If you play D&D casually, you probably aren't terribly invested in which classes or subclasses are the most powerful. You can have a great time playing any class, or even any (well, many) multiclass abominations.
But if you are cursed like me with the philosophical inclination to be all about story and thematic resonance but with a sick little addiction to making number go big, (or if you're just an unapologetic min-maxxer) you're probably aware that the general consensus is that spellcasters in D&D are more powerful than martial characters.
I think this is a problem for the following reason:
The point of balance in a game like this is, in my opinion, there to make your story-and-thematic choices for your character's build ones that feel like they're rewarding you instead of punishing you. The point of D&D should be for you to make a character that fulfills the story you've imagined in your head. Essentially, balance is the rules getting out of the way of the story.
Now, playing a spellcaster in D&D naturally comes with a power fantasy - you want to have supernatural capabilities that no human being has ever had in the real world (or outside of extraordinary and unverified tales if that's your belief system). But there is a fantasy as well in being the powerful martial character: you want to be the kind of person who can keep pace with such magical people with nothing but your wits, skills, and strength.
Ok, but what causes this imbalance?
On its surface, you could conclude that a spellcaster is not going to deal as much damage turn-to-turn because a cantrip doesn't scale as well as extra attack: consider Fire Bolt, among the highest-damage-potential cantrips in the game. At tier 1, it's doing 1d10 fire damage, which is 5.5. A character wielding a d8 weapon, though, will do 1d8+3, probably, at tier 1, meaning that they'd be doing 7.5 damage on a hit. While most classes don't get much beyond that extra attack boost at level 5, while a cantrip scales up at each tier of play, two attacks for 1d8+5 would be 9.5 each and thus 19 total, which does, yes, fall behind a tier 4 Fire Bolt (which does 4d10 and thus an average of 22) but many martial classes will have ways to get around that - Fighters getting more attacks, Barbarians adding larger rage bonuses, Paladins getting an extra d8 of damage, and Monks getting a higher damage die.
But while playing a pure caster in tier 1 is an exercise in spell slot conservation, pretty quickly, they can be more liberal with their spell slots, even if the higher-level ones are still somewhat precious. And while cantrips might not do a ton of damage, a Fireball that hits three or more targets is going to do more damage (generally) than a martial character would do in several turns. And even against a single target, a 5th level Wizard casting Fireball will do 28 damage on average (or 14 on a successful save - if we imagine a 50% success chance, it's an average of 21 damage overall).
Even in single target situations, casters can often outpace martial characters: I've written a lot about the Conjure Minor Elementals/Scorching Ray interaction, which does truly insane damage numbers. And that's before we even get into the harder-to-quantify utility of having spells that can teleport, crowd-control, or otherwise reshape the battlefield, as well as crucially important non-combat spells that can aid with traversal, finding objectives, and just generally helping the party.
The balance, then, I believe, is that martial characters are supposed to be more sustainable. Spell slots are a limited resource, and most classes don't get them back except on a long rest. Meanwhile, a Fighter's "swing sword" ability (aka, The Attack Action) never runs out. It's a cantrip, essentially, but other enhancements can also be bolted onto it. Weapon Masteries can add additional effects to your attacks, and also never run out. Feats like Great Weapon Master will also enhance those attacks, and never run out.
This is all well and good, but I think there are two issues as to why I don't think that's what we actually see:
First off, as many have pointed out, the way we play D&D in the 5E era, adventures tend to be more plot-oriented. The days of long, slow dungeon crawls are mostly in the past, such that other game systems have even been designed to try to recreate that old-school feel. In an edition shaped to a large extent by actual play shows like Critical Role, the idea of a lengthy day with as many as ten combat encounters between long rests is pretty alien. Instead, it's more likely that an adventuring day has one, two, or maybe three encounters if it's a really lengthy day. To make up for this, the encounters tend to be more challenging, with more and/or deadlier monsters. The 2024 DMG updating its encounter-building math to make fights significantly harder, giving a much larger XP budget than we had in 2014, and generally giving tougher encounters than the guidance in Xanathar's.
But what I think is often overlooked is the other issue: PC HP.
