Aura of Protection is bad design and breaks the game
I'm very disappointed this feature still exists in its current state in the new UA. Bumping it up to 7th level does nothing to prevent it from breaking the game as its worst effects are at higher level.
The issue with Aura of Protection is that it provides a flat +3-6 (now up to +7) to all saves, this basically mimics proficiency in those saves but additionally stacks with it. It makes it so that having a paladin and managing their position becomes an essential part of higher level combat. Having a paladin vs not having a paladin is a completely different game in T3 & T4, and the tuning of a lot of more modern adventures and monsters has to be built around the idea that everyone in the group is going to have extremely inflated saving throws. In T4 I've fought monsters throwing around DC 24-26 saves, and if you didn't have a paladin in your group even the proficient characters would struggle to make a single save against these creatures.
Aura of Protection essentially sets the baseline for average saves at least 3 points higher than they should be, because if you don't account for the presence of a paladin your encounter becomes a cakewalk if one is present. It's bad enough that its frequently a tactically optimal decision for the paladin to simply stand still near the back line, doing nothing, simply to cover more people with their aura (a paladin in my currently level 16 game got themselves a dancing sword just to have at least one attack they could use from a distance so that they could position themselves easier). "Everybody hug the paladin" is a constant mantra in every game I play, and I play a ridiculous amount of D&D (5-7 games a week). Groups routinely group up knowing they will subject themselves to easier AoEs because the tradeoff is worth it, everybody gets hit but nobody fails the save. It completely changes how the game plays, and not for the better.
Now that said, I like the feature, I just hate what it does to the game. I wouldn't mind if it was just a flat +1 or maybe even +2 bonus, but if so I think it should have an extra core effect added on. What I'd suggest for this is something like a legendary resistance that the paladin can give any one person in the aura X times per day (proficiency based or CHA based) as a reaction. Basically add some guaranteed "no this doesn't happen" to compensate for the loss of most of the passive bonus (and the weaker the passive, the stronger the active should be - so if it were a +2 bonus maybe the legendary resistance becomes a simple re-roll). The active nature of it could also be used to enhance some of the subclass specific riders, so for example the Devotion paladin might get a rider that also provides a bit of healing or temp HP to anyone that has the reaction used on them.
Paladin is one of my favorite classes, I'm a sucker for gish characters, but this specific feature drives me crazy.
Posted Feb 24, 2023, 6:50 PM UTC
Now, I'm not arguing that Aura of protection isn't necessarily a bit overtuned. But I do think the argument that you need to change how your encounters are designed depending on if there is a Paladin in the party or not doesn't really hold up in my opinion.
I feel like this is the exact opposite to what the goal should be. That the classes are each so distinct and good at what they do that they require thought to challenge in their own unique way. If you can give the same answer to the puzzle of "How do I challenge [x class]" to every class then those classes are far too similar.
Plus, its not all that hard to handle this. Have fights that require more than a single point to be controlled. Forcing the party to split up.
Use more interesting environment to disrupt usual formations (Originally a tree top encounter I made with rope bridges between platforms, later turned into an encounter on land bridges over lava. Anything to limit where someone can stand works).
Simply not targeting saves can make the feature useless, or at least much less useful.
Hell, even over targeting saves can work with AoEs. Everyone taking half damage on an AoE is still enough of a deterrent for most people compared to one or two maybe taking half.
It is quite literally an existing problem for all high level modules published by WotC and their partners (See the Dreams of Red Wizards modules, for example, or any of the other modern high level content released for the Adventurers League program - a lot of people don't realize this but WotC has published a lot of level 11-20 content under that banner). The whole issue with high AC breaking the rules of bounded accuracy applies equally to Aura of Protection, but it's often even more pronounced.
I'm not speaking about this from a theoretical, I'm speaking about it from active observation as someone that plays and DMs a stupid amount of high-level D&D. Adventure design at these levels either has to assume there is a paladin present (and there nearly always is because they are so required) or be a cakewalk.
