If you’ve followed the progression of roleplaying games since their early days, you may have noticed a trend towards equality in every area of play for every role a player may choose. There is a huge problem with this, however. One glance may make you dismiss this view or feel confused by it, but here’s how that view is misleading: the streamlining and flattening of the rules systems towards a mathematically balanced approach destroys the very thing people are trying to achieve and strips out critical elements of the sandbox notion of roleplaying games.
The greatest offender of this drive towards equilibrium is the genre’s flagship property. Dungeons & Dragons has, through its many incarnations, tried to address one mechanical issue or another to make the game feel balanced. In the earliest versions, the solution was to create individual experience point (XP) tables for the classes. On the whole, this looks crude and can lead some players to avoid playing one class or another out of fear that their character will be outclassed quickly. These classes look like they’ve been cheated.
Incremental changes to the game gave more meat to these classes outside of combat, but at what cost? Wizards are exceptionally powerful and clerics aren’t far behind. In a fantasy game, this makes a lot of sense that magic eventually becomes the star of the show. It’s the defining element of fantasy. That’s a huge problem in cooperative play, though. It’s also what’s driven the changes over the years.
Some of the overhauls in the 3.x games tried to fix these issues in one fell swoop beginning with a single XP progression table for all characters that then had the classes balanced to reflect comparable prowess. Wizards lost a large number of spells compared with earlier editions in this offset. The result had clerics on top and wizards still just a step behind. Mathematically speaking, the versatility of these classes (and most spellcasters in general) outweighs that of the others. Sure, wizards’ spells do more damage, but the flexibility in casting and domain spell slots give clerics the upper hand in so many instances that it’s no surprise there are some complaints about game balance. All of this results in an imbalance in parity the designers sought. One of the problems here is the mechanical assumptions that these classes will create magical items and expend XP in the process. That’s a huge problem.
Instead of making item creation an incentive for gaining XP as a form of insight gained in the character’s pursuit of power, the opposite has occurred as a result of metagaming (you can’t escape this, it’s human nature). Why waste resources if you don’t have to with no visible long-term gain? This is one of the Achilles’ heels of 3.x games that causes the breakdown in the mechanics and shows how the balance in the game isn’t there.
4th edition tried to correct this problem by designing all of the abilities using the same template. This completely removed asymmetric play from the game and is at the root of the “sameness” complaints despite the tightly defined prescribed roles classes were stuffed into. This is a major design flaw for a roleplaying game outside a box housing silicon and circuitry. But as the point was to get the attention of the MMO crowd, the idea seemed durable. Nice try, but not good when put in practice as computers aren’t people.
Now we have 5th edition and it’s plagued with the same legacy issues compounded by the design flaws from 3.x on. The game tried to remove a lot of the bloat and detritus of all editions to date. But, it kept a lot of elements and concepts so deeply synonymous with the brand that they only furthered the flaws that will continue to destroy the asymmetry integral to roleplaying games. The remnants of a balanced approach have changed the roles of the classes, the source of which is combat. More on that later.