Is This Game Balanced Around Munchkin Builds?

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

I know that the Pathfinder system itself encourages munchkin character building - it's infamous for it.

But a game can either balance it itself around the median, or it can balance itself so that munchkin builds are the minimum requirement.

So, my question is does the default difficulty ('normal') assume that everyone is building munchkin characters?

[Amoc]

Publicado originalmente por pandariuskairos:

. In other words, 5e isn't 'simpler', it just cut out the bloat. This bloat is what people refer to as the "complexity" of 3.5/pathfinder, but I see it as a kind of illusion. Far from creating more build diversity, I actually see it as limiting build diversity because it creates long strings of dependencies (the pre-requisites). This furthers the issue of munchkin builds and balancing around it.

I really don't understand how you can say that 5e isn't simpler with a straight face, or that you think the character building in 1e is somehow limited in comparison.

I agree that Pathfinder 1e is unnecessarily complex, but 5e trims the fat and the muscle out so that you're left with practically nothing to bite into or experiment with. It's like character building on training-wheels/rails by comparison and it's hard to take what you're saying seriously if you're going to try to argue that they're anywhere near each other in terms of depth.

The opportunity for experimentation and wildly diverging customization even by individual class dwarfs ANYTHING you can accomplish in 5e.

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

Publicado originalmente por Amoc:

but 5e trims the fat and the muscle out

And this is where we disagree - I see 5e as only trimming the 'fat' as you put it, while retaining (and maybe even gaining some) muscle.

[EasternTime]

Publicado originalmente por EasternTime:

Basic information.
Name: Melissa
Chassis: Vivisectionist Alchemist / Wild Rager Ranger.
Lore: "Chimera", marked by a Lamashtu. A person who can gain properties of mythical monsters. Considers her status to be a curse, and studies hard to understand them. Both people and monsters considers her as their own, so she uses that position to be a peacekeeper in her neighborhood. In time, curcumstances make her use her monsterous abilities more and more, and she accepts them as a power to make the best of a bad situation. She is a Neutral character who constantly balances her own selfish interests with her morality.
Concept: Wields natural attacks in battle. Can assume multiple forms based on mythical monsters, gaining different advantages. Can drink mutagens and potions to mutate and get stronger. Can rage for a short period of time to achieve tremendous strength - for example, to escape her bounds.

If someone wonders "How the hell did you build that in PF1e?!", it's actually pretty easy and may be achieved even without 3rd party at all. Of course, access to Soul Hunter Stalker and Chimera Soul stances makes everything VERY simple, but let's consider the core PF here.
Lamashtu's blessing gets you access to a Mother's Teeth trait for 1d2 bite and IDon'tRememberTheName feat for 1d4 claws. It gets you going on level 1. Later on you take the Feral Mutagen discovery line for an upgrade. Previous choices let you to use your natural attacks even when you're not under effects of Feral Mutagen, which was really important since Melissa never takes weapons into her hands due to oath. For different forms you can use various Aspect and Polymorph-like spells of Alchemist.
4 levels of Wild Rager Ranger are really unncecessery, but I wanted to have a Rage ability for cool charater moments, and found Barbarian very thematically unfitting. So yeah, 4 level "dip" is stupid, but I took it anyway. Ranger really fits the village herbalist / peacekeeper theme.
The final result: really wack, but very fun and full of options. Please enjoy my recipe!

[Amoc]

Look, I get that you like 5e better, and you're far from alone. It's a flatly ludicrous statement, however, to say that 5e has anywhere near the mechanical depth, complexity and options for customization that PF1e has. That sort of comment has to come either from ignorance on how the two systems differ, some misunderstanding on the terminology we're using, or weird denial on your part.

5e is objectively and categorically a much simpler game. There's no serious argument to make otherwise and we could very easily make direct comparisons and show you depth and customization that you couldn't even come close to in 5e. One of the previous posters challenged you with a specific example so go ahead and take a stab if you still think you're right.

Like I said, this isn't an argument about which game is better, nor is anyone trying to say 5e is for babies or anything. They're very different games appealing to very different styles but there's really no comparison when it comes to complexity.

[Indure]

Publicado originalmente por EasternTime:

Publicado originalmente por pandariuskairos:

The part that I disagree with is the characterization of 5e as "shallow" and Pathfinder/3.5 as "deep". PF has long, convoluted feat chains and dependencies, 5e compressed several feats together and made them better. You end up taking many 'filler' feats in Pathfinder because it's a pre-requisite to get what you want but has very little value or utility in itself. In 5e you just take what you want, there are few pre-requisites and no lengthy trees to navigate. If you want to be an archer, you take archery...and maybe sharpshooter and skulker too, depending on what kind of archer you want to be. And then you're done. That's it. That's all you have to do. One feat makes you an 'archer' (ok, you can also take a fighting style too). The point is you don't need to take a lengthy feat chain, filled with feats that may not even benefit your build, but are pre-requisites for the one's that do. In other words, 5e isn't 'simpler', it just cut out the bloat. This bloat is what people refer to as the "complexity" of 3.5/pathfinder, but I see it as a kind of illusion. Far from creating more build diversity, I actually see it as limiting build diversity because it creates long strings of dependencies (the pre-requisites). This furthers the issue of munchkin builds and balancing around it.

