I think the reason my ratings would substantially differ from yours is that you are looking at the ways you have seen the classes played (and perhaps even the nature of the players you have observed playing those classes), while I focus on what I see as inate class abilities that facilitate effectiveness in these pillars. Even at 1st, wizards can access the spells detect magic, ghost sound, light, detect magic, alarm, cause fear, charm person, comprehend languages, featherfall, grease, and sleep, all of which can be used during exploration and/or interaction providing capabilities a fighter can never achieve. I can think of nothing a fighter innately has that a wizard could not get (albiet at the cost of some awkwardness like sacrificing intelligence for strength). Of course, if the wizards you have experienced tool out with spells like burning hands, shocking grasp, magic missile, and thunderwave, I would submit that the weakness of wizards in exploration and interaction is not inherent in the class capabilities but in the character design. I personally have never played a wizard that felt shackled when it came to exploration or interaction, while I have really struggled to create a fighter that did not feel shackled.
Charm person and Intimidate is just about as situationally useful. Some people seem to regard it as automatic social interaction win... well, at least in our world people do not take kindly to being mindcontrolled (that's why the comparison to being bullied with intimidate is fitting). If you want to keep someone on your side, you better not just compulse them into doing what you want. Sure, wrapped into a thick layer of mundane manipulation a sneaked in charm spell can be really powerful, but that requires a lot more than just a spellcast.
I basically agree with Lesp here:
Contributing to exploration or interaction just requires being a warm body, although other benefits help.
Social interaction especially and also much of exploration just requires a personality and some roleplaying. A couple of skils help, but all classes have those (except for those that have only lore skills). And even if a character has no skills, they do have ability scores.
Much of interaction is just about roleplaying (or at least it should be in my mind), and exploration is mostly a shared task/problem. Few characters are really bad at exploration since they all have some skills or other. Spells help yes.. but often less so than skills and proper equipment.
I think putting a lot of effort to 'equalize' every class in all 'pillars' would treathen to ruin the roleplaying aspect of the game by wrapping into too much mechanic and too much balance.
Sorry, you have already spoken a kind word to the king this encounter. You may try to bully him, you still have that encounter ability... oh yea.. I know you are a neutral good halfelf bard and that you actually want to help that guy.. but letting you do the right thing over and over would be totally unbalanced...
I can see where limiting all spells to just skill bonuses is boring, but it may be one method for certain spells to bring them more in line. Why should knock be an automatic open, then the wizard knows nothing about locks? Unless knock does not work on mundane locks and is a counter to arcane locks cast by other wizards. Similar to glyphs being magical traps. Or if invisibility is cast, it is not automatically a huge bonus to stealth, because vision is only one of the five major senses.
The vancian spell system is a great way to limit wizard choices, but I see that being further eroded with the ritual system especially for utility spells.
There is another feature I liked from 4E which restricted certain powers, including the wizards, based on the action economy. You could take away a move, standard or minor action in order to maintain a power. But that is lost with 5E. 4E also started to offer niche abilities for each class to cover the other tiers based on class features, utility powers, and skill powers.
The problem with making one class better at a particular pillar than other classes is that not all adventures, campaigns, or play styles are balanced along an even distribution of combat, exploration, and interaction.
What this means is if the adventure/campaign is a mostly exploration campaign then the other classes will be bored or not contribute very much.
If its a mostly social adventure/campaign then the most charismatic class (say Bard for instance) will dominate and other classes will barely contribute.
The same goes for the combat pillar.
So every class should be balanced with other classes within each pillar, but do so in a different way. For instance the Cleric might not hit as hard as the fighter, but they can heal and buff the party and debuff the enemies so they contribute equally.
If they would separate out skills that are exploration based and social based and spread them out evenly between the backgrounds and classes so that each background gave an equal amount of each then the characters will be balanced much better with each other within each pillar. Maybe the Fighter automatically gets intimidate, the Rogue gets bluff, and the Wizard and cleric get relevant knowledge skills or whatever that deal with interaction, or tie them to backgrounds but give one social skill and 2-3 exploration skills, so that each background is balanced. Then get rid of the Rogue's extra background and find a balanced way to represent their ability to improvise and deceive rather than 'skill monkey'. 'Skill Monkey' should be a Specialty not a class feature.