At a certain point, it's just not feasible for players to continue adventuring. If people are sitting at bloodied after using up all their hit dice on a short rest, they're simply not going to push on, and will instead do whatever they can to find an opportunity for a long rest. And not only do narratives often allow for this (in a dungeon crawl, it's usually not that hard to just retrace your steps back to the entrance and camp outside) but there are also lots of mechanics that really protect the ability to take a long rest at will - spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion in particular are the spells that will just pretty much say "no, I get to take a long rest and you (the DM) cannot prevent me from doing so."
If you imagine you've got a group of adventurers at, say, level 4, going through some dungeon, we can imagine that a Fighter might have, say, 40 HP. Even if they're fighting really low-level monsters, like Skeletons, each hit is going to be taking about 6.5 off of that total. If we figure a Skeleton had a 50% chance of hitting them (a +5 attack bonus against someone in chain mail with a 16 AC) then it would take roughly 12 attacks to take the Fighter down. That might seem like a lot, but if they're level 4, and fighting such low-CR monsters, that might only be two rounds of attacks against them, because they'll be fighting so many.
In a game where you have 6 fights over the course of a day, a Wizard is going to have to pick and choose which of those fights gets to see one of their, in this case, 2nd level spells. But after three of them, there's a good chance that the Fighter is so beaten up that they can't really carry on.
So, how would I solve this?
Well, naturally this is something that would need ample playtesting, but my general instinct is to boost PCs HP, and particularly Martial classes.
As it stands, a Monk doesn't inherently have any more HP than a Druid. Monks are, of course, a weird exception - frankly, I think that they missed an opportunity to make their hit die a d10 or even a d12 in 5.5 (what does a hit die represent, exactly? Surely if it's general hardiness, a Monk who has relentlessly trained their body would be more resilient than some Warlock begging magic from their patron?) But even if we look at Paladins and Fighters, a d10 hit die only means, on average, one more HP per level (well, two more at level 1) than a d8. My Wizard will be getting a +4 to Con when he hits level 12, meaning that at that level, he'll have 98 HP. A Paladin in that party with a +2 to Con will have 100. Between my Coat of the Crest (a magic item out of Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn that, among other things, adds +1 to your AC), Mage Armor, and the Shield spell, you could argue that my Wizard is actually a more resilient front-line fighter than the tanky paladin with a shield and plate armor.
That doesn't seem right.
I don't know if just changing hit dice would be enough. What I'd be tempted to do is instead give martial characters way more HP. If we were starting with just hit dice, we could say that rather than rolling your die or taking the average (rounded up) each level, you'd just get the maximum. This would expand the gap between martials and casters - if that were the case, my Wizard at level 12 would have 120 HP and the Paladin would have 144. If I hadn't rolled such high stats, and only had a +2 to Con, instead I'd have 96.
What this would mean, then, is that the martials could keep on fighting longer, weathering more encounters.
But while this would solve the latter problem, I think we'd be left with the more broadly recognized issue, which is just that we don't do long, grueling days with lots of combat encounters.
One solution is to just give martial characters more diverse capabilities. I see this in a game like Draw Steel, where there's far less of a divide between spellcasters and martial characters because every class fundamentally works on the same principles and resource system (even if the resources themselves are a bit different).
But if we don't actually want to mess with the game's mechanics themselves, and approach this simply as a Dungeon Master, what might our approach be?
First off, I think we can recognize that a single adventuring day need not take place in a single session. I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a really action-packed day. As DM, you have some dials you can turn to prevent a party from getting a long rest. The simplest, easiest one is the clock.
Characters cannot benefit from a Long Rest more than twice in a 24-hour period. Thus, if your party gets through one easy or moderate combat encounter and seeks to rest after it, you can simply say that it's still morning. The rest won't come.
The next is to simply keep the pressure on them. If players prefer more cinematic storytelling with action set-pieces, have monsters hound them. The old "you cannot rest here, enemies are nearby" technique.
But, of course, these will punish martials pretty much as much as casters given the gradual (or not so gradual if the fights are big) reduction in HP. And that's why you'd want to combine this with... copious amounts of healing items. Give out healing potions with reckless abandon. Because a healing potion will, you know, heal a character, but it doesn't give them any other resources. Thus, a Rogue or Monk who can "do this all day" when it comes to their character abilities (Monks do have to ration their Focus Points, but they've made it easier to get those back, and still get to make three attacks per turn for free every turn) will actually be able to do this all day if they're getting frequent healing. Thus, the party will actually start to feel like it's good that they aren't all-in on full spellcasters.
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