Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[PhoenixPhyre]

He's agreeing with you. The standard practice in point buy is only give npc powers/skills that are relevant to save time. Nobody cares that thug#1 had a basketweaving skill when he dies in the 1st round of combat.

In all systems you just pick what is relevant to save time.

In point buy this is very easy because you just spend points on skill/stats/abilities/powers so you dont need to explain at all...in D&D terms the players might cry foul if the bad guy used a flurry of blows while wearing heavy armor and casting a 5th level wizard spell. In point buy this is only explained away by how many points the bad guy had.

Some point buy systems also have guidelines of making new powers so if something new showd up in game the players cant scream and shout and call the GM a cheater for not following RAW slavishly.


Note that this isn't foolproof.

I run point buy games almost exclusively and my players often cry foul when I don't specify HOW an NPC has the numbers they have.

I will simply eyeball what is an appropriate value for a character in their position and give it to them rather than actually finagling the details, and then when my players decide that the NPC's score is too high they will ask me for an accounting of how he got it and I will say something like "Well, he has a +14, he COULD have had, say, a 9 dexterity, a +3 quality sword, and two ranks of the melee prodigy merit, but I don't know exactly how he did it because I just gave him the end result to save time," and then my players will feel cheated.

But then again I seem to have extra-ordinarily whiny players so YMMV.

Ah. I see. That makes sense.


The reason I brought up exclusive actions is because of this sort of thing:

If anyone can do Y, and only one archetype can do X, then that archetype has an advantage because they get X and Y, while everyone else only gets Y.

The thing is that wizard can do everything else, and do magic, while everyone else can't do magic. And it doesn't help that magic can be written to do anything, and thus invalidates the other things as well.

Like, in a heartbreaker-esque game, if I'm a rogue, in what way can I do things that a sufficiently motivated wizard cannot? What capacities do I possess that are exclusive to my archetype, and not something that is universal?

If anyone can be sneaky, or try to open locks, or steal things, or attack from stealth, or whatever, then there's nothing that only a rogue can do.

Because in most cases, the wizard can also try to do all of those things, or use magic to replicate them.

So I feel like a good fix would be to either give everyone a niche with exclusive actions (which can result in shadowrun if done poorly), or to democratize all actions, so that anyone can attempt to do anything, just some people are better at it (which means attacking classes as a concept, probably).

I agree, but am not fond of niche protection. I prefer if there are overlapping sets of competencies--each "class" may have a special thing that only they can do, but it's more a method than anything. Anyone can be sneaky, but rogues can be better at it. Or anyone can evade part of the damage, but that class can sometimes evade all of it. Or each class has a way of doing damage, but the details vary.

For example, take picking locks. In 5e, that requires proficiency in thieves' tools. This comes for free from being a rogue or you can get it several other ways--easiest is a background that grants it. Picking locks is a Dexterity-related tool, so rogues tend to be better already, and (if they want) can select it as one of their "expertise" skills and get a huge, scaling bonus. At higher levels, rogues get a feature that makes their minimum roll on picking locks (and all other proficient skills) to be 10 + DEX + Proficiency (~20 if they have maxed Dexterity). That automatically succeeds on most normal locks (DC ~15). On the flip side, wizards can learn knock which will open a lock--it's a 2nd level spell and requires you to prepare it as one of your spells for the day (which are much fewer and further between than in 3e) and also makes a lot of noise. And there are no easy wands of knock lying around.

As a result--anyone can pick a lock with the right investment. Rogues can just do it better without investment, and at higher levels can do it more reliably. Same goes for most things. Anyone can attempt, but some are better than others. There are even feats to give non-casters limited spell casting (a couple at-will cantrips and 1 level 1 spell/day or the ability to learn ritual spells).

An analogy might be to climbing a mountain. The goal is the same for all participants--get to the top. There are many paths to get there--some easier than others. Everyone can get there, the only difference is how. Do you climb straight up? Do you build a jet-pack and fly? Do you carefully pick your way over the crags and boulders?

[Arbane]

He's agreeing with you. The standard practice in point buy is only give npc powers/skills that are relevant to save time. Nobody cares that thug#1 had a basketweaving skill when he dies in the 1st round of combat.

Or as I heard it, "Who CARES how many ranks Cthulhu has in Use Rope?!"



So let's consider a few systems I've heard of--what are the steps to making an NPC (major or minor) in each of the following systems? Do you have to follow the same exact process (including only picking from player-available options) as you would for creating a PC? Are the durability/damage/skill outputs the same as an equivalent-power PC?

* Traveller. I've heard that this one goes by life-cycle and can take quite a while to build a starting PC. I'm assuming you don't have to do that whole process for an NPC.
* GURPS. Something about choosing a number of points and then buying variable-point skills from there?
* Apocalypse World. No clue what the character generation system is.
* FATE (either core or accelerated). I know you have aspects and a high concept, but beyond that I'm unsure.
* Other notable ones?

I really am asking this out of curiosity--I like knowing bits and facts about other systems.

Let's see: Traveller, PCs are created by going through a life-path system with a lot of random rolls, including one for survival and/or getting booted out of their original career and having to start play. In older editions, it was indeed possible to die in mid-chargen. NPCs, I'm not sure about.

GURPS: Correct, it's a point-buy system. You use the same pool of character points to buy stats, skills, advantages, and get some extra points by taking disadvantages. NPCs can be made the same way, or the GM might just eyeball what stats/skills/abilities they 'ought' to have and not worry about the math.

Apocalypse World: PCs pick a specific character class playsheet, pick stats, pick 2 class-specific abilities, and are ready to go. As I understand it, NPCs generally don't even have stats, they're part of the environment.

Fate: Aspects, and sometimes skills. NPCs can be even more simple, I suspect.


The Classic Way The DM writes an adventure for the players to go on. The DM takes time to do this before the game. The DM can take time to plan and prepare things like scenarios that require the whole party to work together.

What is this modernistic storygaming nonsense?! A classic GM is creating a milieu for the adventurers to explore, using their creativity and imagination, and if they can't figure out how to apply themselves in any given situation, then they DESERVE their boredom and/or death!



How? There's no "game" there. You roll dice, the DM makes things up. Apocalypse World is not a good product, and can barely even be called a "game".

Look at you, being wrong.
"You roll dice, the GM makes things up" is EVERY RPG EVER, some just cover it with more layers of obfuscation than AW.


Note that this isn't foolproof.

I run point buy games almost exclusively and my players often cry foul when I don't specify HOW an NPC has the numbers they have.
(SNIP)
But then again I seem to have extra-ordinarily whiny players so YMMV.

You ain't kidding. :smalleek:

At this point, I have to suggest that you build a little altar to the Game Gods and leave offerings every day for a year or two, since you obviously did SOMETHING to enrage them.

[Satinavian]

The reason I brought up exclusive actions is because of this sort of thing:

If anyone can do Y, and only one archetype can do X, then that archetype has an advantage because they get X and Y, while everyone else only gets Y.

The thing is that wizard can do everything else, and do magic, while everyone else can't do magic. And it doesn't help that magic can be written to do anything, and thus invalidates the other things as well.
That is why if i would design a system, everyone would be able to learn magic. It would just not be worth it for many concepts.

A bit like Splittermond does it.

[Cluedrew]

Fate: Aspects, and sometimes skills. NPCs can be even more simple, I suspect.You said most of the stuff I was going to say* but here I think I can add some things. Namely that NPCs don't have to be stated, because you don't actually have to know their exact stats to figure out how hard overcoming the NPC in a given situation is, and when you do the rules seem to suggest you do it on the fly.

* Including defending Apocalypse World's status as a game. I will hear arguments that it is a bad game, but saying it doesn't count as a game is... I don't think you have a leg to stand on there.

[Max_Killjoy]

You said most of the stuff I was going to say* but here I think I can add some things. Namely that NPCs don't have to be stated, because you don't actually have to know their exact stats to figure out how hard overcoming the NPC in a given situation is, and when you do the rules seem to suggest you do it on the fly.


I'm not really a fan of treating NPCs as part of the scenery, as obstacles and challenges.

[Pleh]

The difference is that your assassin can't kill a natural earthquake.

No, but a caster can, which means somewhere in the hypothetical RPS scenario, Caster > Environment > Assassin > Caster


I had three RPG sessions last week, different groups, different systems. The total number of combat encounters was 0. Even if i go a bit further back and consider the combats we actually had try to distribute enemies along martial, stealthy and caster, by far most fights were against martials as fighting is their job.

Sure, martials should be at their prime in combat, which is why Tactical RPS predicts unchallenged martials will tend to win martial combat. Thus, to undermine their advantage by exploiting their weaknesses, you bring in an opposed magic threat (possibly a caster, but maybe a magic trap or beast) so the combat field is more diverse than one note martial combat. Now the martials are owning all of the combat not related to the magic.

The heroes throw their assassin at the magic threat, since in the theoretical scenario, stealth > magic. If applicable, the DM employs martials to target the assassin. Suppose the hero martials are tied up managing the base combat level and might start to lose if they also must protect and support the assassin, the hero caster then hits the enemy martials to keep them off the assassin.

The Martials take point and the others have an active role covering each other's weaknesses.

[Pex]

It kinda amazes me that so many people assume 3e is the "default" way of doing D&D things, especially when it's something where it is the only edition that did it that way. Especially when it's an edition that's been dead for a decade. At this point, AD&D 1e, 2e, or even oD&D or BECMI ways are equal valid to consider.

Otoh someone just go done complaining about assuming the D&D way of doing things is the only way of doing things, so it probably shouldn't. :smallamused:

I'm guessing timing.

There was an internet before 3E, but at that time it was text base and not everyone had a personal computer. 3E came out when the internet became more user friendly. Graphics became standard allowing for web pages and discussion forums. Computer costs went down allowing for more people to have one in their home. 3E was discussed widely and became the D&D standard.

[Frozen_Feet]

Or as I heard it, "Who CARES how many ranks Cthulhu has in Use Rope?!"

You'd be surprised.

I'm totally lassoing the next cosmic horror my character faces.




What is this modernistic storygaming nonsense?! A classic GM is creating a milieu for the adventurers to explore, using their creativity and imagination, and if they can't figure out how to apply themselves in any given situation, then they DESERVE their boredom and/or death!

Oooh, what is this? Someone read their 1st ed AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. :smallamused:




Look at you, being wrong.
"You roll dice, the GM makes things up" is EVERY RPG EVER, some just cover it with more layers of obfuscation than AW.

Look at you, being wrong. That's not every RPG ever. Some realize the dice and the GM are just superfluous distractions and let the players make things up. :smallwink:

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm guessing timing.

There was an internet before 3E, but at that time it was text base and not everyone had a personal computer. 3E came out when the internet became more user friendly. Graphics became standard allowing for web pages and discussion forums. Computer costs went down allowing for more people to have one in their home. 3E was discussed widely and became the D&D standard.

It's possible that if "eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)" had come a few years earlier, or 3e had come out a few years later, there would have been a body of analytical musing about 2e and its variations, and we'd have seen a different reaction to 3e in some ways.




No, but a caster can, which means somewhere in the hypothetical RPS scenario, Caster > Environment > Assassin > Caster


Sure, martials should be at their prime in combat, which is why Tactical RPS predicts unchallenged martials will tend to win martial combat. Thus, to undermine their advantage by exploiting their weaknesses, you bring in an opposed magic threat (possibly a caster, but maybe a magic trap or beast) so the combat field is more diverse than one note martial combat. Now the martials are owning all of the combat not related to the magic.

The heroes throw their assassin at the magic threat, since in the theoretical scenario, stealth > magic. If applicable, the DM employs martials to target the assassin. Suppose the hero martials are tied up managing the base combat level and might start to lose if they also must protect and support the assassin, the hero caster then hits the enemy martials to keep them off the assassin.

The Martials take point and the others have an active role covering each other's weaknesses.


Personally I'd avoid RPS design like the plague.

It should come down to the individual character and the player's decisions, not some hypothetical model of which archetype (ie cliche, ie stereotype) is "supposed" to beat which other archetype.

[Quertus]

Here's the thing, you are supposed to only be acting a small fraction of the time because tabletop games generally run off turns. So if you have 5 players in the game, by and large you are going to be spending 80% of the time twiddling your thumbs waiting for your turn to come around again*.

The problem with the Shadowrun setup is that each players "turn" takes as long as an entire encounter in D&D, and thus everyone else gets really bored waiting for their turn to come up.

While that's true, it's worse than that.

When it's not my turn in D&D, I still have the expectation that I'm going to be taking a turn, that my character is there. I'm evaluating the field, seeing what my character is learning about the scenario & even about my fellow PCs. I'm evaluating tactics, looking up rules, preparing contingencies. I'm engaged.

When it's not my turn in Shadowrun, my character is not in the net / astraly projected / etc. My character is himself just sitting there, twiddling his thumbs.

In fact, to most easily roleplay my ignorance of what has transpired, it's best if I'm not engaged - if I'm actively ignoring what's going on in the game.

So, no, in D&D, I can have 100% participation, 100% engagement. In Shadowrun? Not so much.


You know its funny, I think we are actually saying the same thing here.

Now, I bet you were still taking actions for those ten seconds, the actions just never mattered, right?

Which is precisely what I think would happen to the majority of players if everyone was playing a versatile caster; one person, likely either the smartest or most goal oriented person in the group, would solve virtually every problem on their own and everyone else just sits back and pretends to contribute.

Aggressive agreement? It happens. :smallwink:

10 sessions. And yes, I was taking actions which, ultimately, had exactly 0 value.

If the players are too dense to be able to do anything when handed carte Blanche, I'm not seeing how limiting them could possibly help matters. And if one player is just too competent, then he should handicap himself, like I did with Armus. I'm just not seeing the problem you are describing, aside from when one player is just a ****. And that's a problem regardless of whether or not you've given the PCs Ultimate Power.


Ok, so say we have a dungeon room with a locked door, a wounded prisoner, and a massive boulder blocking the path.

What is the fundamental difference between having a rogue pick the lock, the barbarian move the boulder, and the medic tend to the prisoner during their turns and having a party of three casters draw lots over who gets to cast knock on the door, disintegrate on the boulder, and heal on the prisoner? Aside from the fact that the feeling of team work is wholly illusory in the second example as any one of the casters could have cast all three spells on their own while his two friends sat back and played go fish, that is.**

Here, you get to express your character's personality:

* Well, I would cast Turn Boulder to Pebble on the rock, but I'm too busy casting ESP / Mind Rape on the prisoner.

* Fine, I'll alter gravity and grease up the boulder so we can move it.

* No, wait, don't change things, I haven't finished my detects and divinations yet.

There's not just one response to your scenario.

-----

You've also brought into question the nature of teamwork.

Is "have the strong guy lift things" teamwork? I don't think so.

Personally, I think that a willingness to fill required roles better characterizes teamwork. Which explains part of why I so love the "how do we make a working party out of this random group" minigame - it puts teamwork at the forefront of the game. IMO, teamwork is the rogue being willing to pick the lock or dig out the boulder or unchain the prisoner; the barbarian being willing to move the boulder or break down the door or break the prisoner's bonds / carry the prisoner.

A group of programmers may all technically be able to build any part of the code, or just build it all by themselves if given the time. But that doesn't exclude the unfathomable possibility that we might just be able to break the project down into logical chunks, and divide them up - or even help each other out if we run into problems.

Teamwork can still be a thing with Ultimate Power.


Yes, but the ways those games did things are honestly pretty stupid. If you think "BAB vs THAC0" is a debate worth having, you do not deserve to be part of a serious conversation about RPGs. Ditto racial level limits or different XP tables for different classes. There are some good ideas in older editions (lower HP/damage curve, random items), but 3e is simply a better game than they are and gets correspondingly more mentions. This is accentuated if you're talking about games from a "mining for ideas" perspective.

BAB > THAC0. No disagreement there.

Racial level limits apparently had the intention of giving new players a handicap. Better IMO to make things balanced, but include an explicit "noob" option. I personally prefer the idea of a completely and explicitly OP class named the "BDH".

Different XP tables had the cool side effect of not having everyone level at the same time. This meant that, when you leveled, you got your moment in the spotlight for being the only one with cool new toys. It also meant that you could tie HD to levels, while not tying HD to XP. Sure, you could give the 3e Wizard 2 HD at level 1, but start giving the 3e Fighter 2 HD per level past 5th. But it would just feel... hacked. Inelegant.


5e D&D seems pretty balanced at low levels, and every class is too OP at high levels, which makes me want to start at 1st level again regardless.

I have no interest in the "build mini-game", nor in playing a superpowered "god wizard", I just want to role-play a Fafhrd, Gray Mouser, Robin Hood, or Sinbad-like "guy with sword", and having to even think of "power levels" sounds like a chore.

Other than having so many tables, why would I want to play 3.x D&D? anyway, it was such a long slog before a Magic User PC became less weak than the other classes that if they survived to become poweful it seemed like a just reward in old D&D.

Given my preferences what would make 3.x better?

Fighters ruled the game in earlier editions. 3e was the "casters can have nice things, too" edition. 3.5 then tried to take nice things away from the Fighters. (Why, WotC, why?)

You've enjoyed Fighter superiority long enough that the transition to 3e would be hard, were it not for your "wizards being powerful is a reward" mindset. If you can view it as, "Wizards getting half an edition where they're better is their reward", then you'll be fine there.

Now, I personally prefer 2e D&D. But 3e does have a few nice things that some people prefer. You can calibrate the game anywhere from peasants to BDHs by changing your optimization level. You can likely find mechanics to support most any concept, like the Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. There's an active community to help you out. You build your character, not the random item tables / the GM. Save or die poison isn't really a constant threat to continuity any more. And, of course, THAC0 and "save vs obfuscated verbiage" has been replaced.

I can only assume 5e has a few of those features, too.

One thing that surprises me is that descriptions of bounded accuracy - making the 20th level party still vulnerable to goblins - really turns me off... yet you complain that characters get too powerful in 5e. What makes 20th level Sinbad in 5e too OP for your tastes?

I'm guessing you'd prefer to play E6, whereas many of my players would prefer to start with the Epic Level Handbook.

[Tanarii]

Anyone that thinks racial levels don't deserve at least proper analysis of original intent and purpose, and where and when that intent broke down or stopped serving the requirements of the majority of players, shouldn't be talking about RPG theory in the first place.

Anyone that thinks all classed games using XP must have the same XP table for all classes, that it's required thing, shouldn't be talking about RPG theory in the first place.

[Satinavian]

No, but a caster can, which means somewhere in the hypothetical RPS scenario, Caster > Environment > Assassin > CasterUsually those scenarios don't even have enemy NPCs let alone enemy casters.


Sure, martials should be at their prime in combat, which is why Tactical RPS predicts unchallenged martials will tend to win martial combat. Thus, to undermine their advantage by exploiting their weaknesses, you bring in an opposed magic threat (possibly a caster, but maybe a magic trap or beast) so the combat field is more diverse than one note martial combat. Now the martials are owning all of the combat not related to the magic.

The heroes throw their assassin at the magic threat, since in the theoretical scenario, stealth > magic. If applicable, the DM employs martials to target the assassin. Suppose the hero martials are tied up managing the base combat level and might start to lose if they also must protect and support the assassin, the hero caster then hits the enemy martials to keep them off the assassin.

The Martials take point and the others have an active role covering each other's weaknesses.So, just to make this work the DM has to change the whole world so that armies don't consist of soldiers anymore but of a neat mix of martials, assassins and casters to counter all other forces with basically the same setup.

Well, no, won't happen.

[Pleh]

Usually those scenarios don't even have enemy NPCs let alone enemy casters.

You are looking totally past my point.

There is little substantial difference between the attack roll from a single rock falling in a landslide and the attack roll from a rock thrown by a giant.

Hence, a DM running a landslide is using the same rules as a mindless group of giants hurling boulders.

Hence a landslide can be considered an NPC in the sense that it is an actor in the scene.

I am proposing Environment/NPC transparency.

The DM doesn't need to mix armies of NPCs. They only have to diversify Actors in their Combined Encounter.

When we get stuck with only sentient NPCs being allowed to affect combat balance, we run into very limited balance criteria.

Everything I am proposing would require holistic application of the balance criteria. Because powers are just tools and ought to possess the same advantages universally regardless who or what employs them. If we approximate balance through RPS logic, it's not just classes that are balanced this way. The whole system must adhere.

Now again, it should never be the oversimplified, "rock beats paper." It's more the pokemon, "it is/isn't very effective." The 5e word is, "advantage."

Rock has "advantage" over paper. Martial has advantage over stealth. Magic has advantage over martial. Stealth has advantage over magic.

[Darth Ultron]

When it's not my turn in D&D, I still have the expectation that I'm going to be taking a turn, that my character is there. I'm evaluating the field, seeing what my character is learning about the scenario & even about my fellow PCs. I'm evaluating tactics, looking up rules, preparing contingencies. I'm engaged.


I wish more players were like this. I find the vast majority do nothing when it is not their turn, and worse go way out of their way to leave the game area and do something else.

To even get some players to even read the rules is often a minor miracle. They will sit around and sit around, and then when their turn comes they will stop the game with a dumb question like ''drr, hey guys, what does the spell brun'in hands do?"


So, just to make this work the DM has to change the whole world so that armies don't consist of soldiers anymore but of a neat mix of martials, assassins and casters to counter all other forces with basically the same setup.

Well, no, won't happen.

Why not? Why is the concept of fantastic fantasy armies so hard? Is it just as the dull and boring default vague setting given in the rules? The base setting of ''um, like Earth in 1300, but with tons of magic and fantasy..that um, don't change anything and utterly makes no sense''.

Or is it just that in Lord of the Rings all the good guys had was ''Old Earth real stuff'' and all the bad guys had all the fantasy and magic stuff.

I have always had armies of: Griffin Air Corps, Hill Giant Artillery, Dragon Blasters, Aquatic elf sappers, and even the foot solders are half purple dragon war troll fighter/warlock/sorcerers.

[2D8HP]

....One thing that surprises me is that descriptions of bounded accuracy - making the 20th level party still vulnerable to goblins - really turns me off....
I actually like that, and 5e's "swingyness", keeps it exciting.


...yet you complain that characters get too powerful in 5e. What makes 20th level Sinbad in 5e too OP for your tastes?.
A little to far from normal human scale, also I get "options fatigue".


...I'm guessing you'd prefer to play E6, whereas many of my players would prefer to start with the Epic Level Handbook.


While I prefer higher levels in TD&D (so I may expect to PC to survive), I do find higher level WD&D play a bit dull and unrelatable (same with superhero RPG's like Champions and Villians & Vigilantes).

I prefer playing PC's that are closer to regular humans, but exploring a fantastic world.

I just don't find curbstomping a world exciting, I'd rather play Call of Cthullu than "Epic".

0e/1e 1st level TD&D and CoC PC's are too "squishy", so I do like PC's a bit more powerful than that, but only a bit.

I'd actually be fine playing say 3rd to 10th level TD&D or 2nd to 5th level 5e WD&D.

[Frozen_Feet]

So, just to make this work the DM has to change the whole world so that armies don't consist of soldiers anymore but of a neat mix of martials, assassins and casters to counter all other forces with basically the same setup.

Well, no, won't happen.

Errrr... why not? Real militaries already sort of work like this. Combined arms are based on specialist of different fields of warfare collaborating to strike at the enemy's weak points. Where a military is severely lacking in some aspect, they get overpowered by an opponent which has access.

In-universe, there are only few reasons for non-existence of combined arms: underdeveloped science of tactics, strategy and logistics or lack of resources. If a military has access to all of soldiers, assassins and magicians and is not using all of them, someone in the leadership is being criminally dumb and is begging to lose to the first opposing general who figures out how to use them in combination.

[Satinavian]

You are looking totally past my point.

There is little substantial difference between the attack roll from a single rock falling in a landslide and the attack roll from a rock thrown by a giant.Depends a lot on the system. But the most common approach seems to be that in one case the giant makes attack rolls and in the other the PC makes skill checks. Because the giant throwing boulders is the actor and the character trying to evade the landslide is an actor.


Everything I am proposing would require holistic application of the balance criteria. Because powers are just tools and ought to possess the same advantages universally regardless who or what employs them. If we approximate balance through RPS logic, it's not just classes that are balanced this way. The whole system must adhere."Holistic" is not a good reason to skip over the details, if you have to write and balance all the little powers independently and one ofter another

But if everything that is left from RPS is "the effectiveness of powers varies depending on circumstances but on average they should be balanced", yes, that should be true.


Errrr... why not? Real militaries already sort of work like this. Combined arms are based on specialist of different fYes, modern (and also not so modern) militaries have other roles than front fighters. Support stuff, medics, logistics ect.
But non of those non-combat roles is able to win agains the combat roles in accordance with RPS logic. These people are supporters of soldiers, not foils to soldiers.

Or are you talking about different combat roles ? Those would all be martials. A martial is everyone whose main function in a battle is the use of a weapon. Maybe you could sort reconnaissance into the assassin folder if you really stretch it. Even things like pioneers would better fit as martial than as assassin.


Magic ? Well, depends a lot the magic system. But army spellcasters would either be support roles or just another, fantastic kind of martial. Both don't work well with RPS when one of the other options is "martial".

[Pleh]

Depends a lot on the system. But the most common approach seems to be that in one case the giant makes attack rolls and in the other the PC makes skill checks. Because the giant throwing boulders is the actor and the character trying to evade the landslide is an actor.

In the Firefly game I have, it'd be attack vs dodgr skill in pretty much either case.


"Holistic" is not a good reason to skip over the details, if you have to write and balance all the little powers independently and one ofter another

I'm not skipping over anything. My desire is to establish proof of concept, not develop the system outright. I don't need to rigorously rewrite the whole system to prove that doing so could work.


Yes, modern (and also not so modern) militaries have other roles than front fighters. Support stuff, medics, logistics ect.
But non of those non-combat roles is able to win agains the combat roles in accordance with RPS logic. These people are supporters of soldiers, not foils to soldiers.

Not in single combat. The idea behind supporting roles in military is that a group of individuals act as a single unit.

It's no longer soldier to soldier, but army to army.

The army with the weaker soldiers could still win through superior support.

Armies could try to sabotage one another by targeting the support members, leaving their martials unsupported and outmatched.


Or are you talking about different combat roles ? Those would all be martials. A martial is everyone whose main function in a battle is the use of a weapon. Maybe you could sort reconnaissance into the assassin folder if you really stretch it. Even things like pioneers would better fit as martial than as assassin.

A caster can plink with a crossbow.

Every class is going to fall on a spectrum. Ideally, your class wouldn't dictate your RPS role, rather it would advise it and make you more effective at particular roles.


Magic ? Well, depends a lot the magic system. But army spellcasters would either be support roles or just another, fantastic kind of martial. Both don't work well with RPS when one of the other options is "martial".

There's artillery fire, which is not just support and not martial. SoD spells directly remove enemies from combat and aren't martial maneuvers nor "just support."

[Talakeal]

While that's true, it's worse than that.

When it's not my turn in D&D, I still have the expectation that I'm going to be taking a turn, that my character is there. I'm evaluating the field, seeing what my character is learning about the scenario & even about my fellow PCs. I'm evaluating tactics, looking up rules, preparing contingencies. I'm engaged.

When it's not my turn in Shadowrun, my character is not in the net / astraly projected / etc. My character is himself just sitting there, twiddling his thumbs.

In fact, to most easily roleplay my ignorance of what has transpired, it's best if I'm not engaged - if I'm actively ignoring what's going on in the game.

So, no, in D&D, I can have 100% participation, 100% engagement. In Shadowrun? Not so much.

Yeah, Shadow Run does essentially encourage splitting the party.

However, there is nothing to stop you from paying attention and analyzing the other player's "scenes," and there is nothing to stop the GM from placing crucial information in such scenes to make it a requirement. Also, there are lots of D&D players who just zone out (or worse pull out their phones!) during other player's turns.

Also, imo your proposed everyone is T1 game would function much the same way as Shadow Run a lot of the time as the only way you could mechanically enforce cooperation outside of combat is to have lots of obstacles which require people to be in multiple places at the same time.



Here, you get to express your character's personality:

* Well, I would cast Turn Boulder to Pebble on the rock, but I'm too busy casting ESP / Mind Rape on the prisoner.

* Fine, I'll alter gravity and grease up the boulder so we can move it.

* No, wait, don't change things, I haven't finished my detects and divinations yet.

There's not just one response to your scenario.

-----

You've also brought into question the nature of teamwork.

Is "have the strong guy lift things" teamwork? I don't think so.

Personally, I think that a willingness to fill required roles better characterizes teamwork. Which explains part of why I so love the "how do we make a working party out of this random group" minigame - it puts teamwork at the forefront of the game. IMO, teamwork is the rogue being willing to pick the lock or dig out the boulder or unchain the prisoner; the barbarian being willing to move the boulder or break down the door or break the prisoner's bonds / carry the prisoner.

A group of programmers may all technically be able to build any part of the code, or just build it all by themselves if given the time. But that doesn't exclude the unfathomable possibility that we might just be able to break the project down into logical chunks, and divide them up - or even help each other out if we run into problems.

Teamwork can still be a thing with Ultimate Power.
.

It looks like what you have essentially done is turned the exploration / skill test portions of the game into something that resembles an in character conversation. It is mostly free form and used primarily as an opportunity to express your character's personality. This can be a lot of fun, but in my experience it is the part of the game which most suffers from one guy hogging the spotlight and everyone else getting bored and checking out. There are also a lot of players who simply don't enjoy participating in this sort of game and want the dice to handle it, you frequently see posts on this forum that boil down to "Why does my DM keep making me formulate an argument and / or talk in character? Why can't I just roll a CHA test and be done with it?"

Now, IIRC you like the current power and versatility of 3.5 T1 casters and think it should be brought to every class. You are in favor of removing "spells per day," and making everything "at will," and are against making spell casters need to roll a dice to get their spells off? Is this correct?

IMO this is going to, for the most part, sacrifice out of combat challenge, resource management, team work, dice rolling, and exploration. Not everyone finds all of these things fun, but most players find most of them fun, and you are really going to be sacrificing a lot of the game and a lot of people's enjoyment.


Just to clarify where I am coming from personally:
I prefer the trapping of a martial character to a magical one. I also like to play characters who are defined by their limitations. When I play a caster it is usually a specialist (or if I am playing WoD with an overly narrow paradigm) because I do not find "jack of all trades," characters particularly interesting except maybe in a lone wolf game.
On the other hand I do find that the martial characters in 3.5 are way too narrow for my tastes, having basically only 1 or 2 in combat strategies and virtually no out of combat or defensive abilities and do wish they would get a major boost. My preferred class would have the fluff of the War Blade, the defenses of the Monk, the skills of a Bard, and the play-style of the Warlock.
But I recognize people have different opinions and I think the best game is the one where there is the most overlap in viable archetypes, which for 3.5 means a lot of buffs for T4-5 classes (mostly martials) and a lot of nerfs for the T1-2 classes (mostly casters).

[Frozen_Feet]

@Satinavian:

As I've said earlier, I strongly advocate considering all military characters as martials, as that is what the word means.