The problem with making one class better at a particular pillar than other classes is that not all adventures, campaigns, or play styles are balanced along an even distribution of combat, exploration, and interaction.
What this means is if the adventure/campaign is a mostly exploration campaign then the other classes will be bored or not contribute very much.
This is why I said that the first rule is
We accept that the game by default will have relatively equal amounts of combat, exploration and interaction. If some campaing would break this rule it should be warned by the DM at character creation or be the result of the PCs decitions.
Balancing each character in each pillar has much more design problems than just adhering to the list I made in the initial post (please read it)
@Sesdun: I don't think balanced classes necessarily impinges on role playing at all.
I think putting a lot of effort to 'equalize' every class in all 'pillars' would treathen to ruin the roleplaying aspect of the game by wrapping into too much mechanic and too much balance.
Sorry, you have already spoken a kind word to the king this encounter. You may try to bully him, you still have that encounter ability... oh yea.. I know you are a neutral good halfelf bard and that you actually want to help that guy.. but letting you do the right thing over and over would be totally unbalanced...
First, insofar as I actually believe that the bard should not be able to gain the benefit of two kind words in one encounter, it is not an effort to balance charismatic classes against the others, but merely a reflection of the fact that the king already appreciates that you're a nice guy and harping on it a bit longer isn't going to help convince him that he should do what you say.
More to the point, balancing the classes is not about imposing arbitrary restrictions on the classes that are better at certain pillars, it's about giving more opportunities to the lesser classes to contribute. Giving fighters some kind of ability that lets them contribute to interaction encounters does not mean nobody should be actually role playing what they say, or that what they say has no impact on the outcome, or that the internal logic of the game world must be shattered. I'm not going to get into the debate about whether social interactions should have associated rolls (ie., let players get away with less polished speeches and let bad dice ruin good speeches, or let players without stellar rhetoric or acting play characters with stellar rhetoric and acting). Let's assume absolutely every DM on the planet does not bother with social skill/ability checks and let's the players words alone determine success or failure. Even in that hypothetical, there could be tools that balance out charm person/legend lore (which, granted, are not all-powerful when properly handled) for the non-magical classes. There could be tools that give a bit of extra flavor to a class, so that a given player with a given level of role playing talent can feel like two classes play differently in social settings without either of them being better or worse on average. There could be tools that let someone a little less talented contribute in a meaningful way.
And of course, that isn't the world we live in. For starters, organized play doesn't work that way, and probably won't change to work that way any time soon. Some DMs are more insistant than others that you role play your conversation, some are more willing to give bonuses or penalties for good or bad role playing than others, but certainly the number who use dice on some level to determine success or failure is not small enough that the rules should ignore them (if they were, we wouldn't have rules for using dice in social interactions in the first place). If we're going to have rules for social skills, than those rules should not force fighters to stand in a corner and keep their mouth shut whenever you need to be nice to someone (or flunk the encounter for the whole party). If you want to ignore those rules, go ahead. But just because you ignore them doesn't mean they shouldn't be fixed.
@Androkguz: Your argument is fatally flawed. Supposing that a campaign does follow your default and has relatively equal amounts of combat, exploration, and interation. That would not preclude any given game session being mostly or entirely filled with one particular pillar. Even if every individual session were balanced between the three pillars (a restriction that would put a huge crimp in narrative flow), there are likely to be blocks of time exceeding half an hour devoted to a single pillar. Should the goal of balanced design be to make sure nobody is bored for longer than anybody else, or to make sure nobody is bored for long? And that's not even considering the possibility that the campaign goes in a direction the DM did not expect and favors a single pillar without giving the players a chance to prepare, or the possibility that you might really want to play a fighter but at the same time enjoy campaigns that favor the interaction pillar. I'm not saying it's easy - although I don't think it's as hard as you seem to - but they've got an awful lot of people on payroll who do this stuff for a living. "It's hard" is no excuse for not trying.
