5th edition reportedly imbalanced

My son and his group have decided after playing for a time... that 5th edition is ummm sloppily designed. They came from playing 4e to 5e, so it might be an expectation thing. The ability of my sons paladins to effectively pull the mages old trick of burning a ton of resources when they need to and similar things does not impress them. The group actually considers his character broken by pure accident.

My basic response on hearing this was ... you have to take balance very seriously when designing these games or No Duh.

Anecdotally speaking I've heard much the same from others in my area. I managed to snag a group of play-testers largely because they wanted a 'new shiny' and 5E was just too imbalanced and relied way too much on having the DM do all the heavy lifting when it came to actually figuring out what a balanced fight or how to balance PC's abilities against each other.

As someone whose main game groups are largely married couples with young children, the notion of having to treat prepping the weekly games as a second job because a designer couldn't be bothered to do actually do their job and then tried to sell forcing that work off onto the DM's as a FEATURE is offensive to me. Its hard to get new DM's when the position feels like work instead of fun (like the players get to have).

Another group has decided to play Palladium Fantasy because 'if the game is gonna be unbalanced anyway we may as well have a cool setting to play in.' Admittedly, if you stick to just the Fantasy material (i.e. don't throw in anything from Rifts) the system is a bit dated, but the balance isn't nearly as out of kilter between mundane and magical classes as it is in 3E.

Beyond the marketing-speak of 'exceeding expectations' I have no idea how well 5E has actually sold (or if its sales even matter to Hasbro beyond keeping the IP alive for trademark purposes), but its not doing well in this area (all I've heard from people who actually bought the books is buyer's remorse).

Meanwhile, you may not hear much from the 4E crowd, but as has been mentioned by myself and others previously, there's enough material already available to basically run the system for a lifetime and since the rules are reasonably well balanced and re-fluffing is encouraged there's not a lot of need to spread house-rules all over the interwebs.

One thing that IS telling to me is that after hovering at barely forty 4E products available on Drive-ThruRPG for nearly a year, in the months following 5E coming out in full (basically since the start of this year), the number of products available has shot up to over 90 (and they only release about four products a week) while the number of non-4E digital releases has dropped. I don't think that's an accident and I wonder how the sales dollars for the digital 4E products are tabulated in terms of the D&D division's quarterly sales (i.e. do they have to distinguish between those and their 5E sales or are they just adding theremaining DDi subscriptions revenue and digital purchases of 4E material into the general 'profits' column to improve the apparent performance of 5E?).

One of the things that makes the 4e crowd nicer is they don't feel the need to bash the other systems. But just tote their system's features.

5e....unbalanced? I never would have guessed! Especially when you knock certain classes back to MBAs, give others limited but powerful resources, and let others just continue on like 4e.

5e is just a retroclone with a few gimmicks. Imbalance is a feature. It's what the loudest voices wanted. And serious open play testing never really got beyond 4th or 5th level, so you most people didn't experience the "spell casters and sidekicks" portion of game play, though I don't understand how you wouldn't see it coming. And the dumping everything back on the DM thing is just... blagh.

Do you ever wonder what would have happened if the OGL never existed? If everyone and their brother couldn't take the SRD and make their own game (crappy or otherwise, based on their house-ruled version of x edition) and release it to the world? Would we have ever gotten 4e?

TjD

Chris24601 wrote:

One thing that IS telling to me is that after hovering at barely forty 4E products available on Drive-ThruRPG for nearly a year, in the months following 5E coming out in full (basically since the start of this year), the number of products available has shot up to over 90 (

Did you see what the digital releases are? Many are issues of Dungeon and Dragon. For $5 each!!!! You could just get a 1 month subscription to DDI and download them all in PDF for like $10 or so. They are still missing a bunch of books that I would love to have but rather digitally than on the shelf, just for convenience.
For me, when I am interested in looking up some information about something in particular, I find it much easier open up PDF's and jump the the relevant pages then to pull the book from the shelf or stack of bunch and flip to the right page. It's also great to put the PDF's on a thumb drive or in my google drive and be able to pull them up at work during lunch or other down times. Fortunately, there are PDF's available in "the wild" and I don't feel bad about grabbing one for a book I own - fair use and all.