I do not see this as an obstacle to have RPS relations within the military. From my viewpoint, a triangle of soldier versys assassin versus caster is similar to, say aircraft versus infantry versus anti-air artillery. Or to use an example that's perhaps closer: axes versus spears versus swords in Fire Emblem, and melee versus archery versus offensive magic. (Or however it went. Been a while since I played Fire Emblem.)

In a way, such paradigm would be a return to time of Chainmail (or sideways step towards Warhammer, if that's your poison) where mages were basically fantastic artillery units.

Non-martial magic-use and non-magical non-combatants are a different topic.

[RazorChain]

Errrr... why not? Real militaries already sort of work like this. Combined arms are based on specialist of different fields of warfare collaborating to strike at the enemy's weak points. Where a military is severely lacking in some aspect, they get overpowered by an opponent which has access.

In-universe, there are only few reasons for non-existence of combined arms: underdeveloped science of tactics, strategy and logistics or lack of resources. If a military has access to all of soldiers, assassins and magicians and is not using all of them, someone in the leadership is being criminally dumb and is begging to lose to the first opposing general who figures out how to use them in combination.

Yes but I can take out a machine gun nest even though I'm the medic, sniper, rifleman or whatever as long as I get close enough with a grenade. The party setup isn't about combined arms, it's more about small unit tactics. So if only the sniper can take out the grenadier and only the assault trooper can take out snipers then this ruins verisimilitude because we assume that any guy with a gun can kill another guy with a gun....the rest is only a matter of training, specialization and experience.

So what if the group has no sniper? Does that mean that they can't encounter any grenadiers?

[Frozen_Feet]

The assumption that any guy with a gun can kill any other guy with a gun doesn't actually hold for all possible situations.

The easiest way to implement what I was talking of at tactical level is do what Fire Emblem does and make the relations exist between different pieces of equipment. So yeah, your medic can take out that MG nest if they have a grenade. (Etc.) If they don't, they can't, and are forced to take another option. Sometimes this means losing. This is fine.

[Pleh]

Playing catch-up in the middle of my workweek.


Personally I'd avoid RPS design like the plague.

It should come down to the individual character and the player's decisions, not some hypothetical model of which archetype (ie cliche, ie stereotype) is "supposed" to beat which other archetype.

Consider: Aragorn, suspecting Saruman to be right around the corner, says to Legolas and Gimli, "Do not let him speak. He will cast a spell on us."

I propose there is nothing more human about the characters than taking stock of their tactical options and odds of success. Aragorn might have been one of Middle Earth's leading experts on tactical combat, even against powerful and magical enemies.

In this case, they decided caster > martial, so their best bet was ambush > caster (didn't work for them, but I suspect Gandalf was wearing Plot Armor in that moment).

My point is that RPS breaks no versimilitude if you can tune your worldbuilding to make it all make coherent sense such that players and characters both are somewhat aware of the fact that this is just how the world works.

[Max_Killjoy]

Playing catch-up in the middle of my workweek.



Consider: Aragorn, suspecting Saruman to be right around the corner, says to Legolas and Gimli, "Do not let him speak. He will cast a spell on us."

I propose there is nothing more human about the characters than taking stock of their tactical options and odds of success. Aragorn might have been one of Middle Earth's leading experts on tactical combat, even against powerful and magical enemies.

In this case, they decided caster > martial, so their best bet was ambush > caster (didn't work for them, but I suspect Gandalf was wearing Plot Armor in that moment).

My point is that RPS breaks no versimilitude if you can tune your worldbuilding to make it all make coherent sense such that players and characters both are somewhat aware of the fact that this is just how the world works.


Beside the fact that's one situation in one very particular setting with a very particular take on magic -- be careful trying to emulate the particulars of authorial fiction in an RPG, they're not the same medium. Many players won't accept their character being Gimli to another player's Saruman. If one were to insist that Saruman is an NPC, that takes the situation outside of RPS character balancing.

Nevermind that by conflating tactics and other elements with character archetypes (blending "ambush" with "caster", "environment" with "assassin", etc) you've pretty much blown up RPS already.

Regardless, it doesn't change my utter loathing for RPS structure in game design,

[2D8HP]

...RPS....


...RPS....
:confused:
What does "RPS" mean?

[Max_Killjoy]

.

.
:confused:
What does "RPS" mean?


Rock Paper Scissors.

It's a really awful way to "balance" a game by setting it up so that X beats Y beats Z beats X etc.

[2D8HP]

Rock Paper Scissors.

It's a really awful way to "balance" a game by setting it up so that X beats Y beats Z beats X etc..
Thanks!

[RazorChain]

On the topic of RPS, I don't like them in roleplaying games. First you have to have a class system where one class is just simply better against another class and you have to find a way to enforce it.

Suprise, ambush, attacking someones back, killing someone in their sleep doesn't even enter the picture as these are tactics that can be employed by everyone. RPS implies that spearmen beats cavalry, cavalry beats archers and archers beat spearmen...this is very classic setup but hardly applies to rpgs as you have the options of chosing from myriads of tactics.


So if you have the Assassin who's supposed to beat the Caster then you have to explain why. So if you explain it away that the assassin can sneak behind the caster and stab him in the back then the only thing that is implied is that the Warrior and the Caster can't sneak or stab people in the back. This ruins immersion for me because as an ex soldier I identify myself with the Warrior and I know darn well that I can sneak behind people and stab them in the back in RL....heck part of my training was to camouflage and sneak so I could ambush the enemy.

[Mutazoia]

Anyone that thinks racial levels don't deserve at least proper analysis of original intent and purpose, and where and when that intent broke down or stopped serving the requirements of the majority of players, shouldn't be talking about RPG theory in the first place.

Anyone that thinks all classed games using XP must have the same XP table for all classes, that it's required thing, shouldn't be talking about RPG theory in the first place.

The problem is, we have an entire generation of gamers that cut their teeth on 3.X and/or 4e, and they don't know any better. They can't see the unbalance, because they were "born" with it...they think it's SUPPOSED to be that way.

Anything that makes one class lag behind another in levels is bad, even if that one class has much more power than the other class....they can't grasp the concept of a stronger class leveling slower, or refuse to grasp it.

[Satinavian]

Not in single combat. The idea behind supporting roles in military is that a group of individuals act as a single unit.

It's no longer soldier to soldier, but army to army.

The army with the weaker soldiers could still win through superior support.We are talking about character options, not about unit options in a wargame. And even if that we ignore that, RPS is about 1 one 1 engagements, not about group vs group. RPS doesn't work for support roles.

There's artillery fire, which is not just support and not martial. SoD spells directly remove enemies from combat and aren't martial maneuvers nor "just support."And which kind of class is most likely to get proficiency with artillery across systems ? Variants of soldier classes. It is still the martials.

And there is literally no noteworthy difference between using a weapon to kill someone or using a SoD spell to kill someone. That is just some artifact of the D&D rules which for some reason have a hitpoint system modelling injuries until death and seperate death effects on top of it.

Non-martial magic-use and non-magical non-combatants are a different topic.No, they are the same topic. One of my main points was all the time that most encounters in quite a lot of systems are not actually combat encounters and you really should not build and balance all your character options with combat in mind.

Which means that this "RPS" does not only have to include heavy infanterists, skirmishers, archers, light & heavy cavalry, but also priests, medics, engineers, aristocrats, lawyers, craftsmen, hunters, farmers, architects, merchants, thiefs, scholars ect.

But for most of them typical adventuring challanges don't even have an adversary. If my court painter (yes, i actually played one in a really classical system) awants to make a really impressive portrait that subtly shows the depicted as affiliated to some political movement, what does that mean in Rock, Paper, Scissors sense ? Which other roles is he vulnerable to, which roles has he advantage against and does any of that actually matter ?

Yes, RPS has an important place in a wargame. But even there they are not everything, because the 1 vs. 1 paradigm is missing and actions and perfomance of one unit might significantly change the options and thus value of the next unit. It is not "cavalry wins against skirmishers", it is at least "skirmishers win against cavalry which is already bound in melee by another unit".

In a regular RPG RPS is even less useful than in a wargame.

[Mutazoia]

And there is literally no noteworthy difference between using a weapon to kill someone or using a SoD spell to kill someone.

There's a BIG difference. Ignoring the fact that there is little chance that a sword will kill a target in a single hit (with out a HUGE level difference), while a SoD spell will. The sword needs to be wielded by someone on the "front line", that is at risk of getting hit himself, whereas the SoD spell can be cast from the safety of the back lines. And then you get into a situation where one side's casters are focusing all their attention on the other sides casters, effectively taking each other out of the equation until one side's casters manage to nuke the others...and then they might not have the resources left to do anything about the battle at hand.

In a 1 on 1, or small group skirmish that D&D uses, a SoD spell can instantly wipe out one side, before the sword swinger has a chance to swing his sword.




That is just some artifact of the D&D rules which for some reason have a hitpoint system modelling injuries until death and seperate death effects on top of it.

Because if there wasn't a hitpoint system, EVERYTHING would be save or die. One hit with a sword? Dead. One hit with a dagger? Fall more than 5 feet? Dead.



No, they are the same topic. One of my main points was all the time that most encounters in quite a lot of systems are not actually combat encounters and you really should not build and balance all your character options with combat in mind.

I agree. The reason that there are a large chunk of rules devoted to combat, is that combat is the hardest thing in an RPG to arbitrate fairly and consistently across the board.

[Pleh]

Beside the fact that's one situation in one very particular setting with a very particular take on magic -- be careful trying to emulate the particulars of authorial fiction in an RPG, they're not the same medium. Many players won't accept their character being Gimli to another player's Saruman. If one were to insist that Saruman is an NPC, that takes the situation outside of RPS character balancing.

Well, actually Saruman was probably a dramatically higher level NPC. In this scenario, it wasn't just that he was a caster, it was also that he was supposed to be a lot more powerful than them to boot. He was a BBEG wizard whom they were planning to fight much later with far more preparation and resources.


Nevermind that by conflating tactics and other elements with character archetypes (blending "ambush" with "caster", "environment" with "assassin", etc) you've pretty much blown up RPS already.

I'm not blowing up RPS, I'm adding Lizard and Spock. I'm building on RPS.

"Conflation" has acquired a negative stigma in this community based on the problem people often have with mistakenly (or maliciously) associating incompatible concepts. But the word only means, "to combine two ideas into one."

It isn't bad or fallacious if that's what I'm intending to do, express this intention openly, and show some work at demonstrating the function of the combined concept.

Which if it weren't for all the strangely off-beat answers, I would say that I have done all these things. Somewhere the strawmen are popping up through some loss in translation.


Regardless, it doesn't change my utter loathing for RPS structure in game design,

Be careful here. It's fine to have preferences, but if you are saying you'll never like my idea no matter what (i.e. even if I succeed at making it a fun and balanced system concept), then exactly what do you think you can meaningfully and constructively contribute to my process?

If you have a reason you don't like RPS design and not just a bias, then it should be theoretically possible for me to create a variant RPS design that doesn't have the problems you dislike (granted it may still have other problems).


On the topic of RPS, I don't like them in roleplaying games. First you have to have a class system where one class is just simply better against another class and you have to find a way to enforce it.

Not quite. I am seeing a system that balances powers based on RPS design. Classes only give you easy access to a select band on the spectrum of possible powers, which will give you certain advantages against challenges that utilize different bands on the spectrum.

Ideally, the method for enforcement will largely be handled by arranging the RPS to simulate some variant of reality such that the RPS relationship feels so natural as to be virtually invisible to players.


Suprise, ambush, attacking someones back, killing someone in their sleep doesn't even enter the picture as these are tactics that can be employed by everyone. RPS implies that spearmen beats cavalry, cavalry beats archers and archers beat spearmen...this is very classic setup but hardly applies to rpgs as you have the options of chosing from myriads of tactics.

Sure, but my theory involves prismatically splitting RPS into a spectrum. Max says I'm "blowing it up," but if someone else has a more apt description for an "RPS Rainbow," I wouldn't mind hearing it.

That is to say that, if Spearman beats Cavalry, then when faced with the threat of Cavalry, any character could attempt to approximate themselves as a Spearman to improve their chances, they just are gradually less good at doing it the further away from their native Powers they are stretching.


So if you have the Assassin who's supposed to beat the Caster then you have to explain why. So if you explain it away that the assassin can sneak behind the caster and stab him in the back then the only thing that is implied is that the Warrior and the Caster can't sneak or stab people in the back. This ruins immersion for me because as an ex soldier I identify myself with the Warrior and I know darn well that I can sneak behind people and stab them in the back in RL....heck part of my training was to camouflage and sneak so I could ambush the enemy.

Your training implies that rather than hard specialization, you have more generalized training. Under my proposed paradigm, there would be Rogues, Fighters, and Fighter-Rogue hybrids. You can take the best of both worlds, you'll just never be quite as specialized as the people who sacrifice one or the other.

So access to Powers through Classes should be quite flexible.

Also, nothing about my proposed design would prohibit a Warrior from trying to sneak behind a caster and stab them in the back just because it tends to be effective against wizards.

The problem is that their training enables them to wear heavier, noisier armor and does drastically less to improve their skill in stealth. They can do it, they'll just be far less likely to be effective at it. The fact that wizards are theoretically more susceptible to this tactic might counterbalance the lack of training, but if they have a Martial Guard Dog watching their back while they're distracted, you really want an Assassin.

---

I have more responses, but not enough time before work this morning. Be back later.:smallsmile:

[CharonsHelper]

Sure, but my theory involves prismatically splitting RPS into a spectrum. Max says I'm "blowing it up," but if someone else has a more apt description for an "RPS Rainbow," I wouldn't mind hearing it.

That pretty much describes Pokémon.

There's a whole series of RPS systems. Some have 2 types. But (for example) a fire/flying Pokémon can learn attacks which are neither, they just won't get the 1.5x bonus to damage. But it can be worth using to get the 2x 'super effective' bonus or to avoid the 0.5x ineffective penalty.

There is also the second layer of attack/defense & special attack/defense. If a foe has a great 'defense' then you try to use a 'special' move.

etc.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That pretty much describes Pokémon.

There's a whole series of RPS systems. Some have 2 types. But (for example) a fire/flying Pokémon can learn attacks which are neither, they just won't get the 1.5x bonus to damage. But it can be worth using to get the 2x 'super effective' bonus or to avoid the 0.5x ineffective penalty.

There is also the second layer of attack/defense & special attack/defense. If a foe has a great 'defense' then you try to use a 'special' move.

etc.

And note that Pokemon is notorious for having a strong meta-game (in the sense of "community-favored builds/tactics"). RPS-style techniques are unstable--

* If the rewards/advantages of playing the RPS route are weak, they'll be ignored and you'll end up just annoying people. E.g. Every MMO that tried to enforce elemental strengths and weaknesses.

* If the rewards/advantages of playing the RPS route are strong, one of two things usually happens:

** The counters to one are unbalanced compared to another. As if rock only beat scissors 90% of the time, but scissors beat paper 100% of the time and rock 10% of the time. Or if one is easier to implement than another. Sure, a zerg-rush-analogue may not be the most effective strategy all the time, but it's just about the most simple to execute. This results in a clearly dominant strategy. MewToo uses Psychic!

** The relative balance is exact at the cost of drastically reduced flexibility and choice. This is classic RPS--there are only three options, and balance is exact. But if you want to play something other than rock, paper, or scissors...you're out of luck.

In a TTRPG setting, you're trying to codify things that are best left to the players and the DM. What works in one instance won't necessarily work in another. Thus, it's not a good balancing tool.

[Florian]

On the topic of RPS, I don't like them in roleplaying games. First you have to have a class system where one class is just simply better against another class and you have to find a way to enforce it.

It can be done in a good way, but that´s far away and above how the suggested MMOs handle it.

[CharonsHelper]

** The counters to one are unbalanced compared to another. As if rock only beat scissors 90% of the time, but scissors beat paper 100% of the time and rock 10% of the time.

If most people started taking scissors then rock would inherently become a good choice. And teams with multiple 'scissors' would want at least 1 'paper' on the team to deal with the 'rocks'. etc.

That's the whole advantage of an RPS system - it inherently self-balances to some degree without having a perfectly balanced system.

Even if one choice is 'best' then the counters to it inherently become solid choices as the counter-meta.

[PhoenixPhyre]

If most people started taking scissors then rock would inherently become a good choice. And teams with multiple 'scissors' would want at least 1 'paper' on the team to deal with the 'rocks'. etc.

That's the whole advantage of an RPS system - it inherently self-balances to some degree without having a perfectly balanced system.

Even if one choice is 'best' then the counters to it inherently become solid choices as the counter-meta.

What if rock only beat scissors 50% of the time? 51%? RPS is only "balanced" if there are an odd number of choices and each choice beats exactly 50% of the other choices. In any other condition, it breaks down and usually causes more problems than it fixes.

In a competitive game (PvP or tournament-style) that works reasonably fine. Choice of "character" is part of the skill. But that's pretty alien to an RPG where you're making decisions for an actual character, not just a bundle of abilities. You also don't know ahead of time what the opponent is going to have, nor do you have the flexibility of switching things up--I can't trade out my fighter for a rogue if that's what the situation needs. If it's binding then the allowed party make-ups are strongly limited. And I find that obnoxious.

I don't see RPS-style balancing as being relevant to a cooperative TTRPG, at least not in anything other than a custom-designed, narrowly focused one. TTRPGs are too open-ended--what works in one instance (shank the caster) might backfire horribly in another, based on the circumstances. If you restrict it down to "press X not to die" (which is a bad implementation, to be sure) or similar "there's a good counter. If you don't have it, you're going to struggle," you limit the players in a way that seems arbitrary and pointless. It means that my group of a monk, a warlock, a rogue, and a druid (no front-liner, no flexible arcane caster, no dedicated healer) would be strongly disadvantaged. Or a party with a paladin, a 2H-weapon fighter and a bard. Or many other possible combinations. And that's anti-fun (for me at least).

[CharonsHelper]

What if rock only beat scissors 50% of the time? 51%?

Then it's not an RPS system. It's a failed attempt. I think that it would need to be at least 2/3 of the time to qualify at all (and then scissors couldn't beat paper 100% at the same time either).


RPS is only "balanced" if there are an odd number of choices and each choice beats exactly 50% of the other choices. In any other condition, it breaks down and usually causes more problems than it fixes.

I disagree.

Ex: If you have five choices they could be round-robin of countering, each extra effective against one and beaten by another and neutral vs the other two. I'm actually play-testing a dueling style card-game based upon that premise, and thus far it works pretty well. (Fire>Ice>Air>Earth>Water>Fire) They all have slight differences besides the RPS vibe. I intentionally made Fire the scariest (best offense but no defences), so if your opponent is grabbing Fire that promotes grabbing Water for defence, which makes Earth good to beat that...

It works pretty well - albeit much more simplistic than a TTRPG. (designed to take 5-15min per round)


In a competitive game (PvP or tournament-style) that works reasonably fine. Choice of "character" is part of the skill. But that's pretty alien to an RPG where you're making decisions for an actual character, not just a bundle of abilities. You also don't know ahead of time what the opponent is going to have, nor do you have the flexibility of switching things up--I can't trade out my fighter for a rogue if that's what the situation needs. If it's binding then the allowed party make-ups are strongly limited. And I find that obnoxious.

I do agree that you'd need more character flexibility than most TTRPGs have. A TTRPG would have to be build with the RPS as a core pillar from the ground up. And - I actually disagree with Pleh on one thing. I think that the RPS would have to be extremely blatant and obvious rather than subtle and would have to be in-world knowledge.

If it's subtle and people don't realize that RPS is why they lost then they get annoyed and start ranting about what beat them being OP. (Many MMOs started with RPS systems and slowly wore them away due to complaints.) But no one complains if their fire Pokémon gets beaten by a slightly lower level water Pokémon because it's so blatant and a pillar of the system. (And yes - Psychic Pokémon were OP in the 1st ed - but after that every type was playable. They specifically introduced the Dark & Steel types later because Psychic had no hard counters. After that they were fine.)

I've considered trying to make a system based around hunting down monsters to make gear (replacing much of the 'wealth' part of most TTRPGs) - and that gear rather than your class being the RPS system - allowing you to change between them on the fly.


It means that my group of a monk, a warlock, a rogue, and a druid (no front-liner, no flexible arcane caster, no dedicated healer) would be strongly disadvantaged. Or a party with a paladin, a 2H-weapon fighter and a bard. Or many other possible combinations. And that's anti-fun (for me at least).

As long as the RPS system is robust enough - many combinations would be fine. The RPS would also need to be per tactic rather than by class, with each class given at least two (maybe better at one than the other). etc.

And frankly - many party combinations are already sub-par in D&D as it stands. I don't see how an RPS system would change that.

But I do agree that it wouldn't work just slapped on top of a current D&D. As I said above - it would need to be built into the system from the ground up.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ex: If you have five choices they could be round-robin of countering, each extra effective against one and beaten by another and neutral vs the other two. I'm actually play-testing a dueling style card-game based upon that premise, and thus far it works pretty well. (Fire>Ice>Air>Earth>Water>Fire) They all have slight differences besides the RPS vibe. I intentionally made Fire the scariest (best offense but no defences), so if your opponent is grabbing Fire that promotes grabbing Water for defence, which makes Earth good to beat that...

It works pretty well - albeit much more simplistic than a TTRPG. (designed to take 5-15min per round)


Why even do that in an RPG?

Why should one concept lose to another concept or win over a different concept simply because of who took which concept?

Why not make all the choices as balanced as possible, and leave the winning and losing up to how the players use their characters' abilities, the environment and circumstances, etc?

(Never mind that an RPG is not a dueling-style card game... importing card design concepts into a TTRPG sounds as fraught with potential trouble as trying to import CRPG design concepts into a TTPRG.)

[CharonsHelper]

Why even do that in an RPG?

Why should one concept lose to another concept or win over a different concept simply because of who took which concept?

Why not make all the choices as balanced as possible, and leave the winning and losing up to how the players use their characters' abilities, the environment and circumstances, etc?

Because TTRPGs are NEVER balanced between choices. One of the main draws of an RPS system is that as long as you're in the ballpark it's largely self-balancing between the various choices. Plus - it adds a lot of tactical depth for minimal complexity.


(Never mind that an RPG is not a dueling-style card game... importing card design concepts into a TTRPG sounds as fraught with potential trouble as trying to import CRPG design concepts into a TTPRG.)

I agree that it wouldn't translate 1 for 1. That doesn't mean that the premise is inherently bad.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I disagree.

Ex: If you have five choices they could be round-robin of countering, each extra effective against one and beaten by another and neutral vs the other two. I'm actually play-testing a dueling style card-game based upon that premise, and thus far it works pretty well. (Fire>Ice>Air>Earth>Water>Fire) They all have slight differences besides the RPS vibe. I intentionally made Fire the scariest (best offense but no defences), so if your opponent is grabbing Fire that promotes grabbing Water for defence, which makes Earth good to beat that...

It works pretty well - albeit much more simplistic than a TTRPG. (designed to take 5-15min per round)


That works, for a card game (note--competitive). I can't see it working for an RPG. I would find it horribly obnoxious, personally.



I do agree that you'd need more character flexibility than most TTRPGs have. A TTRPG would have to be build with the RPS as a core pillar from the ground up. And - I actually disagree with Pleh on one thing. I think that the RPS would have to be extremely blatant and obvious rather than subtle and would have to be in-world knowledge.

If it's subtle and people don't realize that RPS is why they lost then they get annoyed and start ranting about what beat them being OP. (Many MMOs started with RPS systems and slowly wore them away due to complaints.) But no one complains if their fire Pokémon gets beaten by a slightly lower level water Pokémon because it's so blatant and a pillar of the system. (And yes - Psychic Pokémon were OP in the 1st ed - but after that every type was playable. They specifically introduced the Dark & Steel types later because Psychic had no hard counters. After that they were fine.)

I've considered trying to make a system based around hunting down monsters to make gear (replacing much of the 'wealth' part of most TTRPGs) - and that gear rather than your class being the RPS system - allowing you to change between them on the fly.


But Pokemon is an example of how soft RPS-style play fails in balancing--there's always a dominant line-up. This is made worse by throwing out the 90% of pokemon that can't even participate because the RPS has made them useless. Importing this into an RPG is asking for a heart-ache.



As long as the RPS system is robust enough - many combinations would be fine. The RPS would also need to be per tactic rather than by class, with each class given at least two (maybe better at one than the other). etc.

But that stretches believability, and is something handled way better by a DM than by fiat system assumptions. Tactics are situational. RPS is (by definition) not situational. I'd have to see implementation details, but I have a hard time believing that adding it would be a benefit.

And as to current D&D? Many combinations are bad in 3.X. In 5e, no particular combinations are expected, needed, or even strongly superior (barring some odd rules interpretations). Those examples I gave were from a 5e game that works just fine. Differently from a more "classic" party, but no big issues. Even the worst of the pack (4 elements monks, un-revised beastmaster rangers, frenzy barbarians) are fine numerically. They're just a little clunky to play or have rough edges.

[RazorChain]

There's a BIG difference. Ignoring the fact that there is little chance that a sword will kill a target in a single hit (with out a HUGE level difference), while a SoD spell will. The sword needs to be wielded by someone on the "front line", that is at risk of getting hit himself, whereas the SoD spell can be cast from the safety of the back lines. And then you get into a situation where one side's casters are focusing all their attention on the other sides casters, effectively taking each other out of the equation until one side's casters manage to nuke the others...and then they might not have the resources left to do anything about the battle at hand.

In a 1 on 1, or small group skirmish that D&D uses, a SoD spell can instantly wipe out one side, before the sword swinger has a chance to swing his sword.

I kinda agree that SoD spells or SoD powers are a bad design choice in a game where you have HP. First chopping somebody in the head should be enough to kill somebody, I'm pretty sure getting whacked with a Zweihander ruins peoples day. So why not just give the Warrior a decapitation power and just get over with it and every one can go around and spam their SoD powers and make HP irrelevant?

On the other hand SoD is just there to counter the ridicilous HP bloat. If those spells do damage instead of SoD it means that when Wizard gets his finger of death it kinda just tickles the barbarian but totally destroys the rogue and that disintigration spell turns another caster to dust while destroying the barbarians toe.




Because if there wasn't a hitpoint system, EVERYTHING would be save or die. One hit with a sword? Dead. One hit with a dagger? Fall more than 5 feet? Dead.

Which is pretty much why most system use HP or wound tiers.

[CharonsHelper]

But Pokemon is an example of how soft RPS-style play fails in balancing--there's always a dominant line-up. This is made worse by throwing out the 90% of pokemon that can't even participate because the RPS has made them useless. Importing this into an RPG is asking for a heart-ache.

I don't think so.

Now - some specific Pokémon are weak because of their stats - but every Pokémon TYPE is at least reasonably viable (a few combinations are better or worse due to weaknesses stacking or being cancelled out). Though I will agree - there are almost always just a couple Pokémon of each type which are the best. (But that has nothing to do with RPS.)

Note: I never played competitively or some such - but I did read some strategy guides from people who did.

And as you said - TTRPGs aren't competitive, so as long as you're decently balanced it's fine. In the Pokémon campaign any Pokémon is perfectly viable - it's only in competitive PvP that certain ones are too weak for play. RPS makes this BETTER.

Ex: Say your buddy is the BEST fire type and you're a mediocre grass type. Sure - overall he's better (as could happen in any TTRPG) but when up against a water type foe you can still be handy to have along.

[Max_Killjoy]

I kinda agree that SoD spells or SoD powers are a bad design choice in a game where you have HP. First chopping somebody in the head should be enough to kill somebody, I'm pretty sure getting whacked with a Zweihander ruins peoples day. So why not just give the Warrior a decapitation power and just get over with it and every one can go around and spam their SoD powers and make HP irrelevant?

On the other hand SoD is just there to counter the ridicilous HP bloat. If those spells do damage instead of SoD it means that when Wizard gets his finger of death it kinda just tickles the barbarian but totally destroys the rogue and that disintigration spell turns another caster to dust while destroying the barbarians toe.


All-or-nothing SoD or SoS never seemed entirely fair to me.

[PhoenixPhyre]

All-or-nothing SoD or SoS never seemed entirely fair to me.

I agree. From a game standpoint, being taken out with a single hit is horrible (especially when there's really little hope of surviving). On the other hand, abilities that have either massive power or no effect are too binary. You either kill the opponent or waste your turn. Balancing them is even harder--any effect that makes them harder to resist strengthens them tremendously, any effect that allows resistance or immunity becomes a must have.

[Florian]

Because if there wasn't a hitpoint system, EVERYTHING would be save or die. One hit with a sword? Dead. One hit with a dagger? Fall more than 5 feet? Dead.

No?

Take a look at the WH40K RPGs or Splittermond.

Those are systems that handle a mix of endurance and wounds, as in you can dodge some blows for a while (endurance), but if you get hit, it´ll be nasty (wounds) and physical (critical effects). And yes, endurance doesn´t come into direct effects, like a car crash or falling down a flight of stairs, unlike the overly simplified hp system does.

[Tinkerer]

No?

Take a look at the WH40K RPGs or Splittermond.

Those are systems that handle a mix of endurance and wounds, as in you can dodge some blows for a while (endurance), but if you get hit, it´ll be nasty (wounds) and physical (critical effects). And yes, endurance doesn´t come into direct effects, like a car crash or falling down a flight of stairs, unlike the overly simplified hp system does.

The wounds system is still a form of an HP system, just on a much smaller scale. When I'm taking notes and doing some theory work I usually refer to the D&D style of HP as CEF, Critical Existence Failure, where you are doing just fine from full HP to 1 HP and then you are suddenly dead/unconscious. Most systems do use some manner of HP however they often tie them in to scaling penalties or other effects.

I absolutely loved the chutzpah from 4th edition D&D where after being mocked for being one of the few systems to not use scaling negative effects they decided to make characters closer to death actually stronger and more competent.

[Florian]

The wounds system is still a form of an HP system, just on a much smaller scale.

Not really. The wound system is tied to the critical hit tables. Theorycraft aside, nearly any weapon can lead to a critical hit and the wound points serve to reduce the severity of the damage. It´s a marked difference wether a hit with a laser weapon burns away the hair on your arm, or, well, you arm, right?

[PhoenixPhyre]

The wounds system is still a form of an HP system, just on a much smaller scale. When I'm taking notes and doing some theory work I usually refer to the D&D style of HP as CEF, Critical Existence Failure, where you are doing just fine from full HP to 1 HP and then you are suddenly dead/unconscious. Most systems do use some manner of HP however they often tie them in to scaling penalties or other effects.

I absolutely loved the chutzpah from 4th edition D&D where after being mocked for being one of the few systems to not use scaling negative effects they decided to make characters closer to death actually stronger and more competent.

I have an issue with stacking penalties (for heroic, combat-oriented games, at least)--it gives the first (successful) mover a huge advantage, leading to a death spiral. In a game where combat should be avoided whenever possible, that's a good thing. In a D&D-like system, where tactical combat is a major selling point, death spirals are awful.

I reified the whole issue by making the CEF system explicitly part of the setting, but that's a separate topic. You either have healing reserves left (>0 HP, no significant issue) or you don't (0 HP, making death saves). Stronger (more powerful, not STR) characters have more reserves and can self-heal through more damage before needing outside intervention.

