MuhVerisimilitude
Hero
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.
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.