda makes me wonder if they won't try new psionics stuff once 5.5e is out.

*I personally think their data collection methods were terribad at best, but that's a wholly separate topic.

pemerton said:

But there obviously are solutions for others. Many have been mooted in this thread! I still think the cleanest is @doctorbadwolf's expansion of Indomitable in both scope and frequency of use.

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Thanks!

EzekielRaiden said:

Of course, this can't possibly be real; if people play the (sub)class, they obviously like it!

Edit: To be actually serious, wow, some of these numbers are really bad. 29% satisfaction for Berserker and 27% for Ranger? That's impressively bad. Even Champion's 54% is shockingly low, given it's the one subclass readily accessible for Fighter. Having 46% of players dislike the flagship subclass of the most widely-played class in the game is...sure something.

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Considering they are also very popular in terms of actual usage, it's pretty clearly more complicated than that.

And no, @Minigiant it's not because they built those options for a demo that doesn't play the game and has been replaced by a totally different demo. It's because they didn't execute their goals well with some PHB options, so people play them because they love the archetype or because they want the implied playstyle, and then the option doesn't deliver.

The Champion is what people want. It just also sucks, so it gets played and also scores very poorly on satisfaction. In case it was about to come up, I'll head off the "Champion is free" counter arguments that always come up. Adam Bradford confirmed that the DDB class and subclass rankings don't change when viewing only people who have purchased the PHB and other books on DDB. Champion gets played a lot because a lot of people want to play it. That's it.

So, any "solutions" to the Champion that either cut it or gut it, are non starters.