this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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While I fully agree that The Wizard On The Coast (and by association Hasbro) has been increasingly scummy this past decade (I kind of blame Pathfinder for salvaging the glorious mess that was 3/3.5e):
People have been angry about balance since there were holy wars over whether AD&D was "for " or not. And it is largely inherent to the nature of any tabletop game. You have two types of people who tend to gravitate toward those. The pure role players who just want to vibe and then the people who go full munchkin/sicko and "ruin it for everyone". Which leads DMs/GMs/Refs to either enable the latter or add a bunch of house rules to negate it because saying "no" isn't a thing*.
And that is perfectly fine. Again, we've been doing that for over twenty (... thirty? forty?) years at this point. And it has nothing to do with the health of the company.
*: One of my favorite "Jesus christ, " house rules is to add a personnel cap to Battletech. That negates the reality that the "meta" would not be giant mechs/rocket magnets and would actually be jeeps with guns on the back.
Ah, but I have to offer some nuance there- Balance is actually pretty good from levels 2 to 8 (level 1 HP issues lmao).
You're absolutely right that RP chillers and munchkin power gamer builds are two entirely different breeds, but my point is that as a DM, I've seen firsthand what happens if you run a party through an adventure that goes 1-11. AC breaks down at higher levels because hit rates increase so much faster, Saving Throws become guaranteed failures at high level if you're not proficient in them, and also Flat Damage Reduction isn't a thing so action economy is pretty rampant.
Anyways I guess my point is that we ran into these balance issues with the pure players who just wanted to vibe. And that's what makes them a serious issue to me. Some people have fun breaking games and I can respect that. The problem is when the game starts breaking when nobody was trying to break it.
(Also there's the whole issue with Magic Items not being priced or treated as available in 5th edition)
Its just a design choice. I have definitely had to deal with the frustration of someone wanting to vibe getting increasingly angry over the munchkin player(s) (which led to an extension of the "If you ever try to grapple, you are buying the entire table drinks" to "if we have to reference a rule book, you are buying snacks for next week"). And it was definitely frustrating to try to balance those two experiences because one person could kill anything through a clever use of the rules for how throwing glass bottles work and the other was supposed to be a mighty Paladin but struggled against level appropriate challenges.
I am not going to say I like all the changes but... I have never liked all the changes. My point is more that NOBODY has ever liked all the changes and that is kind of the point of house rules and splatbooks.
Yeah, they got super lazy with magic item economy in 5e and justified it by saying "you can play this game without the expectation of magic items!" Like bullshit, you just didn't want to deal with the hassle of pricing items correctly to the point that there are items in lower tiers that are functionally the same or better than items in higher tiers. (Ring of warmth vs ring of resistance is an egregious example, but if you look hard enough you'll find more.)
Yup. Mechanically, what do you even spend money on once you've got Platemail? A boat? A castle? Neither of those are especially likely to be of use to a roaming party of adventurers.
I think my favourite example of a really shitty 5e item (that was apparently quite good in previous editions) is the Ioun Stone. If I believe in official item prices (Very Rare items are worth around 50,000gp), then that means I'm paying that much for an item which...
-Has the same impact as a +1 weapon -Uses an Attunement Slot -CAN BE EASILY DESTROYED (Has 20hp, can be hit by enemy AoE attacks. For example... Fireball, dragon breath...)
That said, for what it's worth, dragons aren't the only thing I've homebrewed. Here, I made it standard practice to assign prices to all my magic items. Feel free to steal some!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15je74qMiYxSEnF43zp2UkEoSk3LqRymMbxruPVGQ-i4/edit