D&D Isn't A Balanced Game

hey um before we start i make cooldnd homer on my patreon and i'd love it if you want to check it out okay thanks bye d d isn't a balanced game whoa that's a hot take right off the bat so let me explain myself dungeons and dragons is a pretty old game and since the beginning it's gone through multiple huge overhauls that have changed literally every aspect of the way it's played almost everyone can agree that since first edition's conception literally every other version of the game has been updated with ease of access in mind basically making the game easier for newer players to learn and for veteran gamers to have less aneurysms over obviously that doesn't take 4th edition into account because everyone unanimously agrees it never existed so with all the changes to the way d d was played how could a game that's had so much time in the oven still be unbalanced well there's a lot of small things that all play into each other that make these problems exist so rather than just throw a bunch of dialogue at you all let's split this into parts first off we have the cornerstone of every dnd game the innocent character sheets now for the most part i think the rules for building characters are balanced unless you're specifically going out of your way to break the game such as leveling up in weird ways to abuse features that never intended to work together your characters will almost always be fair but that's not what's unbalanced about this at all in the rules it says that when your character levels up you can either risk it all to roll your hit points or play it safe and take the average amount both of these options are considered official ways to gain hp and it falls under the dm to choose a method and the players to roll with it get it these two methods come with their ups and downs for example if you're a wizard and you roll for your health there's a 50 chance you'll be weaker than a typical wizard a 17 chance you'll end up average and a 33 chance you'll be stronger it makes you as the player feel terrible if you roll poorly because the random assortment of health doesn't feel earned at all it's not based around any predetermined factors it's just luck it's the same thing with rolling stats if i get a terrible number then either i drag my party down in fights by being the weak end of the stick or i purposefully kill my character off and roll up a new set of stats yeah that's right rolling for ability scores and health doesn't encourage players to value their characters more it encourages them to value their stats if you want to get on the bandwagon and say that taking average in your stats isn't as interesting i can totally agree with you but unless we get any other official ways to roll for stats that's just how it is i know that point buys a thing which lets you purchase stats and place them wherever you'd like for your ability scores but for rolling hit points my own personal favorite way works like this whoa you leveled up nice go ahead and roll your health and see what you get oof that's a shame now you have two options would you like to take the average amount of hit points for your class or risk it all one more time and try another role at least with this system the players have more control with the health they end up receiving it encourages risk takers to bet more often and since the chance to take an average health pool is always on the table players will personally feel responsible for the current health they have this system of mine gives more health overall but i like it because it combines both of the official ways you can gain hp into a nice little package but you know what's even more unbalanced than when the players have random stats when the monsters do yep monsters can roll their health too so you know that adult red dragon dwelling in the mountain up there yeah well the dm rolled some pretty high numbers and now the thing has a hundred health more than it should why i don't know it's built differently i guess if you're playing d d with a more forgiving system for rolling stats letting monsters roll theirs the same way could definitely spice things up otherwise i'd be very careful with monsters because in d d figuring out how dangerous a fight is can be tricky enough already and randomizing things can become very unbalanced to very fast don't believe me well here's a scenario with some expertly drawn images to serve as a visual reference you have a party full of wizards suddenly out of the forest springs a monster made out of plants and corpses the shambling mound has appeared roll initiative looks like the little wizards are having a hard time down there could it be that they have only prepared fire and lightning spells against a monster that's resistant it's fine d d beyond said that this was a really easy encounter for them so i'm sure they can survive six rounds later if you're not skilled enough as a dm to read your party's strengths and weaknesses it doesn't matter how difficult the rulebook says the fight is either the players will absolutely obliterate everything in the first few seconds or it'll be a humiliating tpk unless you specifically plan for either of those outcomes dms will find their fight scenes to be unfair until they get the hang of reading the room properly the lost minds of fendelver and descendant to avernus are official d d adventures both of them have fight scenes that are very tilted towards the party being wiped out in the first session you'd think for a game that's being tested by thousands of people before release they'd realized that sooner but nope personally i feel like wizard of the coast is getting better at balancing their game and the newer d books are definitely a big step up from the earlier ones well aside from a few how do you put it broken additions to the game that were quickly patched afterwards if there's one book that i know for a fact wasn't given enough time in the oven though it'd be the dungeon master's guide you know one of the more important books to have if you want to play d d this thing is filled with a variety of stuff you'd expect dungeon master to need in order to prepare the game properly from loot tables to shop items all the way up to magic items all the basics are covered but you watch my videos don't you you know what insanity can come from the items in this book and the true unbalanced power that dwells within the pages remember the rod of security well guess what if you have two of these things you can hide in your own private dimension become immortal and get to level 20 after a training montage instantly hey look two bags of holding i wonder what happens if i put one of them inside of the other do i want to attune to the armor of invulnerability or the cloak of displacements um hey blaine why is it that every attack that targets you misses i never thought a permanent magical ability that hinders almost every attack role by causing it to roll disadvantage could be overpowered who would have thought you know the dark version of the little red riding hood story where the hunter fills the wolf's stomach with heavy stones and he dies afterwards yeah what about it i'm gonna do that but with this 8 000 pound magical stick so yeah there's a lot of items in this book that weren't double checked at all some of them are a much lower rarity than they probably should be as a general rule of thumb the more text a magic item has in its description the more broken it tends to be i can also confirm that until the day this channel dies the dungeon master's guide and the hilariousness of how broken it can be is going to be the focus of every crazy d d challenge video i come up with now to finish things off there's one more big balancing issue with d d that i'd like to share but it's more of the way the game is meant to be played that causes this issue and not anyone in particular's fault for why it's the case basically any dnd campaign that has 15th level characters in it have already signed an agreement that states the following i hereby understand that by continuing this campaign with characters this strong encounters will be so difficult to balance that the fate of the universe will be at stake every other friday spellcasters that reach late game have so many magical abilities that no dm could ever plan for what they might do during a session teleport magic can make a three-month journey take six seconds meteors can rain from the sky and obliterate acres of land a single word is able to kill anyone who says it and the untamed unlimited power of a wish spell can now be in your hands want to take a crack at planning a dnd session with those spells in mind no well i don't blame you from what i've experienced high-level dnd is meant to be a vanity try it out once or twice just for fun and pure chaos but if a campaign is getting too hard to manage and the party's a high level i'd suggest just ending the game on a high note and starting a new one now i do need to say this d d is one of the easiest tabletop games to learn and that's because of the bare bones structuring of the rules it's a barren wasteland out here in comparison to other tabletop games like pathfinder which have three times more content and three times more hectic power scaling nonsense consider yourself lucky to be a part of the dnd community because if anything feels unbalanced it doesn't take much for a dungeon master to fix it themselves the rules are so open-ended that anyone capable of critical thinking can patch problems that make their games less enjoyable hopefully me bringing up a few of my gripes with the system can keep you all aware of issues that could show up in your games obviously balance doesn't always equate to fun but i think tabletop games should always have that illusion of fairness even if it's never truly there but hey want to know what is totally balanced and super cool my own anime into d d homebrew packs filled with a variety of colorful content to sprinkle into any d5v game even if you don't watch anime the packs are designed with normies in mind so you don't need to understand any references to use them properly with at least three fully fledged materials posted every month it's the best content available and that's an absolute fact you can grab every pack ever released right now using the link down below and with that said i'll see you all in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Blaine Simple

Views: 126,625

Rating: 4.8952732 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 6Pp97HNAB_g

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021