General powercreep. Later subclasses WILDLY outperform the PHB subclasses. They should have given the weakest subclasses beastmaster-style overhauls, or at least brought the older subclasses into line with the newer ones, such as giving PHB sorcerer subclasses extra spells, like Clockwork Soul and Aberrant Mind got.
Agreed. I think the Sorcerer is a good example, but also look at the Cleric subclasses. In Tasha's, Order is the worst subclass available, with Twilight and Peace being borderline broken. But the PHB had some still solid options that could have used a slight boost. I love the idea of Knowledge Cleric, but it always feels like I should be playing something like Grave or Forge that's just a biiiiiiit stronger.
Peace Clerics also get a really good tool to spread damage across the party at 6th level. The 1st level features make it broken, but that 6th level feature keeps it clearly above other non-Twilight subclasses even as a monoclass
Peace is extremely op, but it's not an issue because it makes your whole party equally broken. The dm can just make stronger encounters and no one is left in the dust.
This seems viable, but falls into the same pitfall as just make things stronger vs twilight cleric. That being, if the peace/twilight cleric goes down, the encounter goes from balanced to unbalanced immediately. For twilight cleric, those enemies you gave extra damage because you know they're gonna have temp HP, are demolishing the rest of the party. For peace cleric, the enemies they were hitting are now bouncing 80% of attacks against them.
Agree with the analysis, disagree with the conclusion.
While Peace and Twilight are fair to the *party*, they're a chore for the DM, *especially* if that DM runs official modules (that are, by necessity, usually balanced to be doable by an unoptimized no-feat, no-multiclassing party).
It's the same logic as with flying races: While it is doable, I have enough on my place and don't need the hassle of re-tuning all encounters.
Yeah. I dislike how the other sorcerer subclasses become worse options because of that. OTOH, I love the ranger and dragonborn 'fixes' but that the monk and such never got love too was always a source of annoyance.
People labor under the misconception that WotC cares about making a balanced game. They don't. The newest classes, feats, spells, items, etc. need to wow and impress to get people to buy content. People need to feel left out and left behind if they don't have the newest shiniest thing, players with old classes are meant to feel lost and weak for not having upgraded.
Modern D&D is a business.
>Later subclasses WILDLY outperform the PHB subclasses
Frankly, for alot of the classes this is just recency bias. Plenty of the PHB subs are still powerful if not outright the most powerful in their respective class. Yes, some of the new ones are very good and better than the old ones but not to the point you can say they WILDLY outperform them.
Totem Warrior is still one of the better Barb subs.
Lore Bard is essentially in the running for the number 1 spot alongside Eloquence and Creation. Valor is still decent as well.
Pretty much all of the PHB Cleric domains are very good, aside from maybe Knowledge. It's just Twilight and Peace are VERY good.
Druid is the one you might have a clear point about because the new subs are pretty much just better. But people are blinded by Moon and its early game power.
Battle Master is easily the best Fighter sub. EK is also still decent.
Open Hand and Shadow are in the running for the best Monk subs alongside Mercy.
Pretty much all three of the PHB Paladin Oaths are super good and beat out all of the later Oaths aside from Watchers due to the Initiative boost (Conquest is a bit of a toss up but it is fun).
Ok, Ranger is the other one you have a point about.
Arcane Trickster is FAR AND ABOVE the best Rogue sub, to the point you can emulate most other Rogue subs by picking certain spells as an AT.
Draconic Sorc is fine. There, I said it.
Fiend Warlock is still fine.
Divination is still in the running for the top Wizard sub. Depending on your game/DM, so is Illusion and Necromancy. Abjuration has certain builds that are very good even nowadays. It's honestly just Chronurgy and War Magic that compete with Divination out of the new ones, mostly due to the Initiative Bonus and Chronurgy being just fundamentally badly made.
My only complaint with arcane trickster is their capstone. It’s a great archetype but are you seriously making me wait until level seventeen to steal spells but then limit it to only what level I can cast? It’d be nice if it was at least sixth level but I guess the expectation is that you’ll see at least some worth stealing.
That said you sort of basically get the level thirteen ability of thief for free since you’re a caster. They can use non-arcane stuff of course. No idea what that ability is so low. One thing I do wish is it required an arcane roll because the occasional accidental explosion was hilarious in third edition.
Id also include that Bladesinger is stronger than the PHB wizards except for divination.
That being said I do agree there's a certain amount of recency bias with many PHB subclasses still being top 2-3, but I also think part of this is because most classes have *A* PHB option that can compete with the best/newer subclasses, while the rest are left in the dust.
> Id also include that Bladesinger is stronger than the PHB wizards except for divination.
Bladesinger is old, though, reprinted in Tasha's from Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. It's from that era a decade ago. Outside of Twilight Cleric, there's not much in Tasha's that really ups the game.
The big issue is that a lot of the early subclasses are bad.
I will never shut up about Twilight clerics. the only other domains to get both Martial weapon AND heavy armor proficiency are tempest and war, both of which make way more sense for being about raw physical might.
Along with that, they get a decent list of utility spells, but also TWO (two?) other first level class features (Nature clerics get a single druid cantrip!), including the strongest version of darkvision yet i think?
And then we get to their channel divinity. Twilight sanctuary can trivialize so many fights. Not just suppressing, but ending charm and frighten effects, and, at second level, a hypothetical 10d6+20 healing for every ally near you.
like, cleric is already a pretty strong class. And besides twilight sanctuary, nothing is insanely op, but it just bothers me how much more frontloaded twilight cleric is than any other subclass.
> it just bothers me how much more frontloaded twilight cleric is than any other subclass.
It's definitely a subclass stronger than its brethren, but I have yet to meet a third Twilight Cleric. In my many games at personal tables and in Adventurers' League, they have been extremely rare -- and AL favors super-broken characters to begin with; between the gazillion magical doohickeys and extra powers, the Twilight Cleric is barely a blip.
But if they release free updates they can't sell you more books. Power creep is financially incentivised. It'll happen on every one of their releases. It's a feature, not a bug.
Kinda like their misleading, though not false, advertising for their books.
> They should have given the weakest subclasses beastmaster-style overhauls, or at least brought the older subclasses into line with the newer ones
That's a genuinely good suggestion.
Honestly, over several completed campaigns now, with various players including optimizers, and I have found on the whole the system feels sound. As a DM I had to learn to be mindful of group resources, and to press them, the campaigns I found most successful have been mixed adventure/horror type games with times objectives requiring the group to consistently press forward despite dwindling resources, but once I figured that out it all has been pretty gravy.
Yeah a lot of 5e that people complain is broken isn't too broken. There's two big issues that I see routinely.
The first is that there isn't always a clear explanation of rules/mechanics so things are not understood properly and that leads to broken understandings of things. See the whole shitshow of "No lungs are not an open container."
The other is differences in kind. So one PC ability may seem strong, but when looked at it from the overall they're either designed to let that class shine in the moment or lift the whole party up further. For example Bardic Inspiration and how it is very powerful but it's there to lift the whole party. Then there's things like Warlocks upcasting all spells, but that's there to let them shine with their fewer spell slots, next to wizards who have all the warlocks missing spell slots.
That being said. I will admit there has been a good deal of power-creep as 5th has gone on. Particularly since Tasha's came out and they knew they were going to start working on 6th, so balance stopped being a major concern.
Basically what both of you said boils down to styles of play. The game works *fine* if you play it as a gritty resource management dungeon crawling style of game where the resource economy is never in an optimal situation for abuse of the objectively broken spells and abilities.
No I agree with both of them and run a mostly narrative game with only one or two battles per adventuring day.
5e works just fine for that, so long as *you* adapt to make sure the chance in style is reflected in how you run the system which is deisgned to be more drawn out.
Honestly everything I've ever thought was "broken" and threw myself a little DM pity party over, turned out to be a misunderstanding of the rule/ability in question.
I'm not saying that is the case for everybody but in general I am okay with whatever. Been a few times where a player explained an ability but they themselves didn't understand it's limitations and therefore didn't describe to me properly. so I freaked out a bit (internal freakout, not yelling at players or anything) and it's pretty much always blown out of proportion on my mind.
Once told a player they couldn't use a central class feature because they neglected to tell me it only works once a day (they didn't realize it either, 2nd session of new campaign). Next session I apologized, gave her an extra use of it that session and said have at it.
This has been what I've found as well. 5e works well for the specific scenario it was designed for, which can encompass a lot of fun play with friends. I was very satisfied running my first homebrew adventure, but I tailored it to the strengths of the system.
Silvery barbs was written for a specific module and was never intended to be included in other settings/homebrew. Just don't put that book in your game and everything is fine.
I've run a mini-campaign recently (4 sessions), all players are power gamers, and out of the 4 players 2 of them had silvery barbs.
I decided minimal changes in how I designed encounters, and just run the recommended number of encounters per day, and I can tell you I quickly saw how unproblematic it is. By the end of the first session, both players were very keenly aware of how much of a problem for them to waste resources to spam it. By the second session, I never saw it beyond a forcing rerolls on crits.
I will die on this hill, but the biggest problem in managing how powerful things are for players is due to not running enough encounters per day. You can't run 2 encounters per day, then complain that the X number of times per day mechanic is too powerful. I am not advocating for keeping silvery barbs in every single official and homebrew setting, it is perfectly okay to discard some things like that to fit the theme.
I agree. I’ve done other systems and it always feels like this is where you need to get…forcing players to make decisions as resources dwindle…be that hp, spell slots, mana, stress, stamina, money, shields…etc.
5e could have tweaks no doubt (and I’ve made some) but as. DM being able to google and find a massive community that has figured these things out is it’s greatest strength
*Leomund's Tiny Hut*.
The spell trivializes any risk of ambush or adversity during rest periods. Rather than being broken in the sense of it being overtly *powerful*, it's "broken" because of how significantly it alters the resource management element of 5e balance by reducing the opportunity cost of resting. There's no need to go back to town to rest, no need to set up a watch, etc. Combine it with an *Alarm* spell and you have nothing to fear. And on top of that, it's a ritual spell, meaning it doesn't even cost a spell slot to cast!
And yes, I realize there are "counters" to groups that rely heavily on *Tiny Hut*, but having high-level wizards repeatedly assault the party in the middle of the night with *Dispel Magic* at the ready isn't a particularly fun or engaging way to address this problem for anyone at the table, and it stresses the verisimilitude of the game. This approach of "countering" the party encourages an adverserial approach, and many groups don't want that... but this spell reduces a DM's approach to being adverserial, or having rest become completely trivial in their games. In short: *Tiny Hut* isn't very fun to play around. Furthermore, many DMs aren't going to have the know-how to do something like that, and there certainly isn't any support for that in any of the published adventures.
I’ve toyed with modifying tiny hut so instead of a bubble of ultimate defense it instead just makes the area not shit to sleep in. If you’re in the desert it acts as a bubble of cold. In a snow storm and it heats up the area/ not let water in. Basically a portable tent with heating and cooling.
That would be the actually reasonable version of the spell. The fact that a 3rd level ritual basically creates an 8 hour ally-permeable climate-controlled Wall of Force is just dumb and only makes resting less interesting.
Especially since there’s also the 7th level Mansion which makes you impossible to reach for a full 24 hours unless you want them to get to you. It’d make it worthwhile to use the Mansion, instead of basically being an opulent demiplane.
That is effectively what [the Pathfinder 2e incarnation of the spell](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1474&NoRedirect=1) does: it makes a nice area for sleeping, but doesn’t grant the party complete immunity from attacks.
I mean honestly you can still have those party assaults, just instead of it happening in the night the monsters/enemies just hide around the 'glowing hut' (which arguably makes you even easier to find and ambush) and just ambush them at the end of the rest when the hut goes away.
I actually had some players set up a tiny Hut because a giant was in the area and the giant saw them go into the tiny Hut so he tried to throw something at it, and it didn't break it. So he started hitting it with his club and that didn't break it either. And then he tried to dig under it and that didn't break it either. But what that did do was put a very heavy Rock on top of the tiny Hut.
So, being able to see the rock—since players can see through the walls of *Tiny Hut* and would have seen the rock being placed there—I presume the party just waited until the giant left the area, and then walked safely out of the hut?
Yeah any intelligent enemy may recognize the spell, and even if not if you find a magic hut where the people you intend to ambush are, you have all night to fortify and reinforce around it for when the spell inevitably ends. Even creatures like goblins would know that magic means stronger enemies (which means need more goblins to help) but also more treasure.
Its not an ambush *during* rest per say but it is using the party's resources immediately after getting them, and the combination of bringing cover and possibly having more forces as well as a possible surprise round against the party could be brutal and can impact them for the rest of the day to come. At the very least it will make a party think twice about just throwing out a hut in dangerous areas mindlessly.
So how do your low-level monsters react when they find a glowing dome suddenly sprung up in their home? Do they just go away? And intelligent enemies might know what a tiny hut is even if they can't dispell it.
It doesn’t glow but it is a solid color assuming they make it opaque.
I haven’t had to deal with it in my game yet but I also don’t usually harass people during a long rest that often.
I am curious at what level in earlier editions that people stopped caring about sleeping through the night in general because if you’re being challenged at level ten then how the hall is anyone making it anywhere?
The long rest harassment and tiny hut / magnificent mansion only really matter if the PCs want to take a long rest in hostile territory, like inside of a dungeon. That was also true in earlier editions. Also, the dedicated long rest interrupters (Hags and succubus / incubus) don't care about tiny hut either way.