Are there things that can mitigate it? Yes, but at high levels players have ways to circumvent many of those mitigations. Further, the game should not revolve so heavily around a single (passive) feature.
Oh yeah, I'll talk about how bad prewritten modules are all day. But that is because the Modules are bad. Not the classes.
I mean, you are speaking about this in a theoretical way. You are taking a single way of running the game (the least common way at that) and extrapolating problems out from there. Or at best you're talking from anecdotal experience and trying to generalise that to every situation without looking any deeper.
The big benefit of prewritten content is that it takes less prep work. Its just there. The big downside is that its inflexible, not unique to you or your players. That is just the reality of the medium, something that will be the case regardless. Unless you make all classes exactly the same.
What a coincidence! So do I! I currently have a game running at level 25 (hit level 20 and then multiclassed into another class), having been at level 20 for more than a year now. Your suggested problems do not appear in my game despite a high level Paladin being present. Because the effects of Aura of Protection are so easy to mitigate with even the smallest amount of forethought.
What? Players have solutions to problems? That's brand new news to me! Not at all the point of the game to present the players with a challenge and watch how they overcome it!
Yes. It should. In fact, there should be more features like this. There are some features that need to be toned down, Aura of Protection might even need a slight nerf. But its features like this that actually lead to the fun of playing a Paladin. (Obviously this is subjective, though I feel like this one paragraph is the only one that can be reduced down to just personal preference.)
Especially when anything you need to do to 'mitigate' it just automatically makes your encounters better and more interesting even without that feature.
This feature is most powerful in featureless white rooms, against single target encounters. The most notoriously unbalanced and boring kinds of fights. Doing anything to make your encounter more interesting will almost always make Aura of Protection less powerful.
Your solution effectively amounts to "homebrew it away" or "the DM can fix it" while we're talking about revisions to the base system of D&D. Claiming to base your experiences at a level which doesn't even exist by official rules doesn't exactly make the point you think it does here. Aura of Protection violates some of the core design principles of D&D 5e, it is empirically badly designed by the designers own metrics and it's effects can be seen by anyone playing using the rules as written or even light homebrew.
I'm not even saying it needs a power nerf, it needs a design change. I'm actually perfectly fine with it being a powerful ability but the WAY it works is destructive to the balance of the game. Replace it with an equally powerful feature that doesn't throw off the math of the game (and preferably a more interesting one that "numbers go up").
Can you homebrew your way around it? Sure. Does that matter in the context of a playtest ruleset? Absolutely not. The core rules should be solid, without requiring DM intervention (particularly on matters of balance, which many DMs are not great judges of).
No, that's a strawman and its a disingenuous way to phrase it. We both know this. Its the same as complaining that Fireball is OP because all you do is throw hordes of low HP low Dex creatures at your Wizard. You are creating the problem you're complaining about.
No, actually that was just anecdotal to back up already made claims and to dismiss your own anecdotes. The main core of my argument is that your problem comes from using inflexible prewritten modules, most of which are not of great quality (talking only about WotC modules, which I have experience in). While the issue does exist in those modules, it is by the nature of prewritten content not by nature of Aura of Protection.
No, you personally think its badly designed.
It is not.
I think its really funny that you keep insisting that just playing the game is homebrew. "Hey! I put a bunch of goblins in a cave! I'm really changing the base game here! Wait till Reddit gets a load of this new change, choosing to use different statblocks from the Monster Manual! How creative am I?"
Hahahahahahaha, oh wait you're serious? A game that does not require DM intervention would be a game without a DM. DnD will always require a DM by nature of it being an asymmetrical game. Do I wish I could play without a DM sometimes so I can be a player? Absolutely! Would that game be DnD? No.
Its why DnD video games, while being fun on their own, never capture the feeling of actually playing DnD. To think that you could design DnD to not require any DM intervention, or that it should even be a goal to is absolutely laughable.
Footnote - the above is not to say that DMless games are bad, lots of them are very good and fun. But DnD is not a DMless game, and it could never become a DMless game while remaining DnD.