D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I've been planning on making this thread for a while ever since I binged martial/caster balance discussions over a few weeks and read about 300 pages of discussion on the subject. I made a few notes but then put it on hold while doing other things, and now that they came out with the latest play test and nerfed the bear-barian I thought this was appropriate. I post it here rather than in the OneD&D subforum because I believe this is more general and is not primarily about the nerf.

I want to introduce an argument that I saw multiple times in many of these balance discussions, and I name it the Crab Bucket Fallacy. It goes something like this.

Arnold: Fighters are fine as they are. I've never had a problem with having high level Fighters and Wizards in my party.

Bob: Cool, I want to have a real on and off the field martial leader. Here's a draft of the Warlord -- it gets all these powerful cool abilities but I think it's fine because they aren't really better than the Wizard's spells at those levels.

Arnold: Whoa, that's way overpowered. The Fighter doesn't get anything near that.

Bob: I'm not comparing it to the Fighter, I'm comparing it to the Wizard which you said was fine???

Arnold: The Fighter is fine, but no one will play a Fighter if you add this Warlord.

As you can see, a proposed martial class buff is rejected because it is compared to other martials (which are underpowered) and not against casters (which are overpowered). It is much like a crab bucket. No crab can escape the bucket, because the crabs already in it will pull any would-be escapees back into the pit. It's easy to relate this to the barbarian nerf in the play test. The bear totem barbarian was nerfed because it was the best of the barbarian totems so it had to be dragged down to the level of lesser totems (rather than by allowing the other totems to be buffed to an equivalent level).

A number of variations were seen but the form was pretty much the same. You can't buff martial class X because then it will be overpowered compared to martial class Y.

This is obviously a fallacy because you are comparing not against the global optimum (the wizard) but against some local optimum that is not guaranteed to be the global one.

I've also seen a related argument that goes something like this: You can't buff the fighter with utility features because the monk is like a weaker fighter without utility features, and if you give more utility to the fighter, the monk will have nothing.

 

[pointofyou]

There may be something to this though the Bear Totem might not be the best example of it. I know that some people found it to be less overpowered than others but my own experience was that it was powerful enough that it skewed things.

It has looked to me from reading the playtest documents as though they are looking at giving the Fighter some real out-of-combat utility and at taking away many of the Monk's ribbon-ish abilities. This seems like a move in the direction of boosting the Fighter and nerfing the Monk.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

There may be something to this though the Bear Totem might not be the best example of it. I know that some people found it to be less overpowered than others but my own experience was that it was powerful enough that it skewed things.

It has looked to me from reading the playtest documents as though they are looking at giving the Fighter some real out-of-combat utility and at taking away many of the Monk's ribbon-ish abilities. This seems like a move in the direction of boosting the Fighter and nerfing the Monk.

Yes. The barbarian nerf is a side note which is why I only mention it briefly. If I had noted the fallacy would be recurring in these balance threads I would have made note of every use case and focused more on those instead, but...

 

[SteveC]

I think this is a really interesting discussion to have and it's something I've been thinking about recently since I finished up one game and am starting another. So a couple of thoughts.

First, you can't discount how different classes have different roles in the game. The wizard I'm playing now is really good at doing melee combat, but that's only as a wizard, not as a character like a barbarian who's just plain better at it than I am. Now I'm much better in terms of hindering or disabling groups of enemies and doing all of the things that only magical characters can do. In terms of being a team full of well-designed characters, I think this works. If you were to significantly increase the ability for a class in a role they don't normally fill, you would need to reduce them in another area or you'd have a character who's just better.

With that said, there are just some classes or subclasses that are just bad. That's a separate issue since this means that characters with these classes aren't good at things they are intended to be good at. I don't have a lot of experience with monks in 5E, but they have a reputation as being just a poorly designed class. Similarly, the champion fighter has a similar reputation. Is that reputation deserved? Don't know. But if you design a new class or alter one and it makes a bad class seem even worse, is that a problem with the new class, or does it mean the other class needs an adjustment?

It seems to me that class design needs to reflect ability in different roles and those that are just less effective where they are intended to be good need a boost. It does seem that the classes that are good tend to be reduced in power rather than the ones at the bottom end, unfortunately. That's interesting because it doesn't make me want to play the ones that are perceived as bad more, it just reduces the number of classes I want to play at all.