[Pex]

The problem is, we have an entire generation of gamers that cut their teeth on 3.X and/or 4e, and they don't know any better. They can't see the unbalance, because they were "born" with it...they think it's SUPPOSED to be that way.

Anything that makes one class lag behind another in levels is bad, even if that one class has much more power than the other class....they can't grasp the concept of a stronger class leveling slower, or refuse to grasp it.

One way to help is switch up the language. For example, let fighters gain Levels as is normally understood. Wizards don't get Levels. Instead they achieve new Circles of Power. While there are 20 Levels for fighters there are only 10 Circles for wizards. When Wizards achieve their 2nd Circle, Fighter are gaining 3rd Level. Adjust the numbers to taste depending on abilities gained per Level/Circle. Perhaps it's 3 Levels of Fighter for every Circle of Wizard and Fighters reach 30th Level. Maybe the math isn't even. The wizard achieves the 2nd Circle of Power when the fighter is in the latter half of 2nd Level and becomes 3rd Level after next adventure.

[Tinkerer]

Not really. The wound system is tied to the critical hit tables. Theorycraft aside, nearly any weapon can lead to a critical hit and the wound points serve to reduce the severity of the damage. It´s a marked difference wether a hit with a laser weapon burns away the hair on your arm, or, well, you arm, right?

Well I suppose one of the big questions is do you count critical hits as a part of the standard HP system or as their own independent system. *Memories of old school instant death crit tables float by*

Ignoring the possibility of a critical hit I would definitely still count it as a fairly traditional HP system with non-traditional effects when 0 HP is reached.


I have an issue with stacking penalties (for heroic, combat-oriented games, at least)--it gives the first (successful) mover a huge advantage, leading to a death spiral. In a game where combat should be avoided whenever possible, that's a good thing. In a D&D-like system, where tactical combat is a major selling point, death spirals are awful.

That's definitely true. And one of the reasons why I was quite intrigued by 4th editions bloodied powers. It really does match up to several fictional settings such as shonen anime and pro wrestling. I do tend to prefer running games avoiding combat (also preferring decisive strike) though so I didn't really dabble too much in it.

Actually speaking of neat D&D mechanics which can provide equalization on the caster vs martial front and since so many people seem to be discussing 3.X how about back importing Legendary Resistances for pure martial characters? Throw in one every 5-10 levels? Not as a solution however possibly a part of one. It would sync up really well with tales where the martial hero gets hit by a spell of that nature and fights through it.

[Talakeal]

One way to help is switch up the language. For example, let fighters gain Levels as is normally understood. Wizards don't get Levels. Instead they achieve new Circles of Power. While there are 20 Levels for fighters there are only 10 Circles for wizards. When Wizards achieve their 2nd Circle, Fighter are gaining 3rd Level. Adjust the numbers to taste depending on abilities gained per Level/Circle. Perhaps it's 3 Levels of Fighter for every Circle of Wizard and Fighters reach 30th Level. Maybe the math isn't even. The wizard achieves the 2nd Circle of Power when the fighter is in the latter half of 2nd Level and becomes 3rd Level after next adventure.

That's more or less how spell levels work as is.

[PhoenixPhyre]

1) That's definitely true. And one of the reasons why I was quite intrigued by 4th editions bloodied powers. It really does match up to several fictional settings such as shonen anime and pro wrestling. I do tend to prefer running games avoiding combat (also preferring decisive strike) though so I didn't really dabble too much in it.

2) Actually speaking of neat D&D mechanics which can provide equalization on the caster vs martial front and since so many people seem to be discussing 3.X how about back importing Legendary Resistances for pure martial characters? Throw in one every 5-10 levels? Not as a solution however possibly a part of one. It would sync up really well with tales where the martial hero gets hit by a spell of that nature and fights through it.

1) Yeah. I liked that out of 4e--it matches the "heroic heroes doing heroic things" vibe 4e had going. Wouldn't work for a grittier/darker game, but...

2) That's a good idea. Give them a certain (scaling) number of no-sells. Even against things that have no save. You get to say "Nope, that doesn't affect me". You can fluff it differently by class--

* Fighters resist via discipline.
* Barbarians are just too ANGRY!
* Rogues weren't there to be affected anyway

Or something like that. If that's too powerful (lol), make it more specific. Barbarians get to no-sell mind affecting things. Fighters shrug off wounds (death effects). Rogues avoid physical effects (like fireballs, ray attacks, etc). Just spitballing here.

[Knaight]

Because if there wasn't a hitpoint system, EVERYTHING would be save or die. One hit with a sword? Dead. One hit with a dagger? Fall more than 5 feet? Dead.

There's several non-HP wound systems that beg to differ. Most notable are the individual wound penalties for individual wounds systems that don't have an aggregate HP-type mechanic at all, e.g. Mutants and Masterminds or one of the health options in d6 Open.

[Arbane]

Because if there wasn't a hitpoint system, EVERYTHING would be save or die. One hit with a sword? Dead. One hit with a dagger? Fall more than 5 feet? Dead.

Games like Mutants and Masterminds, FATE, and Legends of the Wulin would beg to differ.

And you do know that there are people who've fallen out of airplanes with no parachute and survived, right?


Well, actually Saruman was probably a dramatically higher level NPC. In this scenario, it wasn't just that he was a caster, it was also that he was supposed to be a lot more powerful than them to boot.


Saruman wasn't just a spellcaster, he was a freakin' ARCHANGEL gone bad.


If you have a reason you don't like RPS design and not just a bias, then it should be theoretically possible for me to create a variant RPS design that doesn't have the problems you dislike (granted it may still have other problems).

One big problem with RPS design baked into an RPG's combat system is that it pretty much means some PCs flat-out can't beat some enemies, if they're actually using the game's rules.

Sudden realization: Sure, 3.5 is RPS - it's just that all spellcasters are Paper (Super Paper, even!), but martials are always Rock.



Because TTRPGs are NEVER balanced between choices.

I dunno. RISUS or FATE aspects are as perfectly balanced as apples and oranges.


I have an issue with stacking penalties (for heroic, combat-oriented games, at least)--it gives the first (successful) mover a huge advantage, leading to a death spiral. In a game where combat should be avoided whenever possible, that's a good thing. In a D&D-like system, where tactical combat is a major selling point, death spirals are awful.

Agreed.

The upcoming Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG has an interesting way to handle this: PCs have a Health die they roll when doing things (die pool system) which changes according to how cheerful/healthy/tired they are, but the PLAYERS choose at chargen how it's set up: You can have a character who gets weaker when injured, stays pretty much the same, or effectively gets stronger.

[Calthropstu]

And you do know that there are people who've fallen out of airplanes with no parachute.
If I remember the top 3 all occurred during ww2 each one surpassing 20k feet... into snow.

[Pex]

That's more or less how spell levels work as is.

No kidding. The point was to change the flavor text so the new players who won't accept different level progressions would accept different level progressions when it's called by prettier names.

[Cluedrew]

All-or-nothing SoD or SoS never seemed entirely fair to me.If you get the rates just right, it could be completely fair.

But that don't mean its any fun. Which is the more important issue in my mind.

To Thread: I've kind of lost how this all relates back to the original topic. Beyond martial and casters being points on the RPS net I've forgotten/lost track.

[Quertus]

Now, IIRC you like the current power and versatility of 3.5 T1 casters and think it should be brought to every class. You are in favor of removing "spells per day," and making everything "at will," and are against making spell casters need to roll a dice to get their spells off? Is this correct?

Hmmm... I lost a more detailed rely. In short, I believe characters being able to do things is a good goal - versatility enables this, and prevents Shadowrun levels of niche protection and thumb twiddling. I believe that, if people care about balance, making casters "at will" would be much easier to balance with at-will muggings. Others have put it better, but I believe adding casting rolls to 3e, and stacking casting roll + attack roll + saving throw for many chances to fail is probably a really bad plan, whereas it works fine for unopposed rolls in M:tA.


Yeah, Shadow Run does essentially encourage splitting the party.

However, there is nothing to stop you from paying attention and analyzing the other player's "scenes," and there is nothing to stop the GM from placing crucial information in such scenes to make it a requirement. Also, there are lots of D&D players who just zone out (or worse pull out their phones!) during other player's turns.

I can't evaluate events in character for scenes where my character is not present. And, for the optimal use of my time, nothing stops me from analyzing the much more engaging scene on my phone instead.


Also, imo your proposed everyone is T1 game would function much the same way as Shadow Run a lot of the time as the only way you could mechanically enforce cooperation outside of combat is to have lots of obstacles which require people to be in multiple places at the same time.

... Action economy, finite resources, player cooperation - there's plenty of ways to do this. I suppose splitting the party could also kinda work - but I hardly consider "you didn't step on my toes, because you weren't there" to be indicative of the paragon of cooperation.


It looks like what you have essentially done is turned the exploration / skill test portions of the game into something that resembles an in character conversation. It is mostly free form and used primarily as an opportunity to express your character's personality. This can be a lot of fun, but in my experience it is the part of the game which most suffers from one guy hogging the spotlight and everyone else getting bored and checking out. There are also a lot of players who simply don't enjoy participating in this sort of game and want the dice to handle it, you frequently see posts on this forum that boil down to "Why does my DM keep making me formulate an argument and / or talk in character? Why can't I just roll a CHA test and be done with it?"

Eh, there's some communication issues here. My example was written as a conversation to push on the give and take nature of cooperation. As to the gameplay... In the case where the group wants that style of play, that style of play can work just fine, and doesn't inherently produce Shadowrun. In fact, the phrase, "and while he's doing that, what are you doing?" is about all that should be necessary to make obvious the distinction between the two expected outcomes. However, in the case where the group wants something else, they should do something else.

I do have some experience with limited omnimancy in play. In a friend's homebrew, we could make characters who could literally do (or, at least, attempt) anything. We technically had limits, both in terms of success rolls, and mana pools. I never made such omnimancer characters, however. I made characters like Raymond, whose "magic" was telepathy, not omnimancy. And I made several other not-omnimancers with more focused abilities. The one time I wound up with omnimancy (a gift from a Wizard to Raymond), my character experienced option paralysis. Eventually, he realized that, if the power could be given once, it could be given again, and he gave the power away. Mind you, it was Raymond, not me, who had issues - I came up with plenty of options for things to do with Omnimancy, but dealing with such options was simply outside Raymond's experience.


Now, IIRC you like the current power and versatility of 3.5 T1 casters and think it should be brought to every class. You are in favor of removing "spells per day," and making everything "at will," and are against making spell casters need to roll a dice to get their spells off? Is this correct?

IMO this is going to, for the most part, sacrifice out of combat challenge, resource management, team work, dice rolling, and exploration. Not everyone finds all of these things fun, but most players find most of them fun, and you are really going to be sacrificing a lot of the game and a lot of people's enjoyment.

Largely covered above as to which subset of those I argue for under different circumstances.

Put together, this is more of what I propose to those who complain about a lack of balance. Start with something obviously balanced (like, everyone can do everything), and work from there.

Which subset of these variables people find fun together will vary by individual, group, setting, game, and even whim. Maybe I'm in the mood for critical fumbles today, maybe I'm not.

Exploration, however, I would like to explicitly call out here, as it is both my favorite part of the game, and something I absolutely still perceive as possibly with my ill-defined omnimancers. Suddenly drop them in CoC, or WH40K, or even Minecraft, and they'll have lots of opportunities to explore the strange new realm, and the rules thereof.


Just to clarify where I am coming from personally:
I prefer the trapping of a martial character to a magical one. I also like to play characters who are defined by their limitations. When I play a caster it is usually a specialist (or if I am playing WoD with an overly narrow paradigm) because I do not find "jack of all trades," characters particularly interesting except maybe in a lone wolf game.
On the other hand I do find that the martial characters in 3.5 are way too narrow for my tastes, having basically only 1 or 2 in combat strategies and virtually no out of combat or defensive abilities and do wish they would get a major boost. My preferred class would have the fluff of the War Blade, the defenses of the Monk, the skills of a Bard, and the play-style of the Warlock.
But I recognize people have different opinions and I think the best game is the one where there is the most overlap in viable archetypes, which for 3.5 means a lot of buffs for T4-5 classes (mostly martials) and a lot of nerfs for the T1-2 classes (mostly casters).

Based on my experiences with a homebrew where omnimancy was a thing, it sounds like we prefer not entirely dissimilar things.

I, however, also enjoy the D&D archetype of the potential omnimancer - the Wizard who theoretically could learn any imaginable trick, but is limited to what they have actually learned.


I've considered trying to make a system based around hunting down monsters to make gear (replacing much of the 'wealth' part of most TTRPGs) - and that gear rather than your class being the RPS system - allowing you to change between them on the fly.

The rest of RPS aside, I like this idea. Especially if PCs are dynamic, but monsters have static "elements" that can be planned around.

[Florian]

Well I suppose one of the big questions is do you count critical hits as a part of the standard HP system or as their own independent system. *Memories of old school instant death crit tables float by*

Ignoring the possibility of a critical hit I would definitely still count it as a fairly traditional HP system with non-traditional effects when 0 HP is reached.

Ah, I think you haven´t used such a system yet? Ok, so basics: In this kind of system, you roll damage first, then subtract Wounds and Armor from the result (*). If you negate the roll, you simply soak the incoming attack and lose a point of endurance for it. If damage is still left over, you consult the critical hit table and see what exact effect and location the hit had, meaning that damage is never handled as an abstract.

(*) You can try to dodge or parry the attack first, or hope to negate it with a shield, force field or spell.

[CharonsHelper]

The rest of RPS aside, I like this idea. Especially if PCs are dynamic, but monsters have static "elements" that can be planned around.

I definitely agree that to make RPS work in a TTRPG you would definitely have to have each player have access to multiple branches, though with at least a mild cost to switching between them. (Either best at one, or action economy etc.)

But yes - the monsters would definitely be static (albeit - it's purely spit-balling at this point), though of course NPCs would have the same options as PCs.

[Florian]

I definitely agree that to make RPS work in a TTRPG you would definitely have to have each player have access to multiple branches, though with at least a mild cost to switching between them. (Either best at one, or action economy etc.)

But yes - the monsters would definitely be static (albeit - it's purely spit-balling at this point), though of course NPCs would have the same options as PCs.

Take a look at how L5R works and balances their very pronounced RPS elements.

The base system is build around three classes - Bushi, Courtier and Shugenja, with all of them using the same skills, but each having unique access to class-specific "schools", that give them their special "powers".

The first RPS layer is build into the core class itself:
Bushi: Power of Katana and Duel.
Courtier: Power of the Courts.
Shugenja: Power of the Kami.

Adding schools will open up the second layer, which´ll boost certain aspects further.
Using the optional classes (Ronin, Ninja, Monk - Spider Clan) will add further layers (High Status Rank vs. No Rank, High Honor vs. No Homor, etc.).

Now "pure" Monsters are interesting in this system, as they either conform too much to RPS (certain strengths and vulnerabilities, like something being "of fire" or "against honor") or straight out ignore it, because their position in the setting explicitly calls them out to be no part of "the game".

[Tinkerer]

Ah, I think you haven´t used such a system yet? Ok, so basics: In this kind of system, you roll damage first, then subtract Wounds and Armor from the result (*). If you negate the roll, you simply soak the incoming attack and lose a point of endurance for it. If damage is still left over, you consult the critical hit table and see what exact effect and location the hit had, meaning that damage is never handled as an abstract.

(*) You can try to dodge or parry the attack first, or hope to negate it with a shield, force field or spell.

I have, which particular edition are we discussing here?

I was going off of Dark Heresy 2nd edition which does run how I said before. Sure they make a stink about how wounds do not go down, rather the damage goes up and the wounds statistic counts as a threshold however that is functionally the same as HP going down. Heck I think every GM runs off counting the damage and comparing it to the threshold. Also we might be running across some terminology confusion here, replace every statement of critical hit in my original post with Righteous Fury.

EDIT: Might I inquire as to what the loss of the point of endurance is if not damage handled as an abstract?

[Cosi]

Other than having so many tables, why would I want to play 3.x D&D?

Remember, I didn't say "you should always play 3e rather than AD&D" I said "3e is better designed than AD&D". There are reasons other than design to play one game over another. For example, the number of tables consideration you point out isn't a game design question (at least, not directly). Similarly, your concerns are about tone, not necessarily design. Whether you use BAB or THACO doesn't influence whether your character feels like a Sword and Sorcery hero or a demigod. If what you want to do is not what a game does, you aren't going to play that game regardless of how good it is. If you want to do "cyberpunk fantasy", any quality difference between Exalted and Shadowrun is probably irrelevant.

That said, you can replicate the feel of Sword and Sorcery fairly easily in 3e by playing E6. Indeed I strongly recommend that people simply stop advancing when they reach the power level they want, regardless of what that power level happens to be.


Quertus (and I thought you to a lesser extend with all that talk of hurting verisimilitude by defining the limits of a power) was advocating for having everyone play a highly versatile character with overlapping abilities, and I was offering a counter-point that if everyone has the same abilities they are going to feel samey and redundant.

I'm not advocating (and I don't think Quertus is advocating) for "give the Wizard Rogue abilities. What people are advocating for is not having "Rogue Problems" where there's a lock or a trap and the way to solve it is "point the Rogue at it", because that's not interactive and reduces creativity to "do you have a Rogue, Y/N". Instead, various characters should have different solutions to a given kind of challenge that are differentially effective depending on what specific problem you have. So maybe one character has a travel power that is slow and takes a large number of people and you use that when you need to transport your army around. Another character has a travel power that is faster but takes a larger number of people and you use that when you need to infiltrate somewhere. You don't have anyone who has to sit out the logistics part of the adventure, but you also don't have anyone whose contributions are irrelevant.


So I feel like a good fix would be to either give everyone a niche with exclusive actions (which can result in shadowrun if done poorly), or to democratize all actions, so that anyone can attempt to do anything, just some people are better at it (which means attacking classes as a concept, probably).

The issue, I think, is that "exclusive actions" (which are fine) often ends being "exclusive problems" which are not. It's genuinely okay if the Rogue is the only one who can disarm traps, as long as there are other ways to bypass traps. If the only way to bypass traps is "disarm them", that can't be a Rogue-only ability.


"You roll dice, the GM makes things up" is EVERY RPG EVER, some just cover it with more layers of obfuscation than AW.

No, RPGs go like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. Those actions have predictable effects from the rules.

In Apocalypse World it goes like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. The DM makes up a result.

One of the examples the game gives for "success at a cost" on a stealth mission is someone discovering you.


Different XP tables had the cool side effect of not having everyone level at the same time. This meant that, when you leveled, you got your moment in the spotlight for being the only one with cool new toys.

This can, and should, be accomplished via non-level mechanisms because those give you the ability to give underpowered characters upgrades, rather than fixing "Wizards slow, Fighters fast". Sometimes, the noob is going to want to play a spell guy. Sometimes the expert is going to want to play a sword guy. Having a setup where sword guys all work way X and spell guys all work way Y makes that harder for no good reason.


It also meant that you could tie HD to levels, while not tying HD to XP. Sure, you could give the 3e Wizard 2 HD at level 1, but start giving the 3e Fighter 2 HD per level past 5th. But it would just feel... hacked. Inelegant.

This doesn't seem all that practically different from some classes having larger HD. How does "Fighters get more class features per level, and maybe a per-level HP buff" not capture all the gains from this, while also letting you have a consistently power measure?


Anyone that thinks racial levels don't deserve at least proper analysis of original intent and purpose, and where and when that intent broke down or stopped serving the requirements of the majority of players, shouldn't be talking about RPG theory in the first place.

No. Racial level limits were always stupid. Their original intent may be of interest as a historical question, but they are in no sense defensible as a design choice.


Anyone that thinks all classed games using XP must have the same XP table for all classes, that it's required thing, shouldn't be talking about RPG theory in the first place.

Anything that makes one class lag behind another in levels is bad, even if that one class has much more power than the other class....they can't grasp the concept of a stronger class leveling slower, or refuse to grasp it.

Using different XP tables to balance classes complicates analysis for no reason. If you can balance a 10k XP Wizard and a 10k XP Fighter by making the Fighter level 10 and the Wizard level 7, you can balance them both at level 7 (or 10, or 8, or 9, or 15) and then you can not do XP accounting and also have a cleaner abstraction to talk about character power.

[Darth Ultron]

No, RPGs go like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. Those actions have predictable effects from the rules.

In Apocalypse World it goes like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. The DM makes up a result.


Wow....I would note that DM makes up a result is true in all RPGs that have a DM.

The idea that ''the rules'' somehow have control of the game is just a Player Myth. Really, it is just wishful thinking by the players: that ''the rules'' will, somehow, reduce the power of the DM and keep the DM in line. And it is true a lot of DM's think they are players and then agree with the other players about the rules.

Even if the whole game was nothing but the rules, and it's not, the DM can still do anything ''in the rules''. So the DM can still do anything. So this makes the ''rules'' not matter to the DM.

And ''the rules'' only cover a couple actions in the game, mostly things like combat. And there are no rules for anything else. So again, and much more, a DM can do anything. So again the rules don't matter.

[Talakeal]

I'm not advocating (and I don't think Quertus is advocating) for "give the Wizard Rogue abilities. What people are advocating for is not having "Rogue Problems" where there's a lock or a trap and the way to solve it is "point the Rogue at it", because that's not interactive and reduces creativity to "do you have a Rogue, Y/N". Instead, various characters should have different solutions to a given kind of challenge that are differentially effective depending on what specific problem you have. So maybe one character has a travel power that is slow and takes a large number of people and you use that when you need to transport your army around. Another character has a travel power that is faster but takes a larger number of people and you use that when you need to infiltrate somewhere. You don't have anyone who has to sit out the logistics part of the adventure, but you also don't have anyone whose contributions are irrelevant.

What I am arguing against is the notion that every PC should have roughly the power and versatility of a 3.5 T1 caster.

Such characters are, imo, so all around competent that there is no problem they can't solve alone and thus all characters will become incredibly stale and samey and the team-work aspect of the game will suffer.

I fully agree that problems which can only be solved by a single character type are incredibly lame, but the idea that different characters can solve various problems with varying degrees of difficulty adds a lot to the game.

[LibraryOgre]

What I am arguing against is the notion that every PC should have roughly the power and versatility of a 3.5 T1 caster.

Tier 1 was a mistake, IMO. It grew out of having only a few classes, and not a lot of specificity, so "cleric" and "wizard" became dumping grounds for any magical feat one could think of.

[2D8HP]

...you can replicate the feel of Sword and Sorcery fairly easily in 3e by playing E6....
Thanks for the tip!

:smile:

[flond]

No, RPGs go like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. Those actions have predictable effects from the rules.

In Apocalypse World it goes like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. The DM makes up a result.

One of the examples the game gives for "success at a cost" on a stealth mission is someone discovering you.




So long as you achieve your actual aim before being discovered, that sounds like a fine success at a cost to me. Stealth missions are rarely about hiding in a place just to prove you can after all. The stealth is usually a tool. But hey, you want to call open ended skill rules not role playing games too, go ahead. :smalltongue:

[Arbane]

So long as you achieve your actual aim before being discovered, that sounds like a fine success at a cost to me. Stealth missions are rarely about hiding in a place just to prove you can after all. The stealth is usually a tool. But hey, you want to call open ended skill rules not role playing games too, go ahead. :smalltongue:

How can it be a Role-Playing Game without a page and a half of different types of polearms?

[Mutazoia]

I'm not advocating (and I don't think Quertus is advocating) for "give the Wizard Rogue abilities. What people are advocating for is not having "Rogue Problems" where there's a lock or a trap and the way to solve it is "point the Rogue at it", because that's not interactive and reduces creativity to "do you have a Rogue, Y/N". Instead, various characters should have different solutions to a given kind of challenge that are differentially effective depending on what specific problem you have. So maybe one character has a travel power that is slow and takes a large number of people and you use that when you need to transport your army around. Another character has a travel power that is faster but takes a larger number of people and you use that when you need to infiltrate somewhere. You don't have anyone who has to sit out the logistics part of the adventure, but you also don't have anyone whose contributions are irrelevant.

What if one class, makes every other class functionally obsolete? A Rogue can take time and make a skill roll to unlock a door. A wizard can cast the "unlock" cantrip, doing the same thing, for free, all day long. Barbarian want's to bash a door down, the wizard has a spell for that too. Hell, depending on the level, the wizard can just MAKE a (magical) door and bypass the locked one completely. Pit traps? Don't have the Rogue search, just have the wizard levitate everyone...wizards even have some basic healing spells to horn in on the cleric's role. All this for the low, low cost of.....NOTHING.


The issue, I think, is that "exclusive actions" (which are fine) often ends being "exclusive problems" which are not. It's genuinely okay if the Rogue is the only one who can disarm traps, as long as there are other ways to bypass traps. If the only way to bypass traps is "disarm them", that can't be a Rogue-only ability.

Sure, because you are a brain surgeon, master chef, a pilot, super scientist, and the concept of people having one job that they had to study and train for is so alien to you that you can't stand seeing in a game? All Wizards are Buckaroo Banzai??

Seriously, by your logic, everybody should be a caster, because casting a spell can't be a caster only ability, right? And wizards should be able to use any weapon and walk around in full plate, because that really shouldn't only be a fighter-type ability, right? So, in your dream game, all characters have no classes at all, and are just fully armored, lock picking, sword swinging, spell slinging Gods??




No, RPGs go like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. Those actions have predictable effects from the rules.

In Apocalypse World it goes like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. The DM makes up a result.

One of the examples the game gives for "success at a cost" on a stealth mission is someone discovering you.

And one of those examples gives you the possibility of a result that has no basis in reality at all.

Player: "I bluff the guard!"
DM: "Yellow marsh mellows from the planet fizglorp steal your nose hair! You fail." (hyperbole)




This can, and should, be accomplished via non-level mechanisms because those give you the ability to give underpowered characters upgrades, rather than fixing "Wizards slow, Fighters fast". Sometimes, the noob is going to want to play a spell guy. Sometimes the expert is going to want to play a sword guy. Having a setup where sword guys all work way X and spell guys all work way Y makes that harder for no good reason.

Two different types of characters functioning completely different from each other?? *GASP* the HORROR


This doesn't seem all that practically different from some classes having larger HD. How does "Fighters get more class features per level, and maybe a per-level HP buff" not capture all the gains from this, while also letting you have a consistently power measure?

The fighter still can't one shot a dragon?


No. Racial level limits were always stupid. Their original intent may be of interest as a historical question, but they are in no sense defensible as a design choice.

When the game was designed to only go to level 10, racial levels made more sense. The bonuses you received for playing a demi-human were balanced out by the level caps. Caps that were really only one or two levels below the games maximum at the time.


Using different XP tables to balance classes complicates analysis for no reason. If you can balance a 10k XP Wizard and a 10k XP Fighter by making the Fighter level 10 and the Wizard level 7, you can balance them both at level 7 (or 10, or 8, or 9, or 15) and then you can not do XP accounting and also have a cleaner abstraction to talk about character power.

Analysis? Are you gaming by accountancy?

The power creep on the wizard is much faster than the power creep on the fighter. To try to say they are functionally equal no matter what the level is absurd. That's like saying a Lamborgini and an SUV should cost the same. Sure, you can technically make the SUV just as fast, if not faster than the Lamb, but your going to sink two to three times the cost of the Lamb (bare minimum) to do so. But hey...they're equal off the assembly line, some how?

[Milo v3]

What if one class, makes every other class functionally obsolete? A Rogue can take time and make a skill roll to unlock a door. A wizard can cast the "unlock" cantrip, doing the same thing, for free, all day long. Barbarian want's to bash a door down, the wizard has a spell for that too. Hell, depending on the level, the wizard can just MAKE a (magical) door and bypass the locked one completely. Pit traps? Don't have the Rogue search, just have the wizard levitate everyone...wizards even have some basic healing spells to horn in on the cleric's role. All this for the low, low cost of.....NOTHING.
Is there actually a game which has all those things as at-will cantrip style abilities that isn't a superhero system?

[Zale]

The issue, I think, is that "exclusive actions" (which are fine) often ends being "exclusive problems" which are not. It's genuinely okay if the Rogue is the only one who can disarm traps, as long as there are other ways to bypass traps. If the only way to bypass traps is "disarm them", that can't be a Rogue-only ability.


Yeah, the thing is that sometimes casters get loads of exclusive actions that other people don't- and they're flat out better.

I mean, Knock is better than having to roll to unlock things. Invisibility is better than a hide check. And you can still make those checks if you want, as a caster.

Either everyone gets to do stuff that other people can't, or everyone can kind of do everything. The alternative is deliberate asymmetry.

[Mutazoia]

Is there actually a game which has all those things as at-will cantrip style abilities that isn't a superhero system?

Usually, spells cast out side of combat are more or less "at-will", as casting times do not matter at that point, and the greatly reduced "refresh" rate on spell slots means casting all those things when ever you want is not an issue.

[Cluedrew]

No, RPGs go like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. Those actions have predictable effects from the rules.

In Apocalypse World it goes like this:

1. The DM poses a scenario.
2. You take actions with random outcomes.
3. The DM makes up a result.Besides what flond said, are we talking about an action with a random outcome or a predictable one? I don't think you are actually talking about both Those are very different. In the case of a random outcome, yes Powered by the Apocalypse does generally just hand things over to the GM instead of having random tables for it, but I don't really feel that is a problem. For predictable outcomes, yes the GM makes things up, but within a rather narrow box, that gets even smaller in narrative context, so I have found I can usually predict it as well enough. Sure it is not perfect, and probably wouldn't work in a super competitive verses game, but this isn't that.

Although at the other end, recently I've be shocked* by how the GM has resolved an action as many times in D&D as in any of three Powered by the Apocalypse games I've played, so things breaking expectation can easily happen in either model.

* As in "Wait, what? How did that happen?


How can it be a Role-Playing Game without a page and a half of different types of polearms?Smaller font size or bigger pages.

[Milo v3]

Usually, spells cast out side of combat are more or less "at-will", as casting times do not matter at that point, and the greatly reduced "refresh" rate on spell slots means casting all those things when ever you want is not an issue.
At-Will means you can do whenever you want, it's not to do with casting times. Reduced refresh rate? What are you talking about?

[Cosi]

Wow....I would note that DM makes up a result is true in all RPGs that have a DM.

If the things that happen are the result of one person making stuff up, you are not playing a game. You are being told a story.


What if one class, makes every other class functionally obsolete?

What if lots of classes have no useful abilities?


Seriously, by your logic, everybody should be a caster, because casting a spell can't be a caster only ability, right? And wizards should be able to use any weapon and walk around in full plate, because that really shouldn't only be a fighter-type ability, right? So, in your dream game, all characters have no classes at all, and are just fully armored, lock picking, sword swinging, spell slinging Gods??

How did you get "everyone needs to have every ability" out of a post that explicitly says that exclusive abilities are a thing that is okay?


Two different types of characters functioning completely different from each other?? *GASP* the HORROR

Yes, the horror that we might want to be able to tell which Fighters are nominally equivalent to which Wizards without having to two different table lookups. I can't wait until the game starts introducing new classes, all of whom have their own XP tables. What level of Hexblade is appropriate to fight my party of a 7th level Dragon Shaman, a 10th level Truenamer, a 3rd level Dread Necromancer, and a 6th level Ninja again? Is that party even balanced to begin with?


