@Medix2 It may be useful for future questions, but I think that this particular one might be best suited for the graveyard

"Roleplaying Online Under Lockdown, Part 1" by Kai Poh for Role Over Play Dead

Where Magic Died by Sascha Moros is a 3 Page long, Dice-less, GM-less Game of Belonging outside Belonging for 1-5 Player, to be played in between 30 minutes and 4 hours. Together you will tell the story of an old Tower and the people trying to explore it – and of the difficulties with finding a place of belonging in history.

@NautArch I've always preferred playing wizards in a manner I think of as "upside-down" from what I think you're saying: I like picking some spell selection for $reasons, and then seeing how to make them apply/helpful in whatever situation arises.

I wonder if it comes from the old "% to know spell" dynamic from 1e....

I know that in 3.5, picking spells for thematic or aesthetic reasons tended to mean a significant drop in effectiveness. I had one game where a player's sorcerer specialized thematically and it made him even less effective than the monk.

4e, on the other hand, was designed with the idea that pretty much any choice you made was going to be at least okay!

@nitsua60 Have you found the restrictions on how spells can be used to be much of an obstacle to that creativity in 5e? That was my experience, but it was also quite limited and only covered low-level play

I've heard that a lot. I (personally) suspect there's a big combat as sport vs. combat as war unexamined dynamic underlying some of that.

@Upper_Case I'm not sure I'm following: which restrictions do you mean?

@nitsua60 Things like valid target restrictions, awareness in subjects that they've had a spell cast on them, very short durations or limited effects, that sort of thing

It sounds like not, though!

@BESW all the monks in games you told me about were pretty flashy though, so at least there is that XD

@BESW except for Seeker, or worse Vampire

@Upper_Case No, I haven't found those restraining my creativity, personally.

@trogdor I'm thinking about your dragon-monk in the desert game, alongside Matt's poor "I have to sink all my feats into overcoming elemental resistance in order to be marginally useful" fire sorcerer.

oooooooh

With Geoff's "I have read GitP optimization threads and they are my bible" warlock along for counterpoint.

oh god "even less effective than the monk" refers to the only monk I ever played, feels bad man XD

yeeeeaaah

man

Back in the days when we really didn't know how to do group calibration.

I really wish 3.5 had a similar balance to 4e because then that game would have actually been really great

as is I had fun but it was a little dampened by,... the balance

@BESW yeah exactly

I really really wanted that whole dragon monk thing, so I don't regret doing it, but I do wish it hadn't required me to be,... basically mediocre? I guess?

I had such a hard time trying to make the game fun, because we had a PC who did ridiculous damage with only a touch attack and was very hard to damage himself, a PC who did minimal damage with AC attacks and was very hard to damage himself, and a PC who did minimal damage with vs-save attacks and was very easy to damage himself.

we hit all three spot areas that's for sure XD

honestly it's just another example of why I retroactively don't like 3.5 very much

we had those same three playes later in 4e and there was basically no issue with PC power level related to the other PC's

now it had it's own issues for sure

And of course, on reflection, the setting had some... not great issues. But that's D&D for ya.

especially the lategame balance between us and enemies for our level

yeah

@Upper_Case These elements of spells were applicable to 3.x and 4e as well, at the very least (though 4e divided spells into "powers" for combat, "utility powers" for combat and non-combat, and "rituals" for only non-combat, as well as explicitly approving generous adjudication when improvising combat powers for non-combat applications).

I've come to prefer more narrative definitions of a character's capacity, but for a lot of D&D players the challenge of maximizing effect despite limitations is a major part of creative play.

@BESW I would challenge the framing of that. Picking spells for thematic reasons is normal; the optimization-board culture of ignoring your character's theme and trying to pick the "best" spells causes a bizarre, game-unbalancing spike in effectiveness.

@MarkWells I'd agree if randomly rolling for spells would create relatively matched character builds. But 3.x is rife with both trap spells that are nearly useless, and jackpot spells that are demonstrably powerful in almost every situation.

@BESW For sure (at least with regard to 3.x, I haven't played 4e). But comparing Illusion spells from Shadowrun to those in D&D 5e really sharpened the contrasts for me-- D&D's Illusion spells have a lot more limitations on them

Optimization isn't about making the most powerful character; it's about making good choices for your own table.

And in games where the choices you make will often result in dramatically different power settings... failing to make deliberate choices, defaults to poor choices in almost every party I've ever seen.

Don't confuse optimization with min/maxing.

@BESW I'm not going to get into an argument over your idiosyncratic definition of the word. The behavior is what it is.

The sorcerer and the monk both chose their features for thematic reasons, and even without the min/maxed warlock for contrast their builds were dramatically underpowered compared to what the game itself expected for their levels and equipment.

I wasn't just struggling to build encounters that would be satisfying for all three; I was struggling to find ways that, for example, the monk (with very low attack ability and very high defensive ability) could contribute to ending fights in ways other than "not dying while the others kill it," because the mechanics which looked like the right thematic choices, ended up playing out in ways that didn't satisfy the player.

Troggy wanted to be punching things hard, but by making "dragon monk" choices he wound up without that ability.

I'm also not going to argue over whether 3.5e had major design flaws around making characters ineffective at things they ought to be able to do, because I think we're in near-total agreement on that :)

And that's kinda my point. Making choices in a system like that, without taking into consideration that you're in a system like that, creates "a bizarre, game-unbalancing spike in effectiveness" at least as much as having some people min/max while others don't.