And of course, that isn't the world we live in. For starters, organized play doesn't work that way, and probably won't change to work that way any time soon. Some DMs are more insistant than others that you role play your conversation, some are more willing to give bonuses or penalties for good or bad role playing than others, but certainly the number who use dice on some level to determine success or failure is not small enough that the rules should ignore them (if they were, we wouldn't have rules for using dice in social interactions in the first place). If we're going to have rules for social skills, than those rules should not force fighters to stand in a corner and keep their mouth shut whenever you need to be nice to someone (or flunk the encounter for the whole party). If you want to ignore those rules, go ahead. But just because you ignore them doesn't mean they shouldn't be fixed.
Well I do admit that my viewpoint does not include much about organized play. I almost exclusively play with three of four local groups of people and most of the people in those groups have a quite relaxed attitude to rules in interaction situations.
The problem with making one class better at a particular pillar than other classes is that not all adventures, campaigns, or play styles are balanced along an even distribution of combat, exploration, and interaction.
What this means is if the adventure/campaign is a mostly exploration campaign then the other classes will be bored or not contribute very much.
This is why I said that the first rule is
We accept that the game by default will have relatively equal amounts of combat, exploration and interaction. If some campaing would break this rule it should be warned by the DM at character creation or be the result of the PCs decitions.
Balancing each character in each pillar has much more design problems than just adhering to the list I made in the initial post (please read it)
Actually it doesn't, it solves many more problems than it makes. Assuming that everyone will have equal amounts of each pillar in every adventure is just folly. Simply put, its just not going to happen. Its much better to plan around the likely, than it is to plan around a default that is going to be the exception...
Myexperience with mid paragon bard in 4e was that I traded a negligible combat use for tremendous ability in interaction and exploration. Enough that I exploration always came down to us listing my spells and theN us listing mundane items. ("if only we had a wheelbarrow"). It made exploration much less fun, and made us seek out combat so everyone could shine. our fate experience has been much better - one guy can buy anything, one guy can make any illusion, one guy cany understand any anatomy. Obviously, even in that system, there are better powers and worse powers.
If they don't fix the wizard and rogue next playtest, I'm goingfeed make it clear in my feedback. We need toys for all classes
(actually for interaction, next time I'm going to try a house rule: " no matter what player talks, we always use the best characters modifier. " that way, no one feels penalized for interacting. )
@Androkguz: Your argument is fatally flawed. Supposing that a campaign does follow your default and has relatively equal amounts of combat, exploration, and interation. That would not preclude any given game session being mostly or entirely filled with one particular pillar. Even if every individual session were balanced between the three pillars (a restriction that would put a huge crimp in narrative flow), there are likely to be blocks of time exceeding half an hour devoted to a single pillar. Should the goal of balanced design be to make sure nobody is bored for longer than anybody else, or to make sure nobody is bored for long? And that's not even considering the possibility that the campaign goes in a direction the DM did not expect and favors a single pillar without giving the players a chance to prepare, or the possibility that you might really want to play a fighter but at the same time enjoy campaigns that favor the interaction pillar. I'm not saying it's easy - although I don't think it's as hard as you seem to - but they've got an awful lot of people on payroll who do this stuff for a living. "It's hard" is no excuse for not trying.
The reason to have classes be balanced over the whole of the pillars is so that players have a nice incentive to play any class. If the campaing takes unexpected directions or if every session is about just one pillar, that doesn't change the fact that taking a fighter was not a subpar idea, even if the cards turned against you latter. The reason to have each class (actually, each character) be good at something in each pillar is so that no one gets bored, because you got something to do, even if you provide less than others some times. And finally, while I might enjoy a fighter in an interactive campaing, it is also very likely that I won't. Normally, I expect to fight if I make a fighter, so that's why no campaing should be planned as interactive all the time without a fair warning to the players