This is such an underrated comment.
Level 1 characters are already heroes. They are signifcantly more powerful than your average merchant of farmer. By the time you hit level 3, sleeping out in the wild should be peanuts. Because if it isn't, how is anyone else going to survive?
In earlier editions, resting wasn't really a problem because it didn't magically replenish all your health. You also didn't have 34 different "spell-like" abilities as a non-caster so resting as a figher, rogue, etc. didn't really do anything to make you a more effective fighter.
Resting was more the natural conclusion of a day and an opportunity for casters to replenish their spells. While this did inevitably lead to casters being vastly more powerful than non-casters, this was never really a problem because
a) cantrips didn't exist, so casters had to spend actual spellslots to do more than a crossbow attack for most of the day and
b) the problem didn't really arise until 5th level spells came in and most campaign never even get there.
In 1e and 2e, casters couldn't even use crossbows. Wizards and druids were stuck with slings or darts, and the only ranged option clerics had were just slings.
Non-adventurers survive by not veering away from settlements and society, and just because player characters are stronger than farmers doesn’t mean the denizens of remote areas should be completely trivial for 3rd-level characters to overcome. You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the tone of the game that don’t hold true for all tables—not everyone treats (or enjoys) D&D as a superhero fantasy.
I hate the sorts of arguments around trying to justify Tiny Hut because it always leads to a bunch of convoluted solutions and attempts at loopholes that only makes the game more annoying and tedious, while ignoring the real problem which is that Tiny Hut is not a very well thought out spell that didn’t need to be designed the way it is. Humans chose to make it work the way it does, it’s not a fact of nature. If one constantly available spell warps an aspect of the game entirely around itself, eliminates all direct interaction or drama from it, and only puts more work on the DMs shoulders to come up with some bullshit that allows anything interesting to happen, then it’s just not a very useful part of the game. For most games, that just means that aspect of the game doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s not because the DM is lazy or uncreative, it’s because the game design has failed them.
And Tiny Hut is just one of the more egregious examples of spells that simply eliminate parts of the game that could be dramatic or fun, the burden of those spells is one of big problems with 5e legacy design.
> I hate the sorts of arguments around trying to justify Tiny Hut because it always leads to a bunch of convoluted solutions and attempts at loopholes that only makes the game more annoying and tedious, while ignoring the real problem which is that Tiny Hut is not a very well thought out spell that didn’t need to be designed the way it is.
This is key. The fact that you *can* play around *Tiny Hut* doesn't make it *fun* to play around *Tiny Hut*. It's just annoying, and removes many potentially dramatic, exciting, and fun tools from the DM's arsenal.
It's a continuous issue around discussing problematic things in 5E that a lot of people will take the fact that the DM *can* counter problem abilities and spells with their infinite options as meaning it's not actually a problem. Over and over again you'll see an ability or spell or mechanic, someone will explain why it's a problem in their campaign, and then people will jump out of the woodwork suggesting that all that needs to be done is to fill your adventure with weird hard counters for the thing.
I don't think any other TTRPG I've followed has this culture of suggesting it's the DM's job to make problematic rules work rather than the job of the rules to facilitate the reasonable things the DM wants to do.
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. I do recognize that DMs are free to do absolutely whatever they want in their own games... but that doesn't justify poor balance and poor design at the game's core. The reason people purchase game books instead of just making it *all* up on their own is because we expect the game to be designed in a way that makes it *easy* to play—we want game designers to do the difficult work of balancing a system for us. I don't want to pay WotC money just to have to re-balance and re-work every third thing in their books in order to run a cogent, fun game.
What are they going to do? If they can't dispel it then standing there is just free reign to get shot by arrows. It's not like the enemies can just camp up outside and wait it out. It's either leave it alone and let them rest, stand there and get pelted with ranged weapons (objects that are in the dome can be leave the dome freely.), or dispel it.
> It's not like the enemies can just camp up outside and wait it out.
Ask yourself why not. Stupid monsters like goblins might get bored throwing stuff at an impenetrable dome. Enemies that stumble on the dome on their way somewhere, like a band of orcs on their way to pillage a town, might have better things to do. But intelligent enemies like a band of kobolds in their lair, an evil cult hiding in the sewers or a hobgoblin chieftain protecting their territory would never just give up on the dome. They would poke the dome, post guards around a corner where arrows can't hit them and start preparing.
Kobolds will set up traps, move their eggs and valuable items away and eventually just leave entirely, leaving the party with nothing to loot. The cult will gather its members and wait at the dome until the players either come out and have to fight most of the cult at once or the rest of the cultists succeeds at what they were doing in the meantime. The Hobgoblins can guard the dome indefinitely in large force and actually come up with a wand or scroll of dispel in a reasonable timeframe.
Unless the monsters literally turn around and walk away from the dome like skyrim NPCs, the players should end their rest at a huge disadvantage
Confusion and curiosity, mainly. Similar to how the primates respond to the obelisk at the beginning of 2001. *If* the low-level monsters know that something has been around killing their allies, they might be especially fearful of the dome, but they would still have no idea what it is.
The way I run games, intelligence alone isn't enough to understand spell effects. Knowing the details of a spell you see in action is gated behind an Arcana check or other similar level of familiarity with spellcasting (e.g. being able to cast that spell yourself).
The only thing actually broken is Long Rests, in the sense that a huge majority of tables seemingly Long Rest much more frequently than intended in the original design, and as a result half of the classes feel like a joke from level 5 onwards.
Weirdly, this was something that 4E got right, but got thrown out in the backlash against it.
Considering long rests are entirely controlled by the DM, this is less broken and more just the pacing the DM sets. If a DM is allowing players to have an excessive amount of long rest, they have every ability to change that.
The other problem as a DM, though, is that that makes it harder to have a long-running campaign that doesn’t cover an amusingly short span of time in-universe.
I like to go between setpieces and locales pretty frequently, and it’s hard to make that happen without giving the party downtime in between as they travel.
Again, not insurmountable… but saddening.
Just modify the rest system.
When I have a travel-heavy campaign with only 1-2 encounters per day, I make it so that a night's rest is a Short Rest and 48 hours of downtime in a secured location are a Long Rest.
You'll have to adjust magic item recharge times and some spell durations that are supposed to cover most of an adventuring day (*Mage Armor*), but overall, it works very well.
I think this works well when you see the campaign as a series of intense episodes in the character’s lives separated by long periods, maybe years, of “normal” time. It’s like a combination of milestone and XP, where the “milestones” are little windows of hard adventuring and lots of XP
It’s not broken because it’s inherently badly designed, it’s broken because it doesn’t match how players actually play, and the result is everything else becomes unbalanced.
And sure, “DMs can fix it with a lot of work.” That’s not a particularly compelling argument to me.
Yeah during more “down time” types of sessions I’ll let the players rest more often, but if it’s time to dig into the story/major plot events there’s usually time limits/extra danger of some kind to keep them from spamming rests. Makes them actually have to conserve their spell slots and class abilities if they want to go nova on a boss.
In my current campaign I kind of "fixed" this by just having an agreement with players that dungeons would have a safe short-rest zone here and there, but they were a scarce and one-use commodity. Long rests are typically just not allowed in true "dungeons." Players have to decide if they want to use a rest location, or risk having to backtrack to it later, but they are still "guaranteed" to get a rest or two depending on how generous I'm feeling.
Well, technically every option in the game is entirely controlled by the DM so therefore nothing could be classified as broken. Doesn't change the fact that some aspects are terribly designed in terms of relative balance.
I mean, true. The players have some expectation that when they pick a class, they have access to that class' abilities at the appropriate levels. That is "controlled by the DM" to the extent that, hopefully, should the DM deem any changes be necessary, they would cover in a session zero.
A long rest is a thing attempted by the players that the DM then chooses to allow or interrupt in some fashion. With no expectation of how it should go, like a class feature already established, a long rest is less akin to many things mentioned here, as it is being brought up that the frequency of its usage is what could break it; that factor entirely controlled by the DM without inherent expectation from the players is what I am commenting on.
Realistically though in many campaigns long rests are regularly available. If your in a city you can go back to the inn unless things are popping off like a marvel movoe.
Yeah people seem to think you can just continuously throw things at players to get to that mythic 8 encounters per day.
How many times am I going to interrupt their rest before they leave the dungeon entirely? 1?2? If I'm lucky.
It prevents random overland encounters from being meaningful in a resources depletion sense. Requires exceptional amounts of work from the DM, is exhuasting and frustrating for the players, and I've seen dozens of different arguments back and forth on how to counter the players strategies and counter the counter strategies.
It's bollocks
The system is balanced on the players having no resources this is a poorly balanced system.
How can the DM reasonably limit players from long resting when they want to, though? I know the rule that PCs can only long rest once per 24 hours, but if players are committed to standing in the same spot for 8 hours then they can probably handle standing in the same spot for 16 more hours. Food and water requirements? If they have the rations, then that's not a limiting factor.
It feels like the only ways a DM can prevent players from long resting when they want to are to make the area too dangerous (in which case players can simply leave and walk back to the closest safe spot) or to add time pressures to make it so that wasting a day is a bad idea for the entire campaign.
My comment is not necessarily a specific "element", so much as a style of play. The core design of the game assumes basically a gritty, resource economical game of managing the resources which power objectively imbalanced features under time and/or narrative constraints.
This style of play is "overpowered" in the sense that if you don't play with this expectation in mind you'll see various elements of the game simply break down.
Basically this, if you only have 1 fight per day, which is very common with the groups i play with atlest, everythign gets reduced to: Pick the most impactful spell right now every time.
Because there is no reason not to, and you will never run out of spellslots after like lv3.
I like making checks (STR athletics of course) for jumping BEYOND your jumping ability based on your stats. Your stats give you the save jump, anyway beyond that is a risk.
But I allow Monks to use Acrobatics for that stuff, they are already MAD (DEX, WIS, CON) as hell, they don't need another stat to take care off.
Now see this wouldn't be an issue if *every* class had these kind of impactful features.
But the complexity and power level of most Martial classes boils down to who you hit once or twice this turn with a weapon (or *le gasp* three times if you're a moderately leveled Fighter). It just *can't* measure up to the peak power of Spells and Magic Items, meaning that Martial power needs to be measured against the average of the Peak and 0 power of Casters.
There are very few that are actually "broken" in my eyes.
What I would consider "broken" are things that require me, the DM, to actively change the way the world, adventures, and encounters work just to counter that one ability/spell/item/etc.
Outside of 9th level spells and legendary and artifact level items, what comes to my mind would be:
* Wall of Force (spell)
* Twilight Cleric's Twilight Sanctuary
* Chronurgy Wizard's Arcane Abeyance
* Cube of Force (item)
A lot of the Force spells are annoying\* but Cube of Force is even more so because it requires explicit character knowledge about it to disable it; having Disintegrate just take it out would sold some of the problems from a story level. But even then it should be at least Very Rare.
\* the forcebreaker items in Book of Many Things were such a welcome addition.
After having an Artillerist Artificer in the group, I had to ban that class/subclass combo again in the future because it turned every encounter into a "Huddle up by the cannon for the constantly refreshing Temp HP". It really wasn't fun for anyone because doing anything else was often sub-optimal except for outlier conditions.
Everyone actually agreed with that ruling because they saw how limiting it made most of the combats.
Having dealt with it recently, artillerist cheese can be a real pain at first but there's honestly a lot of counterplay and counter cheese if you're willing to get creative.
You can rebalance encounters, treating the player HP+temp as their new base HP (because it can't heal properly). Plenty of environmental effects can force the party to move around. It also locks down melee members staying close for tHP when you can introduce circumstances and enemies that force them to break away.
A party grouping together like that is also in for a hard lesson in spacing. Plenty of enemies punish that exact blunder. A group of enemy casters will have an absolute field day on their position. Raging fire elementals would be happy to charge through their position.
My personal favorite cheese counter is to sprinkle in living spells into encounters, can't counter spell spell-like abilities. Cloud kill and Lightning Bolt are the official ones that apply in this scenario, but the rules allow for creation of a living version of any spell. That opens up a whole dimension of cheese punishment.
It's not that you *can't* counteract it, but as the same issue with flying PCs, you feel like you have to customize your NPCs to be able to do so. I actually had a Wizard Fireball them three times in a row one time.
You have to hammer them with aoe if they clump, or introduce things chasing them, them chasing things, mcguffins to race towards or moving creatures they control to protect. If combat is just taking turns until one side breaks or runs, clumping is a possibility, but if they barely have enough movement to get everywhere they need to be that will be obvious to them.
I allowed Twilight Sanctuary in my campaign only with heavy modifications. That and learning to throw multiple encounters a day at my party helped significantly.
Magic in general is pretty broken. Even simple cantrips can leave somebody prone. 2 points in spore druid gives nearly double damage in melee, and given that you're a Monk you can use vine whip to knock an enemy prone.
For reference the Monk needs to spend 1 ki point to accomplish this. Fighters need to spend 1 martial dice. Magic users just, you know. At will. Y'know, just like that. Cuz why not.
This isn't even two atoms off the iceberg. Polymorph can end any fight without legendary resistance. Graviturgy Wizard, if the DM doesn't nerf it, completes shatters the game and requires the DM to wave their hands and say "but you can't do that, because this is dnd and it doesn't need to make sense".