Because min/maxing reflects game mastery and the ability to control your character's power levels, so you can choose what your character's capable of.

Ignoring the implications of the system's flaws and just making thematic choices, is abdicating that responsibility.

So I challenge your assertion that picking spells for narratively thematic reasons creates less game imbalance than picking spells based on an understanding of the system. My experience has been the exact opposite, because the game itself (monster stats, DCs, pre-made modules) clearly has an expected power level which is often missed with characters built by ignoring the system's flaws.

And if you wanna say that "optimization means being able to hit the marks you want" rather than "optimization means only going all-out for game-breaking power" is my own unique idiosyncratic definition, well. KRyan and LordGareth have nearly a decade of meta and mainsite material on precisely that subject, and why the extreme stereotype is harmful.

@BESW Yeah, this is still very much a thing in 5e, too. I've had numerous players lament that they can't specialise in any element except fire, because a) there are vastly more fire spells than non, and b) the fire spells are just straight up better than the non-fire spells.

1e6 = 1,000,000 by Speak the Sky is a not-too-serious mini-guide on how to find better rpgs than DnD.

And if you choose to ignore that and specialise in, say, acid, all the same, then you pretty much just suck.

Whereas my last 3.5 campaign was set in a desert, so one player thought it made sense to make a fire-specialization sorcerer. And the desert manual had a LOT of great-looking options for it! ...but the D&D 3.5 desert manual added new "heat exhaustion" rules which are overcome by fire resistance so desert creatures have to have a little fire resistance or they just shrivel up and die in their natural habitat.

So it turns out all those awesome fire spell options in the manual? Were necessary to just get the sorcerer up to slightly-lower-than-normal power levels in any other setting.

And the monk would've been fine, there are ways to make a monk pretty solid, especially in that setting. But he wanted to be a monk who was turning into a dragon, and those options are narratively awesome but mechanically poop.

And because they hadn't calibrated their characters to each other, I wound up with struggles like how a monster's to-hit which had a 50% chance of hitting the sorcerer, couldn't possibly hit the monk.

Because the system has expectations about the defense for a given level of PC which neither of them were meeting, but in opposite directions.

At one point I invented a recurring antagonist who grafted magic items into himself just so that I could justify very specific, niche abilities and weaknesses tailored to each PC so everyone could contribute in boss fights.

Which, you know, sure. I'm the GM, I can do that, but it meant I was spending most of my prep time just making fights moderately functional mechanically. The rest of my prep --characters, story, world-- was neglected. I was re-using old stuff from previous campaigns that didn't really fit because I didn't have the energy to make stuff tailored to these friends and their characters.

Then we moved to 4e and the group calibrated to each other (after that debacle we understood the need) and choices could be made based on "will we work well together" and "does this fit my character" rather than "am I going to sabotage the balance of the game."

@BESW I would've thought with 4e power levels would be pretty close regardless of calibration.

I re-jiggered 4e's entire monster system in the background halfway through the game, but I was able to do it because the system itself was coherent and consistent; I just didn't like the effects it was producing.

@BESW Out of curiosity, was that before or after WotC did more or less the same thing?

@Miniman They mostly are! Which is why we were able to calibrate around "what role do you want to play" and "do we want to have tactical integration or everybody's thing is independent of everybody else's."

@BESW Ah, gotcha.

@Miniman After. Essentials was a significant improvement, but they didn't fix the broken math in skill challenges and the damage/health ratios were still grinding combat to a crawl in the upper levels.

@BESW If you liked that change from 3.5 to 4, you may want to take a peek at Pathfinder 2. I was skeptical but it seems to have changed a lot of those design and balance concerns.

@Miniman Level 1 Equivalent damage tables were amazing. Though if I did it over again, I'd probably just freeze all numerical values around level 5 and only continue to level up with powers and feats without quantitative advancement.

@MikeQ I'm not really looking for a D&D-like setting/system anymore. It doesn't fit my interests or capacities.

Ah right, forgot about that.

(I'm also not super thrilled about Paizo's treatment of its employees, so there's that too.)

@BESW That's very interesting reading. The falloff isn't nearly as steep as I would've assumed (or what I've heard), so I'm guessing defenses get comparatively better as well?

@Miniman Yeah, they adjusted damage to be in ratio with the existing defensive progression.

Either way, I definitely agree with that statement about 3.X designs forcing a choice (for players and DM) between what is mechanically optimal and what seems thematically fun, and then having to spend most of campaign prep just balancing the numbers .

I also did my own little hack, where I took the monster attack's expected average damage and made 1/2 of that a flat damage bonus, and the other 1/2 was expressed as d6s that rolled that value on average.

@BESW Heh, I was just thinking about the swinginess of those higher dice expressions.

So if a monster's attack was dealing 28 damage on average, I'd roll 4d6+14.

It also sped up encounters because I was only using 1d20 and a handful of d6s: no pause while grabbing the right kinds of dice.

(In late-game 4e, anything to increase encounter efficiency at the table was valuable.)

Of course, then I also introduced popcorn initiative, which slowed things down a little but added so much awesome tactical complexity and actually reduced computational overhead.

@MikeQ I think that group's best roleplaying, characterization, and story came out of our 4e campaigns, because we could trust the system more.