 

[pointofyou]

I guess I don't entirely see the huge discrepancy between martials and casters as some people do. That might be because in the most recent D&D campaigns I've run it hasn't been the casters who've been the most powerful characters or even the ones mostly driving the game. I'm open to the idea that's more about the players and how I run than anything else of course. But it does mean that I can see tapping down a proud nail like the Bear Totem as not being about a martial sub/class being "as good as the caster/s" and more about it just being some definition of "too good."

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I guess I don't entirely see the huge discrepancy between martials and casters as some people do. That might be because in the most recent D&D campaigns I've run it hasn't been the casters who've been the most powerful characters or even the ones mostly driving the game. I'm open to the idea that's more about the players and how I run than anything else of course. But it does mean that I can see tapping down a proud nail like the Bear Totem as not being about a martial sub/class being "as good as the caster/s" and more about it just being some definition of "too good."

This is not really a balance discussion and I should perhaps have made this a plus thread or something, but ehhh...

The balance issue does not always appear and it's contingent on a few things.

1: You don't really see the issue if the caster player is bad, or if the martial players are very good (and the wizard is just mediocre).

2: The problem gets worse if the characters have opportunity to long rest after every battle.

3: It can be offset with equipment and loot that favours martials.

 

[pointofyou]

This is not really a balance discussion and I should perhaps have made this a plus thread or something, but ehhh...

The balance issue does not always appear and it's contingent on a few things.

1: You don't really see the issue if the caster player is bad, or if the martial players are very good (and the wizard is just mediocre).

2: The problem gets worse if the characters have opportunity to long rest after every battle.

3: It can be offset with equipment and loot that favours martials.

I don't disagree and I apologize for drifting this from where you wanted it.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The Snarf Supposition: 100% of so-called fallacies made up by people on the internet are either not, in fact, fallacies, or are just special pleading for an already recognized fallacy. Instead, they are just trying to use fancy terms to get people that already agree with you to agree with you by asserting that the people who disagree with you are illogical. See, e.g., the Crab Bucket Fallacy, the Stormwind Fallacy, the Oberoni Fallacy et al.

What you are doing is, in fact, using the straw man fallacy. The primary opposition from people that oppose creating a Fighter with "all the same abilities" as a Wizard is not that no one would play a vanilla fighter; instead, it's because there are people that do not want those abilities in a martial character. Whether that is good, or bad, is a different issue. Some people like Conan, others prefer Wuxia. But that's the real argument.

There is a separate, and collateral, issue as to balance, both between similar classes and as to the related issue of "niche protection" and so-called spotlight issues, but that's not the primary basis for most objections.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

The thing I mostly see regarding Warlords is people insisting it is just a Fighter sub, but if you let it do everything a Warlord should be able able to do on top of the core Fighter abilities, they say "Whoa! That's kind of OP, dude."

 

[Pedantic]

The Snarf Supposition: 100% of so-called fallacies made up by people on the internet are either not, in fact, fallacies, or are just special pleading for an already recognized fallacy. Instead, they are just trying to use fancy terms to get people that already agree with you to agree with you by asserting that the people who disagree with you are illogical. See, e.g., the Crab Bucket Fallacy, the Stormwind Fallacy, the Oberoni Fallacy et al.

What you are doing is, in fact, using the straw man fallacy. The primary opposition from people that oppose creating a Fighter with "all the same abilities" as a Wizard is not that no one would play a vanilla fighter; instead, it's because there are people that do not want those abilities in a martial character. Whether that is good, or bad, is a different issue. Some people like Conan, others prefer Wuxia. But that's the real argument.

There is a separate, and collateral, issue as to balance, both between similar classes and as to the related issue of "niche protection" and so-called spotlight issues, but that's not the primary basis for most objections.

While I agree with this, I think it's going both ways. We routinely see arguments about balance that are proxies for the actual discussion "martial abilities should be like Y" with both sides discussing something other than what's actually at stake. There is no common ground or hope for rhetorical change if we actually had the root discussion, so no one bothers.