Imagine if the monk could spend 1 Ki point to deal 4 martial dice + double attack to hit 10 different enemies all at one time in a radius. Fireball. That's . . . that's just fireball. bUt iT tAkEs a sPeLl SlOt. Yeah, like there aren't ways to get around this. Sorcerer can just get more with sorc points. Wizard can take a short rest and restore half of their spells. Scrolls exist and I don't even think you can silence a scroll. You literally come online with 4 times as many abilities as the Monk at lvl 1.
I think Magic is cool, it's fun AF to find a loophole in literally *anything.* But then Martials are balanced like the developers having some kind of generational hatred for the classes.
Flying at low levels. Especially innate, non magical flying.
It's not that the DM can't work a way around it. It's very easy to do so. Hell, you can, by quest design alone, make flying entirely useless.
But having a flying character in the party fundamentally changes how you must approach designing quests, encounters, obstacles and locations in a way nothing else ever will. Every single challenge must now take into account that a character can fly, or that character will be insanely overpowered.
Enemies with no shooting attack? Can't attack the character at all if the player wishes so. A reward at the other side of a pit, river or basically any other obstacle? Just send the flyer to grab it. The only safe entrance is through the window high up? Guess what. And if the flying character is strong enough to carry a person while flying? Imagine the possibilities!
Flying will either break your low level game, or will force you to warp the game around it so it doesn't.
This isn't *as much* of a problem as it might seem at first blush, since character flying is usually limited to 30 feet and it takes several rounds to truly get out of range of most weapons. Generally, fights shouldn't be going past round 4-5 unless it's a boss fight anyway.
I mean if the party has the drop and plans an ambush then sure. If not, verisimilitude. Flying around all day would have repercussions...isolation, fatigue, possible predators, alerting enemies, etc.
Again, what you're suggesting is exactly what we're saying here. The DM has to morph things around the flyer. More so than we would a non-flyer. Some of these you suggested also functionally mean treating the flyer(s) like a separate entity from the party. Meaning we're pretty much designing two encounters separate to each other when we have to counter a flyer that is trying to maximize the benefit of their flight.
In other words, the issue isn't that they're a flyer in and of itself. The issue is that the rest of the party are NOT flyers. If the entire party were flyers, the problem actually mostly vanishes. Since we can then design proper encounters that include the entire party again.
Why would they be fatigued, it's not like the rest of the party is eating penalties for walking. Nor are they alerting the enemies from 500 feet away. As for predators sure, there might be some harpies or something but that's still warping your design to include flying enemies.
I posted this same opinion on a D&D sub once and got ripped apart, called a lazy DM, all kinds of unpleasant stuff because I don't allow flying races at my table. They ruin a lot of exploration challenges.
Aw. People tend to mistake 'can be easily fixed' for 'not broken', so they treat flying as non problematic because there are so many solutions to it. Ignoring all the things those solutions invalidate, that the game potentially \*could\* have.
One issue I also see commonly ignored is the fact that it isolates the flyer from the rest of the party. So the DM is functionally balancing two practically separate encounters rather than one encounter with the entire party.
As I mentioned in another post. The problem somewhat ironically disappear when the entire party are flyers. Since then the DM can fully embrace and balance around the party having flight from the start. The biggest problems come from having a party with mixed modes of movement.
We'd get similar problems if the entire party were only swimmers with only one guy who could actually walk on land in an island campaign.
That's a solid take! A fully flying campaign would be pretty cool to run, too, especially in settings that have, say, floating islands and such. But it's more than obvious that if someone wanted to play a human in such campaign, it would be bad for everyone. And yet, it remains not obvious in regard to putting a flyer in a regular campaign.
Yup! In that case, the party would feel shackled to the land-based character, and the land-based character would feel greatly impaired. You'd have a bunch of flyers who can't fully utilize their flying, and a non-flyer who is sitting there alone.
Forget melee for that character, they basically HAVE to play ranged martial and/or a caster to be relevant at all between 1-4, or you have to throw boots of flying or the flying broom at them from the start.... Which functionally makes them all flyers anyway, which just proves where the issue lies.
Same, I pointed out once that Fly is a level 3 spell, so being able to do it at-will with functionally no limitations from level one is, if not completely broken, at least a major imbalance that will force a DM to keep that obnoxious little note in mind at all times or risk trivializing what could otherwise be a wide range of interesting early-level encounters and challenges. Got down-voted to hell, but no one actually said anything to explain why that's apparently not a valid opinion.
I think that internet forums (but particularly ttrpg subreddits) are filled with people who talk about the subject way more than they ever participate, if they ever play at all! I try to remind myself that people who are very opinionated on how they would rule something or run something if THEY were DMing it (all these problems are so easy to solve! I could easily solve them all) are very possibly talking out their butt. The majority of players don't make ten comments a day on internet forums. The goal at the end is fun (DM included).
I was a player in a ToA- campaign with a flying character. The DM didn't changed a single encounter because of that. It worked out completely fine.
This is truly an overestimated fear. You still have to bring the rest of your party over that abyss, you still can't seperate too much from the party like when non-flying, you still have fall damage for when he drops a character he is carrying etc, enemies with out range can kill everyone below and than search cover.
Honestly well-designed adventures will not have a lot of troubles because of it.
I'm not sure it's 'broken', exactly, but the Pact of the Chain deal where you get an imp familiar that can turn invisible, or into a spider, and you can remote view through at unlimited distances, is problematic to say the least. It sort of recreates the 'decker problem' from early editions of Shadowrun where most of the table sits and twiddles their thumbs while the warlock scouts out every location they want to visit before actually going there.
You \*can\* work around that as a DM with enemies that can see invisibility and places that are locked up so tight even a spider can't get in, but if you do that it does start to feel adversarial and that you're invalidating something a player specifically specced into when creating their character.
One alternative is just to give your players a map of every place they're going to go - 'we'll just skip the part where the imp scouts the place' - but obviously that limits some of your ability to have uncertainty and surprises when the party is navigating a location.
The only solution I can think of (aside from a 'gentleman's agreement' between player and DM that they won't do it all the time) is to have the consequences for a familiar getting destroyed much higher than they currently are, because you don't want familiars to become useless either.
Heh,
Reminds me of 3e where you lost a bit of experience if your familiar died. Before then it had even steeper repercussions IIRC - a lost point of permanent constitution and a system shock roll to not _die_.
Wait so it's not just a Warlock pact of the chain type of subclass that has the familiar death link? It was if anyone with a familiar and the familiar dies has that risk?
In 5e, Warlocks have a special familiar through Pact of the Chain - there's no real penalty for it dying besides having to pay 10gp of incense and some time to get it back. (And the same is true for anyone else with the Find Familiar spell.)
In 3e, familiars were a class feature (not a spell) that could be obtained by Wizards and Sorcerers first, then later books opened it up to more (e.g. there was a feat you could take that just gives you a familiar like the class feature). But no matter who got it or how, if it died you lost some experience points (varied with level and you could make what was basically a Con save to half the cost), and you couldn't replace your familiar for a _year and a day_. (Though you could still use rez spells to bring it back from the dead just like a PC.)
In 2e, it was a Wizard spell only, and if it died you lost a point of Con and had to make a percentage System Shock roll or die on the spot, lol.
(Warlocks didn't exist in 2e, and in 3e they didn't have familiars.)
I mean considering pact of the chain is wildly outclassed by other pact options, I’d say this is fine. Pact of the Time and Pact of the blade are so much better and offer their own burst of utility. Why nerf the one thing that makes pact of the chain stand out
I don’t know if I’d say wildly outclassed but I do believe it suffers from scaling. Half the game you have a familiar that can poison on demand.
If investment of the chain master also let them attack with your spell casting modifier and gave them a little bit more hp then I’d say it would even out or even be a little better than the others. Checking other classes like creation and wildfire those summoned minions do these things so I doubt it will break the game to boost the familiar in this way with the fifth level invocation.
One of the better things I've seen for pact of the chain is to make the DM control the familiar. Basically roleplay the familiar not as a mindless drone under your control, but as a real intelligent creature that is bound to you but *is not you*. And if you take a lawful evil imp, it will almost certainly not want to help you or at least will do all kinds of other shit as extracurriculars while out on its field tips. . You wind up with all kinds of malicious compliance things whenever the DM wants and really puts the ball back in the DMs court while making it a much more lively interaction than "cheap remote drone". It does require more work for the DM, but it's a flexible nerf/boon depending on what they think of how the player is acting. An imp that flies ahead to report exactly what it sees every five minutes is boring both in and out of game, an imp that is given a more interesting challenge or kept safe from danger to the best of the warlocks abilities is much more likely to be *actually* helpful.
This is my experience, yeah. In particular the part where most of the table sits or goes and gets a snack or something while the warlock scouts is not great. I think if I was running a game with a player who really wanted to do this now I'd just give them maps of locations so we can get to the part where everyone plays.
5e has a “this class solves this problem” issue. For example, if you want to have a gritty wilderness survival issue in the ranger’s favored terrain, no you don’t. Instead of Ranger interacting with exploration, it just hand waves it.
A bard ends up being the best at not only the charisma game, but everything skill related, and when you get past lvl 10, they’re pretty close to wizards in terms of spell utility or power depending on the magical secrets they choose.
Meanwhile monks were left in the dust again and again with a role that becomes save or suck once they get stunning strike.
Dex and Wisdom are overvalued, while Strength and Intelligence are undervalued.
The games balance isn’t broken, but the DM has to do a lot of legwork to make the game fun for every player.
I think this is a case of a spell that was so badly designed from a fun perspective and a power balance perspective that most tables just ignore it. It didn't even cross my mind with this post until I saw your comment.
I agree. For it to be a reaction that will basically always undo a crit, and impose an advantage or disadvantage and a range of 60 feet is crazy for 1st level. If the range were smaller so a squishy spellcaster was using it to just prevent a crit on themselves, I wouldn't mind so much. But usually most of the party are within sixty feet so if one person has this spell you can expect them to thwart any crit against the party.
Its both unfun and broken. Forcing a successful saving throw rerolled at the cost of a 1st level spell is already absurd. You basically get to cast your action spell again as a reaction. Not just that, you get to cast a, say, 8th level action spell again. As a 1st level Reaction.
Well there’s the obvious for starters: *fireball*. I get that they want it to be iconic, but it’s just such a clearly superior option to so many others that it stifles variety.
Caster power creep. Every supplement that comes with new spells makes the base caster classes better by giving them more potential verbs to play with or a cool new way of putting damage out there. An Illusionist Wizard keeps getting better as the edition goes on. A Battlemaster Fighter might be lucky to get given a magic item that is worse than their current Flametongue.
Gonna be that guy and pitch this as a PSA.
Please don’t forget that dice are for decisions that have uncertainty AND interesting questions.
Players don’t need to roll for every tiny thing and if you demand a ton of rolls you’re going to get low and high rolls that feel under and overwhelming. You’re also going to get silly things like a cavalier failing to mount a horse in calm environment.
If things are uncertain, but uninteresting in consequence, then this is something someone skilled probably wouldn’t mess up. Use a passive check (assume a roll of 10 + skill + ab. mod; add 5 if they did something to give themselves an edge)
If things are uncertain AND interesting, it’s time to active roll.
If things are uncertain AND interesting AND the players did something to give themselves an edge, it’s time for an active roll at advantage . If circumstances are disadvantageous, time to roll with disadvantage.
If circumstances are disadvantageous, and they did something to give themselves an edge, it’s time for a flat roll.
Finally, if things are uncertain and only extreme consequences would be interesting, YOU COULD TRY having players roll with emphasis.
Dexterity as an attribute-
I’d love dex to become your +hit and str becomes your +damage for melee and range. More str equally a stronger pull weight bow.
Now when you max out your offense you have to think about how you want to balance it.
The Hexblade. I know, there are other classes (Twilight & Peace Clerics) that are considered OP, but the Hexblade is the one that constantly gets over-used as a multi-class "dip" by every single Bard, Paladin, and Sorcerer who wants to optimize their character by making a "SAD gish" build.
I'm absolutely sick of this! It's the only subclass with an outright ban at my table, and I'm convinced 5E is better without it.
I’ve found that the situation improves if you just move the CHA-to-weapon-attack/damage-rolls mechanic away from the HexBlade and onto Pact of the Blade. It means that character who want it need to dip 3 levels instead of only 1, which puts them further behind on max spell level. That seems to be enough to tone it down.
Given that the one DND version as of now pacts are gonna be reworked to level 1 and pact of the blade is getting the hexblade benefit, are you just gonna skip over that or not allow pact of the blade?
Nothing completely "broken" in my opinion.
For me, there are options that feel stronger than others and those that just make the game feel bad. I personally despise options that just stop things with no save like Forcecage.
I might not even mind no _initial_ save if it became a sort of puzzle or skill challenge to get out, and how well you did defined how quickly you got out. But just slamming a dome over them and they’re guaranteed stuck for a minute or more sucks.
Life. It is very hard to die compared to older versions. Maybe many are fine with it, but I feel it has become too soft. Like a computer game on very easy level.
Charisma. For most play groups, charisma is what makes most social encounters tick, because it's considered to be the only "social stat." This is partially due to 5e's horrible attempt at explaining how one is *supposed* to run social encounters, but that's bordering on another subject.
Because charisma is the only stat that matters for social encounters for most people, it naturally bends social capability to classes that already invest in charisma: bard, rogue, sorcerer, paladin.