Now if I could just run 2 different games out of my Steam library on different computers at the same time without taking one offline...

TjD

I was hoping for the best, mixed feelings really, the we took balance seriously thing really is a feature for 4e, but how a DM flies the game can have a big difference too. In 4e a DM who really hit em with lots of minions would skew the balance differently than one who rarely used them. I had no problems with the original battlerager vigor but others did for instance.

5e has all the problems of 3e for all the same reasons.

They refused to learn from their mistakes, and ran from anything related to 4e to the point of making shit up that did not work even though they could have lifted a subsystem strait from 4e that was known to work.

Indeed, they even ran from the things that even some of the haters hailed as great improvements... namely interesting monsters with all their stats in a single block and balanced sufficiently well that you could use a simple encounter budget system to assemble your encounters.

The only difference between a goblin and an orc back to their hit dice and weapon choice. Spell-like abilities you have reference in another book are back. Swingy monsters whose CR doesn't remotely give the DM a picture of how dangerous or easy a monster might be is back. Having to multiply the creature's XP by the ratio of PCs to Monsters in the encounter is back.

The main reason people I know around here aren't playing 5E is that the imbalance and resulting increase in DM workload is beyond what people with jobs and families can reasonably put into the effort (its back to being practically a part-time job instead of being able to whip up a night's fun in an hour).

I also think the revelation by WotC that their primary avenue for releasing new game content is going to be their periodic adventure campaigns and that only options relevant to that campaign will be released and only the core and those options will be available for organized play had killed a lot of the enthusiasm, at least in my area.

I'm not surprised, but I am a little disheartened. On the other hand... more market share for me eventually.

The DM/group who declared 5th edition wildly imbalanced decided to rip Feats from it thinking they are the source of the imbalance. My sons accidentally over powered character had been one of the sparks which inspired this determination as his paladin was able to solo enemies of levels higher than the whole party was able to tangle with.

When the whole "D&D Next" was announced, they said it would be an edition that would appeal to everyone. My response was that if you make a product designed to please everyone, you will only end up pleasing no one.

I don't have a lot of contact with other gamers in my area. Being employed full-time-and-more AND being a parent leaves little time for me to go out "into the wild" and see what other gamers are doing. But I hear these little stories on the internet about how a lot of people that are playing 5e are starting to see that it is more poorly designed than they thought it would be. Unfortunately, the phrase that I hear being thrown around with it is "at least it is better than 4E"... /sigh

My son is talking about translating their characters in to 4e... so they can clean break with 5e ...We are planning on seeing if we can get Character Builder on his laptop and I might buy him some extra 4e books

We haven't played into the upper levels yet but so far from levels 1 thru 8 (twice) we've found 5e quite enjoyable and not unbalanced at all. Every character in our groups ranging from 1-7 characters per session adds to the team and no one seems to get "left behind." The RP aspects of 5e are quite good, best "in character" sessions we've had in years.

I dont know that Roberts group has gone very high either he was talking at level 5 having his character able to personally take out a bad guy intended for a party of 3 levels higher and in effect his character was able to steal the functional lime-light regularly without trying.

We ran adventures for 5E with our local adventures league (through level 5) and we didn't notice any balance issues. What we did run into was a lot of young people who kept trying to break the rules in order to do things they weren't allowed to in according to the system, like trying to raise the dead before you hit level 5 with our necromancer. I will say this about 5E, there's a lot of stuff in the DMG that still needs to be flushed out, I certainly don't mind playing it as a player, but I found that I didn't enjoy DMing 5E as much as I did for 4E. And granted, I know a lot of it had to deal with the people I was playing with.