When the game was designed to only go to level 10, racial levels made more sense. The bonuses you received for playing a demi-human were balanced out by the level caps. Caps that were really only one or two levels below the games maximum at the time.

Nope. That's not how balance works. Power now for power later is not balanced.


Analysis? Are you gaming by accountancy?

Yes, I would like to know what the rules of the game I'm playing do. I'm increasingly disturbed by the number of people who apparently believe "knowing how to play a game" is unnecessary for or even harmful to their efforts to play that game.


The power creep on the wizard is much faster than the power creep on the fighter. To try to say they are functionally equal no matter what the level is absurd.

This point is either you willfully misreading what I said again (I said "if you can balance them in condition X you can balance them in condition Y", not "they are currently balanced"), or you saying that it is literally impossible for Wizards and Fighters to ever be balanced. Both of those positions are stupid.


I mean, Knock is better than having to roll to unlock things. Invisibility is better than a hide check. And you can still make those checks if you want, as a caster.

I've repeatedly said that knock is not really better than Open Lock at the time you get it. It has advantages (faster, more consistent), but also disadvantages (less uses, higher opportunity cost). invisibility just is a Hide check. It's a Hide check at a +20 bonus, but there's no reason in principle a Rogue couldn't get a +20 bonus to Hide. The reason it's often superior in practice is that people don't want mundanes to have nice things, but it seems unfair to blame that on casters.

[Venom3053000]

I think part of the mundane problem is the Rogue Fighter split really messes with them

Fighter's basically get nothing but the ability to smash faces in and if they can't are basically a pack mule for the rest of the party, they can't lead because they don't get any of the skills needed to lead and they have no Knowledge skills so they know nothing about anything, if they didn't have Craft they wouldn't have any way to make a living but as a muderhobo in a city


now Rogue do get the Skills needed to do stuff but also die faster in a fight and if they can't sneak attack or hide against the large number of creatures that make that useless the best thing they can do is use whatever magic item a magic user gave them and hope it helps


so you can either fight well and basically do nothing else or fight well against some things while a good blow can take you out of the fight but at least you can do things besides just fighting

and thats stupid

[Arbane]

If the things that happen are the result of one person making stuff up, you are not playing a game. You are being told a story.

I have some BAD NEWS for you about the role of GMs in the vast majority of RPG systems.

They are one person in the game, who MAKES STUFF UP for the other players to deal with.


I think part of the mundane problem is the Rogue Fighter split really messes with them

Fighter's basically get nothing but the ability to smash faces in and if they can't are basically a pack mule for the rest of the party, they can't lead because they don't get any of the skills needed to lead and they have no Knowledge skills so they know nothing about anything, if they didn't have Craft they wouldn't have any way to make a living but as a muderhobo in a city


now Rogue do get the Skills needed to do stuff but also die faster in a fight and if they can't sneak attack or hide against the large number of creatures that make that useless the best thing they can do is use whatever magic item a magic user gave them and hope it helps


so you can either fight well and basically do nothing else or fight well against some things while a good blow can take you out of the fight but at least you can do things besides just fighting

and thats stupid

Very much agreed. One of the most common ideas to 'fix' Fighters is to gestalt them with Rogues, so they can break face AND be a skillmonkey. (I don't think it's enough, but it's a good start.)

[Satinavian]

I've repeatedly said that knock is not really better than Open Lock at the time you get it. It has advantages (faster, more consistent), but also disadvantages (less uses, higher opportunity cost). invisibility just is a Hide check. It's a Hide check at a +20 bonus, but there's no reason in principle a Rogue couldn't get a +20 bonus to Hide. The reason it's often superior in practice is that people don't want mundanes to have nice things, but it seems unfair to blame that on casters.For the rogue it costs build ressources. Skill points (and lots of class skills) are one of the major class features rogues get. And two skills is already a significant part of that.

For a wizard it is only an opportunity cost of a spellslot that day and an insignificant amount of money. A wizard who learns knock and invisibility has not to give up anything for it.

That is why people complain far less about scorcerers with knock and invisibility.

[Psyren]

Tier 1 was a mistake, IMO. It grew out of having only a few classes, and not a lot of specificity, so "cleric" and "wizard" became dumping grounds for any magical feat one could think of.

I would say the problem is not that those classes became dumping grounds for all the magic, but that they have so few opportunity costs to grabbing most or all of it.

In other words - a class that is capable of anything is not actually a problem; rather, the problem is a build that is capable of everything. A wizard who can excel at melee is okay, a wizard who can be a talented summoner is okay, a wizard who can find the macguffin is okay, and a wizard who can control his enemies is okay. The issue is a wizard that can do all of these, or even one that can do all of these with only a night's rest in between.

Though I will add that some of these - particularly "talented summoner" - are themselves routes to becoming capable of everything and so those need to be toned down too.

[Venom3053000]

Very much agreed. One of the most common ideas to 'fix' Fighters is to gestalt them with Rogues, so they can break face AND be a skillmonkey. (I don't think it's enough, but it's a good start.)

I'd probably mess around with feats if I was trying to fix the Fighter

make things worthwhile not just "oh your slightly less bad at dual wielding" and some requirments would have to go (Why is Legendary Rider an epic level feat?) :smallmad:

You call something a Feat and it should BE an Heroic Feat

[Quertus]

I'm not advocating (and I don't think Quertus is advocating) for "give the Wizard Rogue abilities. What people are advocating for is not having "Rogue Problems" where there's a lock or a trap and the way to solve it is "point the Rogue at it", because that's not interactive and reduces creativity to "do you have a Rogue, Y/N". Instead, various characters should have different solutions to a given kind of challenge that are differentially effective depending on what specific problem you have.

The issue, I think, is that "exclusive actions" (which are fine) often ends being "exclusive problems" which are not. It's genuinely okay if the Rogue is the only one who can disarm traps, as long as there are other ways to bypass traps. If the only way to bypass traps is "disarm them", that can't be a Rogue-only ability.

Pretty much. When you encounter a door, the Rogue can pick the lock, the Wizard can cast Knock, the Fighter can beat it down, and the Cleric... can check to see if it was locked in the first place? :smallwink:


This can, and should, be accomplished via non-level mechanisms because those give you the ability to give underpowered characters upgrades, rather than fixing "Wizards slow, Fighters fast". Sometimes, the noob is going to want to play a spell guy. Sometimes the expert is going to want to play a sword guy. Having a setup where sword guys all work way X and spell guys all work way Y makes that harder for no good reason.

Hmmm... Let's dissect this. Whether the characters level at the same time or different times, you can give the noob a handicap in levels or XP (or not do so). Or bonus wealth / equipment. Or upgrades to their class / stats.

The only advantage to leveling at the same time that I can see is, if they change characters, you can keep them at the same level handicap, and hope that it is still balanced. It makes the math of enforcing and forcing balance a little easier. Which, to me, means that is has the corresponding downside that the GM is that much less likely to evaluate the impact of the handicap rather than just applying it blind.

So... What advantage(s) to balanced by level over balanced by XP did you see?


This doesn't seem all that practically different from some classes having larger HD. How does "Fighters get more class features per level, and maybe a per-level HP buff" not capture all the gains from this, while also letting you have a consistently power measure?

From the PoV of 3e?

First: elegance.

Second: where do you tie skill points, feats, stat boosts, etc?

Third (partially contingent upon the 2nd): I can see this system producing a lot of unintended cross-class early entry BS.

Fourth (related to 1st): how the **** do you build a gestalt in such a system? :smallconfused:


Using different XP tables to balance classes complicates analysis for no reason. If you can balance a 10k XP Wizard and a 10k XP Fighter by making the Fighter level 10 and the Wizard level 7, you can balance them both at level 7 (or 10, or 8, or 9, or 15) and then you can not do XP accounting and also have a cleaner abstraction to talk about character power.

See above for examples of why I see it as an issue of where you have complexity, not of whether it exists.


What I am arguing against is the notion that every PC should have roughly the power and versatility of a 3.5 T1 caster.

Such characters are, imo, so all around competent that there is no problem they can't solve alone and thus all characters will become incredibly stale and samey and the team-work aspect of the game will suffer.

Ok, there's a bunch of problems here. First and foremost, action economy, having been the downfall of many an otherwise overpowering BBEG, is a huge gaping hole in the "I'll just do it all myself" plan.

Second, "play with better people" would like to have a word with you regarding the presumed lack of teamwork.

Third, if balanced characters are inherently incredibly "stale and samey", then we should clearly not aim for balance, and we should just make Wizards better.


I fully agree that problems which can only be solved by a single character type are incredibly lame, but the idea that different characters can solve various problems with varying degrees of difficulty adds a lot to the game.

I don't disagree, but most people's complaints about muggles is that they just can't solve many classes of problems. So... Are we aggressively agreeing again?


Yeah, the thing is that sometimes casters get loads of exclusive actions that other people don't- and they're flat out better.

I mean, Knock is better than having to roll to unlock things. Invisibility is better than a hide check. And you can still make those checks if you want, as a caster.

Either everyone gets to do stuff that other people can't, or everyone can kind of do everything. The alternative is deliberate asymmetry.

Knock is only strictly better if it's at will, silent, and doesn't simultaneously unlock the hidden cache of lava above your head. Last time I used a Knock-like effect, none of those were true.

Nor could I try to argue for using it to relock the door behind me.


Usually, spells cast out side of combat are more or less "at-will", as casting times do not matter at that point, and the greatly reduced "refresh" rate on spell slots means casting all those things when ever you want is not an issue.

Um, what? Last time I had a D&D Wizard dumb enough to memorize Knock, it was a huge blow to my resources / stamina.


Yes, the horror that we might want to be able to tell which Fighters are nominally equivalent to which Wizards without having to two different table lookups. I can't wait until the game starts introducing new classes, all of whom have their own XP tables. What level of Hexblade is appropriate to fight my party of a 7th level Dragon Shaman, a 10th level Truenamer, a 3rd level Dread Necromancer, and a 6th level Ninja again? Is that party even balanced to begin with?

I would love to see that nightmare. It couldn't be worse than Rifts.


Nope. That's not how balance works. Power now for power later is not balanced.

It's not "balance", it's "demo". You can play the game up to level 5 in this easy demo, but, to play all the way up to level 10, you need to buy the real game (and play on at least "normal" difficulty)


Yes, I would like to know what the rules of the game I'm playing do. I'm increasingly disturbed by the number of people who apparently believe "knowing how to play a game" is unnecessary for or even harmful to their efforts to play that game.

I've repeatedly said that knock is not really better than Open Lock at the time you get it. It has advantages (faster, more consistent), but also disadvantages (less uses, higher opportunity cost). invisibility just is a Hide check. It's a Hide check at a +20 bonus, but there's no reason in principle a Rogue couldn't get a +20 bonus to Hide. The reason it's often superior in practice is that people don't want mundanes to have nice things, but it seems unfair to blame that on casters.

Just wanted to say that I very much agree with these sentiments. So, is the first step to solving the perceived problem to let muggles have nice things?


In other words - a class that is capable of anything is not actually a problem; rather, the problem is a build that is capable of everything. A wizard who can excel at melee is okay, a wizard who can be a talented summoner is okay, a wizard who can find the macguffin is okay, and a wizard who can control his enemies is okay. The issue is a wizard that can do all of these, or even one that can do all of these with only a night's rest in between.

So, if we just merge übercharger, leadership, skill monkey, and diplomancer into a single muggle, it'll be balanced, and we can get back to playing the game?

[Arbane]

I'd probably mess around with feats if I was trying to fix the Fighter

make things worthwhile not just "oh your slightly less bad at dual wielding" and some requirments would have to go (Why is Legendary Rider an epic level feat?) :smallmad:

You call something a Feat and it should BE an Heroic Feat

Agreed. Apparently, early in D&D3's development Feats were going to be Fighter-only, but then they decided to give them to everyone, so they had to water them down so they wouldn't be 'too good'.... :smallannoyed:

So yeah, I fully support Better Feats For Fighters. And making most of the standard combat maneuvers things they can just DO without sucking an AoO.



I don't disagree, but most people's complaints about muggles is that they just can't solve many classes of problems.


Yep. Consider the following plots. Each is an entire quest in itself for the lowly non-magical peasants, and a single spell for their rightful caster overlords:

Travel across a continent in a single day.
Get to the top of an inhospitable mountain.
Save a noble who's been poisoned.
Solve a murder mystery.
Visit another plane.
Revive the dead.
Translate an ancient text in a forgotten language.
Save a friend who's dying of a rare disease.
Find out what a hostile conspiracy is plotting.

There's plenty more, these are just off the top of my head.

[Mutazoia]

At-Will means you can do whenever you want, it's not to do with casting times. Reduced refresh rate? What are you talking about?

Is there a time, other than in an anti-magic field, when you can't cast a spell when ever you want? Being in combat, just means you may have to suck an AoO to do so.


What if lots of classes have no useful abilities?

What if each class, had it's own...class....of useful abilities, and we didn't have one class that could mimic all of those abilities with the wave of a hand?


Yes, the horror that we might want to be able to tell which Fighters are nominally equivalent to which Wizards without having to two different table lookups. I can't wait until the game starts introducing new classes, all of whom have their own XP tables. What level of Hexblade is appropriate to fight my party of a 7th level Dragon Shaman, a 10th level Truenamer, a 3rd level Dread Necromancer, and a 6th level Ninja again? Is that party even balanced to begin with?

Fighters and wizards are not equivalent....that's the problem. They shouldn't be. But one of them has a huge power advantage over the other, with no real cost for that power. And if having each class with it's own XP table is so horrifying, then we either A) don't have 500 new classes introduced with each splat and don't release so many spats, or B) have these new classes function as "kits" that use the XP table of their base class.

We already have a power imbalance, just with the core rules. If you keep adding new classes willy-nilly, your just making the problem worse.


Nope. That's not how balance works. Power now for power later is not balanced.

That's not even close to the example. It was "power here for a handicap over here". Think of it in point buy system terms: A take a -1 flaw, and in exchange, I get an extra 1 point to spend elsewhere. Your example would be: I gain an extra point for a flaw, and get a bonus point for 'reasons'.



Yes, I would like to know what the rules of the game I'm playing do. I'm increasingly disturbed by the number of people who apparently believe "knowing how to play a game" is unnecessary for or even harmful to their efforts to play that game.

What you describe is more wanting to know which class is more powerful than the others, rather than wanting to know how the rules work.


This point is either you willfully misreading what I said again (I said "if you can balance them in condition X you can balance them in condition Y", not "they are currently balanced"), or you saying that it is literally impossible for Wizards and Fighters to ever be balanced. Both of those positions are stupid.

If you can balance two sponges when both are wet, you can balance them when one is wet and one is bone dry. Gotcha.

If a wizard can one shot a dragon from range, and a fighter has to whittle it down with his sword, they are balanced. Gotcha.



I've repeatedly said that knock is not really better than Open Lock at the time you get it.

Functional words here are "at the time you get it". But then again, Open Lock is not really all that good when you first get it, either. But then, rogues don't have cantrips to open locks either.


invisibility just is a Hide check. It's a Hide check at a +20 bonus, but there's no reason in principle a Rogue couldn't get a +20 bonus to Hide.

To get a +20 bonus, the usual method is to "take 20"...take 20 minutes (basically) to do something that a wizard does with a wave of his hand.....


The reason it's often superior in practice is that people don't want mundanes to have nice things, but it seems unfair to blame that on casters.

Yes...we shouldn't blame the casters who get nice things for free, when everybody else gets jack, or has to put effort into getting said things.

Nobody is really blaming the casters...we are blaming the imbalanced rules that give casters their own nice things, as well as the nice things that the other classes have.

[Milo v3]

Is there a time, other than in an anti-magic field, when you can't cast a spell when ever you want? Being in combat, just means you may have to suck an AoO to do so.
Yeah you're definitely not understanding what I just said.....

You can't cast a spell whenever you want because spells are finite in how many you can use per day in most systems, or they take up time, or some other resource.

[Mutazoia]

Yeah you're definitely not understanding what I just said.....

You can't cast a spell whenever you want because spells are finite in how many you can use per day in most systems, or they take up time, or some other resource.

Yeah, I got you.

[Talakeal]

Ok, there's a bunch of problems here. First and foremost, action economy, having been the downfall of many an otherwise overpowering BBEG, is a huge gaping hole in the "I'll just do it all myself" plan.


I said that action economy matters in combat (at least below a certain level of optimization where you can freely manipulate time); its outside of combat where it is really hard to make action economy matter and doing so repeatedly becomes increasingly contrived.

Also, if I wanted to serve no purpose in the party besides another warm body who provides combat support I could just play a muggle as is.


Second, "play with better people" would like to have a word with you regarding the presumed lack of teamwork.

This isn't about other people, this is about me.

Maybe I am a "toxic person," but personally if I don't contribute anything to the group I would rather not be there, and if I can solve a problem on my own I would prefer to work on my own. This is both in and out of character.

I also feel that forcing everyone to participate whether or not they are needed just so everyone can pretend they contributed is very patronizing.


Third, if balanced characters are inherently incredibly "stale and samey", then we should clearly not aim for balance, and we should just make Wizards better.

I think you are confused. Forcing everyone to play the same character type (in this case a "jack of all trades) would be balanced, but balance does not mean forcing everyone to play the same character. Different but equal is definitely a thing.


I don't disagree, but most people's complaints about muggles is that they just can't solve many classes of problems. So... Are we aggressively agreeing again?


No. I do not agree that every character needs to be able to solve every, or even most, problems to be viable.

But again, it comes down to what you mean by "solve", after all there is no problem in 3.5 that is can't be fixed by sampling buying a candle of invocation, and given time and ingenuity enough I fully believe that a mundane character can meaningfully contribute to just about any traditional fantasy problem.

[Florian]

Is there actually a game which has all those things as at-will cantrip style abilities that isn't a superhero system?

I´m mentioning Splittermond quite often. Every character has a pool of "Spell Points" that know two states: "used" and "burned". Used points can be continuously reset but can only create temporary spell effects, burned points reset after 24 hours but will generate persistent effects (third option is to "overcharge" an instantaneous spell at the cost of burning points).

The key difference to d20 is how spells work, their mechanics more deeply integrated with the rest of the (skill) system. For ex, you need to be able to pick a lock to make meaningful use of the Instant Lock Pick spell, or you should be good at spotting and navigation to make most of Form of the Eagle, and so on.

Edit: So its more common to see a "Fighter" having the Protection, Strength and Light schools, or a "Rogue" having the Shadow and Air schools, than what we typically identify as "Clerics" or "Wizards".

[Satinavian]

Going to "At will" for spells would get rid of ressource management for spell slots. Which would then allow to get rid of casters ability to go Nova by shifting ressources from one encounter to another. Casters would always cast as best as they could and the overall power of spells could be toned down accordingly.

It is a direction one could take, but i am not really convinced.


Also Splittermond has just one of many mana point system. That is not exactly "at will". And while it works very well, this particular aspect is not exactly original. Ars Magica or Shadowrun are closer to at will but not completely there as in both cases powerful magic requires some rest as magic has a chance to inflict fatique. Iirc Warhammer RPG did once allow something like at will casting but the price was paid in really dangerous misfires.

[Cosi]

I have some BAD NEWS for you about the role of GMs in the vast majority of RPG systems.

They are one person in the game, who MAKES STUFF UP for the other players to deal with.

Again, there is a very obvious difference between "the DM makes up something and you resolve it with actions derived from the rules" and "the DM makes up something and also how you resolve it".


For a wizard it is only an opportunity cost of a spellslot that day and an insignificant amount of money. A wizard who learns knock and invisibility has not to give up anything for it.

He also doesn't get anything for it. There are no points awarded for the spells in your spellbook. Once he prepares them, he's giving up a glitterdust or color spray, which is an enormously larger cost than the Rogue is paying for his ability on a per-use basis.


So... What advantage(s) to balanced by level over balanced by XP did you see?

I'm not sure what you mean.

In the general case, you get the advantage of having a vastly more elegant way of comparing character power. Also, I think you're dramatically overstating the advantages of separate level up points. First, from a simple logistical point of view, leveling up your character is generally a "pause the session" event even if it's just one person doing it, so it behooves you to do level ups in parallel to as large a degree as possible. Second, I think giving some people new toys while others don't get them is unlikely to cause the dynamic you want.

For helping out noobs specifically, I think an explicit handicap isn't a good paradigm regardless of how you implement it. Telling people "you suck, here are free points" is going to offend some people, so your mechanism needs to be (to some degree) implicit. Relative skill gaps are also going to change over the course of a game, so your mechanism needs to be dynamic. Giving DMs better tools to design encounters to highlight one character or another's abilities is just a better paradigm for helping out new players, and it generalizes more.


First: elegance.

I don't think it's more elegant. To put it in CS terms, "separate XP tables" is O(n) lookups for determining balance, while "single XP table" is O(1). I know which one looks more elegant to me.


Second: where do you tie skill points, feats, stat boosts, etc?

You could just give bonus stuff as needed. Honestly though, I think the case for giving different classes different numbers of feats is even worse than the case for giving them different XP curves. Everyone picks off the same list of feats.


Third (partially contingent upon the 2nd): I can see this system producing a lot of unintended cross-class early entry BS.

Going to 4e style Paragon Paths fixes that problem, and is just a better paradigm in general.


Fourth (related to 1st): how the **** do you build a gestalt in such a system? :smallconfused:

I don't see how this is a problem at all. How is it harder to combine "a +1 BAB bonus and an additional +1 class bonus" than "10 levels when the other class has 6"?


What if each class, had it's own...class....of useful abilities, and we didn't have one class that could mimic all of those abilities with the wave of a hand?

I didn't realize there was a Wizard spell called "all Druid abilities". Could you point that out for me?


Fighters and wizards are not equivalent....that's the problem. They shouldn't be.

Again, no one is saying "equivalent". What people are saying is "balanced". Clerics and Wizards are balanced. Clerics and Wizards are not the same. Warblades and Binders are balanced. Warblades and Binders are not the same. Knights and Scouts are balanced. Knights and Scouts are not the same.


And if having each class with it's own XP table is so horrifying, then we either A) don't have 500 new classes introduced with each splat and don't release so many spats, or B) have these new classes function as "kits" that use the XP table of their base class.

No, we do the smart thing and we have one XP table. Because that is literally infinity times better than your terrible solution and the only "cost" is that now we can look at one number on someone's character sheet to know how powerful they are supposed to be. There is no reason to do things the way you want to do them except that it lets you have an imbalance between equal level classes, but you don't want to do that because that is stupid.


We already have a power imbalance, just with the core rules. If you keep adding new classes willy-nilly, your just making the problem worse.

Then we should fix that imbalance, because people want lots of classes. People want Binders and Warlocks and Beguilers and Totemists. If your system can't deliver that, or can only deliver that as reskins to your core classes, it has failed. Point blank.


That's not even close to the example. It was "power here for a handicap over here". Think of it in point buy system terms: A take a -1 flaw, and in exchange, I get an extra 1 point to spend elsewhere. Your example would be: I gain an extra point for a flaw, and get a bonus point for 'reasons'.

That is exactly the example. You pick your race at 1st level. You therefore accrue its advantages from the start of the game (a point in time that might reasonably be called "now") and the cost you incur is paid when you reach max level (a point in time that is presumably "later"). Thus you have one character being overpowered at low levels (when they pay nothing for racial bonuses) and a different character being overpowered at high levels (when they get to advance and the other one doesn't). Setting aside the fact that such a design is inherently unfun (being overpowered sometimes and underpowered other times rarely balances out), it means that any game that doesn't start from 1st and run to 10th is inherently broken.

So yeah, racial level limits aren't a good idea.They're super obviously not a good idea, and once people got better at game design they stopped including them. Anyone who advocates for them now doesn't understand enough about how game design works to contribute to a conversation.


What you describe is more wanting to know which class is more powerful than the others, rather than wanting to know how the rules work.

Wow, if only we had a word for "the thing that determines how powerful classes are". It should probably determine other stuff too, like how to resolve checks or how monsters work or things like that. Maybe it could include all the stuff you need to make rulings about the game. We could call it "the rules".


If you can balance two sponges when both are wet, you can balance them when one is wet and one is bone dry. Gotcha.

How is that even remotely what I said? Let's try this again:

If you know which abilities you need to make a 10k XP Wizard balanced with a 10k XP Fighter, you can just give those ability sets to 10th level characters instead of adding the indirection layer of XP.


If a wizard can one shot a dragon from range, and a fighter has to whittle it down with his sword, they are balanced. Gotcha.

It means that you should give the Fighter abilities that are as good as what the Wizard is doing. Or take away abilities from the Wizard until he's as bad as what the Fighter is doing. Or a mixture of the two.


To get a +20 bonus, the usual method is to "take 20"...take 20 minutes (basically) to do something that a wizard does with a wave of his hand.....

Or, you know, having bonuses. Like from skill ranks or abilities.


Nobody is really blaming the casters...we are blaming the imbalanced rules that give casters their own nice things, as well as the nice things that the other classes have.

Except your solution is, as far as you seem to be willing to explain it, "casters have to get nice things because then we can have separate XP tables, something I consider to be a terminal goal in game design."

[Florian]

Going to "At will" for spells would get rid of ressource management for spell slots. Which would then allow to get rid of casters ability to go Nova by shifting ressources from one encounter to another. Casters would always cast as best as they could and the overall power of spells could be toned down accordingly.

It is a direction one could take, but i am not really convinced.

Even with spell slots, it doesn't really make sense that spells have an auto-scaling component to them (and sticking with the old Vance stories, "multi-function" or "unspecified" spells should be more than atypical - instead of "Summon Monster III", the should be a specific "Summon Joe the Dretch", and so on). The PF kineticist is interesting in this regard, due to the "gather power" and "store power" class feature.

[Satinavian]

He also doesn't get anything for it. There are no points awarded for the spells in your spellbook. If that is your only problem, that is easy to fix. Like "the wizard gets level*4 spell levels he can have in his spellbook to prepare from". Then spells like knock would have a relevant cost to have. And wizards would have actually different abilities from each other.

[2D8HP]

....people want lots of classes. People want Binders and Warlocks and Beguilers and Totemists....
Oh man. With all the "splat" so they're so many classes so one may have a custom character, why not just go for a full bore point buy character creation like GURPS or HERO?

What I'd like is a simple (because frankly if the rules aren't based on ones I already learned in the 1980's they need to be real easy to learn if I'm going to bother) system for creating characters like Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

In D&D terms Fafhrd is an expert swordsmen (said to be better than d'Artagnan,*Lord Brandoch Daha,*Conan the Barbarian, and*Scar Gordon) using a large sword ("Graywand") so Fighter.

Outdoor survival skills, so Ranger.

Is often a thief, so Rogue.

The Gray Mouser is also an expert swordsmen, using a rapier named Scalpel and a dirk named Cat's Claw, so Fighter.

Even more of a thief than Fafhrd, so Rogue.

And has cast a few (but not many) spells, so a bit of a Wizard (but not a full one).

I'm sure others want to be able to have characters that do different types of magic, such as those used by Alodar in Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics (but personally I don't desire to play any kind of "Archmage".

Since I find GURPS and HERO (and Pathfinder) far too complex, I don't think I'll have much luck, as if it's not based on the '70's D&D or RuneQuest rules I already know, I have a hard time learning any new systems, but I'm still curious.

[Milo v3]

.
Oh man. With all the "splat" so they're so many classes so one may have a custom character, why not just go for a full bore point buy character creation like GURPS or HERO?

What I'd like is a simple (because frankly if the rules aren't based on ones I already learned in the 1980's they need to be real easy to learn if I'm going to bother) system for creating characters like Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

In D&D terms Fafhrd is an expert swordsmen (said to be better than d'Artagnan,*Lord Brandoch Daha,*Conan the Barbarian, and*Scar Gordon) using a large sword ("Graywand") so Fighter.

Outdoor survival skills, so Ranger.

Is often a thief, so Rogue.

The Gray Mouser is also an expert swordsmen, using a rapier named Scalpel and a dirk named Cat's Claw, so Fighter.

Even more of a thief than Fafhrd, so Rogue.

And has cast a few (but not many) spells, so a bit of a Wizard (but not a full one).

I'm sure others want to be able to have characters that do different types of magic, such as those used by Alodar in Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics (but personally I don't desire to play any kind of "Archmage".

Since I find GURPS and HERO (and Pathfinder) far too complex, I don't think I'll have much luck, as if it's not based on the '70's D&D or RuneQuest rules I already know, I have a hard time learning any new systems, but I'm still curious.

If you were to stat them up in Pathfinder Fafhrd would be a Slayer and Gray Mouser would probably only need to be a Rogue. The many classes means it's very easy to make a character without needing to worry mixing classes together.

As for why use it over point-buy, I often find point-buy systems try to have balance by having every over specialise to an insane degree and there isn't really any balance beyond "try to be a nice GM". While a class system will have everyone incrementally grow specific stats so they "should" be around the same power.

[Talakeal]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.

[Quertus]

I said that action economy matters in combat (at least below a certain level of optimization where you can freely manipulate time); its outside of combat where it is really hard to make action economy matter and doing so repeatedly becomes increasingly contrived.

Can one of you guys craft us some replacement potions? I'm busy researching why my spoo has too much fleem.

Action economy is a thing outside of combat, too. Hence my oft-used words, "and, while he's doing that, what are you doing?".


Also, if I wanted to serve no purpose in the party besides another warm body who provides combat support I could just play a muggle as is.

Absolutely agree. So, what do you want?


This isn't about other people, this is about me.

Maybe I am a "toxic person," but personally if I don't contribute anything to the group I would rather not be there, and if I can solve a problem on my own I would prefer to work on my own. This is both in and out of character.

I also feel that forcing everyone to participate whether or not they are needed just so everyone can pretend they contributed is very patronizing.

... I'm not sure where to go here. Let's poke at the edges for a bit.

So, if a barn needs raising, because you (presumably) have no unique skills to lend to the effort, and "anyone could do it", you are disinterested in lending a hand? What if it's your barn? What if the barn is on fire?

As to that last bit about "pretending to contribute", well, sadly, there are very few cooperative board games. I'm only familiar with two: Arkham Horror and... I forget the name of the other one. In both cases, the playing pieces are very similar, but each have their own specialty. In both cases, there are plenty of things that need to be done in the game, and anyone could theoretically do any of them, with slightly to vastly different odds of success. Teamwork is huge in such games. Getting everyone to work towards the common goal, each tackling a piece of the work, without there being any definitive, hard-coded "this person's job". That's the kind of feel I'm aiming for in an RPG (give or take characters having stronger emotional attachment to particular tasks).


I think you are confused. Forcing everyone to play the same character type (in this case a "jack of all trades) would be balanced, but balance does not mean forcing everyone to play the same character. Different but equal is definitely a thing.

Fine, but people seem to have difficulty distinguishing their characters in a way that doesn't a) kill game balance, and/or b) lead to "this is a job for Aquaman" / Shadowrun style niche protection & thumb twiddling.


No. I do not agree that every character needs to be able to solve every, or even most, problems to be viable.