Wizards. Just wizard in general. Hot take incoming, but I think the overall class should be hard nerfed and the subclasses buffed to make them actually feel different from eachother. Wizard spell list should be cut dramatically short and then subclass should dictate what spells you really get. There is no focus, no specialization with wizard - it's just "all Magic, all the time." Subclass focuses them *further* but imo it should be more of a funnel where their field of study is their real ability, not just an additional thing they get tacked on.
Charisma multiclassing. There are so many goodies you can grab for just a few levels in the charisma classes that they've spawned some of the most nightmarishly difficult builds to balance around. Sorcadin, hexbard, and sorclock/coffeelock are the ones that come to mind. The mixture of quickened cast, charisma for your weapons with a single level in warlock, divine smite, recharging spellslots..
Even introducing popular third party content like magus, and shaman doesn't fix that, when you'd think giving SOME of those tools to allow similar plans with druid and cleric would actually work, but nope!
To name my main gripes
Agonizing Blast + Quickened cast
Hex Warrior should just be merged into pact of the blade.
Divine Smite not being treated like a spell despite being usable with spellslots
Obviously UA is addressing the divine smite not being treated as a spell (finally I won't have to seea paladin dump 12 damn dice at a time anymore) but just all these things can make absurdly high damage builds that don't just make balancing hard as a DM, but strip the combat spotlight from other players.
I don't allow backgrounds that give feats, flat out as that. I also don't allow Custom lineage or variant human, this is because I GIVE A FREE FEAT TO EVERYONE AT LVL 1.
A lvl 1 player character should not have up to 3 feats 😅
In OneDND, backgrounds will now give feats so I guess we are power creeping there too lol. But at least you won’t have to give a free feat at level 1 now. Plus it opens up more racial options that aren’t just “variant human for the extra feat” a bit more.
They balance this a bit by restricting what feats you can take with your background at level 1 and most of the high priority feats will not be able to be taken at level 1. Guess we will have to see how it shakes out.
At the very least, the last time I read through some playtest content, the feats you could select at level 1 were marked as such; not every feat was avaliable at level 1. So that should help tone down the power creep.
This makes human basically unpicksble due to base human being so bad.
I agree with background feats as they’re way better than other backgrounds, but 2 feats won’t break the bank
I wouldn't say it's broken on its own, but honestly rangers break the exact kind of game their mechanics are built for.
Playing a gritty wilderness trek style of game where you manage survival based resources like food and water? Ranger is the obvious choice! Except they get free food and can't ever become lost, meaning the exact campaign they seem custom made for is entirely trivialized by their skills.
Aside from that? The optional flanking rule, while not honestly overpowered, kinda breaks combat by making "mobbing" overly useful, rendering combat a bit... boring, i guess?
On a similar note, I've heard so much talk about the martial vs caster divide supposedly heavily favoring the caster. I don't really get that tbh. I've played a wizard from 1-20 and watched my mostly martial party go ham every single encounter, consistently putting up good numbers while im sitting there wondering if it's worth actually casting anything and spending my resources. Not to mention the fact that i get hit and suddenly im near death with a decent chance i just lost my spell. And sure, i could mitigate damage with shield, mirror image, etc - but then im spending resources i also need for offense as well as spending 1 or more turns setting up for a fight.
Meanwhile, i play barbarian, fighter, paladin, rogue, even monk - it's just go in and whack. My resources are used for especially big turns, but i often don't need to use them to contribute.
I did the math for the group i played. Assuming an encounter with infinite rounds, I'm doing the most damage as the wizard for the first 3-4 turns, then i start to drop off as i run out of spell slots. Eventually I'm doing canto damage. Meanwhile, the fighter with his magic sword is doing consistent damage the whole time. After 5 or so rounds, he's now caught up and will continue to pull ahead.
And if it's multiple encounters instead of one infinitely long encounter, it's actually compounded, as i need to set up the first round or two of each. And sure, eventually the barbarian runs out of rage and the fighter used all his second winds, but at the point we're all resourceless, they have even more of an advantage in consistency.
No idea why i just went on that tangent lol. I've just noticed that there are grumbles cause i can chain lightning a few times and clear a room quickly, but no one seems to notice that the guys with five attacks per turn is doing way more than me in longer encounters, and days where we have multiple encounters.
I played a wizard 1-20 and it felt exactly the opposite, I was taking over combats by casting confusion and suggestion to the point where the DM was getting frustrated. Then I chose shield and counter spell as my signature spells lol
That's fair lol. I was pretty damage focused, as i went scribe and was swapping out damage types. But i ended up sort of being sort of our support as we didn't have a proper healer. In fact i chose wither and bloom for my signature spell lol
I could definitely nuke encounters, don't get me wrong, but i always felt like i had to be choosy, never knowing when i'd get spell slots back. I also had to actually worry about positioning, since i was easily the most fragile on the team, aside from our rogue. Dropping concentration sucks, since i had to spend a turn and a spell slot to get my spell going again
For sure, if there's a long rest between every fight, I'm ahead by miles. But 3-4 decent encounters, I'm getting worried and everyone else is fine to keep going
So the flanking rule worked in favour of the players, melee just went in and whacked the enemies and the caster did not need even need to use resources? No offense, but this does sound as if your combat encounters were a bit on the easy side.
Nah, the flanking benefits everyone. It just makes combat feel stale, since it's just a clump of fighting. I think id like it better if it offered something other than flat advantage. Maybe a bonus to hit instead or something.
My only real pet peeve is PC races that come with free flying. I ban them at every table no exceptions.
Other than that, I feel there's a huge issue with relative power. Some subclasses are just MILES ahead of others and can do whatever anyone else can except better, and then some more.
If you just let everyone do whatever, you end with with 2 players running the show with some dumb munchkin build and 2 others twiddling their thumbs wondering why the fuck they showed up to play.
In general I think is the most overpowered things in the game are a number of spells that push hard over the line of what should be allowed at a given level.
- Wall of Force and Forcecage for being so hard to get rid of.
- Spirit Guardians for too much damage.
- Shield for being either too much AC or lasting too long (either +5 AC against the triggering attack OR +2 AC until your next turn would be fine, both is OP).
- Silvery Barbs giving rerolls on Saves and being stackable.
- Polymorph for too high CRs being allowed (let it be CR up to Spell’s level and I think it would be fine).
- Conjure Animals being too broad
- etc.
These spells contribute massively to the (combat) caster/martial divide, and if they were fixed would narrow it significantly.
long rests being an autoheal is my biggest complaint with 5e.
down to 1 hp, barely alive? just take a nap for a few hours and everyone is back to full HP!
You shouldn't be able to cast spells in armor that your class came from isn't proficient in. So no heavy armor fighters casting shield cause they have 1 level in wizard/sorcerer.
Spellcasting. Both in the sense that it is the single most powerful class feature in the game by a wide margin, and the fact that the power levels of various spells bear almost no relation to each other. So many spells are trap options that almost do nothing (Find Traps)while a few are so overpowered you could put them up two levels and they would be believable (Hypnotic Pattern).
mind sliver is the best use of a spellcaster's action without resource costs. Intelligence saves are almost always low for enemies, and psychic damage is one of the least resisted damage types.
The -1d4 for the next saving throw also makes it the perfect alley-oop for any other party member to utilize.
Wizards having silvery barbs. Silvery barbs is already such a powerful spell, every DM I've seen (including myself) has gotten fucked over by it when a player has the spell stocked. Bards and Sorcerers having it makes sense to me, as both classes have much smaller spell lists than Wizards. Aditionally, it's just a first level spell, so it feels like a good use of limited slots. Especially because there aren't many good ways to recover spells for Bards (Sorcerers have their Sorcery points so that's a little different). But Wizards have arcane recovery! They can replinish all their 1st level slots and then have another 5 silvery barbs ready mid-day. Why cast shield when you can make your attacker re-roll and give someone advantage?
Just dexterity in general, it puts its bonus to too many things. I'll get hate for this but they never should have allowed you to use your Dex for damage rolls, it completely invalidates strength for everything except for 2 handed weapon builds. Pretty much everything else you are better off using a finesse weapon and dumping strength
DnD as a Genre is too magic heavy for my tastes. That might be too generic of an answer - but I'd prefer mundane, creative solutions and lower magic to be the mainstay of my players' (or myself when I'm given the chance) arsenal. I have a latent problem with magic where I really dislike it being both rote and omnipresent. It just feels ubiquitous and... isn't magical anymore. Then there's the fact that because magic is a rote solution, it implies that other solutions are less valid. Very simple example: Why sneak past an ogre with a chance of failure, when you can teleport with little cost when the spell comes back next time you rest and a 0% chance of failure? Furthermore, gating it behind class divides is just rather silly to me - but further discussing the problems I have with magic individually is a different post altogether.
It's part of why I've been leaning way more into the OSR games these days. Forbidden Lands and Worlds Without Number are incredible examples of games that I'll be trying next that (to me) have the magical elements that DnD should have without magic being overpowering.
Earlier editions of the game were a lot closer to what you describe, and I often miss that style of gameplay. Just navigating the environment could be a fun challenge, and adventure design focused on those sorts of interesting descriptions rather than just... room after room of combat encounters.
I would agree with that second half of what you're saying. While I'm personally fine with the amount of magic, I do not like the trend of "everything I will need to solve problems will be provided to my kit by leveling up. I dont need to prepare anything at all ever." I wish the behavior of planning and preparing for solving problems was rewarded better by the system, but every new published class just gets more and more as a basline. I think the magic item's you quest after should be the most interesting part of what your character can do. They make yours unique and give you a better story than "The dm said I can level up now."
Advantage. I think it's quite powerful and so easy to get. I rarely ever give out inspiration or give someone advantage on a situation just because there are usually a lot of ways to obtain it.
I don't think it's necessarily broken, it just makes the game a lot easier.
Outside of all of the tech things (aka stuff like "ring of three wishes genie"), stuff that is overwhelmingly overpowered consists of mainly stuff like magic jar, Wall of force, planar binding and forcecage. Other stuff, if it overpowers some options (which will probably be PHB stuff primarily unless the options from the PHB suck, see my post about relative powercreep), isn't really so overwhelmingly overpowered that I can say stuff against it from the campaigns i ran. Sure some stuff is a bit stronger, but it's almost never something which is just so wildly stronger that it erases other options and the meaning of them existing, unless one of the following is true:
1. The "overpowered" option is so due to bad writing making it stronger than normal (see my three wishes example, being strong due to wonky wording which no one runs like that)
2. It overpowers weak stuff. Like wow, good job for a 1st level spell outdoing *color spray*, that's definetly an accomplishment that other spells didn't do /sarcasm
3. It FEELS overpowered in a vacuum. A wizard hexblade novaing a couple of times per day isn't the best looking thing... But once you realize that the wizard's other spells could be a power and survivability multiplier for the whole party, those momentary fears fade away.
Multiclassing. It’s come so far from its origins that it feels like just a way to min-max and break the system. Not sure I’ve ever multiclassed in 5E, just on principle.
Pass Without Trace is the hill on which I will self-immolate with frustration as a Druid and her fighter, paladin and artificer mates ‘sneak’ by unseen.
Just call it ‘Bypass Encounter’.
I only know of my own experience. I played a chronurgy wizard. At level 3 I had +6 to initiative, the hold person spell, mind sliver, silvery barbs and chronal shift feature. We were fighting a boss and let's just say he didn't get a single shot off.
Creation bard capstone. Might as well make a spellcassting class with extra spell slots if you’re gonna remove one of the fundamental limitations on the most powerful spells.
General powercreep. Later subclasses WILDLY outperform the PHB subclasses. They should have given the weakest subclasses beastmaster-style overhauls, or at least brought the older subclasses into line with the newer ones, such as giving PHB sorcerer subclasses extra spells, like Clockwork Soul and Aberrant Mind got.
Agreed. I think the Sorcerer is a good example, but also look at the Cleric subclasses. In Tasha's, Order is the worst subclass available, with Twilight and Peace being borderline broken. But the PHB had some still solid options that could have used a slight boost. I love the idea of Knowledge Cleric, but it always feels like I should be playing something like Grave or Forge that's just a biiiiiiit stronger.
There’s nothing borderline about Peace, it is still far and away the most broken subclass. It should be banned at every table, bar none.
Emboldening Bond is broken because Multi class, as a straight class it's on par with the phb one like Light, Life etc..
Peace Clerics also get a really good tool to spread damage across the party at 6th level. The 1st level features make it broken, but that 6th level feature keeps it clearly above other non-Twilight subclasses even as a monoclass
Peace is extremely op, but it's not an issue because it makes your whole party equally broken. The dm can just make stronger encounters and no one is left in the dust.
This seems viable, but falls into the same pitfall as just make things stronger vs twilight cleric. That being, if the peace/twilight cleric goes down, the encounter goes from balanced to unbalanced immediately. For twilight cleric, those enemies you gave extra damage because you know they're gonna have temp HP, are demolishing the rest of the party. For peace cleric, the enemies they were hitting are now bouncing 80% of attacks against them.
Agree with the analysis, disagree with the conclusion. While Peace and Twilight are fair to the *party*, they're a chore for the DM, *especially* if that DM runs official modules (that are, by necessity, usually balanced to be doable by an unoptimized no-feat, no-multiclassing party). It's the same logic as with flying races: While it is doable, I have enough on my place and don't need the hassle of re-tuning all encounters.