To be sure, 5e also has it's munchkin builds (I am a regular watcher of D&D Optimized so I know all about them), but it isn't explicitly baked into the system. It's possible, just not to the same extent as it is in PF.

And then there's bounded accuracy - this cap on how high stats and bonuses can gets actually puts an absolute limit on how egregious your munchkin building can get, and may be the most brilliant thing D&D ever did. I absolutely love bounded accuracy as it keeps the game sensible and from spiraling out of control into power creep.

Since you seem to be familiar with 5e and even watch D&D Optimized I want to challenge you to recreate my favorite character from P&P PF1e in 5e. Would you be interested?

Basic information.
Name: Melissa
Chassis: Vivisectionist Alchemist / Wild Rager Ranger.
Lore: "Chimera", marked by a Lamashtu. A person who can gain properties of mythical monsters. Considers her status to be a curse, and studies hard to understand them. Both people and monsters considers her as their own, so she uses that position to be a peacekeeper in her neighborhood. In time, curcumstances make her use her monsterous abilities more and more, and she accepts them as a power to make the best of a bad situation. She is a Neutral character who constantly balances her own selfish interests with her morality.
Concept: Wields natural attacks in battle. Can assume multiple forms based on mythical monsters, gaining different advantages. Can drink mutagens and potions to mutate and get stronger. Can rage for a short period of time to achieve tremendous strength - for example, to escape her bounds.

(This is a baseline version of a character. A version of Melissa who actually saw play was a geshtalt - it's something like Legend path in WotR. Since it includes 3rd party class Stalker and rules for gestalt, I opt to post the original concept here for fairness of comparison).

I want to see if you can create something this mechanically complex in D&D fith edition. This is the "deepness" people are talking about.

It's super easy to recreate this in 5e:

Name: Melissa
Class: Ranger

Boom, I think I covered everything :).

[B Unit]

This topic has grown a bit long in the tooth. The reality is that you *do not* have to play a munchkin build on Normal difficulty. That is, you do not need to dip and take levels of something that makes no sense thematically in order to gain some sort of tactical advantage, nor do you need to min/max your attributes.

Having said that, you are still expected to weigh your options and make intelligent decisions when creating your character and levelling up within the context of what you envision your character to be. If you deliberately take feats the game advises against (indicated by the thumbs down), you will have a harder time for example.

[EasternTime]

Publicado originalmente por Indure:

Publicado originalmente por EasternTime:

Since you seem to be familiar with 5e and even watch D&D Optimized I want to challenge you to recreate my favorite character from P&P PF1e in 5e. Would you be interested?

Basic information.
Name: Melissa
Chassis: Vivisectionist Alchemist / Wild Rager Ranger.
Lore: "Chimera", marked by a Lamashtu. A person who can gain properties of mythical monsters. Considers her status to be a curse, and studies hard to understand them. Both people and monsters considers her as their own, so she uses that position to be a peacekeeper in her neighborhood. In time, curcumstances make her use her monsterous abilities more and more, and she accepts them as a power to make the best of a bad situation. She is a Neutral character who constantly balances her own selfish interests with her morality.
Concept: Wields natural attacks in battle. Can assume multiple forms based on mythical monsters, gaining different advantages. Can drink mutagens and potions to mutate and get stronger. Can rage for a short period of time to achieve tremendous strength - for example, to escape her bounds.

(This is a baseline version of a character. A version of Melissa who actually saw play was a geshtalt - it's something like Legend path in WotR. Since it includes 3rd party class Stalker and rules for gestalt, I opt to post the original concept here for fairness of comparison).

I want to see if you can create something this mechanically complex in D&D fith edition. This is the "deepness" people are talking about.

It's super easy to recreate this in 5e:

Name: Melissa
Class: Ranger

Boom, I think I covered everything :).

Can you please make a whole list? I believe it won't take longer than 15 minutes in D&D 5e.

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

Publicado originalmente por Amoc:

Look, I get that you like 5e better, and you're far from alone. It's a flatly ludicrous statement, however, to say that 5e has anywhere near the mechanical depth, complexity and options for customization that PF1e has. That sort of comment has to come either from ignorance on how the two systems differ, some misunderstanding on the terminology we're using, or weird denial on your part.

5e is objectively and categorically a much simpler game. There's no serious argument to make otherwise and we could very easily make direct comparisons and show you depth and customization that you couldn't even come close to in 5e. One of the previous posters challenged you with a specific example so go ahead and take a stab if you still think you're right.

Nope, I completely reject the notion that 5e is 'simpler' and PF/3.5 is more 'complex'.