... given time and ingenuity enough I fully believe that a mundane character can meaningfully contribute to just about any traditional fantasy problem.

Hold on. I'm confused. Here's what I'm reading:

* currently, mundane characters can contribute just fine to nearly any scenario (given time and ingenuity)
* "ingenuity" is a player skill, so muggles may be "hard mode", limited to more advanced players
* "time" is not something one normally has in combat, so muggles are more balanced with Wizards outside of combat.
* you don't care about "contributing", you only care about things you can solo.
* therefore muggles currently being balanced insofar as being able to contribute is meaningless to you.
* therefore, you want... ???

I'm struggling to fill in that last blank with something other than "hard niche protection".


Going to "At will" for spells would get rid of ressource management for spell slots. Which would then allow to get rid of casters ability to go Nova by shifting ressources from one encounter to another. Casters would always cast as best as they could and the overall power of spells could be toned down accordingly.

It is a direction one could take, but i am not really convinced.

Or Fighters could be buffed. Or both.

But of what are you not convinced? That removing a variable (the length of the work day, and it's effects on character effectiveness) from the equation would make balancing the equation easier?


If that is your only problem, that is easy to fix. Like "the wizard gets level*4 spell levels he can have in his spellbook to prepare from". Then spells like knock would have a relevant cost to have. And wizards would have actually different abilities from each other.

You know, I never had a character back in 2e D&D meet two Wizards who played the same.

Of course, I'm not sure if I've had a character in 3e meet two Wizards (of even remotely similar level)...

[Max_Killjoy]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.

I think I've laid out in detail a few times that the answer comes down to what kind of game you want to play and what kind of setting you want the characters to encounter and so on.

There is no one right answer, but a lot of the strife seems to come from the insistence that there is a single correct answer.

[Talakeal]

Fine, but people seem to have difficulty distinguishing their characters in a way that doesn't a) kill game balance, and/or b) lead to "this is a job for Aquaman" / Shadowrun style niche protection & thumb twiddling.

That is not a problem I have ever encountered.


Hold on. I'm confused. Here's what I'm reading:

* currently, mundane characters can contribute just fine to nearly any scenario (given time and ingenuity)
* "ingenuity" is a player skill, so muggles may be "hard mode", limited to more advanced players
* "time" is not something one normally has in combat, so muggles are more balanced with Wizards outside of combat.
* you don't care about "contributing", you only care about things you can solo.
* therefore muggles currently being balanced insofar as being able to contribute is meaningless to you.
* therefore, you want... ???

I'm struggling to fill in that last blank with something other than "hard niche protection".

A game where there is no hard niche protection but people can have varying degrees of difficulty with different tasks, where the best strategy is to have a variety of characters whose abilities complement each other rather than one or two classes who make everyone else irrelevant.

Fortunately for me virtually every RPG that is not 3.X D&D already meets these criteria, which is why I am baffled when I see people on this forum insist that it is impossible and 3.X fundamentally cannot be fixed.



So, if a barn needs raising, because you (presumably) have no unique skills to lend to the effort, and "anyone could do it", you are disinterested in lending a hand? What if it's your barn? What if the barn is on fire?

This is a problem that requires multiple people. Therefor I cannot do it on my own because I only one man. Very few scenarios in RPGs work like this, a wizard could easily solo it, and a handful of unskilled hirelings would be better suited to helping with it than heroic PCs.

[Arbane]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.

Not a chance. You try to gimp wizards, and a portion of the fanbase screams bloody murder. You try to give fighters nice thing, a portion of the fanbase starts screaming about realism. You leave it unbalanced, and people like me complain incessantly.
This is a problem with no solution that can possibly please everyone.

[Milo v3]

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle


Basically, people need to figureout what they want each tier of levels to actually represent. As current, I see the issue as "over time the game slowly changes what type of adventures take place, but most martials never leave the low-level style of adventuring".

4e devs handled this by having every class scale as it increases in level; at low-levels you're pulp-y heroes, by twelfth level your basically a superhero regardless of class, once you're past 20th level everyone is basically (or literally) a demigod.

While 5e decided they'd wanted what 3.5e had as it's 3-6th level playstyle as the entire feel of the game, so they restrained things so that it's harder to pull out from that scope.

Exalted starts at the demigod tier, and never leaves it. Nobilis starts at the deity tier and never leaves it. Chuubo's marvelous wish-granting engine can start at the scale of "okay lets go into the city and look at stuff in shops" and end at Nobilis-scale stuff. Mutants and Masterminds has Power-Level as a completely separate thing from how many points you have to build your characters or advance, so you can have things like batman who have tonnes and tonnes of points but he still might be a street-level superhero because of his lack of powers.

[RazorChain]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.


For me there is no imbalance as I almost never play D&D. Other systems have solved the issue multiple times. So I must conclude that people dont want this solved or maybe it's a legacy issue.

[Talakeal]

For me there is no imbalance as I almost never play D&D. Other systems have solved the issue multiple times. So I must conclude that people dont want this solved or maybe it's a legacy issue.

Same here.

I keep getting drawn into the debate when someone insists that the problem can't be solved and that all other games are inconsistent / irrational for claiming to have done so.

[Cluedrew]

I think I've laid out in detail a few times that the answer comes down to what kind of game you want to play and what kind of setting you want the characters to encounter and so on.I think you have, in fact some variant of that, presented by somebody, has been the conclusion of every one of these threads I can remember (although I haven't been keeping track). Its not a new conclusion, in fact I would argue the fact how you design a game being dependant on the game you want to make is pretty universal accepted. I think more importantly, the issue is no one can agree about what kind of game D&D is supposed to be.

Also another vote for "I enjoy games that have solved the problem."

[Lord Raziere]

Also another vote for "I enjoy games that have solved the problem."

Yeah given that I like, own Fate and such, I'm just gonna jump on this bandwagon while hypocritically continuing to play my hobgoblin artificer in Eberron using PF on this very forum.

[Talakeal]

I think you have, in fact some variant of that, presented by somebody, has been the conclusion of every one of these threads I can remember (although I haven't been keeping track). Its not a new conclusion, in fact I would argue the fact how you design a game being dependant on the game you want to make is pretty universal accepted. I think more importantly, the issue is no one can agree about what kind of game D&D is supposed to be.

Also another vote for "I enjoy games that have solved the problem."

That's also a good point. Most everyone started on D&D and is nostalgic about it, and people are trying to argue that their way is the one true soul of D&D and everything else is a bad imposter.

For me the essence of D&D will always be what it felt like to play 2E AD&D and read the original two Dragon Lance trilogies in Middle School.

[Max_Killjoy]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.



For me there is no imbalance as I almost never play D&D. Other systems have solved the issue multiple times. So I must conclude that people dont want this solved or maybe it's a legacy issue.


Same here.

I keep getting drawn into the debate when someone insists that the problem can't be solved and that all other games are inconsistent / irrational for claiming to have done so.



I think I've laid out in detail a few times that the answer comes down to what kind of game you want to play and what kind of setting you want the characters to encounter and so on.

There is no one right answer, but a lot of the strife seems to come from the insistence that there is a single correct answer.



I think you have, in fact some variant of that, presented by somebody, has been the conclusion of every one of these threads I can remember (although I haven't been keeping track). Its not a new conclusion, in fact I would argue the fact how you design a game being dependant on the game you want to make is pretty universal accepted. I think more importantly, the issue is no one can agree about what kind of game D&D is supposed to be.

Also another vote for "I enjoy games that have solved the problem."


That's kinda my vote too; but specific to the game that's at the core of this repeated conversation, I think as noted by others it comes down to a legacy issue, some people not wanting a solution (for whatever reason), and many people not agreeing on what D&D is supposed to be. Of course, part of the cause of the problem in the first place is D&D trying to be the everything-fantasy-RPG to everyone all at the same time.

Similar to Talakeal, what draws me into these conversations is the mistaken notion that the problem can't be solved, because some of us keep laying out a multitude of options for how to deal with it. The canard that keeps really irking me is that mistaken claim that this is somehow not largely a problem of D&D-like systems, and that other systems (and settings) also have these ridiculous balance issues whether people realize it or not. See also, "Point-buy is even more imbalanced and broken than D&D".

http://cdn-frm-us.wargaming.net/4.5/style_emoticons/wot/Smile_smile.gif




That's also a good point. Most everyone started on D&D and is nostalgic about it, and people are trying to argue that their way is the one true soul of D&D and everything else is a bad imposter.

For me the essence of D&D will always be what it felt like to play 2E AD&D and read the original two Dragon Lance trilogies in Middle School.


For me, D&D will always be that game that everyone wanted to play instead of WEG d6 Star Wars, back in my early gaming days... that game that conflated dodging and armor... that game that though it took a minute to swing a sword one time... that game I started looking to find better alternatives to almost immediately.

[Quertus]

A game where there is no hard niche protection but people can have varying degrees of difficulty with different tasks, where the best strategy is to have a variety of characters whose abilities complement each other rather than one or two classes who make everyone else irrelevant.

Fortunately for me virtually every RPG that is not 3.X D&D already meets these criteria, which is why I am baffled when I see people on this forum insist that it is impossible and 3.X fundamentally cannot be fixed.

Barring certain shenanigans, 3e doesn't suffer from this as much as you make it sound, as limited spell slots is a thing. The optimal strategy for the Wizard is to leave the locks to the Rogue (if the party has one), because the Rogue can pick locks all day long without expending resources. The optimal strategy for the Wizard is to not throw summon spells, and leave the fighting to the Fighter (OK, really, the Rogue again, but don't tell the Fighter), because they can fight all day long without expending resources.

But it's best for the Wizard to know these spells, and be ready to use them (in scroll form, perhaps) should the Muggles be incapacitated, find themselves out of their depth, or consider the task a suicide mission.


This is a problem that requires multiple people. Therefor I cannot do it on my own because I only one man. Very few scenarios in RPGs work like this, a wizard could easily solo it, and a handful of unskilled hirelings would be better suited to helping with it than heroic PCs.

Hmmm... if the module says it's for 4 level X PCs, and a single level X Wizard can solo it (without shenanigans), then clearly the module is broken.


You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.


I think you have, in fact some variant of that, presented by somebody, has been the conclusion of every one of these threads I can remember (although I haven't been keeping track). Its not a new conclusion, in fact I would argue the fact how you design a game being dependant on the game you want to make is pretty universal accepted. I think more importantly, the issue is no one can agree about what kind of game D&D is supposed to be.

Also another vote for "I enjoy games that have solved the problem."


That's kinda my vote too; but specific to the game that's at the core of this repeated conversation, I think as noted by others it comes down to a legacy issue, some people not wanting a solution (for whatever reason), and many people not agreeing on what D&D is supposed to be. Of course, part of the cause of the problem in the first place is D&D trying to be the everything-fantasy-RPG to everyone all at the same time.

D&D (especially 3e) allows you to play at multiple power levels, thus succeeding fairly well at "being everything to everyone". The game is what your group makes of it. This, to me, is a feature*, not a bug. So, yes, I'm a fan of leaving the imbalance, no matter how many times the übercharger upstages my tactically inept academia mage.

If it is ever the case that they make an edition of D&D where Wizards are actually guaranteed to all the time always be better than muggles, then I'll be upset. Until then, I'm reasonably happy with the potential range of capabilities present in all classes (albeit not so much with the obfuscation and deceptive trap options).

* the notion of making hard balance, and having your variety by playing a module intended for level X with characters of level X+-Y is starting to grow on me, but I still see too many ways for it to fail for me to be comfortable with it.


what draws me into these conversations is the mistaken notion that the problem can't be solved, because some of us keep laying out a multitude of options for how to deal with it. The canard that keeps really irking me is that mistaken claim that this is somehow not largely a problem of D&D-like systems, and that other systems (and settings) also have these ridiculous balance issues whether people realize it or not. See also, "Point-buy is even more imbalanced and broken than D&D".

... I have yet to play a point buy system that wasn't more broken in play than D&D. But, then again, I lack the same level of system mastery in other systems as I have in D&D, so it may just be that I autocorrect better in D&D than in other systems.

[Calthropstu]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.

We could always do E: all of the above.
Why not build an optional system where the gm can choose what setting to turn on?
Hell, I could even have it make sense. 4 seasons, 4 gods. The god of magic rules over a season(magic =power), the god of power rules another(Both=power), the god of battle rules another (Martial =power) and the god of serenity(neither =power)

[Cluedrew]

D&D (especially 3e) allows you to play at multiple power levels, thus succeeding fairly well at "being everything to everyone". The game is what your group makes of it.I can't help but feel a little bit sad that your definition of "everything" is small enough that it can be covered by different levels of D&D play.

Let us ignore the Eclipse Phases, the ShadowRuns and the Uncharted World systems that cover types of content that D&D simply does not have. Let us ignore the social and crafting system which in my experience have basically been free form. Then yes, D&D is everything in that you can struggle to survive at low levels or tear through things at high levels.

I am simplifying the issue but I think it the point is the same.

[Darth Ultron]

I keep getting drawn into the debate when someone insists that the problem can't be solved and that all other games are inconsistent / irrational for claiming to have done so.

Well, I have always pointed out the easy solution is: A Powerful, In control DM.

Just take the typical problem of a jerk player ''just using(abusing) the rules'' to inflate their ego and ruin others peoples fun:

DM:"Up ahead is a locked metal door..."

Jerk Player: "Zimdum the Wizard just uses his Open Anything spell, so what is in the room?''

DM, bows, "Yes, great player, your character opens the door as per the rules. All hail the rules."

Everyone: ''All hail the rules"

Poor Player: "Raskin the Sneaky just sits in the corner and watches...I guess."

But watch when you add a Good DM:

DM:"Up ahead is a locked metal door..."

Jerk Player: "Zimdum the Wizard just uses his Open Anything spell-----''

DM:"Nothing happens and the door stays locked."

Jerk Player: "What?"

Other Player: "Oh, Raskin the Sneaky moves forward to make an open locks roll to open the door!"


That's also a good point. Most everyone started on D&D and is nostalgic about it, and people are trying to argue that their way is the one true soul of D&D and everything else is a bad imposter.

For me the essence of D&D will always be what it felt like to play 2E AD&D and read the original two Dragon Lance trilogies in Middle School.

This is something that other people don't seem to get: D&D ''was'' a ''way'' because you, the player, made it that way. And you can still do that today.

Some how people got the idea that ''if page 77 says X, we must do X all ways or it is not D&D''. And that is just the start of the problems.

[Milo v3]

Well, I have always pointed out the easy solution is: A Powerful, In control DM.

Just take the typical problem of a jerk player ''just using(abusing) the rules'' to inflate their ego and ruin others peoples fun:
*Horrible horrible example*

... that sounds like a giant jerk move. Why didn't the jerk-GM just say "Don't take the knock spell because I don't like how it messes with other classes" rather than have players waste class features?

And it's really really getting boring with you constantly portraying people who argue against you as if they're worshippers of the rules rather than just people who disagree with you.... Also... "Using x spell to do it's one and only purpose entirely as intended" != abusing rules or ruining peoples fun. What you described wasn't even a jerk player...

[Tinkerer]

You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

We have pretty much determined that CMD exists in 3.X D&D (the jury is still out on most other games), but we are still arguing about whether it would be best to:

A: Leave the imbalance where it is
B: Bring martials up to the caster's level
C: Bring casters down to the martial's level
or D: Meet someplace in the middle

I wonder if we will ever get past the hurdle and into the real work of actually figuring out how such a thing would be done.

*Spoiler alert*

NOPE! But at the same time yes, kinda, it's been done a few times. Some progress gets made and then things get sucked back into the vacuum of the debate. The key is to just ignore the people sidetracking the conversation. Best to go with a definitive statement in the opening post then try and keep things on track. Say something like "Yep, I know that there is another way of doing this however this is the way that I'm looking at addressing it now." But that's just the observation of a long time lurker.

So far probably the most productive result of the debate is Grod's Law. Which is one of those obvious things which you constantly get tempted to break when designing. I actually put it up on my wall near my GM workstation.

[Max_Killjoy]

D&D (especially 3e) allows you to play at multiple power levels, thus succeeding fairly well at "being everything to everyone". The game is what your group makes of it. This, to me, is a feature*, not a bug.


D&D doesn't allow play at multiple power levels -- as-written it presumes and inherently entails play across a wide extent of power levels, from zero to demigod. In order to play long term at a particular power level, the progression rules have to be ignored or modified.




So, yes, I'm a fan of leaving the imbalance, no matter how many times the übercharger upstages my tactically inept academia mage.


Your "tactically inept academia mage" is an anomaly -- it's a deliberate avoidance of what's otherwise going to happen simply by the rules of the game, and doesn't represent what happens without that deliberate effort.




If it is ever the case that they make an edition of D&D where Wizards are actually guaranteed to all the time always be better than muggles, then I'll be upset. Until then, I'm reasonably happy with the potential range of capabilities present in all classes (albeit not so much with the obfuscation and deceptive trap options).


At least in 3.x and the like, it takes deliberate effort to not have wizards outstrip "muggles" by mid-levels.

The very use of the word "muggles" here is pretty telling in a way you might not intend, actually.




... I have yet to play a point buy system that wasn't more broken in play than D&D. But, then again, I lack the same level of system mastery in other systems as I have in D&D, so it may just be that I autocorrect better in D&D than in other systems.


HERO, 4th or 5th edition. Far less broken in-play than any edition of D&D, or d20 game, that I ever played.

With a system like HERO, once you set the power level, that's typically the general area you're at (you rarely get zero to superhero, unless it's blatantly deliberate), and that's what you have to balance. With D&D, what's balanced at level X is often not balanced at level X+5 or level X-5, which are also fundamentally different levels of power.

Also, there's a fundamental difference in how the overall communities approach the games. "Can I?" and "Should I?" are two very different questions, and it's my experience that the overall D&D community approaches character building from a "Can I?" perspective, and the overall HERO community approaches character building from a "Should I?" perspective. Look at the D&D-specific sections of these forums, and how many character-build threads are fundamentally about what is the most powerful combination of elements possible. If one were to compare that with the HERO forums when I was active there, most of the questions were framed as "Here's this character I want to play, how do I make this work in a game with the following premise and the following guidelines (CP total, damage and defense limits, etc)?"

IME, D&D players tend to look at the rules as the limits of what they can do, to be pushed as hard as they can be pushed -- while HERO players tend to look at the rules as a toolkit for building the character they want to play within the context of the campaign and setting.


E: please don't be offended if you are a counter-example to the trends I have long observed, I am not discounting your existence.

[Calthropstu]

... that sounds like a giant jerk move. Why didn't the jerk-GM just say "Don't take the knock spell because I don't like how it messes with other classes" rather than have players waste class features?

And it's really really getting boring with you constantly portraying people who argue against you as if they're worshippers of the rules rather than just people who disagree with you.... Also... "Using x spell to do it's one and only purpose entirely as intended" != abusing rules or ruining peoples fun. What you described wasn't even a jerk player...

Oh, the knock spell worked, but everyone knows about the knock spell, so anti-knock magics and tech would exist. To think a second level spell will get you into any door is... stupid.

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, the knock spell worked, but everyone knows about the knock spell, so anti-knock magics and tech would exist. To think a second level spell will get you into any door is... stupid.

Knock vs anti-Knock... welcome to the low-level version of spell-vs-counterspell chess.

[Talakeal]

Hmmm... if the module says it's for 4 level X PCs, and a single level X Wizard can solo it (without shenanigans), then clearly the module is broken.

Again, it sounds like you are getting the logic completely backwards. You really think the module is broken because it doesn't go out of its way to either explain on the box that some classes are much stronger than us or the module is not written in such a way that it somehow nerfs all the strong classes and buffs the weak ones?


... I have yet to play a point buy system that wasn't more broken in play than D&D. But, then again, I lack the same level of system mastery in other systems as I have in D&D, so it may just be that I autocorrect better in D&D than in other systems.

My experience is pretty much the opposite, I have yet to see a point buy system that was as broken as 3.X. And those things that are broken in point buy systems are usually the result of a concentrated effort to break the game (like those passive galaxy destroying builds above) while 3.X is broken right out of the gate.

The Angry GM had an interesting article on this recently, basically his point was that you are never going to fully foolproof a game, but you only really need to worry about the stuff that comes up in ordinary play. His rule of thumb is to count the number of "If, and then..."s in the exploit in question, the higher it gets the less you need to worry about it because it is probably a weird edge case or someone deliberately trying to monkey with the rules, both of which are better solved with an OOC discussion about player behavior than a flaw in the rule set.

In my opinion most class based games offer balance and simplicity compared to a point buy games freedom and flexibility. The problem is that 3.X kind of failed on both counts so it is a sort of worst of both worlds hybrid. Also, with the way multi-classing and prestige classing are set up in many ways 3.X is a point buy system as much as a class based system, just a really weird clunky one.


Barring certain shenanigans, 3e doesn't suffer from this as much as you make it sound, as limited spell slots is a thing. The optimal strategy for the Wizard is to leave the locks to the Rogue (if the party has one), because the Rogue can pick locks all day long without expending resources. The optimal strategy for the Wizard is to not throw summon spells, and leave the fighting to the Fighter (OK, really, the Rogue again, but don't tell the Fighter), because they can fight all day long without expending resources.

In theory yes, which is why I have been arguing that balance in 3.X isn't really as bad as it is cracked up to be. The problems as I see it are:

1: Spells per day isn't really a limitation. Most of the time there is no reason why you can't just rest after every spell and it is the optimal strategy to do so. It is very hard to keep constant time pressure on the party without frustrating everyone, breaking verisimilitude, or causing a TPK and most DM's I know don't even try anymore. Even if the DM does try and enforce wandering monsters or what not to break up a rest, there are plenty of spells which allow the players to rest outside of normal time and space without having to risk it.

2: 3.X is super stingy with mundane abilities. Feats, ability scores, and saving throws are pretty hard to come by compared to other editions, and the skill system is just a mess, too few skill points, class skill lists are too small, there are too many skills (meaning they could combine a lot of them into one skill), and cross class skills are overly penalized. Casters suffer with this as well, but they have magical alternatives to most every mundane ability and don't really have to worry about it.

3: Once you get to a certain point casters no longer have limitations no matter how you play. In my experience the ability to cast Gate and Shape-change are the big ones, at that point you can simply ignore any limits and use any ability in the game as often as you like.

You can break the game further using questionable exploits like altering time flow with Genesis, using SLA wishes to create arbitrarily powerful magic items, conjured up Ice Assassins of deities, or go the pun-pun route and dig into manipulate form, but these are really just icing on the cake. Also, muggles can do them to with access to the right magic items, so they aren't really an issue with CMD or with base play IMO.

[2D8HP]

...D&D ''was'' a ''way'' because you, the player, made it that way. And you can still do that today.

Some how people got the idea that ''if page 77 says X, we must do X all ways or it is not D&D''. And that is just the start of the problems..
As I'm sure your aware Darth, the DM (and really the whole table) make the rules.


...Dungeons and Dragons, The Underground and Wilderness Adventures, p. 36: "... everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it that way."

AD&D 1e, DMG, p. 9: "The game is the thing, and certain rules can be distorted or disregarded altogether in favor of play."

AD&D 2E, DMG, p. 3: "At conventions, in letters, and over the phone, I'm often asked for the instant answer to a fine point of the game rules. More often than not, I come back with a question -- what do you feel is right? And the people asking the question discover that not only can they create an answer, but that their answer is as good as anyone else's. The rules are only guidelines."

D&D 3.5 DMG, p. 6: "Good players will always realize that you have ultimate authority over the game mechanics, even superseding something in a rulebook."

Overriding a rule for good reason isn’t cheating. It’s part of the overall rules.

[In fact, you could make an amusing case that demanding that the DM never make a ruling that violates a published rule is cheating - since the published rules say that she can.]...


D&D 5e DMG, p. 263:: "As the Dungeon Master, You aren't limited by the rules in the Player's Handbook, the guidelines in this book, or the selection of monsters in the Monster Manual


I'd describe most RPG's I've played as:
1) GM describes a scene.
2) Player says an action that their PC attempts.
3) GM decides if the PC has no chance of success, no chance of failure, or a partial chance of success.
4) If a partial chance of success, GM makes up on the spot a percentage chance of success.
5) Player rolls dice. .
6) If the player rolls under (or over) the made up number their PC succeeds in attempting the task, if over (or under) the PC fails.
7) GM narrates the immediate consequences until it's time to again ask, "what do you do".
8) Repeat.

In general if the "system" let's me play:

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Robin Hood, the Seven Samurai, and Sinbad?: Yes!

Avengers, James Bond, and the X-Men?: Eh nah.

But I think that's just me.

[lesser_minion]

Oh, the knock spell worked, but everyone knows about the knock spell, so anti-knock magics and tech would exist. To think a second level spell will get you into any door is... stupid.

If a single spell can't do something, why should a single skill check be able to do it?

[Arbane]

Oh, the knock spell worked, but everyone knows about the knock spell, so anti-knock magics and tech would exist. To think a second level spell will get you into any door is... stupid.

What anti-knock magic exists in D&D that doesn't also stop lockpicking?

(And Lesser_minion beat me to it.)

[Calthropstu]

What anti-knock magic exists in D&D that doesn't also stop lockpicking?

(And Lesser_minion beat me to it.)

Nothing STOPS lockpicking, it just increases the dc. Knock is a mere second level spell. Building around it is NOT that hard, and if I have to have some wizard research a spell, or some master locksmith invent a special lock that knock doesn't work on, then that's what I do.
There ARE rules for it, if the specifics don't exist.

[Milo v3]

Nothing STOPS lockpicking, it just increases the dc. Knock is a mere second level spell. Building around it is NOT that hard, and if I have to have some wizard research a spell, or some master locksmith invent a special lock that knock doesn't work on, then that's what I do.
There ARE rules for it, if the specifics don't exist.
Nah, Arcane Lock in 3.5e did actually stop lockpicking. Which was stupid as hell.

[Quertus]

I can't help but feel a little bit sad that your definition of "everything" is small enough that it can be covered by different levels of D&D play.

Let us ignore the Eclipse Phases, the ShadowRuns and the Uncharted World systems that cover types of content that D&D simply does not have. Let us ignore the social and crafting system which in my experience have basically been free form. Then yes, D&D is everything in that you can struggle to survive at low levels or tear through things at high levels.

I am simplifying the issue but I think it the point is the same.

I agree, that would be sad. But, in the context of the thread "Caster beats Mundane", that's all the mundanes care about, isn't it?


Well, I have always pointed out the easy solution is: A Powerful, In control DM.

Just take the typical problem of a jerk player ''just using(abusing) the rules'' to inflate their ego and ruin others peoples fun:

DM:"Up ahead is a locked metal door..."

Jerk Player: "Zimdum the Wizard just uses his Open Anything spell, so what is in the room?''

DM, bows, "Yes, great player, your character opens the door as per the rules. All hail the rules."

Everyone: ''All hail the rules"

Poor Player: "Raskin the Sneaky just sits in the corner and watches...I guess."

But watch when you add a Good DM:

DM:"Up ahead is a locked metal door..."

Jerk Player: "Zimdum the Wizard just uses his Open Anything spell-----''

DM:"Nothing happens and the door stays locked."

Jerk Player: "What?"

Other Player: "Oh, Raskin the Sneaky moves forward to make an open locks roll to open the door!"



This is something that other people don't seem to get: D&D ''was'' a ''way'' because you, the player, made it that way. And you can still do that today.

Some how people got the idea that ''if page 77 says X, we must do X all ways or it is not D&D''. And that is just the start of the problems.

Three things. One: the GM doesn't need to be a **** and change the rules to fix this problem. Simply having 20 locked doors in your medium-sized dungeon should be enough to give the Rogue the spotlight (and, hopefully, to convince the idiot playing the Wizard to use his spells more efficiently).

Two: I've seen far too many idiots in the GM seat make the game worse by changing the rules without understanding the consequences of those change to consider it valid to change the rules without first looking for a better solution.

Three: if the pieces move like checkers, you're no longer playing Chess.


D&D doesn't allow play at multiple power levels -- as-written it presumes and inherently entails play across a wide extent of power levels, from zero to demigod. In order to play long term at a particular power level, the progression rules have to be ignored or modified.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - what I meant was, 3e allows characters from the BMX biker to the Angel summoner, and lots further on both ends. I can't play a demigod in CoC, I don't think I can play Conan in Exalted. But, in D&D, that's a huge range of potential play space.

With a little homebrew, those who hate progress can play E6 (or those on the opposite end can just start at epic level).

There is a place for those who enjoy build challenges, and (almost) for those who just want to play. There's a place for those who want complex to play characters, and for those who want fairly brainless turns.

I consider this a feature, that the table can customize the game to suit their needs.


Your "tactically inept academia mage" is an anomaly -- it's a deliberate avoidance of what's otherwise going to happen simply by the rules of the game, and doesn't represent what happens without that deliberate effort.

Oh, I am quite thankful that my play groups include players who, even back in Y2K, a) could master the rules well enough to show up my red-robed blunderer, and b) enjoyed playing muggles.

But, no, I've watched plenty of noobs produce incompetent wizards without even trying. The hyper-competent Playground Wizard doesn't just happen naturally in the wild - or, at least, is certainly far from guaranteed.


At least in 3.x and the like, it takes deliberate effort to not have wizards outstrip "muggles" by mid-levels.

The very use of the word "muggles" here is pretty telling in a way you might not intend, actually.

At Playgrounder level skill, perhaps. But I've seen plenty of noobs still be inept at mid level, even with the vaunted Wizard class.

And, yes, it's quite telling that I use the word "muggles" - I consider "mundane" to be an insult.


HERO, 4th or 5th edition. Far less broken in-play than any edition of D&D, or d20 game, that I ever played.

With a system like HERO, once you set the power level, that's typically the general area you're at (you rarely get zero to superhero, unless it's blatantly deliberate), and that's what you have to balance. With D&D, what's balanced at level X is often not balanced at level X+5 or level X-5, which are also fundamentally different levels of power.

Also, there's a fundamental difference in how the overall communities approach the games. "Can I?" and "Should I?" are two very different questions, and it's my experience that the overall D&D community approaches character building from a "Can I?" perspective, and the overall HERO community approaches character building from a "Should I?" perspective. Look at the D&D-specific sections of these forums, and how many character-build threads are fundamentally about what is the most powerful combination of elements possible. If one were to compare that with the HERO forums when I was active there, most of the questions were framed as "Here's this character I want to play, how do I make this work in a game with the following premise and the following guidelines (CP total, damage and defense limits, etc)?"

IME, D&D players tend to look at the rules as the limits of what they can do, to be pushed as hard as they can be pushed -- while HERO players tend to look at the rules as a toolkit for building the character they want to play within the context of the campaign and setting.

I've played Hero, albeit with players too unskilled with the system to have a concept of "should I" - thus my comment that my skill at D&D may cloud the issue.

When played blind, Hero is less balanced than D&D, IME. YMMV.


E: please don't be offended if you are a counter-example to the trends I have long observed, I am not discounting your existence.

I don't really do "offended" - and a) even if I did, you are one of the least likely people to offend me; b) I consider acknowledgement of my differences a compliment, not an insult.