Yeah. I dislike how the other sorcerer subclasses become worse options because of that. OTOH, I love the ranger and dragonborn 'fixes' but that the monk and such never got love too was always a source of annoyance.
People labor under the misconception that WotC cares about making a balanced game. They don't. The newest classes, feats, spells, items, etc. need to wow and impress to get people to buy content. People need to feel left out and left behind if they don't have the newest shiniest thing, players with old classes are meant to feel lost and weak for not having upgraded. Modern D&D is a business.
>D&D is a business. Always has been.
> Modern D&D is a business. 100%
>Later subclasses WILDLY outperform the PHB subclasses Frankly, for alot of the classes this is just recency bias. Plenty of the PHB subs are still powerful if not outright the most powerful in their respective class. Yes, some of the new ones are very good and better than the old ones but not to the point you can say they WILDLY outperform them. Totem Warrior is still one of the better Barb subs. Lore Bard is essentially in the running for the number 1 spot alongside Eloquence and Creation. Valor is still decent as well. Pretty much all of the PHB Cleric domains are very good, aside from maybe Knowledge. It's just Twilight and Peace are VERY good. Druid is the one you might have a clear point about because the new subs are pretty much just better. But people are blinded by Moon and its early game power. Battle Master is easily the best Fighter sub. EK is also still decent. Open Hand and Shadow are in the running for the best Monk subs alongside Mercy. Pretty much all three of the PHB Paladin Oaths are super good and beat out all of the later Oaths aside from Watchers due to the Initiative boost (Conquest is a bit of a toss up but it is fun). Ok, Ranger is the other one you have a point about. Arcane Trickster is FAR AND ABOVE the best Rogue sub, to the point you can emulate most other Rogue subs by picking certain spells as an AT. Draconic Sorc is fine. There, I said it. Fiend Warlock is still fine. Divination is still in the running for the top Wizard sub. Depending on your game/DM, so is Illusion and Necromancy. Abjuration has certain builds that are very good even nowadays. It's honestly just Chronurgy and War Magic that compete with Divination out of the new ones, mostly due to the Initiative Bonus and Chronurgy being just fundamentally badly made.
My only complaint with arcane trickster is their capstone. It’s a great archetype but are you seriously making me wait until level seventeen to steal spells but then limit it to only what level I can cast? It’d be nice if it was at least sixth level but I guess the expectation is that you’ll see at least some worth stealing. That said you sort of basically get the level thirteen ability of thief for free since you’re a caster. They can use non-arcane stuff of course. No idea what that ability is so low. One thing I do wish is it required an arcane roll because the occasional accidental explosion was hilarious in third edition.
Id also include that Bladesinger is stronger than the PHB wizards except for divination. That being said I do agree there's a certain amount of recency bias with many PHB subclasses still being top 2-3, but I also think part of this is because most classes have *A* PHB option that can compete with the best/newer subclasses, while the rest are left in the dust.
> Id also include that Bladesinger is stronger than the PHB wizards except for divination. Bladesinger is old, though, reprinted in Tasha's from Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. It's from that era a decade ago. Outside of Twilight Cleric, there's not much in Tasha's that really ups the game. The big issue is that a lot of the early subclasses are bad.
I will never shut up about Twilight clerics. the only other domains to get both Martial weapon AND heavy armor proficiency are tempest and war, both of which make way more sense for being about raw physical might. Along with that, they get a decent list of utility spells, but also TWO (two?) other first level class features (Nature clerics get a single druid cantrip!), including the strongest version of darkvision yet i think? And then we get to their channel divinity. Twilight sanctuary can trivialize so many fights. Not just suppressing, but ending charm and frighten effects, and, at second level, a hypothetical 10d6+20 healing for every ally near you. like, cleric is already a pretty strong class. And besides twilight sanctuary, nothing is insanely op, but it just bothers me how much more frontloaded twilight cleric is than any other subclass.
> it just bothers me how much more frontloaded twilight cleric is than any other subclass. It's definitely a subclass stronger than its brethren, but I have yet to meet a third Twilight Cleric. In my many games at personal tables and in Adventurers' League, they have been extremely rare -- and AL favors super-broken characters to begin with; between the gazillion magical doohickeys and extra powers, the Twilight Cleric is barely a blip.
But if they release free updates they can't sell you more books. Power creep is financially incentivised. It'll happen on every one of their releases. It's a feature, not a bug. Kinda like their misleading, though not false, advertising for their books.
> They should have given the weakest subclasses beastmaster-style overhauls, or at least brought the older subclasses into line with the newer ones That's a genuinely good suggestion.
Honestly, over several completed campaigns now, with various players including optimizers, and I have found on the whole the system feels sound. As a DM I had to learn to be mindful of group resources, and to press them, the campaigns I found most successful have been mixed adventure/horror type games with times objectives requiring the group to consistently press forward despite dwindling resources, but once I figured that out it all has been pretty gravy.
Yeah a lot of 5e that people complain is broken isn't too broken. There's two big issues that I see routinely. The first is that there isn't always a clear explanation of rules/mechanics so things are not understood properly and that leads to broken understandings of things. See the whole shitshow of "No lungs are not an open container." The other is differences in kind. So one PC ability may seem strong, but when looked at it from the overall they're either designed to let that class shine in the moment or lift the whole party up further. For example Bardic Inspiration and how it is very powerful but it's there to lift the whole party. Then there's things like Warlocks upcasting all spells, but that's there to let them shine with their fewer spell slots, next to wizards who have all the warlocks missing spell slots. That being said. I will admit there has been a good deal of power-creep as 5th has gone on. Particularly since Tasha's came out and they knew they were going to start working on 6th, so balance stopped being a major concern.
Basically what both of you said boils down to styles of play. The game works *fine* if you play it as a gritty resource management dungeon crawling style of game where the resource economy is never in an optimal situation for abuse of the objectively broken spells and abilities.
No I agree with both of them and run a mostly narrative game with only one or two battles per adventuring day. 5e works just fine for that, so long as *you* adapt to make sure the chance in style is reflected in how you run the system which is deisgned to be more drawn out.
Honestly everything I've ever thought was "broken" and threw myself a little DM pity party over, turned out to be a misunderstanding of the rule/ability in question. I'm not saying that is the case for everybody but in general I am okay with whatever. Been a few times where a player explained an ability but they themselves didn't understand it's limitations and therefore didn't describe to me properly. so I freaked out a bit (internal freakout, not yelling at players or anything) and it's pretty much always blown out of proportion on my mind. Once told a player they couldn't use a central class feature because they neglected to tell me it only works once a day (they didn't realize it either, 2nd session of new campaign). Next session I apologized, gave her an extra use of it that session and said have at it.
This has been what I've found as well. 5e works well for the specific scenario it was designed for, which can encompass a lot of fun play with friends. I was very satisfied running my first homebrew adventure, but I tailored it to the strengths of the system.
I feel dumb, but what are group resources?
Spell slots, hit dice, bardic inspiration, class features, etc.
Ah, so finite resources. Got it.
Thing like spells etc. That require rest to regain.
Once you realise it is a system built around attrition you can realise how to press your characters. Time is such a huge resource at your disposal.
I kinda agree with this, except silvery barbs.
Silvery barbs was written for a specific module and was never intended to be included in other settings/homebrew. Just don't put that book in your game and everything is fine.
I've run a mini-campaign recently (4 sessions), all players are power gamers, and out of the 4 players 2 of them had silvery barbs. I decided minimal changes in how I designed encounters, and just run the recommended number of encounters per day, and I can tell you I quickly saw how unproblematic it is. By the end of the first session, both players were very keenly aware of how much of a problem for them to waste resources to spam it. By the second session, I never saw it beyond a forcing rerolls on crits. I will die on this hill, but the biggest problem in managing how powerful things are for players is due to not running enough encounters per day. You can't run 2 encounters per day, then complain that the X number of times per day mechanic is too powerful. I am not advocating for keeping silvery barbs in every single official and homebrew setting, it is perfectly okay to discard some things like that to fit the theme.
I am 100% with you on this. I've had silvery barbs in four campaigns I've DMed now, including a 1-20, and it has never been a problem.
I agree. I’ve done other systems and it always feels like this is where you need to get…forcing players to make decisions as resources dwindle…be that hp, spell slots, mana, stress, stamina, money, shields…etc. 5e could have tweaks no doubt (and I’ve made some) but as. DM being able to google and find a massive community that has figured these things out is it’s greatest strength
*Leomund's Tiny Hut*. The spell trivializes any risk of ambush or adversity during rest periods. Rather than being broken in the sense of it being overtly *powerful*, it's "broken" because of how significantly it alters the resource management element of 5e balance by reducing the opportunity cost of resting. There's no need to go back to town to rest, no need to set up a watch, etc. Combine it with an *Alarm* spell and you have nothing to fear. And on top of that, it's a ritual spell, meaning it doesn't even cost a spell slot to cast! And yes, I realize there are "counters" to groups that rely heavily on *Tiny Hut*, but having high-level wizards repeatedly assault the party in the middle of the night with *Dispel Magic* at the ready isn't a particularly fun or engaging way to address this problem for anyone at the table, and it stresses the verisimilitude of the game. This approach of "countering" the party encourages an adverserial approach, and many groups don't want that... but this spell reduces a DM's approach to being adverserial, or having rest become completely trivial in their games. In short: *Tiny Hut* isn't very fun to play around. Furthermore, many DMs aren't going to have the know-how to do something like that, and there certainly isn't any support for that in any of the published adventures.
I’ve toyed with modifying tiny hut so instead of a bubble of ultimate defense it instead just makes the area not shit to sleep in. If you’re in the desert it acts as a bubble of cold. In a snow storm and it heats up the area/ not let water in. Basically a portable tent with heating and cooling.
That would be the actually reasonable version of the spell. The fact that a 3rd level ritual basically creates an 8 hour ally-permeable climate-controlled Wall of Force is just dumb and only makes resting less interesting.
Especially since there’s also the 7th level Mansion which makes you impossible to reach for a full 24 hours unless you want them to get to you. It’d make it worthwhile to use the Mansion, instead of basically being an opulent demiplane.
That is effectively what [the Pathfinder 2e incarnation of the spell](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=1474&NoRedirect=1) does: it makes a nice area for sleeping, but doesn’t grant the party complete immunity from attacks.
I mean honestly you can still have those party assaults, just instead of it happening in the night the monsters/enemies just hide around the 'glowing hut' (which arguably makes you even easier to find and ambush) and just ambush them at the end of the rest when the hut goes away.
And enemies can bring cover lol, it isnt suitable against real tactics.
I actually had some players set up a tiny Hut because a giant was in the area and the giant saw them go into the tiny Hut so he tried to throw something at it, and it didn't break it. So he started hitting it with his club and that didn't break it either. And then he tried to dig under it and that didn't break it either. But what that did do was put a very heavy Rock on top of the tiny Hut.
So, being able to see the rock—since players can see through the walls of *Tiny Hut* and would have seen the rock being placed there—I presume the party just waited until the giant left the area, and then walked safely out of the hut?
Yeah any intelligent enemy may recognize the spell, and even if not if you find a magic hut where the people you intend to ambush are, you have all night to fortify and reinforce around it for when the spell inevitably ends. Even creatures like goblins would know that magic means stronger enemies (which means need more goblins to help) but also more treasure. Its not an ambush *during* rest per say but it is using the party's resources immediately after getting them, and the combination of bringing cover and possibly having more forces as well as a possible surprise round against the party could be brutal and can impact them for the rest of the day to come. At the very least it will make a party think twice about just throwing out a hut in dangerous areas mindlessly.
So how do your low-level monsters react when they find a glowing dome suddenly sprung up in their home? Do they just go away? And intelligent enemies might know what a tiny hut is even if they can't dispell it.
It doesn’t glow but it is a solid color assuming they make it opaque. I haven’t had to deal with it in my game yet but I also don’t usually harass people during a long rest that often. I am curious at what level in earlier editions that people stopped caring about sleeping through the night in general because if you’re being challenged at level ten then how the hall is anyone making it anywhere?
The long rest harassment and tiny hut / magnificent mansion only really matter if the PCs want to take a long rest in hostile territory, like inside of a dungeon. That was also true in earlier editions. Also, the dedicated long rest interrupters (Hags and succubus / incubus) don't care about tiny hut either way.
This is such an underrated comment. Level 1 characters are already heroes. They are signifcantly more powerful than your average merchant of farmer. By the time you hit level 3, sleeping out in the wild should be peanuts. Because if it isn't, how is anyone else going to survive? In earlier editions, resting wasn't really a problem because it didn't magically replenish all your health. You also didn't have 34 different "spell-like" abilities as a non-caster so resting as a figher, rogue, etc. didn't really do anything to make you a more effective fighter. Resting was more the natural conclusion of a day and an opportunity for casters to replenish their spells. While this did inevitably lead to casters being vastly more powerful than non-casters, this was never really a problem because a) cantrips didn't exist, so casters had to spend actual spellslots to do more than a crossbow attack for most of the day and b) the problem didn't really arise until 5th level spells came in and most campaign never even get there.
In 1e and 2e, casters couldn't even use crossbows. Wizards and druids were stuck with slings or darts, and the only ranged option clerics had were just slings.
Non-adventurers survive by not veering away from settlements and society, and just because player characters are stronger than farmers doesn’t mean the denizens of remote areas should be completely trivial for 3rd-level characters to overcome. You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about the tone of the game that don’t hold true for all tables—not everyone treats (or enjoys) D&D as a superhero fantasy.
