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Echo Knight is Wildemount's Most Popular Subclass
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8006169" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>White room is the scientific approach, or the closest you're going to get to it, in D&D. I needs to be used intelligently, i.e. not assuming you can long-rest after every encounter or the like, but it's the best tool we have.</p><p></p><p>Actual play is subject to no controls whatsoever, and tends to produce results that are meaningless unless they highlight very specific issues (which will almost always have come up prominently in white room examinations), because too much else is in play, not least player skill, DM skill, DM kindness-nastiness, whether the DM is keen to "shut down" a certain ability, how the DM builds his encounters, what the rest of the group is playing, the environment of the adventure, whether the DM is running 1 encounter/day or 15 encounters/day, and so on. Actual play definitely has some value, but claiming you should totally ignore white room analysis and act like a class/race/etc. is fine until it shows it isn't in your game is obviously silly. Yet that is literally what is being proposed by some people.</p><p></p><p>(Also, as an aside, I really feel like if we found all the people who claimed white-room stuff was pointless or whatever, then compared that to a list of people who preemptively banned stuff because it was OP or broken, we'd find it had many of the same people on it. Not practical, sadly.)</p><p></p><p>WH40K vs D&D shows a steep difference, too, here, which kind of ruins your point. WH40K is an adversarial skirmish game where you both have specific rules you're supposed to be sticking to and are both trying to "win", rather than to essentially "tell a story together", as all D&D is. Actual play is therefore massively more reliable in that case. It's still subject to player skill, which is a huge variable, and army comp, which is another huge variable, and a dumbass with a bad comp, or a dumbass who runs into a counter-comp may manage to make the most profoundly broken (not just OP, broken) army look bad. But that's rarer, because there are a lot fewer variables and people are "playing to win", not role-playing or encouraging a story being told.</p><p></p><p>I've been playing skirmish games and RPGs for 32 years now. So I can compare two things:</p><p></p><p>1) The number of times something looked bad in a reasonable white-room analysis (i.e. not one assuming a long rest after every encounter or the like), and yet played absolutely fine because of some unexpected factor.</p><p></p><p>and</p><p></p><p>2) The number of times something looked pretty bad in a reasonable white-room analysis, and then played out somewhere between close to as bad, or much worse.</p><p></p><p>And 2 is vastly more common than 1, in my experience. People who are mechanically-inclined aren't idiots about this sort of thing. So long as the white room analysis is reasonable, the worst case scenario is that it points out <em>potential</em> problems. Negative bias applies to both scenarios so claiming that doesn't work here.</p><p></p><p>I do have some sympathy for people who are distrustful of white-room stuff though, because the key word here is "reasonable". A lot of white room analysis <em>isn't reasonable</em>. It makes assumptions that are either not true, not intended, or are based on an extremely specific combination of factors, without being clear on it. And some white-room analysis is simply bad faith stuff designed to make something look bad even when they know it isn't (thankfully rare here, because we're so damn old, I suspect, that we just don't care enough to do that!). So like I am sympathetic to not wanting to trust white-room stuff, but equally, my experience is that when it is done in a reasonable way, it is usually correct in at least highlighting that there is an issue/problem.</p><p></p><p>If your position is just "take the white room stuff on board, but see how it actually works for your group", then I think that's fine and not silly. But ignoring it entirely, even where it's reasonable? Silly.</p><p></p><p>(As discussed, Echo Knight merely seems powerful to me, rather than broken or anything. It's not going to be any more of an issue than a well-played Wizard - probably less. That's one thing D&D 5E has to reckon with - some of the most "overpowered" classes and races are the base classes and races.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8006169, member: 18"] White room is the scientific approach, or the closest you're going to get to it, in D&D. I needs to be used intelligently, i.e. not assuming you can long-rest after every encounter or the like, but it's the best tool we have. Actual play is subject to no controls whatsoever, and tends to produce results that are meaningless unless they highlight very specific issues (which will almost always have come up prominently in white room examinations), because too much else is in play, not least player skill, DM skill, DM kindness-nastiness, whether the DM is keen to "shut down" a certain ability, how the DM builds his encounters, what the rest of the group is playing, the environment of the adventure, whether the DM is running 1 encounter/day or 15 encounters/day, and so on. Actual play definitely has some value, but claiming you should totally ignore white room analysis and act like a class/race/etc. is fine until it shows it isn't in your game is obviously silly. Yet that is literally what is being proposed by some people. (Also, as an aside, I really feel like if we found all the people who claimed white-room stuff was pointless or whatever, then compared that to a list of people who preemptively banned stuff because it was OP or broken, we'd find it had many of the same people on it. Not practical, sadly.) WH40K vs D&D shows a steep difference, too, here, which kind of ruins your point. WH40K is an adversarial skirmish game where you both have specific rules you're supposed to be sticking to and are both trying to "win", rather than to essentially "tell a story together", as all D&D is. Actual play is therefore massively more reliable in that case. It's still subject to player skill, which is a huge variable, and army comp, which is another huge variable, and a dumbass with a bad comp, or a dumbass who runs into a counter-comp may manage to make the most profoundly broken (not just OP, broken) army look bad. But that's rarer, because there are a lot fewer variables and people are "playing to win", not role-playing or encouraging a story being told. I've been playing skirmish games and RPGs for 32 years now. So I can compare two things: 1) The number of times something looked bad in a reasonable white-room analysis (i.e. not one assuming a long rest after every encounter or the like), and yet played absolutely fine because of some unexpected factor. and 2) The number of times something looked pretty bad in a reasonable white-room analysis, and then played out somewhere between close to as bad, or much worse. And 2 is vastly more common than 1, in my experience. People who are mechanically-inclined aren't idiots about this sort of thing. So long as the white room analysis is reasonable, the worst case scenario is that it points out [I]potential[/I] problems. Negative bias applies to both scenarios so claiming that doesn't work here. I do have some sympathy for people who are distrustful of white-room stuff though, because the key word here is "reasonable". A lot of white room analysis [I]isn't reasonable[/I]. It makes assumptions that are either not true, not intended, or are based on an extremely specific combination of factors, without being clear on it. And some white-room analysis is simply bad faith stuff designed to make something look bad even when they know it isn't (thankfully rare here, because we're so damn old, I suspect, that we just don't care enough to do that!). So like I am sympathetic to not wanting to trust white-room stuff, but equally, my experience is that when it is done in a reasonable way, it is usually correct in at least highlighting that there is an issue/problem. If your position is just "take the white room stuff on board, but see how it actually works for your group", then I think that's fine and not silly. But ignoring it entirely, even where it's reasonable? Silly. (As discussed, Echo Knight merely seems powerful to me, rather than broken or anything. It's not going to be any more of an issue than a well-played Wizard - probably less. That's one thing D&D 5E has to reckon with - some of the most "overpowered" classes and races are the base classes and races.) [/QUOTE]
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