Again, it sounds like you are getting the logic completely backwards. You really think the module is broken because it doesn't go out of its way to either explain on the box that some classes are much stronger than us or the module is not written in such a way that it somehow nerfs all the strong classes and buffs the weak ones?

If the box says "team lift", and weighs two pounds? Yes, the label is broken. If the module wasn't properly tested? Yes, the module is broken.


My experience is pretty much the opposite, I have yet to see a point buy system that was as broken as 3.X. And those things that are broken in point buy systems are usually the result of a concentrated effort to break the game (like those passive galaxy destroying builds above) while 3.X is broken right out of the gate.

Yes, an unskilled noob playing a Wizard will die far more often than one playing a Fighter with more HP & better AC. I agree that 3e is unbalanced right out of the gate.

But I've accidentally broken point buy games - sometimes with my first character. It takes me a lot more effort and skill to break 3e anywhere near that much.


The Angry GM had an interesting article on this recently, basically his point was that you are never going to fully foolproof a game, but you only really need to worry about the stuff that comes up in ordinary play. His rule of thumb is to count the number of "If, and then..."s in the exploit in question, the higher it gets the less you need to worry about it because it is probably a weird edge case or someone deliberately trying to monkey with the rules, both of which are better solved with an OOC discussion about player behavior than a flaw in the rule set.

"Monkeying with the rules" is a) how I learn a system; b) bloody fun - I enjoy building mechs in Battletech, not just playing with things straight out of the books. Heck, could you imagine if D&D only allowed you to play pre-built characters?


In my opinion most class based games offer balance and simplicity compared to a point buy games freedom and flexibility. The problem is that 3.X kind of failed on both counts so it is a sort of worst of both worlds hybrid. Also, with the way multi-classing and prestige classing are set up in many ways 3.X is a point buy system as much as a class based system, just a really weird clunky one.

While that's partially true, there is a power in names. Being able to say that the character is a Wild Shape Ranger / War Shaper, and have that have defined meaning, is more powerful, more meaningful than saying that you spent 50 points on Shape Change, 20 points on Combat:all, and took 10 ranks in Outdoorsmanship.


In theory yes, which is why I have been arguing that balance in 3.X isn't really as bad as it is cracked up to be. The problems as I see it are:

1: Spells per day isn't really a limitation. Most of the time there is no reason why you can't just rest after every spell and it is the optimal strategy to do so. It is very hard to keep constant time pressure on the party without frustrating everyone, breaking verisimilitude, or causing a TPK and most DM's I know don't even try anymore. Even if the DM does try and enforce wandering monsters or what not to break up a rest, there are plenty of spells which allow the players to rest outside of normal time and space without having to risk it.

"And while he's doing that, what are you doing?"

Also, I prefer to run a sandbox, wherein I'm asking every (major) NPC exactly that same question.

Mind you, I understand that mindset. You see, in many games (say, for instance, Minecraft), I play the game that way - I'm still organizing my chests, moving dirt around, and play testing paths, while my ally is slaying the BBEG / Ender Dragon. They've done so in a horribly inelegant fashion, IMO, but they've done so in a way that is optimal with regards to temporal efficiency.

So... If the Wizard is fine being perfectly safe, resting for a day after every spell, while the world moves on at a much less sedate pace, more power to them. Or, well, less power, as the rest of the world will probably level much faster than them. :smalltongue:


2: 3.X is super stingy with mundane abilities. Feats, ability scores, and saving throws are pretty hard to come by compared to other editions, and the skill system is just a mess, too few skill points, class skill lists are too small, there are too many skills (meaning they could combine a lot of them into one skill), and cross class skills are overly penalized. Casters suffer with this as well, but they have magical alternatives to most every mundane ability and don't really have to worry about it.

Custom item of +X to Y usually solves most such issues, IME.

Not that I often have such issues, as "skillless" sounds like "inept" sounds like fun, to me. :smalltongue:

More seriously, I generally agree with you here.


3: Once you get to a certain point casters no longer have limitations no matter how you play. In my experience the ability to cast Gate and Shape-change are the big ones, at that point you can simply ignore any limits and use any ability in the game as often as you like.

Barring shenanigans, 3.5 Gate is prohibitively expensive. I agree it was pretty nice in 3e.


You can break the game further using questionable exploits like altering time flow with Genesis, using SLA wishes to create arbitrarily powerful magic items, conjured up Ice Assassins of deities, or go the pun-pun route and dig into manipulate form, but these are really just icing on the cake. Also, muggles can do them to with access to the right magic items, so they aren't really an issue with CMD or with base play IMO.

Sounds like orc mischief shenanigans to me.

However... I'd love to play a game where I actually got my hands on divine material for a custom, programmable version of Ice Assassin...

[Talakeal]

If the box says "team lift", and weighs two pounds? Yes, the label is broken. If the module wasn't properly tested? Yes, the module is broken.

Well then, I guess the only honest thing to put on every modules (and core rule-book) would be: A game for 1 Optimized Caster. Everyone else get the **** out!"



But I've accidentally broken point buy games - sometimes with my first character. It takes me a lot more effort and skill to break 3e anywhere near that much.

"Monkeying with the rules" is a) how I learn a system; b) bloody fun - I enjoy building mechs in Battletech, not just playing with things straight out of the books. Heck, could you imagine if D&D only allowed you to play pre-built characters?

I enjoy playing around with systems to. Which is why I don't play D&D if I can find any other table.

Very curious what point buy game you played that was so easily broken, I have played a solid handful and have never had one with balance issues.

On the other hand all it took to break 3.5 was someone saying "Hey, these monsters we are fighting can cast a whole plethora of spells at will. I am going to cast shape-change and turn into them!"


While that's partially true, there is a power in names. Being able to say that the character is a Wild Shape Ranger / War Shaper, and have that have defined meaning, is more powerful, more meaningful than saying that you spent 50 points on Shape Change, 20 points on Combat:all, and took 10 ranks in Outdoorsmanship.

Most people describe their character concept rather than a list of numbers regardless of the game.


"And while he's doing that, what are you doing?"

Also, I prefer to run a sandbox, wherein I'm asking every (major) NPC exactly that same question.

Mind you, I understand that mindset. You see, in many games (say, for instance, Minecraft), I play the game that way - I'm still organizing my chests, moving dirt around, and play testing paths, while my ally is slaying the BBEG / Ender Dragon. They've done so in a horribly inelegant fashion, IMO, but they've done so in a way that is optimal with regards to temporal efficiency.

So... If the Wizard is fine being perfectly safe, resting for a day after every spell, while the world moves on at a much less sedate pace, more power to them. Or, well, less power, as the rest of the world will probably level much faster than them. :smalltongue:


And what do you do if the PCs decide to take the long way to the dungeon or just take a few months off adventuring to spend time with their families? If an eight hour break between each encounter royally screws over the players how does your campaign function when a much longer and much more understandable delay comes up?



Custom item of +X to Y usually solves most such issues, IME.

Sure does, assuming you are in a game where the players can get ahold of custom items. But the thing is, if your skills only exist because of magic items you don't really have any skills.

In my game the wizard, for example, talked the rest of the party into giving him 100% of the groups treasure as he mathematically proved that a wizard with 6x WBL is far and away more powerful than a balanced party each with normal WBL.




However... I'd love to play a game where I actually got my hands on divine material for a custom, programmable version of Ice Assassin...

The argument is that you use eschew material components which allows you to cast the spell without needing a piece of divine material as divine material does not have an explicitly listed XP cost and thus eschew material components bypasses the need.


Barring shenanigans, 3.5 Gate is prohibitively expensive. I agree it was pretty nice in 3e.

Most people ignore XP costs for spells by not casting it with a spell slot, instead using planar binding, shape-change, or another gate to cast it as a SLA.

[Cluedrew]

I can't help but feel a little bit sad that your definition of "everything" is small enough that it can be covered by different levels of D&D play. [...]I agree, that would be sad. But, in the context of the thread "Caster beats Mundane", that's all the mundanes care about, isn't it?Pardon? Could you please elaborate on that?

[Quertus]

Pardon? Could you please elaborate on that?

"Caster beats Mundane" implies that there is some metric whereby Caster and Mundane could be measured, such that Caster > Mundane.

Now, to me, Caster > Mundane is inherently true, because I find magic cool. Regardless of which is more powerful, contributes more, etc. I play casters, even when they're bad*.

In regards to D&D "being everything to everyone", it occurred to me to compare that to this theoretical metric. D&D has an absolutely huge range of possible capabilities out of any given character. Just saying "Fighter", the charter could be anything from a halfling with straight 3s for stats** wielding a kukri with which he is not proficient, to an übercharger, or possibly even a(n inefficient) Diplomancer.

Now, admittedly, if "versatility" is part of this metric, it is prohibitively difficult to create a Fighter with Tier 1 versatility without copious cheese bordering on shenanigans. But it's still possible (even if the resulting character would be seasoned to no-one's tastes).

But, just with regards to what value the character has for the theoretical metric of this thread, D&D succeeds at "being everything to everyone".

EDIT: looking back, I see that I said, "that's all that mundanes care about". The implication there was that it's the people playing the muggles that are complaining, and that they aren't complaining that being mundane isn't cool, merely that it isn't functional. Now, personally, I play casters. I love... certain aspects of the D&D Wizard. But I prefer for the muggles to be "better" than Wizards, for Mundane > Caster. If I ever find a version of D&D where it's always true that Caster > Mundane, for all instances of Caster and Mundane, well, I'll be complaining, too. So that implication clearly isn't completely accurate.

* however, that one game where I spent 10 sessions and contributed exactly nothing? That was outside even my rather liberal tolerances.
** ok, yes, this takes ability damage/drain, or some rather obscure rules, to pull off...

[digiman619]

"Caster beats Mundane" implies that there is some metric whereby Caster and Mundane could be measured, such that Caster > Mundane.

Now, to me, Caster > Mundane is inherently true, because I find magic cool. Regardless of which is more powerful, contributes more, etc. I play casters, even when they're bad*.
With respect, you are an anomoly that can legit enjoy "hard mode" where they are comparatively useless and indeed named your account off of such a character.


In regards to D&D "being everything to everyone", it occurred to me to compare that to this theoretical metric. D&D has an absolutely huge range of possible capabilities out of any given character. Just saying "Fighter", the charter could be anything from a halfling with straight 3s for stats** wielding a kukri with which he is not proficient, to an übercharger, or possibly even a(n inefficient) Diplomancer.
Again, with respect, no. Outside of crippling your build for story reasons like your namesake was, people expect a base amount of competency with their characters. While failure should always be an option, it's rarely the goal.


Now, admittedly, if "versatility" is part of this metric, it is prohibitively difficult to create a Fighter with Tier 1 versatility without copious cheese bordering on shenanigans. But it's still possible (even if the resulting character would be seasoned to no-one's tastes).

But, just with regards to what value the character has for the theoretical metric of this thread, D&D succeeds at "being everything to everyone".
I would say that 5E does this to a reasonable degree. While there are of course ways to break the game, a Fighter 20 can still be worthwhile in a party with a Wizard 20 and Cleric 20. This is not the case in 3.X, and one of the reasons is that a lot of the broken stuff isn't anymore. There still needs to be, in my opinion, at least, a significant aspect of the game where magic is a bad choice and there isn't. I recall the concept of "everyone needs to be able to reasonably overcome 70% of the various types of challenges" being thrown around, so that means that there needs to be 30% of the game that Wizards (and Clerics and Druids) are bad at, as magic is still the go-to for anything important.

[Quertus]

With respect, you are an anomoly that can legit enjoy "hard mode" where they are comparatively useless and indeed named your account off of such a character.

Well, "comparatively useless" / hard mode would actually be Armus; "phenomenal power, wielded poorly" is more Quertus' shtick. Otherwise, true, except... don't most people enjoy playing video games on higher difficulty levels once they've mastered the easier levels?


Again, with respect, no. Outside of crippling your build for story reasons like your namesake was, people expect a base amount of competency with their characters. While failure should always be an option, it's rarely the goal.

My point was merely that one can build such characters. If the space exceeds the range of acceptable characters, that merely proves that the potential space covers the entirety of the desirable space.


I would say that 5E does this to a reasonable degree. While there are of course ways to break the game, a Fighter 20 can still be worthwhile in a party with a Wizard 20 and Cleric 20. This is not the case in 3.X, and one of the reasons is that a lot of the broken stuff isn't anymore.

And a Fighter and a Monk continue to dominate the game with Quertus well into epic levels. And the Rogue and Psychic Warrior and Monk continued to dominate the game until ~20th in the game where I likely played my "best" caster (the Arcane Archer contributed, but rarely dominated). And a Fighter and... melee brute (probably actually a CoDzilla)... held their own in a party with another player playing a strong arcane caster (Wizard, I suspect). And I've seen plenty of Wizards played very poorly, because player skills are a thing. So... other than when I tested a theory and gimped a Fighter build, I can't actually think of any time I've seen a Fighter who couldn't hang with a Wizard of equivalent level.

Or, perhaps, put more succinctly, I've seen individual characters who couldn't really hang with their party / struggled to do so (Quertus being one example), but I've never felt "class A cannot possibly be optimized (or nerfed) to hang with this particular instance of class B" while playing 3e.


There still needs to be, in my opinion, at least, a significant aspect of the game where magic is a bad choice and there isn't. I recall the concept of "everyone needs to be able to reasonably overcome 70% of the various types of challenges" being thrown around, so that means that there needs to be 30% of the game that Wizards (and Clerics and Druids) are bad at, as magic is still the go-to for anything important.

Hmmm... Tricky. See, what I love about the D&D Wizard is the "there's an app for that" feel. Now, any given wizard might not know the app, or have it prepared, but they know that they theoretically can build an app to solve any problem. So saying that magic has to be bad at 30% of problems sounds like it kills off what I love about the D&D Wizard. Unless "inefficient" or "clearly suboptimal compared to other approaches" qualifies, then, yes, by all means, let the Rogue pick the 99 locks be can, and the Wizard will Knock - or the Fighter will bash down - the one he fails at.

[lesser_minion]

Nothing STOPS lockpicking, it just increases the dc. Knock is a mere second level spell. Building around it is NOT that hard, and if I have to have some wizard research a spell, or some master locksmith invent a special lock that knock doesn't work on, then that's what I do.
There ARE rules for it, if the specifics don't exist.

To elaborate on my earlier comment:

What, about this door, makes it such an accomplishment to open?
Why does this hold for a door that can be opened with a single dice roll?
Why does it not hold for a door that can be opened with a single spell?
From an OOC perspective, your approach would only help if you can answer all three questions.

In-character/in-universe:

Why would a person protect a door against knock without also trying to protect it against lockpicks?
Why would a person entrust a major element of their security to a mere door, without also providing other defences?
Additionally:

In the specific example scenario presented, why was the caster not forewarned that wards existed against knock spells?
Is it not the design intent of 3e that at least some of the spells in the level 0 - 4 range are useful at all levels, as demonstrated by the existence of wands?
What about rogues who decide to pick up the spell for themselves instead of buying skill ranks?
What if the wizard just makes a set of +40 thieves' tools instead?

[Satinavian]

Hmmm... Tricky. See, what I love about the D&D Wizard is the "there's an app for that" feel. Now, any given wizard might not know the app, or have it prepared, but they know that they theoretically can build an app to solve any problem. So saying that magic has to be bad at 30% of problems sounds like it kills off what I love about the D&D Wizard. Unless "inefficient" or "clearly suboptimal compared to other approaches" qualifies, then, yes, by all means, let the Rogue pick the 99 locks be can, and the Wizard will Knock - or the Fighter will bash down - the one he fails at.And other people are annoyed by exactly the same "there is an app for that" feel. There don't want a class which can solve all problems with just a little preparation and even without giving up valuable build ressources (= giving up the ability to solve certain other problems ever).

As for experience, yes, we get that in your group full casters seemed to work fine as seen from your perspective (i am not even sure your other players share that view). But in many other groups it is a real problem which is why we have this discussion over and over. And none of those other groups is helped from the fact that your group somehow doesn't have the same problem.

From personal experience, yes, spellcasters easily overshadow mundanes. Even in groups where less optimization is common. And comparing experienced players to new players, it is far more often a problem with new or inexperienced players or those with poor system mastery.

The experienced players are able to accurately estimate the power level of the other PCs just by observation. And tend to either hold back on a good chassis or make a poor chassis work well enough to achieve the group compatible niveau. But it is always the inexperienced players who concentrate on their own character and class abilities who end up discovering that they are vastly overpowered or underpowered at lv 13+(when it is obvious enough even for those without system mastery).

[Cluedrew]

I see that I said, "that's all that mundanes care about". The implication there was that it's the people playing the muggles that are complaining, and that they aren't complaining that being mundane isn't cool, merely that it isn't functional.Actually I was a little worried about the implication that people who play non-casters only care about their ability to curb stomp people in a fight, but that seems to not be the intent. I for one am totally interested in the crafters, socialites, leaders, hackers, tricksters and so on.

In fact I think a large part of the problem is that non-caster=fighter a lot of the time*. There is that argument if casters have magic and the muggles don't, how are the muggles don't, how are they supposed to keep up? I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Casters have magic and muggles have EVERYTHING else. They have physical strength, social influence, engineering, stealth, tricks and traps, unbreakable wills and irresistible charms. How does the guy who goes hokis-pokis with a book keep up with all that?

I would gladly trade my bard's spell list for a list of contacts and rules that let me turn my high charisma into something actionable. But D&D doesn't seem to support mechanics outside of "hit things" and "arbitrary cosmic power", which is often arbitrarily high. So mechanically I'm playing a wizard/fighter hybrid with some artistically flavoured buffs. It doesn't quite feel the same.

* Yes, I use the word martial myself. That is because I feel the fighter connotations are less problematic than the boring ones.


Hmmm... Tricky. See, what I love about the D&D Wizard is the "there's an app for that" feel. Now, any given wizard might not know the app, or have it prepared, but they know that they theoretically can build an app to solve any problem.I don't like that feel. Besides some bias that magic is not magic if it is too convenient (I imaging it is similar to your "a magical character is not magical if they can't use magic very often", although in the other direction) the idea of having a convenient solution for anything seems the anti-thesis of going on an adventure. Does remind me of a great moment in a play.

"What, going to pull some terrible spell out of your magic book?"
"Spell books are so old fashioned. Acolyte, hand me my iScroll."

[Tanarii]

I don't like that feel. Besides some bias that magic is not magic if it is too convenient (I imaging it is similar to your "a magical character is not magical if they can't use magic very often", although in the other direction) the idea of having a convenient solution for anything seems the anti-thesis of going on an adventure. Does remind me of a great moment in a play.

"What, going to pull some terrible spell out of your magic book?"
"Spell books are so old fashioned. Acolyte, hand me my iScroll."
Yeah. It's fine if Magepunk. But otherwise, the idea that magic = scientific / technology instead of magic = mysterious and unknowable seems a bit off. Even for D&D style Wizards, which are pretty heavy on a 'rigorous' approach to magic.

[Calthropstu]

To elaborate on my earlier comment:

What, about this door, makes it such an accomplishment to open?
Why does this hold for a door that can be opened with a single dice roll?
Why does it not hold for a door that can be opened with a single spell?
From an OOC perspective, your approach would only help if you can answer all three questions.

In-character/in-universe:

Why would a person protect a door against knock without also trying to protect it against lockpicks?
Why would a person entrust a major element of their security to a mere door, without also providing other defences?
Additionally:

In the specific example scenario presented, why was the caster not forewarned that wards existed against knock spells?
Is it not the design intent of 3e that at least some of the spells in the level 0 - 4 range are useful at all levels, as demonstrated by the existence of wands?
What about rogues who decide to pick up the spell for themselves instead of buying skill ranks?
What if the wizard just makes a set of +40 thieves' tools instead?


Quite simple.

There exists a truly expensive locking mechanism that is actually 2 locks in one. The second lock cannot be unlocked until the first has been unlocked. Using a second knock spell the sam round would work, but the first resets itself when the second is not unlocked.
An expert lockpicker would be able to discover this trick given some time.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah. It's fine if Magepunk. But otherwise, the idea that magic = scientific / technology instead of magic = mysterious and unknowable seems a bit off. Even for D&D style Wizards, which are pretty heavy on a 'rigorous' approach to magic.

It's a hard road to walk. As soon as you hand a bunch of gamers all over the place a set of systemized objective rules for magic that their characters have access to, you're straining "magic as mysterious and unknowable".

[Tanarii]

It's a hard road to walk. As soon as you hand a bunch of gamers all over the place a set of systemized objective rules for magic that their characters have access to, you're straining "magic as mysterious and unknowable".
Yeah I thought about that as soon as I posted it. Rigorous game rules means magic is perceived as having rules that can be rigorously applied in-world.

Furthermore, D&D is its own genre. Specifically the taking-the-piss genre. It is often sold as 'High Fantasy', but it's not. It's got tons of sci-fi fantasy and pulp fantasy elements brought in by various fans of them among the original players. The Wizard in particular is definitely a 'rigorous' approach to magic spell caster. At least on order with experimental Greek philosophers / Renaissance alchemists, even if they aren't at the point of early natural philosophers.

And outside of the D&D-taking-the-piss genre there's a huge variety of what it means to be magical. From mystical (Merlin or Gandalf, or Grey Mouser or Conan's World) , to technocrat / magic item users, to rules based in various settings (Dresden, Wheel of Time, Sanderson's works), to others.

[Milo v3]

Quite simple.

There exists a truly expensive locking mechanism that is actually 2 locks in one. The second lock cannot be unlocked until the first has been unlocked. Using a second knock spell the sam round would work, but the first resets itself when the second is not unlocked.
An expert lockpicker would be able to discover this trick given some time.

You don't target locks, the spell targets the door/chest/etc. itself and specifically says "the door does not relock itself". Unfortunately, the 3.5e developers really poorly thought out this spell.

[digiman619]

Well, "comparatively useless" / hard mode would actually be Armus; "phenomenal power, wielded poorly" is more Quertus' shtick. Otherwise, true, except... don't most people enjoy playing video games on higher difficulty levels once they've mastered the easier levels?
Except those games are single player; when you play a game with more people, your wants are no longer the sole concern. I mean, you can totally build a Cleric of Palor with the Healing and Sun domains and never turn undead or cast a cure spell and choose what spells you get each day randomly, but when we need someone to stop a scourge of vampires, you doing your Self-Imposed Challenge messes it up for everyone else.


My point was merely that one can build such characters. If the space exceeds the range of acceptable characters, that merely proves that the potential space covers the entirety of the desirable space.
Yes, and you can build a Wizard who has every spell slot filled with Read Magic. It is almost always possible to cripple your build if you so choose. But unless someone explicitly decides "I want to beat the Tomb of Horrors with a Halfling Commoner", people will want a base level of competancy in their characters.

Also such a wizard can always load up different spells tomorrow and be highly competant. The "All 3's halfling" will always suck.


And a Fighter and a Monk continue to dominate the game with Quertus well into epic levels. And the Rogue and Psychic Warrior and Monk continued to dominate the game until ~20th in the game where I likely played my "best" caster (the Arcane Archer contributed, but rarely dominated). And a Fighter and... melee brute (probably actually a CoDzilla)... held their own in a party with another player playing a strong arcane caster (Wizard, I suspect). And I've seen plenty of Wizards played very poorly, because player skills are a thing. So... other than when I tested a theory and gimped a Fighter build, I can't actually think of any time I've seen a Fighter who couldn't hang with a Wizard of equivalent level.

Or, perhaps, put more succinctly, I've seen individual characters who couldn't really hang with their party / struggled to do so (Quertus being one example), but I've never felt "class A cannot possibly be optimized (or nerfed) to hang with this particular instance of class B" while playing 3e.
But player skill is totally independant of class and build choices. You can't design the game around that.


Hmmm... Tricky. See, what I love about the D&D Wizard is the "there's an app for that" feel. Now, any given wizard might not know the app, or have it prepared, but they know that they theoretically can build an app to solve any problem. So saying that magic has to be bad at 30% of problems sounds like it kills off what I love about the D&D Wizard. Unless "inefficient" or "clearly suboptimal compared to other approaches" qualifies, then, yes, by all means, let the Rogue pick the 99 locks be can, and the Wizard will Knock - or the Fighter will bash down - the one he fails at.
With respect, you are part of the problem on this one. This whole thread is about changing the 3.P paradigm of "magic does everything" and you are unwilling to change that. I'm not opposed to the concept of "given time, Joe can solve almost any problem". The problem that that time should be hours/days/weeks/months depending on the size of the problem, not "until I can take a nap".


In fact I think a large part of the problem is that non-caster=fighter a lot of the time*. There is that argument if casters have magic and the muggles don't, how are the muggles don't, how are they supposed to keep up? I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Casters have magic and muggles have EVERYTHING else
The problem is that pretty much everything of even moderate importance in D&D (especially in 3.X) is done with magic. There is never any problem that "Let me use some magic" isn't the correct answer to. Occasionlly you will have to take a roundabout path to get there (dealing with being with big SR via summoned/called monsters for example) , but "use magic on it" is always the optimal choice. It's especially jarring because the only thing that stops magic is an anti-magic field, and the only way you can generate one is with more magic.

[Cosi]

If that is your only problem, that is easy to fix. Like "the wizard gets level*4 spell levels he can have in his spellbook to prepare from". Then spells like knock would have a relevant cost to have. And wizards would have actually different abilities from each other.
(This also applies to Milo)

I think you misunderstood. My argument wasn't "there should be a limit on how many spells are in your spellbook". Really, there already is -- you get 4 per spell level for free, give or take, and pay for the rest out of notionally limited WBL. My point was that Wizards don't get any value out of knowing spells. They get value out of preparing spells. The fact that a Wizard could have prepared knock today is no more an advantage to him if he has not done so than the fact that the Fighter could have taken Great Cleve is an advantage to him if he has not done so.

Seriously, take a look at the 2nd level spells you are giving up when you prepare knock. glitterdust and web are great spells, and you have to explicitly and directly not use them to use knock. There is a real and serious opportunity cost to casting knock. It is, I suppose, theoretically possible that the opportunity cost of "you give up a spell that could be influential or outright decisive in a fight" is not enough to justify "you unlock one door", but no one is even making that argument, and until they do the anti-knock side is simply not worth taking seriously.


You know, its funny, this topic has been kicking around this board for years now, with at least one thread about it on the main page at any given time, and we still haven't really gotten around to solutions.

The solution is actually really simple. You pick a power level, write some tests for it, and iteratively test and revise until the game is at that power level. Figuring out what that power level should be actually is the hard part.


Why not build an optional system where the gm can choose what setting to turn on?

I just want to point out that this is always phrased in terms of a choice for the DM, never the group. Because screw you for wanting something different from him.


Some how people got the idea that ''if page 77 says X, we must do X all ways or it is not D&D''. And that is just the start of the problems.

Once again Darth Ultron fails to understand why we play Dungeons and Dragons instead of Magical Tea Party. We don't buy books because we hate trees, and WotC doesn't sell them as table ornaments. The books exist because having a pre-defined set of interactions is better than making everything up on the spot.


Knock vs anti-Knock... welcome to the low-level version of spell-vs-counterspell chess.

I don't understand what you want here. Do you want there to not be counters to knock? Do you want there to not be knock? People using their abilities to counter other people's abilities seems like pretty exactly how the game should work.


Again, it sounds like you are getting the logic completely backwards. You really think the module is broken because it doesn't go out of its way to either explain on the box that some classes are much stronger than us or the module is not written in such a way that it somehow nerfs all the strong classes and buffs the weak ones?

Yes. Or, it depends on how you look at it. It's the same problem people have when they go from "Wizards are better than Fighters" to "Wizards are broken". You can't get an absolute judgment out of inequalities. If A > B, that doesn't imply that A is broken. It could imply than both are broken, or that neither is broken, or that B is too weak. Quertus' position is that modules should be balanced to the party. Clearly they aren't, but that doesn't inherently mean the Wizard is wrong. You don't have an external benchmark to make that judgment.

To put this in very simple, mathematical terms, can you prove A > 5 from A > B?


My experience is pretty much the opposite, I have yet to see a point buy system that was as broken as 3.X. And those things that are broken in point buy systems are usually the result of a concentrated effort to break the game (like those passive galaxy destroying builds above) while 3.X is broken right out of the gate.

"Broken" is a complicated term. Certainly, there are point-buy games that are very bad (like various White Wolf games). Do they fail in the same ways as 3e? Not really. But you can't say that they're "less broken" on that basis until you've defined what "broken" is supposed to mean.


If a single spell can't do something, why should a single skill check be able to do it?

Do you mean "in 3e specifically, per RAW" or "in general"?


I would say that 5E does this to a reasonable degree. While there are of course ways to break the game, a Fighter 20 can still be worthwhile in a party with a Wizard 20 and Cleric 20.

I still don't think this is the result of any great innovation. 5e is just E6 dragged out over 20 levels. It doesn't really let you do any things in a balanced way that 3e didn't, it just lets you spend more levels doing them.


And other people are annoyed by exactly the same "there is an app for that" feel. There don't want a class which can solve all problems with just a little preparation and even without giving up valuable build ressources (= giving up the ability to solve certain other problems ever).

Well it's a good thing that there's not a class like that.


Casters have magic and muggles have EVERYTHING else. They have physical strength, social influence, engineering, stealth, tricks and traps, unbreakable wills and irresistible charms. How does the guy who goes hokis-pokis with a book keep up with all that?

Only if you assume that casters aren't allowed to do those things. Fantasy is replete with people who are strong or charming or smart or clever and still magical. And as long as that is true, you cannot have an equality between "magic" and "not magic" in the long term, because the abilities of "not magic" characters aren't protected.

[Darth Ultron]

Once again Darth Ultron fails to understand why we play Dungeons and Dragons instead of Magical Tea Party. We don't buy books because we hate trees, and WotC doesn't sell them as table ornaments. The books exist because having a pre-defined set of interactions is better than making everything up on the spot.

Well, it works like this:

Me: Humm, the rule books written by a bunch of bias, radical guys years ago are nice for a vague biases for a game to play: but I will change and alter anything I want to make the game better or what I want it to be.

Others: ''All Hail the Rules''.

It's like the others are like toy robots that keep walking into a wall. The rule says X, they do X, even if it is just walking right into the wall again and again. Me, I don't even get near the wall and change things..oh, about a mile away from that wall.

[Talakeal]

Those are some good points about needing to define broken.

Still, I think it is almost unanimous amongst the community which classes rank where on the power scale, and when module after module has the same problems I don't think it is quite fair to blame the modules for the imbalance.

[Cluedrew]

The problem is that pretty much everything of even moderate importance in D&D (especially in 3.X) is done with magic.Hence my little rant about my bard. I would love to be able to be able to get things done on "natural" charisma alone, but I can't. Instead I have to turn to spells. Some of which are fun but it doesn't quite fit my character concept sometimes. I guess the problem is they put focus on one power source (see below). However when I look at the vista of my imagination, I see characters getting things done through all of these, and I wonder how they messed it up so bad.