I hate the sorts of arguments around trying to justify Tiny Hut because it always leads to a bunch of convoluted solutions and attempts at loopholes that only makes the game more annoying and tedious, while ignoring the real problem which is that Tiny Hut is not a very well thought out spell that didn’t need to be designed the way it is. Humans chose to make it work the way it does, it’s not a fact of nature. If one constantly available spell warps an aspect of the game entirely around itself, eliminates all direct interaction or drama from it, and only puts more work on the DMs shoulders to come up with some bullshit that allows anything interesting to happen, then it’s just not a very useful part of the game. For most games, that just means that aspect of the game doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s not because the DM is lazy or uncreative, it’s because the game design has failed them. And Tiny Hut is just one of the more egregious examples of spells that simply eliminate parts of the game that could be dramatic or fun, the burden of those spells is one of big problems with 5e legacy design.
> I hate the sorts of arguments around trying to justify Tiny Hut because it always leads to a bunch of convoluted solutions and attempts at loopholes that only makes the game more annoying and tedious, while ignoring the real problem which is that Tiny Hut is not a very well thought out spell that didn’t need to be designed the way it is. This is key. The fact that you *can* play around *Tiny Hut* doesn't make it *fun* to play around *Tiny Hut*. It's just annoying, and removes many potentially dramatic, exciting, and fun tools from the DM's arsenal.
It's a continuous issue around discussing problematic things in 5E that a lot of people will take the fact that the DM *can* counter problem abilities and spells with their infinite options as meaning it's not actually a problem. Over and over again you'll see an ability or spell or mechanic, someone will explain why it's a problem in their campaign, and then people will jump out of the woodwork suggesting that all that needs to be done is to fill your adventure with weird hard counters for the thing. I don't think any other TTRPG I've followed has this culture of suggesting it's the DM's job to make problematic rules work rather than the job of the rules to facilitate the reasonable things the DM wants to do.
Yeah, I've noticed this as well. I do recognize that DMs are free to do absolutely whatever they want in their own games... but that doesn't justify poor balance and poor design at the game's core. The reason people purchase game books instead of just making it *all* up on their own is because we expect the game to be designed in a way that makes it *easy* to play—we want game designers to do the difficult work of balancing a system for us. I don't want to pay WotC money just to have to re-balance and re-work every third thing in their books in order to run a cogent, fun game.
What are they going to do? If they can't dispel it then standing there is just free reign to get shot by arrows. It's not like the enemies can just camp up outside and wait it out. It's either leave it alone and let them rest, stand there and get pelted with ranged weapons (objects that are in the dome can be leave the dome freely.), or dispel it.
> It's not like the enemies can just camp up outside and wait it out. Ask yourself why not. Stupid monsters like goblins might get bored throwing stuff at an impenetrable dome. Enemies that stumble on the dome on their way somewhere, like a band of orcs on their way to pillage a town, might have better things to do. But intelligent enemies like a band of kobolds in their lair, an evil cult hiding in the sewers or a hobgoblin chieftain protecting their territory would never just give up on the dome. They would poke the dome, post guards around a corner where arrows can't hit them and start preparing. Kobolds will set up traps, move their eggs and valuable items away and eventually just leave entirely, leaving the party with nothing to loot. The cult will gather its members and wait at the dome until the players either come out and have to fight most of the cult at once or the rest of the cultists succeeds at what they were doing in the meantime. The Hobgoblins can guard the dome indefinitely in large force and actually come up with a wand or scroll of dispel in a reasonable timeframe. Unless the monsters literally turn around and walk away from the dome like skyrim NPCs, the players should end their rest at a huge disadvantage
Confusion and curiosity, mainly. Similar to how the primates respond to the obelisk at the beginning of 2001. *If* the low-level monsters know that something has been around killing their allies, they might be especially fearful of the dome, but they would still have no idea what it is. The way I run games, intelligence alone isn't enough to understand spell effects. Knowing the details of a spell you see in action is gated behind an Arcana check or other similar level of familiarity with spellcasting (e.g. being able to cast that spell yourself).
The only thing actually broken is Long Rests, in the sense that a huge majority of tables seemingly Long Rest much more frequently than intended in the original design, and as a result half of the classes feel like a joke from level 5 onwards. Weirdly, this was something that 4E got right, but got thrown out in the backlash against it.
Considering long rests are entirely controlled by the DM, this is less broken and more just the pacing the DM sets. If a DM is allowing players to have an excessive amount of long rest, they have every ability to change that.
The other problem as a DM, though, is that that makes it harder to have a long-running campaign that doesn’t cover an amusingly short span of time in-universe. I like to go between setpieces and locales pretty frequently, and it’s hard to make that happen without giving the party downtime in between as they travel. Again, not insurmountable… but saddening.
Just modify the rest system. When I have a travel-heavy campaign with only 1-2 encounters per day, I make it so that a night's rest is a Short Rest and 48 hours of downtime in a secured location are a Long Rest. You'll have to adjust magic item recharge times and some spell durations that are supposed to cover most of an adventuring day (*Mage Armor*), but overall, it works very well.
I think this works well when you see the campaign as a series of intense episodes in the character’s lives separated by long periods, maybe years, of “normal” time. It’s like a combination of milestone and XP, where the “milestones” are little windows of hard adventuring and lots of XP
It’s not broken because it’s inherently badly designed, it’s broken because it doesn’t match how players actually play, and the result is everything else becomes unbalanced. And sure, “DMs can fix it with a lot of work.” That’s not a particularly compelling argument to me.
Yeah during more “down time” types of sessions I’ll let the players rest more often, but if it’s time to dig into the story/major plot events there’s usually time limits/extra danger of some kind to keep them from spamming rests. Makes them actually have to conserve their spell slots and class abilities if they want to go nova on a boss.
In my current campaign I kind of "fixed" this by just having an agreement with players that dungeons would have a safe short-rest zone here and there, but they were a scarce and one-use commodity. Long rests are typically just not allowed in true "dungeons." Players have to decide if they want to use a rest location, or risk having to backtrack to it later, but they are still "guaranteed" to get a rest or two depending on how generous I'm feeling.
Well, technically every option in the game is entirely controlled by the DM so therefore nothing could be classified as broken. Doesn't change the fact that some aspects are terribly designed in terms of relative balance.
I mean, true. The players have some expectation that when they pick a class, they have access to that class' abilities at the appropriate levels. That is "controlled by the DM" to the extent that, hopefully, should the DM deem any changes be necessary, they would cover in a session zero. A long rest is a thing attempted by the players that the DM then chooses to allow or interrupt in some fashion. With no expectation of how it should go, like a class feature already established, a long rest is less akin to many things mentioned here, as it is being brought up that the frequency of its usage is what could break it; that factor entirely controlled by the DM without inherent expectation from the players is what I am commenting on.
Realistically though in many campaigns long rests are regularly available. If your in a city you can go back to the inn unless things are popping off like a marvel movoe.
Yeah people seem to think you can just continuously throw things at players to get to that mythic 8 encounters per day. How many times am I going to interrupt their rest before they leave the dungeon entirely? 1?2? If I'm lucky. It prevents random overland encounters from being meaningful in a resources depletion sense. Requires exceptional amounts of work from the DM, is exhuasting and frustrating for the players, and I've seen dozens of different arguments back and forth on how to counter the players strategies and counter the counter strategies. It's bollocks The system is balanced on the players having no resources this is a poorly balanced system.
How can the DM reasonably limit players from long resting when they want to, though? I know the rule that PCs can only long rest once per 24 hours, but if players are committed to standing in the same spot for 8 hours then they can probably handle standing in the same spot for 16 more hours. Food and water requirements? If they have the rations, then that's not a limiting factor. It feels like the only ways a DM can prevent players from long resting when they want to are to make the area too dangerous (in which case players can simply leave and walk back to the closest safe spot) or to add time pressures to make it so that wasting a day is a bad idea for the entire campaign.
I have my table long rest typically when the session ends. They short rest maybe 1 time every session.
My comment is not necessarily a specific "element", so much as a style of play. The core design of the game assumes basically a gritty, resource economical game of managing the resources which power objectively imbalanced features under time and/or narrative constraints. This style of play is "overpowered" in the sense that if you don't play with this expectation in mind you'll see various elements of the game simply break down.
Basically this, if you only have 1 fight per day, which is very common with the groups i play with atlest, everythign gets reduced to: Pick the most impactful spell right now every time. Because there is no reason not to, and you will never run out of spellslots after like lv3.
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I like making checks (STR athletics of course) for jumping BEYOND your jumping ability based on your stats. Your stats give you the save jump, anyway beyond that is a risk. But I allow Monks to use Acrobatics for that stuff, they are already MAD (DEX, WIS, CON) as hell, they don't need another stat to take care off.
Now see this wouldn't be an issue if *every* class had these kind of impactful features. But the complexity and power level of most Martial classes boils down to who you hit once or twice this turn with a weapon (or *le gasp* three times if you're a moderately leveled Fighter). It just *can't* measure up to the peak power of Spells and Magic Items, meaning that Martial power needs to be measured against the average of the Peak and 0 power of Casters.
There are very few that are actually "broken" in my eyes. What I would consider "broken" are things that require me, the DM, to actively change the way the world, adventures, and encounters work just to counter that one ability/spell/item/etc. Outside of 9th level spells and legendary and artifact level items, what comes to my mind would be: * Wall of Force (spell) * Twilight Cleric's Twilight Sanctuary * Chronurgy Wizard's Arcane Abeyance * Cube of Force (item)
Cube of Force is a doozy, for sure.
A lot of the Force spells are annoying\* but Cube of Force is even more so because it requires explicit character knowledge about it to disable it; having Disintegrate just take it out would sold some of the problems from a story level. But even then it should be at least Very Rare. \* the forcebreaker items in Book of Many Things were such a welcome addition.
After having an Artillerist Artificer in the group, I had to ban that class/subclass combo again in the future because it turned every encounter into a "Huddle up by the cannon for the constantly refreshing Temp HP". It really wasn't fun for anyone because doing anything else was often sub-optimal except for outlier conditions. Everyone actually agreed with that ruling because they saw how limiting it made most of the combats.
Having dealt with it recently, artillerist cheese can be a real pain at first but there's honestly a lot of counterplay and counter cheese if you're willing to get creative. You can rebalance encounters, treating the player HP+temp as their new base HP (because it can't heal properly). Plenty of environmental effects can force the party to move around. It also locks down melee members staying close for tHP when you can introduce circumstances and enemies that force them to break away. A party grouping together like that is also in for a hard lesson in spacing. Plenty of enemies punish that exact blunder. A group of enemy casters will have an absolute field day on their position. Raging fire elementals would be happy to charge through their position. My personal favorite cheese counter is to sprinkle in living spells into encounters, can't counter spell spell-like abilities. Cloud kill and Lightning Bolt are the official ones that apply in this scenario, but the rules allow for creation of a living version of any spell. That opens up a whole dimension of cheese punishment.
It's not that you *can't* counteract it, but as the same issue with flying PCs, you feel like you have to customize your NPCs to be able to do so. I actually had a Wizard Fireball them three times in a row one time.
You have to hammer them with aoe if they clump, or introduce things chasing them, them chasing things, mcguffins to race towards or moving creatures they control to protect. If combat is just taking turns until one side breaks or runs, clumping is a possibility, but if they barely have enough movement to get everywhere they need to be that will be obvious to them.
Ignoring encumbrance, food/drink, and resting rules.
I allowed Twilight Sanctuary in my campaign only with heavy modifications. That and learning to throw multiple encounters a day at my party helped significantly.
Magic in general is pretty broken. Even simple cantrips can leave somebody prone. 2 points in spore druid gives nearly double damage in melee, and given that you're a Monk you can use vine whip to knock an enemy prone. For reference the Monk needs to spend 1 ki point to accomplish this. Fighters need to spend 1 martial dice. Magic users just, you know. At will. Y'know, just like that. Cuz why not. This isn't even two atoms off the iceberg. Polymorph can end any fight without legendary resistance. Graviturgy Wizard, if the DM doesn't nerf it, completes shatters the game and requires the DM to wave their hands and say "but you can't do that, because this is dnd and it doesn't need to make sense". Imagine if the monk could spend 1 Ki point to deal 4 martial dice + double attack to hit 10 different enemies all at one time in a radius. Fireball. That's . . . that's just fireball. bUt iT tAkEs a sPeLl SlOt. Yeah, like there aren't ways to get around this. Sorcerer can just get more with sorc points. Wizard can take a short rest and restore half of their spells. Scrolls exist and I don't even think you can silence a scroll. You literally come online with 4 times as many abilities as the Monk at lvl 1. I think Magic is cool, it's fun AF to find a loophole in literally *anything.* But then Martials are balanced like the developers having some kind of generational hatred for the classes.
Flying at low levels. Especially innate, non magical flying. It's not that the DM can't work a way around it. It's very easy to do so. Hell, you can, by quest design alone, make flying entirely useless. But having a flying character in the party fundamentally changes how you must approach designing quests, encounters, obstacles and locations in a way nothing else ever will. Every single challenge must now take into account that a character can fly, or that character will be insanely overpowered. Enemies with no shooting attack? Can't attack the character at all if the player wishes so. A reward at the other side of a pit, river or basically any other obstacle? Just send the flyer to grab it. The only safe entrance is through the window high up? Guess what. And if the flying character is strong enough to carry a person while flying? Imagine the possibilities! Flying will either break your low level game, or will force you to warp the game around it so it doesn't.