Convoluted, bloated and overwrought are not the same thing as 'complexity' and too many people mistake quantity for quality.

Here's an analogy I really like:

Is a 20 lb. pile of loose string 4x more "complex" than a 5 lb. pile of loose string?

It is not, it is simply 4x heavier.

PF is that 20 lb. pile of loose string. Just because it has "more" does not mean it is deeper or more complex. It's an illusion of complexity.

I would say stop conflating complicated with complex. PF is complicated, but not necessarily more complex.

Regardless, this is getting a bit off topic, because all I really wanted to know is if Wrath of the Righteous is fundamentally built on munchkin builds. I understand that the Pathfinder system itself contributes to that by it's very nature, but it's also true that any game system can be balanced in a manner so as not to actually require such a build. Kingmaker was a munchkin game, on any difficulty, and I'm pretty certain that Wrath of the Righteous will be too.

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

Publicado originalmente por sweetchilliheat:

This topic has grown a bit long in the tooth. The reality is that you *do not* have to play a munchkin build on Normal difficulty. That is, you do not need to dip and take levels of something that makes no sense thematically in order to gain some sort of tactical advantage, nor do you need to min/max your attributes.

Having said that, you are still expected to weigh your options and make intelligent decisions when creating your character and levelling up within the context of what you envision your character to be. If you deliberately take feats the game advises against (indicated by the thumbs down), you will have a harder time for example.

I understand that, but I'm not yet convinced. Kingmaker had so many broken classes and builds and useless feats, I'm not sure Owlcat has changed anything from that. Will be keeping an eye open though.

[Indure]

Publicado originalmente por EasternTime:

Publicado originalmente por Indure:

It's super easy to recreate this in 5e:

Name: Melissa
Class: Ranger

Boom, I think I covered everything :).

Can you please make a whole list? I believe it won't take longer than 15 minutes in D&D 5e.

It was a joke. 5e can't come close to making anything resembling the finer details in a pathfinder class. In 5e the most complexity you can get is with multi-classing and even then it usually causes more harm than gain.

[zero]

its kinda funny to try to pretend 5e isn't more simplier when by the admission of wizzy themself: it was meant to be, they took out most of the crunch and mechanics and boiled it down to modifers that generally do not change, and only real adv/disadvantage to worry about.

from a design standpoint its meant to be simplier, its not a bad thing, its meant to be an entry.

pf is much more complex in comparison, thats why so many people like it.

and yes, just because it does "more" DOES mean its more complex.

a screwdriver with a head that can change is literally by defition more complex then just a flathead screwdriver.

in the end though, to try to remain on topic: as long as you vaguely go in the direction a class wants you to go, you dont need to "munchkin" at all for normal, or even hard diffculty, you'll be fine, even if you take some dips into fun stuff.

[Indure]

Publicado originalmente por pandariuskairos:

Publicado originalmente por sweetchilliheat:

This topic has grown a bit long in the tooth. The reality is that you *do not* have to play a munchkin build on Normal difficulty. That is, you do not need to dip and take levels of something that makes no sense thematically in order to gain some sort of tactical advantage, nor do you need to min/max your attributes.

Having said that, you are still expected to weigh your options and make intelligent decisions when creating your character and levelling up within the context of what you envision your character to be. If you deliberately take feats the game advises against (indicated by the thumbs down), you will have a harder time for example.

I understand that, but I'm not yet convinced. Kingmaker had so many broken classes and builds and useless feats, I'm not sure Owlcat has changed anything from that. Will be keeping an eye open though.

It's not anyone's job to convince you. 3-4 people have stated that after they played WotR, they believe it can be completed on normal difficulty without munchkin builds. Even though you have zero experience you don't believe them. What more is there to gain from this thread? What possible standard of proof would even be adequate for you?

[EasternTime]

Publicado originalmente por Indure:

Publicado originalmente por EasternTime:

Can you please make a whole list? I believe it won't take longer than 15 minutes in D&D 5e.

It was a joke. 5e can't come close to making anything resembling the finer details in a pathfinder class. In 5e the most complexity you can get is with multi-classing and even then it usually causes more harm than gain.

Ah, I see. Sorry. You got me. I was scratching my head here - I checked out the 5e Ranger and haven't found any way to get a natural attack.

[Indure]

Publicado originalmente por EasternTime:

Publicado originalmente por Indure:

It was a joke. 5e can't come close to making anything resembling the finer details in a pathfinder class. In 5e the most complexity you can get is with multi-classing and even then it usually causes more harm than gain.

Ah, I see. Sorry. You got me. I was scratching my head here - I checked out the 5e Ranger and haven't found any way to get a natural attack.

To be fair to 5e the latest version did introduce an alchemist subclass, but it does very little to meet the requirements of your build.

[EasternTime]

Publicado originalmente por sweetchilliheat:

If you deliberately take feats the game advises against (indicated by the thumbs down), you will have a harder time for example.

I actually did that a few times :D
You really should understand what are you doing, though.