Only if you assume that casters aren't allowed to do those things. Fantasy is replete with people who are strong or charming or smart or clever and still magical. And as long as that is true, you cannot have an equality between "magic" and "not magic" in the long term, because the abilities of "not magic" characters aren't protected.Well here are a couple of things I have to say to this and they all have to do with the idea of power sources.

Let us say there is a system where everything on your list is a power source. So you can be good by being sufficiently smart or charming or any other. So lets say you build you "strong or charming or smart or clever and still magical" character. Compared to the strong and charming and smart and clever but not magical, it might actually be underpowered. A character that is just smart will probably fall behind on that is (equally) smart and also strong. One that is magical and clever might fall behind on that is smart, strong and charming.

There is of course there is one assumption here that D&D 3.5 violates entirely. And that is that that each power source counts equally. Their limitations may be different, they take drastically different forms, but I think you should be able to get significant things done with each. And that is where D&D fails. Fixing that is the first step to making magic and not magic meet.

The second is of course limiting how many you can invest in and balancing how much you get from your investment. Then magic balances not magic because magic is not strength, nor charm, nor smart, nor clever. Not by itself at least, not discounting the possibly of mixing two or more but then you don't get as much of each.

On Broken: In the context of a game "does not behave as expected" would be the application of the general "does not work". So case study on D&D 3.5: What is "expected" is hard to say exactly, but from some stats I've heard about tiers of classes over time, Tier 3 seems to be the intent. If we say a range of 2 tiers works out of the box (which admittedly is just a rule of thumb, but when designing for such a widely targeted game staying well within such a rule is probably a good idea) and center that on the target, we get tier 2-4 works as intended and everything outside of that is broken.

Just a quick napkin theory.

[Calthropstu]

@Cosi
Because the GM is the final arbiter. Sure, the players and the gm should have a discussion and give their two cents, but rarely will everyone agree so someone has to make that call.
The GM is just the most logical choice.

[Zale]

I've repeatedly said that knock is not really better than Open Lock at the time you get it. It has advantages (faster, more consistent), but also disadvantages (less uses, higher opportunity cost). invisibility just is a Hide check. It's a Hide check at a +20 bonus, but there's no reason in principle a Rogue couldn't get a +20 bonus to Hide. The reason it's often superior in practice is that people don't want mundanes to have nice things, but it seems unfair to blame that on casters.

Knock is better in that it is absolute. Knock doesn't care about how skilled you are at Picking Locks. Knock doesn't really care how difficult the lock is to pick.

Unlike a rogue-type, a wizard merely needs to decide, at some point, to pick up knock, and they'll always be just as able to open any particular lock as the rogue will. They won't have to devote skill points to it, or particularly try to maintain it, unlike the rogue. They'll also be able to do loads of other things, if they wish, and still come back to knock.

Of course, Knock isn't perfect. Using a 2nd level spell to open a locked door is kind of dumb. It's a limited resource.

But at the end of the day, by way the game was designed, it is something that magic can do that a mundane never can: open any lock without any effort.

Invisibility hits some of the same flaws, as does Find Trap and similar spells. They let the wizard keep up with, or emulate the job of the rogue without much effort, but in inverse, the rogue has no real way of easily and cheaply emulating the job of the wizard.

Not perfectly, but the wizard's tricks are general better than the rogues, and typically, the wizard can also just use the rogue's tricks if they really want.



Knock is only strictly better if it's at will, silent, and doesn't simultaneously unlock the hidden cache of lava above your head. Last time I used a Knock-like effect, none of those were true.


Balancing by GM cruelty isn't balance, it's just trying to coerce your players into bowing to your will. Well made games shouldn't be so poorly designed that the GM has to descend like a wrathful god just to avoid invalidating entire character archetypes because someone is using their class features.



He also doesn't get anything for it. There are no points awarded for the spells in your spellbook. Once he prepares them, he's giving up a glitterdust or color spray, which is an enormously larger cost than the Rogue is paying for his ability on a per-use basis.


This is absolutely true- however, consider, that this means the balance is maintained not because a Wizard cannot do the rogue's job, but because the wizard recognizes that they don't need to.

Being balanced around one archetype being able to do anyone's job, and just choosing not to is not a really.. fun dynamic?

The rogue should be roguing because they are absolutely better than the wizard at it, and the wizard isn't choosing to not step in and do their job for them.



In theory yes, which is why I have been arguing that balance in 3.X isn't really as bad as it is cracked up to be. The problems as I see it are:

1: Spells per day isn't really a limitation. Most of the time there is no reason why you can't just rest after every spell and it is the optimal strategy to do so. It is very hard to keep constant time pressure on the party without frustrating everyone, breaking verisimilitude, or causing a TPK and most DM's I know don't even try anymore. Even if the DM does try and enforce wandering monsters or what not to break up a rest, there are plenty of spells which allow the players to rest outside of normal time and space without having to risk it.

2: 3.X is super stingy with mundane abilities. Feats, ability scores, and saving throws are pretty hard to come by compared to other editions, and the skill system is just a mess, too few skill points, class skill lists are too small, there are too many skills (meaning they could combine a lot of them into one skill), and cross class skills are overly penalized. Casters suffer with this as well, but they have magical alternatives to most every mundane ability and don't really have to worry about it.

3: Once you get to a certain point casters no longer have limitations no matter how you play. In my experience the ability to cast Gate and Shape-change are the big ones, at that point you can simply ignore any limits and use any ability in the game as often as you like.

You can break the game further using questionable exploits like altering time flow with Genesis, using SLA wishes to create arbitrarily powerful magic items, conjured up Ice Assassins of deities, or go the pun-pun route and dig into manipulate form, but these are really just icing on the cake. Also, muggles can do them to with access to the right magic items, so they aren't really an issue with CMD or with base play IMO.

I agree completely. Feats are usually terrible, and you get so few of them. Most classes, by core, lack the same level of granularity that magic receives. There are hundreds of spells to pick from, each of which is a fun trick and which slowly grow over time.

Mundane characters don't really get anything like that.

[Satinavian]

I think you misunderstood. My argument wasn't "there should be a limit on how many spells are in your spellbook". Really, there already is -- you get 4 per spell level for free, give or take, and pay for the rest out of notionally limited WBL. My point was that Wizards don't get any value out of knowing spells. They get value out of preparing spells. The fact that a Wizard could have prepared knock today is no more an advantage to him if he has not done so than the fact that the Fighter could have taken Great Cleve is an advantage to him if he has not done so.But he can prepare it when he knows he will likely need it.

Encounters don't happen as series of random events without prior information. The way wizards can prepare from all the spells in their book allows them to be nearly as effective as if they could choose them spontanously if they make good informed guesses. And if the guesses didn't work, there is the option to retreat and prepare something else. And this even ignores divination to prepare the right stuff as some people use.

Seriously, take a look at the 2nd level spells you are giving up when you prepare knock. glitterdust and web are great spells, and you have to explicitly and directly not use them to use knock. There is a real and serious opportunity cost to casting knock. It is, I suppose, theoretically possible that the opportunity cost of "you give up a spell that could be influential or outright decisive in a fight" is not enough to justify "you unlock one door", but no one is even making that argument, and until they do the anti-knock side is simply not worth taking seriously. For knock specifically, it is usually not a good choice at level 3 but you won't really miss the web/glitterdust at level 13 and it is still effective against high level locks.

But even at level three, if the wizard has knock in the book, the group can get through the well locked and really sturdy door with at most another day rest where otherwise they might need to get back to town and pay some high level rogue hireling. That is a power that is there just from the spell sitting in the spelbook.


Only if you assume that casters aren't allowed to do those things. Fantasy is replete with people who are strong or charming or smart or clever and still magical. And as long as that is true, you cannot have an equality between "magic" and "not magic" in the long term, because the abilities of "not magic" characters aren't protected.
Sure.

An easy way to handle that is ... POINTBUY. Sure, casters can be smart or charming and pay for that with weaker magic than a more straitforward caster would have. The only thing pointbuy systems have difficulties to put a pricetag on is "magical potential", the ability to buy certain magical abilities even if a player might chhoose to do other things with her points. While people agree that an exclusive ability to learn something should cost something, there is no easy answer to "how much".

Which also goes back to the former problem. Every D&D Wiz spell could theoretically land in a wizards spell book. Even as an overwhelming majority of them won't for any given wizard, the wizard class becomes stronger for each such spell in existence.

[Arbane]

An easy way to handle that is ... POINTBUY. Sure, casters can be smart or charming and pay for that with weaker magic than a more straitforward caster would have. The only thing pointbuy systems have difficulties to put a pricetag on is "magical potential", the ability to buy certain magical abilities even if a player might chhoose to do other things with her points. While people agree that an exclusive ability to learn something should cost something, there is no easy answer to "how much".

According to my copy of GURPS, 5 points for Magery 0, 10 points per level after that. (And if you're using the basic magic system, you have to buy spells as individual skills, which will snork up a LOT of points.) That's in a game where a starting PC is usually 100-200 points.



Which also goes back to the former problem. Every D&D Wiz spell could theoretically land in a wizards spell book. Even as an overwhelming majority of them won't for any given wizard, the wizard class becomes stronger for each such spell in existence.

And Clerics are even worse, as they don't need a spellbook. Every new splatbook provides new options they can take every day.

[Max_Killjoy]

Balancing by GM cruelty isn't balance, it's just trying to coerce your players into bowing to your will. Well made games shouldn't be so poorly designed that the GM has to descend like a wrathful god just to avoid invalidating entire character archetypes because someone is using their class features.


One, sounds like a corollary to Grod's Law.

Two, IMO, a GM having to tell people not to use ability X in play, means that the GM failed in out-of-play character creation.

Three, it has occurred to me to add to me elsewhere posted thoughts on differences between gaming sub-communities; again IMO, the D&D sub-community may still suffer for a lingering perception that they should be able to write up a character and sit down at any table anywhere playing that version of D&D, and use that character without concern or modification (level differences aside), which is related to the repeatedly seen (sometimes implied, sometimes overt), "It worked at my table, if it wouldn't work at your table you're doing something wrong" or "we never had that problem in our games, if you had that problem then you're doing something wrong".

[lesser_minion]

There exists a truly expensive locking mechanism that is actually 2 locks in one. The second lock cannot be unlocked until the first has been unlocked. Using a second knock spell the sam round would work, but the first resets itself when the second is not unlocked.
An expert lockpicker would be able to discover this trick given some time.

I asked you for the out-of-universe-why, not the in-universe-how. A locked door is not a major obstacle in and of itself. It doesn't "let the rogue feel useful" when you use a blatant contrivance to let them be the one to do something minor.

[Tanarii]

I asked you for the out-of-universe-why, not the in-universe-how. A locked door is not a major obstacle in and of itself. It doesn't "let the rogue feel useful" when you use a blatant contrivance to let them be the one to do something minor.
Knock vs pick locks is a terrible thing to base a discussion of caster vs mundane around. Or maybe good. Because t's not an example of caster > mundane.

One costs a resource, is relatively fast, in many editions is noisy, only does one thing, and usually works.

The other cost no resources, takes time, is usually quiet, is sometimes part of a greater skill, and can fails within a given time unit or completely (if only one check is allowed).

They are different, not one greater than the other. The huge difference in D&D (since Knock is a D&D spell), spell casters doing things by spells costs a resource.

[digiman619]

Knock vs pick locks is a terrible thing to base a discussion of caster vs mundane around. Or maybe good. Because it's not an example of caster > mundane.

One costs a resource, is relatively fast, in many editions is noisy, only does one thing, and usually works.

The other cost no resources, takes time, is usually quiet, is sometimes part of a greater skill, and can fail within a given time unit or completely (if only one check is allowed).

They are different, not one greater than the other. The huge difference in D&D (since Knock is a D&D spell), spell casters doing things by spells costs a resource.

It may not cost daily resources, but it does cost build resources: skill points, gp for theives' tools, and possibly feats. What's worse about it is that if you built a rouge to be the greatest lockpick possible (Halfling Rogue 3, 20 DEX,(+5), max ranks (+6), masterwork tools (+2) Skill Focus (+3), Nimble Fingers (+2); total +18), he will still be outperforned by knock when it comes online (even if he Takes 20, he can't open an Amazing (DC 40) lock, but knock can).

And assuming we're talking about the 3.5, being the greatest lockpick possible will still run afoul of magic because they automatically fail against arcane locks.

[Zale]

Three, it has occurred to me to add to me elsewhere posted thoughts on differences between gaming sub-communities; again IMO, the D&D sub-community may still suffer for a lingering perception that they should be able to write up a character and sit down at any table anywhere playing that version of D&D, and use that character without concern or modification (level differences aside), which is related to the repeatedly seen (sometimes implied, sometimes overt), "It worked at my table, if it wouldn't work at your table you're doing something wrong" or "we never had that problem in our games, if you had that problem then you're doing something wrong".


You should be able to trust that the rules of a game will be essentially the same regardless of which table you sit down at, or at least, that changes will be stated so you can alter your expectations.

That's the point of having rulebooks: consistent expectations.

Naturally, characters have to be tweaked to fit theme or story, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a premade bunch of characters you'd like to play.

[Tanarii]

And assuming we're talking about the 3.5.
I'm not. That's a dead edition, just like the other dead editions. I was talking generically across all editions.

The other reason it's a poor comparison is it's common example of Schroedinger's Wizard. Knock is commonly brought up as a reason casters can do anything a mundane can and better, but it's rarely actually prepared at the average table.

[Max_Killjoy]

You should be able to trust that the rules of a game will be essentially the same regardless of which table you sit down at, or at least, that changes will be stated so you can alter your expectations.

That's the point of having rulebooks: consistent expectations.

Naturally, characters have to be tweaked to fit theme or story, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a premade bunch of characters you'd like to play.


Compare with HERO or GURPS, where the system is a toolkit and every campaign might have a very different setup -- and it's highly unrealistic to expect universal portability.

[lesser_minion]

Knock vs pick locks is a terrible thing to base a discussion of caster vs mundane around. Or maybe good.

That's basically what I'm getting at. It's a problem when clerics and wizards trivialise what could otherwise have been a major obstacle, but a 2nd level spell that clears a minor obstacle is not really worth getting worked up about.

There's nothing wrong with the spell: the problem is that 3.x's Open Lock skill is a complete and utter scam.

[Calthropstu]

I asked you for the out-of-universe-why, not the in-universe-how. A locked door is not a major obstacle in and of itself. It doesn't "let the rogue feel useful" when you use a blatant contrivance to let them be the one to do something minor.

Because having a door extremely well protected is something people do?

Look at modern doors. Companies spend hundreds of thousands to build a single impenetrable door. Why would a fantasy world be any different?

Essentially, what is created is a modern locksmith vs lockpick war, and magic is just another tool that must be defended against by locksmiths.

[lesser_minion]

Because having a door extremely well protected is something people do?

Yes, yes it is. I already covered this.

In the real world, a door is protected with locks, chains, guards, passers-by, security cameras, alarms, spies, and even "scorched earth" techniques such as adding dye packs to paper money. Not with locks on their own.

No lock can do anything more than buy time. If you aren't doing anything with that time, then the lock is a total waste.

[Pleh]

You should be able to trust that the rules of a game will be essentially the same regardless of which table you sit down at, or at least, that changes will be stated so you can alter your expectations.

That's the point of having rulebooks: consistent expectations.

Naturally, characters have to be tweaked to fit theme or story, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a premade bunch of characters you'd like to play.

Yes and no. Unfortunately, viability of a character depends on much more than just if the rules are consistent. Character abilities must also be relevant, which not all of them always are relevant to every scenario or campaign.

For example, Lockpicking is a fairly useless skill if the Campaign is based around survival in a totally undeveloped wilderness with no "manmade" (insert sentient race here) structures to begin with, much less complex lock mechanisms to secure the doors that don't exist.

The consistency of the rules just means that their expertise at lockpicking will be quite advantageous in the scenario that they eventually craft locks for themselves to pick.

[Talakeal]

Similar to Talakeal, what draws me into these conversations is the mistaken notion that the problem can't be solved, because some of us keep laying out a multitude of options for how to deal with it. The canard that keeps really irking me is that mistaken claim that this is somehow not largely a problem of D&D-like systems, and that other systems (and settings) also have these ridiculous balance issues whether people realize it or not. See also, "Point-buy is even more imbalanced and broken than D&D".

I am actually having trouble parsing this sentence. Are you agreeing or disagreeing that this problem is inevitable in any D&D like game and that point buy is even more broken than D&D?


For me, D&D will always be that game that everyone wanted to play instead of WEG d6 Star Wars, back in my early gaming days... that game that conflated dodging and armor... that game that though it took a minute to swing a sword one time... that game I started looking to find better alternatives to almost immediately.

I was into D&D long before I was old enough to grasp the crunch, let alone find anyone to play with. I watched the cartoon and bought the toys as a little kid, and then I got the AD&D Monstrous Compendium as a gift for my seventh birthday, read it cover to cover (not really understanding the crunch) and then did the same with the rest of the volumes in the series. Then I read the Dragonlance books in elementary school and was running more or less free form campaigns for my friends. It wasn't until middle school that I actually played real D&D, and I loved it. But it was more the concept of role-playing games that I was in love with rather than the actual implementation, and I and my friends also thought the minute long rounds and AC = Dodge where silly.

As soon as I got into high school and realized there was a whole world of other RPGs I left D&D and never looked back unless it was the only game in town (which to this day still happens a shocking amount of the time). But still, D&D will always be nostalgic for me and those AD&D campaigns were super fun.

[Calthropstu]

Yes, yes it is. I already covered this.

In the real world, a door is protected with locks, chains, guards, passers-by, security cameras, alarms, spies, and even "scorched earth" techniques such as adding dye packs to paper money. Not with locks on their own.

No lock can do anything more than buy time. If you aren't doing anything with that time, then the lock is a total waste.

True enough. But how quickly can knock be cast?
In order to buy that time, you need a lock that can thwart most attempts to disable it. Thwarting the knock spell is one of the first things a master locksmith would do. Whether it is through a contingency spell (cast arcane lock when knock is cast) or a time delay mechanical device that knock can't beat. The door protected by such a lock would be quite expensive, and the lock itself a very high dc to pick requiring multiple checks.
Either way, if you don't protect against a 2nd lvl spell which a mere 3rd level adventurer whelp can cast you're just asking for trouble.

[lesser_minion]

True enough. But how quickly can knock be cast?
In order to buy that time, you need a lock that can thwart most attempts to disable it. Thwarting the knock spell is one of the first things a master locksmith would do. Whether it is through a contingency spell (cast arcane lock when knock is cast) or a time delay mechanical device that knock can't beat. The door protected by such a lock would be quite expensive, and the lock itself a very high dc to pick requiring multiple checks.
Either way, if you don't protect against a 2nd lvl spell which a mere 3rd level adventurer whelp can cast you're just asking for trouble.

If you've built up the door with guards and traps and so on, such that it's a major obstacle to get through it, sure. But in that case, it's not what Darth Ultron originally proposed, which was to arbitrarily have Knock not work on locked doors while leaving them susceptible to Open Lock checks.

Anyway, I've already said how I think the spell fits into the overall thread premise (i.e.: it's fine, but the non-caster version is a scam), and I think we're actually on basically the same page with respect to how it should be dealt with in play.

[Max_Killjoy]

I keep getting drawn into the debate when someone insists that the problem can't be solved and that all other games are inconsistent / irrational for claiming to have done so.



Similar to Talakeal, what draws me into these conversations is the mistaken notion that the problem can't be solved, because some of us keep laying out a multitude of options for how to deal with it. The canard that keeps really irking me is that mistaken claim that this is somehow not largely a problem of D&D-like systems, and that other systems (and settings) also have these ridiculous balance issues whether people realize it or not. See also, "Point-buy is even more imbalanced and broken than D&D".



I am actually having trouble parsing this sentence. Are you agreeing or disagreeing that this problem is inevitable in any D&D like game and that point buy is even more broken than D&D?


I'm agreeing that the problem is inevitable with any D&D-like game. Further, it's a risk for any class-and-level game.

I would not however say that point buy is more broken than D&D -- in fact I consider a well-made point-buy without anything resembling classes, archetypes, tropes, or other chliches to be less vulnerable to the problem.

[Talakeal]

I'm agreeing that the problem is inevitable with any D&D-like game. Further, it's a risk for any class-and-level game.

I would not however say that point buy is more broken than D&D -- in fact I consider a well-made point-buy without anything resembling classes, archetypes, tropes, or other chliches to be less vulnerable to the problem.

Which problem exactly? That magic beats mundane or that some classes will inevitably better than others?

[Max_Killjoy]

Which problem exactly? That magic beats mundane or that some classes will inevitably better than others?

The original context of that string of comments was class imbalance being inevitable.

[Quertus]

With respect, you are part of the problem on this one. This whole thread is about changing the 3.P paradigm of "magic does everything" and you are unwilling to change that. I'm not opposed to the concept of "given time, Joe can solve almost any problem". The problem that that time should be hours/days/weeks/months depending on the size of the problem, not "until I can take a nap".

That is possible. My unique perspective may be causing me to be "part of the problem". However, I'm not convinced that's the case. There are two reasons for this.

First, the problem has never seemed terribly well defined. Or, perhaps, it's that a whole bunch of separate issues have been stuffed under the same umbrella. And "magic does everything", as you put it, is not the same as all of these individual issues. The second is, I don't see most of those issues to be actual, unsolvable problems. In fact, I see some of these "issues" as good things.

* Fighters can't contribute as much as Wizards in combat. Honestly, an übercharger, or a well-buffed Rogue can one-shot things well outside their weight category - what more do people want? This is not an actual problem.

* Fighters are more susceptible to certain things, like Force Cage and Will Saves in combat. And Wizards are more susceptible to certain things, like Fort Saves and HP damage, than Fighters in combat.

* Fighters don't have an answer to Force Cage, like Wizards do to HP damage. Um, actually, they've got lots of answers.

* Fighters are forced to specialize, and be one-trick ponies, whereas Wizards are allowed to learn any spell whatsoever. Yup, this is annoying - I'd love for Fighters to be multi-trick ponies. Heck, even animals in D&D can learn more than one trick.

* Fighters can't contribute as much as Wizards outside of combat. Eh, this one is complex - the lack of rules for many out of combat actions means that much of this if player skills, GM whim, etc - not something where the Wizard has an inherent advantage. The things for which there are rules, custom items of +X to foo can certainly give options, but cut into the Fighter's limited budget. However, the übercharger can just win at combat with their budget, so maybe scaling them back a hair to allow out of combat utility isn't going to really crimp their style.

* Scenarios can be designed where the Fighter's one trick won't work. One, that's a good thing: it means you have to think: ahead of time about how to build the character to minimize the range of encounters to which your one trick won't apply; ahead of time about diversifying your character; or on the spot about what to do now that your one trick has been shut down. Two, sure, and most casters get shut down in antimagic, when bound and/or gagged, etc.

* Fighters are reliant on Wizards - from buffs to BFC, and even magic items. One, traditionally, Wizards were quite reliant on meat shields Fighters. Two, yes, few are more upset than me that Fighters are built so selfishly that they fail to contribute to the group the way buffing casters do. The spirit of Teamwork would be so improved if no such "selfish" classes existed, and everyone was forced to spend their actions and resources helping others. The Fighter can spend his XP teaching the group teamwork tricks, use his actions (and limited resources) to boost attacks / saves, and spend his feats and XP creating items for the group. Three,

* in a 1-on-1 fight, Wizard beats Fighter. Um... I'm going with "that's great, get your PvP *** out of here, and let me get back to fighting monsters with team-oriented players". Ever since the original AU Barbarian, I've been happily in the "Wizard kills Fighter" camp.

* Fighters can't X. Yeah, I'm not a fan of niche protection - give every class the potential to X. Open Locks, Knock spell, and raw damage all allow a character to deal with a locked door. This is a good thing.

* Fighters can't contribute. I hear you. Try Shadowrun, then talk to me about scenes where you can't contribute. So, removing niche protection is a good start towards allowing contribution, IMO; making characters more versatile (as hidden behind a call for more skill points, and a broader class skills list) is a decent second move.

* Wizards can contribute. Um... I view this as a feature, not a bug.

* Wizards can solo adventures. This is a legitimate complaint, but not one about game balance; rather, it's a complaint about table balance. In particular:


Three, it has occurred to me to add to me elsewhere posted thoughts on differences between gaming sub-communities; again IMO, the D&D sub-community may still suffer for a lingering perception that they should be able to write up a character and sit down at any table anywhere playing that version of D&D, and use that character without concern or modification (level differences aside), which is related to the repeatedly seen (sometimes implied, sometimes overt), "It worked at my table, if it wouldn't work at your table you're doing something wrong" or "we never had that problem in our games, if you had that problem then you're doing something wrong".

This. Back in my day, I'd walk around with a folder full of characters, and see which one fit the current table. It's baffling to me that people could possibly have a "one size fits all" notion of D&D.


And other people are annoyed by exactly the same "there is an app for that" feel.

This cuts both ways. So, do you think it is valid for someone to have a "you think you can contribute without magic?" sentiment? Otherwise, that's on those people for being annoyed.


As for experience, yes, we get that in your group full casters seemed to work fine as seen from your perspective (i am not even sure your other players share that view). But in many other groups it is a real problem which is why we have this discussion over and over. And none of those other groups is helped from the fact that your group somehow doesn't have the same problem.

That misses the point. The point is, it's possible to not have this problem, and I've seen it in multiple groups.

Those with the problem should be really interested in finding out from those who don't how to avoid the problem.


The experienced players are able to accurately estimate the power level of the other PCs just by observation. And tend to either hold back on a good chassis or make a poor chassis work well enough to achieve the group compatible niveau. But it is always the inexperienced players who concentrate on their own character and class abilities who end up discovering that they are vastly overpowered or underpowered at lv 13+(when it is obvious enough even for those without system mastery).

And my contention is, that's on those with good system mastery for allowing things to get there.


i am not even sure your other players share that view

They do. Or they're liars. I prefer the former explanation, personally.


Actually I was a little worried about the implication that people who play non-casters only care about their ability to curb stomp people in a fight,

I mean, you certainly will get that sentiment, especially in D&D, especially when one class is called the "Fighter". But, no, I was attempting to encompass all of the extremely diverse positions that fall under this huge umbrella when saying that they're all rather samey in caring about this one scale, and not about things like how cool magic is.


I would gladly trade my bard's spell list for a list of contacts and rules that let me turn my high charisma into something actionable. But D&D doesn't seem to support mechanics

I seem to have missed a quote... I may have to get back to addressing this.


Well then, I guess the only honest thing to put on every modules (and core rule-book) would be: A game for 1 Optimized Caster. Everyone else get the **** out!"

"Optimize to the table, or get the **** out" is a sentiment I've seen at many real tables.


Very curious what point buy game you played that was so easily broken, I have played a solid handful and have never had one with balance issues.

GURPS, Hero, M&M, H&H, and a few more obscure ones, plus a homebrew or two.


On the other hand all it took to break 3.5 was someone saying "Hey, these monsters we are fighting can cast a whole plethora of spells at will. I am going to cast shape-change and turn into them!"

I broke point buy with a starting character, you broke 3.5 with an ending character? Hmmm... In 2e, I'd say, well, at least you got a good decade or two of play out of the game before it broke.


Most people describe their character concept rather than a list of numbers regardless of the game.

Then the advantage of Names is in that "Ranger / War Shaper 20" means something, whereas "150 point shape shifting combat survivalist" is less well defined.


And what do you do if the PCs decide to take the long way to the dungeon or just take a few months off adventuring to spend time with their families? If an eight hour break between each encounter royally screws over the players how does your campaign function when a much longer and much more understandable delay comes up?

Clearly, we view things differently if you feel you are somehow talking about more time now.

Further, I run the game such that all sandbox content is optional. The difference is, if you choose to interact with X, but move so slowly that most of the participants die of old age, let alone complete their actions before you finish your "master plan" to deal with them, then you can't really interact with X in a meaningful way.


Sure does, assuming you are in a game where the players can get ahold of custom items. But the thing is, if your skills only exist because of magic items you don't really have any skills.

In my game the wizard, for example, talked the rest of the party into giving him 100% of the groups treasure as he mathematically proved that a wizard with 6x WBL is far and away more powerful than a balanced party each with normal WBL.

Wow. Is this the same party where your Fighter sat in a Force Cage every other battle while you sat and twiddled your thumbs, while the Wizard did nothing to help?

If so, I'mma go back to PLAY WITH BETTER PEOPLE!!!

Unless, of course, all of you agree that successfully competing the module is the only important thing. That "have fun with friends" is just crazy talk. Then, if that's the case, um, I probably shouldn't say what I'm thinking, actually.


The argument is that you use eschew material components which allows you to cast the spell without needing a piece of divine material as divine material does not have an explicitly listed XP cost and thus eschew material components bypasses the need

Oh, I'm familiar with the argument. So, by this logic, all I need to do is find a spell for which I could conceivably use X as a material component, without X having explicitly been given a price, and, by RAW, I can just start pulling X out of my spell component pouch. I'm pretty sure this can be broken far worse than just a few silly divine toenails.


Most people ignore XP costs for spells by not casting it with a spell slot, instead using planar binding, shape-change, or another gate to cast it as a SLA.

Shenanigans. This "breaks the game". Things have a cost - if you aren't paying it, you're breaking the game.


Except those games are single player; when you play a game with more people, your wants are no longer the sole concern. I mean, you can totally build a Cleric of Palor with the Healing and Sun domains and never turn undead or cast a cure spell and choose what spells you get each day randomly, but when we need someone to stop a scourge of vampires, you doing your Self-Imposed Challenge messes it up for everyone else.

This implies two things: one, that the purpose of the game is to beat the module; two, that you are challenging yourself in a way that is detrimental to the purpose of the game.

Let's throw that away.

IMO, the purpose of the game is to have fun with friends. Player skill is a thing. With perfectly mechanically balanced characters, some players will dominate due to greater player skill. Happily, there exist "hard mode" characters for them to play. Certain other players will struggle due to lack of player skills. Happily, there exist OP builds for them to play.

Now, with the right character for each player, the group can have fun, with everyone contributing to the successful completion of the module.

:smallbiggrin:


Also such a wizard can always load up different spells tomorrow and be highly competant.

Only if the Wizard knows different spells.


But player skill is totally independant of class and build choices. You can't design the game around that.

I absolutely can and have designed games that allow players to take handicaps (in either direction).


The problem is that pretty much everything of even moderate importance in D&D (especially in 3.X) is done with magic. There is never any problem that "Let me use some magic" isn't the correct answer to. Occasionlly you will have to take a roundabout path to get there (dealing with being with big SR via summoned/called monsters for example) , but "use magic on it" is always the optimal choice. It's especially jarring because the only thing that stops magic is an anti-magic field, and the only way you can generate one is with more magic.

Always? No, "have the Rogue pick the lock" is the optimal choice. "Have the Rogue (or übercharger) kill the monster" is the optimal choice. Magic is not always the optimal choice.


The solution is actually really simple. You pick a power level, write some tests for it, and iteratively test and revise until the game is at that power level. Figuring out what that power level should be actually is the hard part.

That's if you want the system to be balanced. But, as others have said, no system will ever be completely balanced. But, yes, you can get it "close enough", if you pick some acceptable delta beforehand.