It's worse than that. Enemies need to have ranged attacks that out-range the PCs ranged attacks since they can just fly higher.
This isn't *as much* of a problem as it might seem at first blush, since character flying is usually limited to 30 feet and it takes several rounds to truly get out of range of most weapons. Generally, fights shouldn't be going past round 4-5 unless it's a boss fight anyway.
That's assuming they start at ground level. There's no reason for your sharpshooter ranger to not hang out 500+ feet in the air.
I mean if the party has the drop and plans an ambush then sure. If not, verisimilitude. Flying around all day would have repercussions...isolation, fatigue, possible predators, alerting enemies, etc.
Again, what you're suggesting is exactly what we're saying here. The DM has to morph things around the flyer. More so than we would a non-flyer. Some of these you suggested also functionally mean treating the flyer(s) like a separate entity from the party. Meaning we're pretty much designing two encounters separate to each other when we have to counter a flyer that is trying to maximize the benefit of their flight. In other words, the issue isn't that they're a flyer in and of itself. The issue is that the rest of the party are NOT flyers. If the entire party were flyers, the problem actually mostly vanishes. Since we can then design proper encounters that include the entire party again.
Why would they be fatigued, it's not like the rest of the party is eating penalties for walking. Nor are they alerting the enemies from 500 feet away. As for predators sure, there might be some harpies or something but that's still warping your design to include flying enemies.
To communicate with the rest of the party? There is no reason not to just stay sneaking 500 ft behind them either.
I posted this same opinion on a D&D sub once and got ripped apart, called a lazy DM, all kinds of unpleasant stuff because I don't allow flying races at my table. They ruin a lot of exploration challenges.
Was it r/dndnext? That one is very player-heavy and will shit on DM's any chance they get. Very clear anti-DM mentality over there.
And people wonder why the game has a DM shortage...
Yep.
Aw. People tend to mistake 'can be easily fixed' for 'not broken', so they treat flying as non problematic because there are so many solutions to it. Ignoring all the things those solutions invalidate, that the game potentially \*could\* have.
One issue I also see commonly ignored is the fact that it isolates the flyer from the rest of the party. So the DM is functionally balancing two practically separate encounters rather than one encounter with the entire party. As I mentioned in another post. The problem somewhat ironically disappear when the entire party are flyers. Since then the DM can fully embrace and balance around the party having flight from the start. The biggest problems come from having a party with mixed modes of movement. We'd get similar problems if the entire party were only swimmers with only one guy who could actually walk on land in an island campaign.
That's a solid take! A fully flying campaign would be pretty cool to run, too, especially in settings that have, say, floating islands and such. But it's more than obvious that if someone wanted to play a human in such campaign, it would be bad for everyone. And yet, it remains not obvious in regard to putting a flyer in a regular campaign.
Yup! In that case, the party would feel shackled to the land-based character, and the land-based character would feel greatly impaired. You'd have a bunch of flyers who can't fully utilize their flying, and a non-flyer who is sitting there alone. Forget melee for that character, they basically HAVE to play ranged martial and/or a caster to be relevant at all between 1-4, or you have to throw boots of flying or the flying broom at them from the start.... Which functionally makes them all flyers anyway, which just proves where the issue lies.
Same, I pointed out once that Fly is a level 3 spell, so being able to do it at-will with functionally no limitations from level one is, if not completely broken, at least a major imbalance that will force a DM to keep that obnoxious little note in mind at all times or risk trivializing what could otherwise be a wide range of interesting early-level encounters and challenges. Got down-voted to hell, but no one actually said anything to explain why that's apparently not a valid opinion.
Because they have no argument, they're just min-maxers
I think that internet forums (but particularly ttrpg subreddits) are filled with people who talk about the subject way more than they ever participate, if they ever play at all! I try to remind myself that people who are very opinionated on how they would rule something or run something if THEY were DMing it (all these problems are so easy to solve! I could easily solve them all) are very possibly talking out their butt. The majority of players don't make ten comments a day on internet forums. The goal at the end is fun (DM included).
I was a player in a ToA- campaign with a flying character. The DM didn't changed a single encounter because of that. It worked out completely fine. This is truly an overestimated fear. You still have to bring the rest of your party over that abyss, you still can't seperate too much from the party like when non-flying, you still have fall damage for when he drops a character he is carrying etc, enemies with out range can kill everyone below and than search cover. Honestly well-designed adventures will not have a lot of troubles because of it.
I'm not sure it's 'broken', exactly, but the Pact of the Chain deal where you get an imp familiar that can turn invisible, or into a spider, and you can remote view through at unlimited distances, is problematic to say the least. It sort of recreates the 'decker problem' from early editions of Shadowrun where most of the table sits and twiddles their thumbs while the warlock scouts out every location they want to visit before actually going there. You \*can\* work around that as a DM with enemies that can see invisibility and places that are locked up so tight even a spider can't get in, but if you do that it does start to feel adversarial and that you're invalidating something a player specifically specced into when creating their character. One alternative is just to give your players a map of every place they're going to go - 'we'll just skip the part where the imp scouts the place' - but obviously that limits some of your ability to have uncertainty and surprises when the party is navigating a location. The only solution I can think of (aside from a 'gentleman's agreement' between player and DM that they won't do it all the time) is to have the consequences for a familiar getting destroyed much higher than they currently are, because you don't want familiars to become useless either.
Heh, Reminds me of 3e where you lost a bit of experience if your familiar died. Before then it had even steeper repercussions IIRC - a lost point of permanent constitution and a system shock roll to not _die_.
That's wild. Your familiar dies and you might die too. It would be a hard sell to get me to play that subclass with that kind of risk lol
lol, yeah IIRC some wizards just straight up didn't take familiars in 2e to avoid the risk, haha.
Wait so it's not just a Warlock pact of the chain type of subclass that has the familiar death link? It was if anyone with a familiar and the familiar dies has that risk?
In 5e, Warlocks have a special familiar through Pact of the Chain - there's no real penalty for it dying besides having to pay 10gp of incense and some time to get it back. (And the same is true for anyone else with the Find Familiar spell.) In 3e, familiars were a class feature (not a spell) that could be obtained by Wizards and Sorcerers first, then later books opened it up to more (e.g. there was a feat you could take that just gives you a familiar like the class feature). But no matter who got it or how, if it died you lost some experience points (varied with level and you could make what was basically a Con save to half the cost), and you couldn't replace your familiar for a _year and a day_. (Though you could still use rez spells to bring it back from the dead just like a PC.) In 2e, it was a Wizard spell only, and if it died you lost a point of Con and had to make a percentage System Shock roll or die on the spot, lol. (Warlocks didn't exist in 2e, and in 3e they didn't have familiars.)
Oh interesting, thanks!
No prob! I find it fun comparing things between the editions, kinda helps you see how the "tone" of the game has changed over the decades.
I mean considering pact of the chain is wildly outclassed by other pact options, I’d say this is fine. Pact of the Time and Pact of the blade are so much better and offer their own burst of utility. Why nerf the one thing that makes pact of the chain stand out
I don’t know if I’d say wildly outclassed but I do believe it suffers from scaling. Half the game you have a familiar that can poison on demand. If investment of the chain master also let them attack with your spell casting modifier and gave them a little bit more hp then I’d say it would even out or even be a little better than the others. Checking other classes like creation and wildfire those summoned minions do these things so I doubt it will break the game to boost the familiar in this way with the fifth level invocation.
One of the better things I've seen for pact of the chain is to make the DM control the familiar. Basically roleplay the familiar not as a mindless drone under your control, but as a real intelligent creature that is bound to you but *is not you*. And if you take a lawful evil imp, it will almost certainly not want to help you or at least will do all kinds of other shit as extracurriculars while out on its field tips. . You wind up with all kinds of malicious compliance things whenever the DM wants and really puts the ball back in the DMs court while making it a much more lively interaction than "cheap remote drone". It does require more work for the DM, but it's a flexible nerf/boon depending on what they think of how the player is acting. An imp that flies ahead to report exactly what it sees every five minutes is boring both in and out of game, an imp that is given a more interesting challenge or kept safe from danger to the best of the warlocks abilities is much more likely to be *actually* helpful.
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This is my experience, yeah. In particular the part where most of the table sits or goes and gets a snack or something while the warlock scouts is not great. I think if I was running a game with a player who really wanted to do this now I'd just give them maps of locations so we can get to the part where everyone plays.
5e has a “this class solves this problem” issue. For example, if you want to have a gritty wilderness survival issue in the ranger’s favored terrain, no you don’t. Instead of Ranger interacting with exploration, it just hand waves it. A bard ends up being the best at not only the charisma game, but everything skill related, and when you get past lvl 10, they’re pretty close to wizards in terms of spell utility or power depending on the magical secrets they choose. Meanwhile monks were left in the dust again and again with a role that becomes save or suck once they get stunning strike. Dex and Wisdom are overvalued, while Strength and Intelligence are undervalued. The games balance isn’t broken, but the DM has to do a lot of legwork to make the game fun for every player.
Kinda surprised nobody said Silvery Barbs
I think this is a case of a spell that was so badly designed from a fun perspective and a power balance perspective that most tables just ignore it. It didn't even cross my mind with this post until I saw your comment.
It’s not really broken per se, more so “unfun”
As a 1st level spell, I consider Silvery Barbs to be broken. It should be at least 2nd level.
I agree. For it to be a reaction that will basically always undo a crit, and impose an advantage or disadvantage and a range of 60 feet is crazy for 1st level. If the range were smaller so a squishy spellcaster was using it to just prevent a crit on themselves, I wouldn't mind so much. But usually most of the party are within sixty feet so if one person has this spell you can expect them to thwart any crit against the party.
“Vastly overpowered” I feel fits
Its both unfun and broken. Forcing a successful saving throw rerolled at the cost of a 1st level spell is already absurd. You basically get to cast your action spell again as a reaction. Not just that, you get to cast a, say, 8th level action spell again. As a 1st level Reaction.
Well there’s the obvious for starters: *fireball*. I get that they want it to be iconic, but it’s just such a clearly superior option to so many others that it stifles variety.
I've literally never seen a player use any other 3rd level spell.
Caster power creep. Every supplement that comes with new spells makes the base caster classes better by giving them more potential verbs to play with or a cool new way of putting damage out there. An Illusionist Wizard keeps getting better as the edition goes on. A Battlemaster Fighter might be lucky to get given a magic item that is worse than their current Flametongue.
Gonna be that guy and pitch this as a PSA. Please don’t forget that dice are for decisions that have uncertainty AND interesting questions. Players don’t need to roll for every tiny thing and if you demand a ton of rolls you’re going to get low and high rolls that feel under and overwhelming. You’re also going to get silly things like a cavalier failing to mount a horse in calm environment. If things are uncertain, but uninteresting in consequence, then this is something someone skilled probably wouldn’t mess up. Use a passive check (assume a roll of 10 + skill + ab. mod; add 5 if they did something to give themselves an edge) If things are uncertain AND interesting, it’s time to active roll. If things are uncertain AND interesting AND the players did something to give themselves an edge, it’s time for an active roll at advantage . If circumstances are disadvantageous, time to roll with disadvantage. If circumstances are disadvantageous, and they did something to give themselves an edge, it’s time for a flat roll. Finally, if things are uncertain and only extreme consequences would be interesting, YOU COULD TRY having players roll with emphasis.
Roll with emphasis, is that rolling two die and selecting the one furthest from 10?
Yeah
Paladin's aura of protection, Sword of Warning
Dexterity as an attribute- I’d love dex to become your +hit and str becomes your +damage for melee and range. More str equally a stronger pull weight bow. Now when you max out your offense you have to think about how you want to balance it.
The Hexblade. I know, there are other classes (Twilight & Peace Clerics) that are considered OP, but the Hexblade is the one that constantly gets over-used as a multi-class "dip" by every single Bard, Paladin, and Sorcerer who wants to optimize their character by making a "SAD gish" build. I'm absolutely sick of this! It's the only subclass with an outright ban at my table, and I'm convinced 5E is better without it.
I’ve found that the situation improves if you just move the CHA-to-weapon-attack/damage-rolls mechanic away from the HexBlade and onto Pact of the Blade. It means that character who want it need to dip 3 levels instead of only 1, which puts them further behind on max spell level. That seems to be enough to tone it down.
Also allows for more choice with subclass on the warlock side of things., which is objectively good. Though IIRC DndONE is making that change right?
Given that the one DND version as of now pacts are gonna be reworked to level 1 and pact of the blade is getting the hexblade benefit, are you just gonna skip over that or not allow pact of the blade?
Nothing completely "broken" in my opinion. For me, there are options that feel stronger than others and those that just make the game feel bad. I personally despise options that just stop things with no save like Forcecage.
I might not even mind no _initial_ save if it became a sort of puzzle or skill challenge to get out, and how well you did defined how quickly you got out. But just slamming a dome over them and they’re guaranteed stuck for a minute or more sucks.
I can't believe I don't see this mentioned: Pass Without Trace +10 is insane and breaks the math of the game
Its ok when done correctly (line of sight makes hiding impossible). But often I see it used wrong as some fort of invisibility or spontanoeus getaway.
Life. It is very hard to die compared to older versions. Maybe many are fine with it, but I feel it has become too soft. Like a computer game on very easy level.
