Although the early years of the current 5e Dungeons & Dragons system saw little new rule content added beyond the initial trio of books, at this point there is no avoiding power creep in a 5e D&D campaign. The D&D 5e rules rely on a simple concept of bounded accuracy, designed to ensure that target numbers and accuracy values stay within a tight range. Like its predecessor in 4e D&D, this means the actual roll on a d20 always matters to some degree, unlike prior editions where some builds would always succeed at certain tasks, while others would always fail. New magic items introduced in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything broke the bonded accuracy values for Player Character spell casters.
Supplemental books have also introduced subclasses and spells that outshine most initial Player’s Handbook content. There is even power creep evident in D&D backgrounds in 2022, where the initial background choices were more about character backstory than optimization. For a Dungeon Master starting a 5e D&D campaign at this point in the system’s lifecycle, there is simply no avoiding power creep, leaving DMs to try to balance between characters that may rely solely on Player’s Handbook material as well as those that draw from several sourcebooks for added optimization. Even when 5e D&D first launched there were imbalances between classes, as seen with the attempts to overhaul the lackluster Ranger class, but the gap between optimal and under-performing character options has only grown since then.
Tabletop RPG fans have generally defined power creep as the phenomenon where source books published after a game’s core rules contain more powerful options than those that were initially presented. This leads to an “arms race” of sorts, which encourages every player to keep up with each book as it is released. Since many of the most powerful official D&D subclasses are not in the Player’s Handbook, it is fair to say power creep has reached the current system. The brazenly unbalanced subclasses from the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemont, like Echo Knight Fighter and Chronurgist Wizard, are considerably more powerful than most pre-existing subclasses.
How Power Creep Imbalances Became A Problem For D&D Classes
Class-specific items like the Bloodwell Vial and Moon Sickle skew the game’s balance overtly, as they are the same rarity as the Wand of the Warmage featured in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, but they also increase the caster’s Difficulty Class for spells instead of just adding to spell accuracy. In games where magic items can be purchased, players selecting the original Wand of the Warmage are now making a mistake, thanks to these power creep items that break the math for bounded accuracy. Similarly, players might select a Player’s Handbook background like Urchin or Outlander, which says something about where their character came from and offers largely negligible bonuses to navigation. The new Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos backgrounds add additional spells to a caster’s spell list, providing far more impact on the game.
Longtime veterans of D&D may note that the power creep in the current rules still shows remarkable restraint compared to some earlier editions. The 4e D&D rules put game balance as a high priority, going as far as publishing errata of powers throughout the edition to ensure constant parity among classes, thereby avoiding power creep. The long-running 3.0 and 3.5 editions of D&D, however, had far less emphasis on balance, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons did not seem to consider balance at all, focusing solely on simulating a specific style of fantasy adventure, regardless of whether that produced a balanced game. Late in the lifecycle of each edition more adventurous (and often unbalanced) player options have been presented, and with One D&D on the horizon, this seems to be the case for 5e D&D as well.
What constitutes power creep, or a rule imbalance, is often debatable, as some DMs think the 5e D&D Monk class is overpowered, while the majority agree that it is one of the weakest classes in current D&D. Still, few would disagree that much of the newer D&D material eclipses the player options available when the edition first launched. Players building characters at this stage are likely to leverage the powerful Silvery Barbs spell from the Strixhaven supplement, the Cleric’s Twilight Domain from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, or the powerful backgrounds introduced in Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. Few players would select the Champion Fighter subclass when powerful options like the Echo Knight exist.
D&D Power Creep Can Make Campaigns More Interesting, With More Subclasses & Options
As fans of legacy versions of D&D can attest, power creep is far from the death of a game. So long as every player has the same diverse options at their disposal, a campaign late in a D&D edition’s lifecycle can be far more interesting than one using only the handful of options from the Player’s Handbook. Some of those original options remain competitive since a D&D ranged Fighter or Rogue multi-class build using subclasses like Battlemaster and Assassin is still hard to beat, even with newer content available. A DM may need to assist players who build suboptimal characters so that they can hold their own alongside other party members, and they will certainly need to tailor the game’s challenges to a stronger party.
For every subclass like the Abjuration specialist Wizard, or the Path of the Totem Warrior Barbarian, that remains effective in current D&D, there are others like the Evocation specialist Wizard or the Champion Fighter that have been made obsolete by subclasses like Chronurgist or Echo Knight. Some of these options were already noticeably lackluster when the edition first launched, but the power creep from subsequent books has made the gap in efficacy more evident over the years. The changes are a mixed bag, as books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything may have ruined bounded accuracy with new magic items, but Tasha’s also included dynamic new D&D rule changes that allowed players to create effective race and class pairings that might not have worked otherwise.
The present state of 5e D&D is certainly more complex than it was when the edition left its play test roughly eight years ago, but that complexity makes the game more interesting and dynamic for most groups. The revisions foreshadowed for One D&D will likely return balance to the game, and some builds that excel in the current rules may not function under the new system. There is no avoiding power creep in the current rules, but for most gaming groups, this simply means building a character involves consulting three to four books instead of one. If nothing else, the existence of power creep has consistently served to drive sales for D&D books. For those overwhelmed by the imbalance of the current rules, signing up to participate in the One D&D playtest might provide a perfect “reset” of sorts, before the Dungeons & Dragons power creep cycle inevitably repeats several years down the line.