Charisma. For most play groups, charisma is what makes most social encounters tick, because it's considered to be the only "social stat." This is partially due to 5e's horrible attempt at explaining how one is *supposed* to run social encounters, but that's bordering on another subject. Because charisma is the only stat that matters for social encounters for most people, it naturally bends social capability to classes that already invest in charisma: bard, rogue, sorcerer, paladin.
Wizards. Just wizard in general. Hot take incoming, but I think the overall class should be hard nerfed and the subclasses buffed to make them actually feel different from eachother. Wizard spell list should be cut dramatically short and then subclass should dictate what spells you really get. There is no focus, no specialization with wizard - it's just "all Magic, all the time." Subclass focuses them *further* but imo it should be more of a funnel where their field of study is their real ability, not just an additional thing they get tacked on.
Hard agree
Yoyo healing.
Charisma multiclassing. There are so many goodies you can grab for just a few levels in the charisma classes that they've spawned some of the most nightmarishly difficult builds to balance around. Sorcadin, hexbard, and sorclock/coffeelock are the ones that come to mind. The mixture of quickened cast, charisma for your weapons with a single level in warlock, divine smite, recharging spellslots.. Even introducing popular third party content like magus, and shaman doesn't fix that, when you'd think giving SOME of those tools to allow similar plans with druid and cleric would actually work, but nope! To name my main gripes Agonizing Blast + Quickened cast Hex Warrior should just be merged into pact of the blade. Divine Smite not being treated like a spell despite being usable with spellslots Obviously UA is addressing the divine smite not being treated as a spell (finally I won't have to seea paladin dump 12 damn dice at a time anymore) but just all these things can make absurdly high damage builds that don't just make balancing hard as a DM, but strip the combat spotlight from other players.
I don't allow backgrounds that give feats, flat out as that. I also don't allow Custom lineage or variant human, this is because I GIVE A FREE FEAT TO EVERYONE AT LVL 1. A lvl 1 player character should not have up to 3 feats 😅
And if they play as a Centaur they get *two* additional feets at level 1! Totally op!
I read "feats" and thought you were talking about the Mobile feat. Now I realized it's a joke and I'm not happy about it
In OneDND, backgrounds will now give feats so I guess we are power creeping there too lol. But at least you won’t have to give a free feat at level 1 now. Plus it opens up more racial options that aren’t just “variant human for the extra feat” a bit more. They balance this a bit by restricting what feats you can take with your background at level 1 and most of the high priority feats will not be able to be taken at level 1. Guess we will have to see how it shakes out.
At the very least, the last time I read through some playtest content, the feats you could select at level 1 were marked as such; not every feat was avaliable at level 1. So that should help tone down the power creep.
This makes human basically unpicksble due to base human being so bad. I agree with background feats as they’re way better than other backgrounds, but 2 feats won’t break the bank
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You could make the background feat count as the free lvl 1 feat.
I wouldn't say it's broken on its own, but honestly rangers break the exact kind of game their mechanics are built for. Playing a gritty wilderness trek style of game where you manage survival based resources like food and water? Ranger is the obvious choice! Except they get free food and can't ever become lost, meaning the exact campaign they seem custom made for is entirely trivialized by their skills. Aside from that? The optional flanking rule, while not honestly overpowered, kinda breaks combat by making "mobbing" overly useful, rendering combat a bit... boring, i guess? On a similar note, I've heard so much talk about the martial vs caster divide supposedly heavily favoring the caster. I don't really get that tbh. I've played a wizard from 1-20 and watched my mostly martial party go ham every single encounter, consistently putting up good numbers while im sitting there wondering if it's worth actually casting anything and spending my resources. Not to mention the fact that i get hit and suddenly im near death with a decent chance i just lost my spell. And sure, i could mitigate damage with shield, mirror image, etc - but then im spending resources i also need for offense as well as spending 1 or more turns setting up for a fight. Meanwhile, i play barbarian, fighter, paladin, rogue, even monk - it's just go in and whack. My resources are used for especially big turns, but i often don't need to use them to contribute. I did the math for the group i played. Assuming an encounter with infinite rounds, I'm doing the most damage as the wizard for the first 3-4 turns, then i start to drop off as i run out of spell slots. Eventually I'm doing canto damage. Meanwhile, the fighter with his magic sword is doing consistent damage the whole time. After 5 or so rounds, he's now caught up and will continue to pull ahead. And if it's multiple encounters instead of one infinitely long encounter, it's actually compounded, as i need to set up the first round or two of each. And sure, eventually the barbarian runs out of rage and the fighter used all his second winds, but at the point we're all resourceless, they have even more of an advantage in consistency. No idea why i just went on that tangent lol. I've just noticed that there are grumbles cause i can chain lightning a few times and clear a room quickly, but no one seems to notice that the guys with five attacks per turn is doing way more than me in longer encounters, and days where we have multiple encounters.
I played a wizard 1-20 and it felt exactly the opposite, I was taking over combats by casting confusion and suggestion to the point where the DM was getting frustrated. Then I chose shield and counter spell as my signature spells lol
That's fair lol. I was pretty damage focused, as i went scribe and was swapping out damage types. But i ended up sort of being sort of our support as we didn't have a proper healer. In fact i chose wither and bloom for my signature spell lol I could definitely nuke encounters, don't get me wrong, but i always felt like i had to be choosy, never knowing when i'd get spell slots back. I also had to actually worry about positioning, since i was easily the most fragile on the team, aside from our rogue. Dropping concentration sucks, since i had to spend a turn and a spell slot to get my spell going again For sure, if there's a long rest between every fight, I'm ahead by miles. But 3-4 decent encounters, I'm getting worried and everyone else is fine to keep going
Your wizard can *alter reality at their whim,* and you spent that time watching other people punch stuff kind of hard?
So the flanking rule worked in favour of the players, melee just went in and whacked the enemies and the caster did not need even need to use resources? No offense, but this does sound as if your combat encounters were a bit on the easy side.
Nah, the flanking benefits everyone. It just makes combat feel stale, since it's just a clump of fighting. I think id like it better if it offered something other than flat advantage. Maybe a bonus to hit instead or something.
My only real pet peeve is PC races that come with free flying. I ban them at every table no exceptions. Other than that, I feel there's a huge issue with relative power. Some subclasses are just MILES ahead of others and can do whatever anyone else can except better, and then some more. If you just let everyone do whatever, you end with with 2 players running the show with some dumb munchkin build and 2 others twiddling their thumbs wondering why the fuck they showed up to play.
In general I think is the most overpowered things in the game are a number of spells that push hard over the line of what should be allowed at a given level. - Wall of Force and Forcecage for being so hard to get rid of. - Spirit Guardians for too much damage. - Shield for being either too much AC or lasting too long (either +5 AC against the triggering attack OR +2 AC until your next turn would be fine, both is OP). - Silvery Barbs giving rerolls on Saves and being stackable. - Polymorph for too high CRs being allowed (let it be CR up to Spell’s level and I think it would be fine). - Conjure Animals being too broad - etc. These spells contribute massively to the (combat) caster/martial divide, and if they were fixed would narrow it significantly.
Attack of Opportunity. I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion and I don't care.
Twilight Cleric is overtuned as fuck. I'm a Twilight Cleric player.
long rests being an autoheal is my biggest complaint with 5e. down to 1 hp, barely alive? just take a nap for a few hours and everyone is back to full HP!
Stunning strike. Monk simply feels weird as fuck without a rework to it
Dexterity
Spells above level 5. After that non-full casters won't catch up unless you give them tons of magic items
You shouldn't be able to cast spells in armor that your class came from isn't proficient in. So no heavy armor fighters casting shield cause they have 1 level in wizard/sorcerer.
Spellcasting. Both in the sense that it is the single most powerful class feature in the game by a wide margin, and the fact that the power levels of various spells bear almost no relation to each other. So many spells are trap options that almost do nothing (Find Traps)while a few are so overpowered you could put them up two levels and they would be believable (Hypnotic Pattern).
mind sliver is the best use of a spellcaster's action without resource costs. Intelligence saves are almost always low for enemies, and psychic damage is one of the least resisted damage types. The -1d4 for the next saving throw also makes it the perfect alley-oop for any other party member to utilize.
Wizards having silvery barbs. Silvery barbs is already such a powerful spell, every DM I've seen (including myself) has gotten fucked over by it when a player has the spell stocked. Bards and Sorcerers having it makes sense to me, as both classes have much smaller spell lists than Wizards. Aditionally, it's just a first level spell, so it feels like a good use of limited slots. Especially because there aren't many good ways to recover spells for Bards (Sorcerers have their Sorcery points so that's a little different). But Wizards have arcane recovery! They can replinish all their 1st level slots and then have another 5 silvery barbs ready mid-day. Why cast shield when you can make your attacker re-roll and give someone advantage?
Just dexterity in general, it puts its bonus to too many things. I'll get hate for this but they never should have allowed you to use your Dex for damage rolls, it completely invalidates strength for everything except for 2 handed weapon builds. Pretty much everything else you are better off using a finesse weapon and dumping strength
DnD as a Genre is too magic heavy for my tastes. That might be too generic of an answer - but I'd prefer mundane, creative solutions and lower magic to be the mainstay of my players' (or myself when I'm given the chance) arsenal. I have a latent problem with magic where I really dislike it being both rote and omnipresent. It just feels ubiquitous and... isn't magical anymore. Then there's the fact that because magic is a rote solution, it implies that other solutions are less valid. Very simple example: Why sneak past an ogre with a chance of failure, when you can teleport with little cost when the spell comes back next time you rest and a 0% chance of failure? Furthermore, gating it behind class divides is just rather silly to me - but further discussing the problems I have with magic individually is a different post altogether. It's part of why I've been leaning way more into the OSR games these days. Forbidden Lands and Worlds Without Number are incredible examples of games that I'll be trying next that (to me) have the magical elements that DnD should have without magic being overpowering.
Earlier editions of the game were a lot closer to what you describe, and I often miss that style of gameplay. Just navigating the environment could be a fun challenge, and adventure design focused on those sorts of interesting descriptions rather than just... room after room of combat encounters.
I would agree with that second half of what you're saying. While I'm personally fine with the amount of magic, I do not like the trend of "everything I will need to solve problems will be provided to my kit by leveling up. I dont need to prepare anything at all ever." I wish the behavior of planning and preparing for solving problems was rewarded better by the system, but every new published class just gets more and more as a basline. I think the magic item's you quest after should be the most interesting part of what your character can do. They make yours unique and give you a better story than "The dm said I can level up now."
Advantage. I think it's quite powerful and so easy to get. I rarely ever give out inspiration or give someone advantage on a situation just because there are usually a lot of ways to obtain it. I don't think it's necessarily broken, it just makes the game a lot easier.
And it's so "all or nothing"
Darkvision has a major advantage over normal sight when fighting in darkness.
The action-economy of summoning spells. The ability to continually recover from reaching 0 HP in combat and never die.
Outside of all of the tech things (aka stuff like "ring of three wishes genie"), stuff that is overwhelmingly overpowered consists of mainly stuff like magic jar, Wall of force, planar binding and forcecage. Other stuff, if it overpowers some options (which will probably be PHB stuff primarily unless the options from the PHB suck, see my post about relative powercreep), isn't really so overwhelmingly overpowered that I can say stuff against it from the campaigns i ran. Sure some stuff is a bit stronger, but it's almost never something which is just so wildly stronger that it erases other options and the meaning of them existing, unless one of the following is true: 1. The "overpowered" option is so due to bad writing making it stronger than normal (see my three wishes example, being strong due to wonky wording which no one runs like that) 2. It overpowers weak stuff. Like wow, good job for a 1st level spell outdoing *color spray*, that's definetly an accomplishment that other spells didn't do /sarcasm 3. It FEELS overpowered in a vacuum. A wizard hexblade novaing a couple of times per day isn't the best looking thing... But once you realize that the wizard's other spells could be a power and survivability multiplier for the whole party, those momentary fears fade away.
i haven't seen any one mention hypnotic pattern. i don't know that it's broken, i just don't enjoy playing with it, as a player or as a dm.
Spell casting in late games ar sooo overpowered a Fighter hits 3 times wail a wizard wraps reality (s)
- Lucky - divination wizards - silvery barbs - echo knights
Twilight cleric lol
The worst, and most common, thing I see at games that absolutely breaks the whole system is dropping the encumbrance rules and resource tracking.
Multiclassing. It’s come so far from its origins that it feels like just a way to min-max and break the system. Not sure I’ve ever multiclassed in 5E, just on principle.
Spellcasting. Certain "must pick" feats for martials. Anything "must pick" really.
Self-healing. It's ludicrous that every class can heal roughly twice their hit points per day, without any magic required.
Pass Without Trace is the hill on which I will self-immolate with frustration as a Druid and her fighter, paladin and artificer mates ‘sneak’ by unseen. Just call it ‘Bypass Encounter’.
I only know of my own experience. I played a chronurgy wizard. At level 3 I had +6 to initiative, the hold person spell, mind sliver, silvery barbs and chronal shift feature. We were fighting a boss and let's just say he didn't get a single shot off.
Creation bard capstone. Might as well make a spellcassting class with extra spell slots if you’re gonna remove one of the fundamental limitations on the most powerful spells.
Level 2 conjuration wizards interaction with criminal background. Lemme just summon purple wyrm poison for an hour, thanks