However, I personally enjoy and value the range of possible balance points available from a single system. I enjoy being able to get the CoC "oh, elder gods, we're all gonna die" feel, and the BDH "We waded through them like they were humans" feel, from the same encounter, without forcing people to learn a new system.

I believe that this balancing act is what you should be doing at the table level, to make sure that everyone can contribute to the game.


Yes. Or, it depends on how you look at it. It's the same problem people have when they go from "Wizards are better than Fighters" to "Wizards are broken". You can't get an absolute judgment out of inequalities. If A > B, that doesn't imply that A is broken. It could imply than both are broken, or that neither is broken, or that B is too weak. Quertus' position is that modules should be balanced to the party. Clearly they aren't, but that doesn't inherently mean the Wizard is wrong. You don't have an external benchmark to make that judgment.

To put this in very simple, mathematical terms, can you prove A > 5 from A > B?

Hmmm... my position is more that the party should be balanced to the module, actually. Same end result, different technique. As an added bonus, "Caster>Mundane" is automatically solved by my version, whereas "give all the party wealth to the Wizard, then have the GM build the module to the Wizard" exacerbates that problem when you go the opposite direction.


Still, I think it is almost unanimous amongst the community which classes rank where on the power scale, and when module after module has the same problems I don't think it is quite fair to blame the modules for the imbalance.

There is a range of potential power for each class, depending on build. There is a huge range where those intersect - arguably, that range covers and extends beyond the entire playable range, given things like the level 1 commoner who defeated the Tarrasque.


Naturally, characters have to be tweaked to fit theme or story, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a premade bunch of characters you'd like to play.

You may want to reconsider bringing your SA DPS Rogue, or your diplomancer, through "Necrophilia on Bone Hill". But, if you've got a party that works together, and has fun together, you're welcome to try.

[lesser_minion]

What if one class, makes every other class functionally obsolete? A Rogue can take time and make a skill roll to unlock a door. A wizard can cast the "unlock" cantrip, doing the same thing, for free, all day long. Barbarian want's to bash a door down, the wizard has a spell for that too. Hell, depending on the level, the wizard can just MAKE a (magical) door and bypass the locked one completely. Pit traps? Don't have the Rogue search, just have the wizard levitate everyone...wizards even have some basic healing spells to horn in on the cleric's role. All this for the low, low cost of.....NOTHING.


Usually, spells cast out side of combat are more or less "at-will", as casting times do not matter at that point, and the greatly reduced "refresh" rate on spell slots means casting all those things when ever you want is not an issue.

Meaningful costs aren't a class feature. If there is no feature to the overall scenario that makes costs meaningful, they won't be meaningful. That's not a balance issue.

I've only discussed knock so far, but almost all of the examples you gave in your complaint were flawed in a similar way to Darth's knock scenario. If you're just plonking a minor obstacle in front of players and there are no other significant features to the encounter, why should it cost anything to overcome it?

If the problem is that rogues et al are spending large amounts of build resources to be able to deal with "level appropriate" minor obstacles... why not just fix that?

[Cluedrew]

I mean, you certainly will get that sentiment, especially in D&D, especially when one class is called the "Fighter". But, no, I was attempting to encompass all of the extremely diverse positions that fall under this huge umbrella when saying that they're all rather samey in caring about this one scale, and not about things like how cool magic is.Oh trust me, I have my opinions on how not cool D&D magic is. I even made a thread about it a while back. It got just over 30 replies as I recall. This thread has just over 30 pages and is hardly the first of its kind. So I have to talk about the things people will talk with me about if I want to talk about anything.

To sum it up: D&D magic is an endless series of black box solutions that have slowly have had anything that could have made them interesting warn away but the passing editions to make casters more convenient to play. Some individual spells have interesting flavour text, but the spell lists as a whole are just a mess.

On Supporting Charisma: D&D has support for two things: attacking something with a weapon and casting spells. OK it does support some other things, but they will can't be more than a sideshow without... actually I'm not sure what it would take. Home-brewing new subsystems would do it, but you might be able to do it with less than that. I would rather having rules that let my bard get contacts or shift a crowd's opinion with a performance. You can't really do those things.

[Pex]

I'm not. That's a dead edition, just like the other dead editions. I was talking generically across all editions.

The other reason it's a poor comparison is it's common example of Schroedinger's Wizard. Knock is commonly brought up as a reason casters can do anything a mundane can and better, but it's rarely actually prepared at the average table.

What are you talking about? Everyone knows every spellcaster always has the exact spell they need at the moment it's needed. If what you said was true people might start to think spellcasters really can't do everything all the time and being in the same party with warriors can work. Can't have that. The Tier System forbids it.


You should be able to trust that the rules of a game will be essentially the same regardless of which table you sit down at, or at least, that changes will be stated so you can alter your expectations.

That's the point of having rulebooks: consistent expectations.

Naturally, characters have to be tweaked to fit theme or story, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a premade bunch of characters you'd like to play.

You don't play 5E, do you.


Compare with HERO or GURPS, where the system is a toolkit and every campaign might have a very different setup -- and it's highly unrealistic to expect universal portability.

Point, in the sense that I couldn't play my premade GURPS superhero speedster in the same campaign as your GURPS longsword wielding soldier. However, if I were to have premade my GURPS superhero speedster for the fun of it one weekend then get to join a GURPS Supers game 5 months later I could play my superhero speedster without having to ask a series of questions of how the rules work.

[Talakeal]

* Fighters can't contribute as much as Wizards in combat. Honestly, an übercharger, or a well-buffed Rogue can one-shot things well outside their weight category - what more do people want? This is not an actual problem.

* Fighters are more susceptible to certain things, like Force Cage and Will Saves in combat. And Wizards are more susceptible to certain things, like Fort Saves and HP damage, than Fighters in combat.

* Fighters don't have an answer to Force Cage, like Wizards do to HP damage. Um, actually, they've got lots of answers.

* Fighters are forced to specialize, and be one-trick ponies, whereas Wizards are allowed to learn any spell whatsoever. Yup, this is annoying - I'd love for Fighters to be multi-trick ponies. Heck, even animals in D&D can learn more than one trick.

* Fighters can't contribute as much as Wizards outside of combat. Eh, this one is complex - the lack of rules for many out of combat actions means that much of this if player skills, GM whim, etc - not something where the Wizard has an inherent advantage. The things for which there are rules, custom items of +X to foo can certainly give options, but cut into the Fighter's limited budget. However, the übercharger can just win at combat with their budget, so maybe scaling them back a hair to allow out of combat utility isn't going to really crimp their style.

* Scenarios can be designed where the Fighter's one trick won't work. One, that's a good thing: it means you have to think: ahead of time about how to build the character to minimize the range of encounters to which your one trick won't apply; ahead of time about diversifying your character; or on the spot about what to do now that your one trick has been shut down. Two, sure, and most casters get shut down in antimagic, when bound and/or gagged, etc.

* Fighters are reliant on Wizards - from buffs to BFC, and even magic items. One, traditionally, Wizards were quite reliant on meat shields Fighters. Two, yes, few are more upset than me that Fighters are built so selfishly that they fail to contribute to the group the way buffing casters do. The spirit of Teamwork would be so improved if no such "selfish" classes existed, and everyone was forced to spend their actions and resources helping others. The Fighter can spend his XP teaching the group teamwork tricks, use his actions (and limited resources) to boost attacks / saves, and spend his feats and XP creating items for the group. Three,

* in a 1-on-1 fight, Wizard beats Fighter. Um... I'm going with "that's great, get your PvP *** out of here, and let me get back to fighting monsters with team-oriented players". Ever since the original AU Barbarian, I've been happily in the "Wizard kills Fighter" camp.

* Fighters can't X. Yeah, I'm not a fan of niche protection - give every class the potential to X. Open Locks, Knock spell, and raw damage all allow a character to deal with a locked door. This is a good thing.

* Fighters can't contribute. I hear you. Try Shadowrun, then talk to me about scenes where you can't contribute. So, removing niche protection is a good start towards allowing contribution, IMO; making characters more versatile (as hidden behind a call for more skill points, and a broader class skills list) is a decent second move.

* Wizards can contribute. Um... I view this as a feature, not a bug.

* Wizards can solo adventures. This is a legitimate complaint, but not one about game balance; rather, it's a complaint about table balance. In particular:


This is all a matter of degrees.

In 3.5 a well built martial excels in one very specific type of combat, while a well built caster excels in everything.

Martials don't have nearly enough versatility, casters have far to much.

Like most everything in life, versatility is a very good thing in moderation but a very bad thing in excess.


"Optimize to the table, or get the **** out" is a sentiment I've seen at many real tables.

Forgive the snark in my previous post.

Its a legitimate question though, if you think it is up to the module to enforce balance what is your proposed solution? Build every module so that it goes all out of denying powerful classes the use of their abilities while lobbing soft balls at the low tier class? Or just change the title from "Suitable for 4-6 characters" to something like "Suitable for 4-6 mid tier characters but 1-2 high tier characters and 10-12 low tier characters"?






GURPS, Hero, M&M, H&H, and a few more obscure ones, plus a homebrew or two.

None that I am terribly familiar with unfortunately.

The point buy games I am experienced with do not have anything close to the sort of broken stuff that 3.5 does.

In theory a class based game should be better balanced than a point buy game because the designers have a limited number of options to balance and test but for some reason this seldom seems to actually work out.



I broke point buy with a starting character, you broke 3.5 with an ending character? Hmmm... In 2e, I'd say, well, at least you got a good decade or two of play out of the game before it broke.

I'm betting that you didn't accidentally break the game with a starting power though.

But yeah, if we were talking about 2E I wouldn't have this problem because 2E has slow advancement and doesn't grant full spell-casting abilities of shape-changed forms. In 3.X you level up every 13 fights IIRC, which we can easily blow through in a single long session.




Then the advantage of Names is in that "Ranger / War Shaper 20" means something, whereas "150 point shape shifting combat survivalist" is less well defined.

Clearly defined archetypes are indeed one of the advantages of a class based system. I personally much prefer being able to make the character I actually want to play as an individual rather than an archetype, but YMMV.



Further, I run the game such that all sandbox content is optional. The difference is, if you choose to interact with X, but move so slowly that most of the participants die of old age, let alone complete their actions before you finish your "master plan" to deal with them, then you can't really interact with X in a meaningful way.

Yes, if you run your game on rails time becomes a much bigger concern. I would much prefer a recovery mechanic where I could tell a wider variety of stories without having to shackle the players to a timetable.



Wow. Is this the same party where your Fighter sat in a Force Cage every other battle while you sat and twiddled your thumbs, while the Wizard did nothing to help?

If so, I'mma go back to PLAY WITH BETTER PEOPLE!!!

Unless, of course, all of you agree that successfully competing the module is the only important thing. That "have fun with friends" is just crazy talk. Then, if that's the case, um, I probably shouldn't say what I'm thinking, actually.


Sure is.

But yeah, I agree it is partially a player problem, but having fun and doing the effective thing should not be opposed to each other like that, the optimal strategy for a good game should, imo, be for everyone to work together and coordinate their actions as a team, which is rarely the case in high op D&D.



Oh, I'm familiar with the argument. So, by this logic, all I need to do is find a spell for which I could conceivably use X as a material component, without X having explicitly been given a price, and, by RAW, I can just start pulling X out of my spell component pouch. I'm pretty sure this can be broken far worse than just a few silly divine toenails.

Yeah, its a stupid argument. Still, gaining access to literal divinity is a pretty big accomplishment in the grand scheme of things.



Shenanigans. This "breaks the game". Things have a cost - if you aren't paying it, you're breaking the game.

Regardless of whether it is broken, 3.5 RAW is clear the SLA's never cost XP and there are a plethora of spells and items that grant SLAs.

I agree... but I am really surprised you do, as you seem to be defending high power player, and in my experience 90% of high power play is finding ways to avoid paying costs.

[Talakeal]

The original context of that string of comments was class imbalance being inevitable.

It is inevitable, but not to the same degree as 3.X.

Just look at 4E for example. Balance isn't perfect*, but it is much closer than any other edition of D&D, just like 3.X is much further from every other edition.



*Although as I said earlier, I am not sure what perfect balance would look like, even from a philosophical perspective.

[digiman619]

That is possible. My unique perspective may be causing me to be "part of the problem". However, I'm not convinced that's the case. There are two reasons for this.

First, the problem has never seemed terribly well defined. Or, perhaps, it's that a whole bunch of separate issues have been stuffed under the same umbrella. And "magic does everything", as you put it, is not the same as all of these individual issues. The second is, I don't see most of those issues to be actual, unsolvable problems. In fact, I see some of these "issues" as good things.

* Fighters can't contribute as much as Wizards in combat. Honestly, an übercharger, or a well-buffed Rogue can one-shot things well outside their weight category - what more do people want? This is not an actual problem.
Except blasty wizards are better at this too.

* Fighters are more susceptible to certain things, like Force Cage and Will Saves in combat. And Wizards are more susceptible to certain things, like Fort Saves and HP damage, than Fighters in combat.
That's assuming that they're actually on the field and not sitting back with summons or scry-and-die.

* Fighters don't have an answer to Force Cage, like Wizards do to HP damage. Um, actually, they've got lots of answers.
Really? What anti-force cage tech do fighters have? Especially from their own class features and not spend their limited WBL on?


* Fighters can't contribute as much as Wizards outside of combat. Eh, this one is complex - the lack of rules for many out of combat actions means that much of this if player skills, GM whim, etc - not something where the Wizard has an inherent advantage. The things for which there are rules, custom items of +X to foo can certainly give options, but cut into the Fighter's limited budget. However, the übercharger can just win at combat with their budget, so maybe scaling them back a hair to allow out of combat utility isn't going to really crimp their style.
Additionally, all the things that can conceivably help the fighter keep up with magic is more magic, forcing them to be forever beholden to casters.


* Scenarios can be designed where the Fighter's one trick won't work. One, that's a good thing: it means you have to think: ahead of time about how to build the character to minimize the range of encounters to which your one trick won't apply; ahead of time about diversifying your character; or on the spot about what to do now that your one trick has been shut down. Two, sure, and most casters get shut down in antimagic, when bound and/or gagged, etc.
Being gagged and bound makes you helpless, so they can be CDG'd at whim, so pretty much everyone is boned in that situation. And antimagic field is a 6th level spell with a 10-foot radius. They can make a move action and be fine.

* Fighters are reliant on Wizards - from buffs to BFC, and even magic items. One, traditionally, Wizards were quite reliant on meat shields Fighters. Two, yes, few are more upset than me that Fighters are built so selfishly that they fail to contribute to the group the way buffing casters do. The spirit of Teamwork would be so improved if no such "selfish" classes existed, and everyone was forced to spend their actions and resources helping others. The Fighter can spend his XP teaching the group teamwork tricks, use his actions (and limited resources) to boost attacks / saves, and spend his feats and XP creating items for the group. Three,
Except even back then, they eventually stopped being reliant on the meat shields fighters. Fighters never stop being reliant on casters.

* in a 1-on-1 fight, Wizard beats Fighter. Um... I'm going with "that's great, get your PvP *** out of here, and let me get back to fighting monsters with team-oriented players". Ever since the original AU Barbarian, I've been happily in the "Wizard kills Fighter" camp.
That's not "My character can beat your character" and more "two clerics are more effective than a cleric and a fighter"

* Fighters can't X. Yeah, I'm not a fan of niche protection - give every class the potential to X. Open Locks, Knock spell, and raw damage all allow a character to deal with a locked door. This is a good thing.
Except that every milestone of player power is because of the caster. No one is allowed to fly until the wizard hits 5th (fly), no one is allowed to teleport until 7th (dimension door), no one is allowed to go to other planes until the wizard hits 9th (plane shift). Etc.

* Wizards can contribute. Um... I view this as a feature, not a bug.
The problem is that they can contribute their job and everyone else's.

* Wizards can solo adventures. This is a legitimate complaint, but not one about game balance; rather, it's a complaint about table balance. In particular:
It is explicitly about balance; the fact that it is relatively easy to make a character of Class A that can solo adventures built for 4 characters and that it is impossible for Class B to do, and and the game purports that A and B are on par with each other, there is a problem.


This implies two things: one, that the purpose of the game is to beat the module; two, that you are challenging yourself in a way that is detrimental to the purpose of the game.

Let's throw that away.

IMO, the purpose of the game is to have fun with friends. Player skill is a thing. With perfectly mechanically balanced characters, some players will dominate due to greater player skill. Happily, there exist "hard mode" characters for them to play. Certain other players will struggle due to lack of player skills. Happily, there exist OP builds for them to play.

Now, with the right character for each player, the group can have fun, with everyone contributing to the successful completion of the module.

:smallbiggrin:
Do you not remember a thread you made about "hard mode" where a dozen other people tried to get it through your skull that "hard mode" is not really a thing in RPGs? Because that hasn't become a thing since then.


Only if the Wizard knows different spells.
Which he is guaranteed to have as he gets free spells from level up. Try again.


I absolutely can and have designed games that allow players to take handicaps (in either direction).
And how many of them are cooperative?


Always? No, "have the Rogue pick the lock" is the optimal choice. "Have the Rogue (or übercharger) kill the monster" is the optimal choice. Magic is not always the optimal choice.
The difference is that there is nothing that they can do that a wizard can't do at a minimal cost as well or better than the martial.

[Milo v3]

With the PVP thing, it's important to remember that in games where NPCs are statted up using the same mechanics as players, the issues that you're treating as just a PVP thing is actually a PVE thing. According to the rules for XP and encounters, a level 20 wizard is just as capable as a level 20 fighter, even though the mages can do things like summon level 20 fighters to do their bidding....

[Quertus]

This is all a matter of degrees.

In 3.5 a well built martial excels in one very specific type of combat, while a well built caster excels in everything.

Martials don't have nearly enough versatility, casters have far to much.

Like most everything in life, versatility is a very good thing in moderation but a very bad thing in excess.

More "can excel at anything" than actually does excel at everything. And, as I recall, there was a thread asking for Batman wizard sightings in actual play that came up empty.

And I'm not sure I agree with the notion that there there can be such a thing as too much versatility.


Forgive the snark in my previous post.

Its a legitimate question though, if you think it is up to the module to enforce balance what is your proposed solution? Build every module so that it goes all out of denying powerful classes the use of their abilities while lobbing soft balls at the low tier class? Or just change the title from "Suitable for 4-6 characters" to something like "Suitable for 4-6 mid tier characters but 1-2 high tier characters and 10-12 low tier characters"?

Hmmm... I clearly haven't communicated this well. Probably because I'm conflating several things, much like most people do in these threads.

For simplicity, let's ignore some of what I've said, and focus on the part I believe is most important: it's up to the group to enforce balance to the group. Which should include balance to the module.

If a single character can solo the module, that character is not balanced to the module, and is also not balanced to the group, unless the entire group consists of characters who could solo the module.

If a character is useless in the module (the DPS Rogue or Diplomancer running through Necrophilia on Bone Hill), then they are not balanced to the module, even if they would otherwise be balanced to the party.

For completeness, let me just say, I have yet to see a module where a Wizard trying to solo it wouldn't run out of spells, barring shenanigans. Or, in rare cases, the player cheating, having read through the module and picked the perfect loadout might succeed. But usually not.

I have, however, seen modules where a single perfect stealth build (Dark Whisper Gnome Rogue and Pixie / Dark Petal Rogue I'm looking at you) technically could solo the module, albeit in a horribly unfun "and then I skip every single encounter / obstacle" way.


None that I am terribly familiar with unfortunately.

The point buy games I am experienced with do not have anything close to the sort of broken stuff that 3.5 does.

In theory a class based game should be better balanced than a point buy game because the designers have a limited number of options to balance and test but for some reason this seldom seems to actually work out.

With which point buy systems are you familiar?


I'm betting that you didn't accidentally break the game with a starting power though.

Um, define "starting power". Because I think you'll lose that bet.


Clearly defined archetypes are indeed one of the advantages of a class based system. I personally much prefer being able to make the character I actually want to play as an individual rather than an archetype, but YMMV.

Yes, but I can rarely create the character I want to play in point buy, either. :smallfrown:


Yes, if you run your game on rails time becomes a much bigger concern. I would much prefer a recovery mechanic where I could tell a wider variety of stories without having to shackle the players to a timetable.

Wait, what? How did you get Timetable = rails?


Sure is.

:smalleek:


But yeah, I agree it is partially a player problem, but having fun and doing the effective thing should not be opposed to each other like that, the optimal strategy for a good game should, imo, be for everyone to work together and coordinate their actions as a team, which is rarely the case in high op D&D.

The optimal solution for winning most games is to pull out a gun and shoot the opponent. Or poison them beforehand. Or blackmail them into losing. Or cheat.

Optimal and fun have never really been friends.


I agree... but I am really surprised you do, as you seem to be defending high power player, and in my experience 90% of high power play is finding ways to avoid paying costs.

As I've said, I'm quite glad that 3e allows the range of play from CoC "by the elder gods, we're all gonna die" to BDH "We waded through them like they were humans" from the same encounter. Personally, I prefer things more on the BDH side - "We waded through them like they were humans" was the actual party slogan from what was probably my favorite 3e party.

I'm sure several of those characters wouldn't have been valid at some tables - IIRC, one used 3rd party materials, another was extra cheese with a side of cheese. But so what? They were balanced against each other (ie, everyone got to both contribute and shine in acceptable measure) and against the module (ie, no single character was either useless or capable of soloing the module). And no shenanigans - no breaking the fundamental underpinnings of costs, action economy, etc - were required.


Except blasty wizards are better at this too.

The Fighter kills it dead in one hit, the blasty wizard kills it dead twice over in one hit? I'm not really seeing how that makes a difference.

My point is, you can clearly create a character who can contribute sufficiently in combat, using any chassis.

Therefore, to make the game fun, one can create a character off any chassis at the correct (combat) power level for the group.


Additionally, all the things that can conceivably help the fighter keep up with magic is more magic, forcing them to be forever beholden to casters.

And this is a good thing. Now, if we could just make Fighters necessary, too.


Except that every milestone of player power is because of the caster. No one is allowed to fly until the wizard hits 5th (fly), no one is allowed to teleport until 7th (dimension door), no one is allowed to go to other planes until the wizard hits 9th (plane shift). Etc.

Um, what? The Rogue can't open locks until the Wizard gets Knock at 3rd? My Avorial or Pixie can't fly until 5th? My commoner can't get sucked through a gate until 9th?


The problem is that they can contribute their job and everyone else's.

That implies that they have a "job". Sounds like orc mischief niche protection to me.


.Do you not remember a thread you made about "hard mode" where a dozen other people tried to get it through your skull that "hard mode" is not really a thing in RPGs? Because that hasn't become a thing since then.

I do have a hard head, true, but it's kinda hard for people to disprove a thing when I'm staring at it. It's been a thing since forever. I'm still confused why people want to insist it isn't.


Which he is guaranteed to have as he gets free spells from level up. Try again.

Fair enough (in 3e, at least - this thread is in the general role-playing forum, after all).


And how many of them are cooperative?

Point. Few of them are strictly cooperative. But, it is still a non-zero number. So it can be done.

[2D8HP]

...GURPS, Hero, M&M, H&H, and a few more obscure ones, plus a homebrew or two...
I made some GURPS PC's long ago, and I bought quite a few GURPS "World books" over the years, and I've played Champions (the first HERO system game) which was once very popular, so I have some familiarity with that. M&M I assume stands for Mutants & Masterminds which I thought was a "D20" comic-book superhero game, I'm surprised to learn that it's point-buy, I believe that it has a Fantasy supplement, so it seems that those who want a "classless" version of 3.5 D&D (for whatever damn fool reason) should look at that. H&H I'm guessing stands for the Hideouts & Hoodlums RPG, yet another superhero game?

By Lolth's bright blue panties why so many superheroes?


...If a character is useless in the module (the DPS Rogue or Diplomancer running through Necrophilia on Bone Hill...

...I have, however, seen modules where a single perfect stealth build (Dark Whisper Gnome Rogue and Pixie / Dark Petal Rogue I'm looking at you) technically could solo the module, albeit in a horribly unfun "and then I skip every single encounter / obstacle" way..
How the Sam Hell do you remember all these disperate classes?


.. as I've said, I'm quite glad that 3e allows the range of play from CoC "by the elder gods, we're all gonna die" to BDH "We waded through them like they were humans" from the same encounter. Personally, I prefer things more on the BDH side - "We waded through them like they were humans" was the actual party slogan from what was probably my favorite 3e party.
..
CoC = Call of Cthullu (my second favorite RPG to GM), BDH = ???

"Big dumb heroes" maybe?

While I prefered playing TD&D, RuneQuest, and Traveller, I liked Call of Cthullu but the superhero games Villians & Vigilantes, and Champions weren't for me, but that may be because I wasn't ready to move on from Swords & Sorcery yet, while most oc the rest of my circle had played more Dungeons & Dragons (with bits of All the World's Monster's, and Arduin) than me, and was ready to move on (why Crom why?!)

As to the thread topic (sort of), in the TD&D I played we never got to high enough levels that "caster superiority" happened among PC's (though the were super powerful NPC Magic Users), what levels does "caster superiority" become an issue in 3.5 WD&D?

[Mutazoia]

Being gagged and bound makes you helpless, so they can be CDG'd at whim, so pretty much everyone is boned in that situation. And antimagic field is a 6th level spell with a 10-foot radius. They can make a move action and be fine.

Except (in 3.X at least), casters can have the Silent Spell and Still spell meta magic feats, allowing them to still be able to cast, even while bound and gagged.....

I'm having trouble finding a feat that allows a martial character to swing a sword while bound and gagged....

[Talakeal]

And I'm not sure I agree with the notion that there there can be such a thing as too much versatility.

You have made that abundantly clear in multiple threads, and I have repeatedly stated that such may work for you, but I have no interest in playing a game where all of the PCs are the same and my character has no weaknesses to define them.


With which point buy systems are you familiar?

The various WoD games are the only systems other than D&D which I know well, I spend most of my time playing homebrew systems, either mine or someone else's.

I have a passing familiarity with Mutants and Masterminds, Shadowrun, Exalted, Riddle of Steel, WHFRP, several iterations of Star Wars and LoTR games, and Call of Cthulhu, but I would need to do some refresher reading before I got into a serious crunch discussion about any of them as it has been several years since I played any of them seriously.


Um, define "starting power". Because I think you'll lose that bet.

Yeah, well it really depends on what game it was and the specifics of the character involved, but I have never seen an RPG character that was broken out of the gate outside of World of Synnibar or FATAL.


Yes, but I can rarely create the character I want to play in point buy, either. :smallfrown:

That's pretty weird.

Is it just a limit of DMs not letting you play the character you want or the character being too high powered for the system to handle, or do you want to play something really weird and esoteric?

I have trouble picturing a character you couldn't make in, say Mutants and Masterminds, and I personally have never encountered a fictional character that I couldn't make in my own Heart of Darkness system outside of those whose abilities are so ill defined that they are virtually incomprehensible.


Wait, what? How did you get Timetable = rails?

Because you rely on your players only doing things where they have a countdown hanging over their heads to balance the game. If they want to kick back and say, explore a tomb that has been abandoned for seven thousand years, how exactly are you going to stop them from taking an eight hour rest every few rooms? If you have villains constantly scheming to destroy them and time pressure is so tight that sleeping for a few extra days out of the month means certain doom, what are you going to do if the party decides to take a season off adventuring to help their parents on the farm?


The optimal solution for winning most games is to pull out a gun and shoot the opponent. Or poison them beforehand. Or blackmail them into losing. Or cheat.

Optimal and fun have never really been friends.

Hyperbole much?

A well made team game allows everyone to contribute and rewards cooperation and diversity.

In 3.5 you are literally better off telling the low tier characters to stay home and keeping their share of the loot and XP for yourself more often than not.

[Satinavian]

First, the problem has never seemed terribly well defined. Or, perhaps, it's that a whole bunch of separate issues have been stuffed under the same umbrella. And "magic does everything", as you put it, is not the same as all of these individual issues. The second is, I don't see most of those issues to be actual, unsolvable problems. In fact, I see some of these "issues" as good things.It was never about all those problems not being solvable. It was about all possible solutions going against at least one playstyle preference and therefore never going to get implemented.


* Fighters are reliant on Wizards - from buffs to BFC, and even magic items. One, traditionally, Wizards were quite reliant on meat shields Fighters.No, wizards really are not reliant on meat shield fighters. That is what undead/constructs/summons/hirelings are for. Even if we ignore all of those options, another fullcaster would be better at this job and could ccontribute more otherwise. Someone like a cleric or druid could without even building for that duty. "Wizards need fighters too" really boils down to nothing but "two PCs are better than one, even if one of the two happens to be a fighter"

* Fighters can't contribute. I hear you. Try Shadowrun, then talk to me about scenes where you can't contribute. So, removing niche protection is a good start towards allowing contribution, IMO; making characters more versatile (as hidden behind a call for more skill points, and a broader class skills list) is a decent second move.Personally i like Shadowrun more than D&D. While it is also an old system with lots of baggage and its fair share of unbalanced or wonky rules it is actually better at letting everyone contribute. Also i don't mind half an hour solo actions where one character gets the spotlight. At least if it is not always the same character.

This cuts both ways. So, do you think it is valid for someone to have a "you think you can contribute without magic?" sentiment? Otherwise, that's on those people for being annoyed.The semantics of this answer eludes me. Please explain again.

That misses the point. The point is, it's possible to not have this problem, and I've seen it in multiple groups.I know it is possible to not have this problem. That doesn't help those who do at all.

Those with the problem should be really interested in finding out from those who don't how to avoid the problem.So, what can they learn from your examples ?

Quertus : "If you play a full caster really tactically inept and thus hold back by using his powers only to a fraction of its potential, it is possible to not overshadow everyone else"

Hmmm ... still sounds like it is easier to just nerf wizards if they overshadow other PCs in your group.

Armus : "You can have fun with a mechanically really weak character if you have both ability and opportunity to contribute with player skill instead"

Hmmm ... that won't make the players feeling overshadowed any more happy as they obviously don't have enough player skill to compensate existing lack of character ability.

And my contention is, that's on those with good system mastery for allowing things to get there.And the most obvious way for those with system mastery to forbid such imbalance is nerfing full casters, especcially wizards.


I broke point buy with a starting character, you broke 3.5 with an ending character?Point buy usually doesn't really distinguish between starting and ending characters. Sure, if you only take a small fraction of existing abilities into account, it is less possible to break a system.

Overall neither point buy nor levelling is balanced. Everyone can write an unbalanced power/feat/class ability irregardless how the overall system works. Pointbuy makes it easier to balance power to power as class abilities always come with lots of implicite opportunity costs for taking the rest of the class package. But pointbuy also tends to allow more combinations and balancing possible synergies is tricky.

On average both concepts probably produce roughly the same level of balance. But pointbuy allows more character variability for the same amount of rules so i tend to prefer it as i really like hybrids or unconventional approaches to something.

[Darth Ultron]

it's up to the group to enforce balance to the group.

While this is a nice idea, I don't think it is possible. If it was, there would not be a problem. The thing is the players can't, or often won't, balance the game...and this is only worse in a game of ''all players, but one player is called dm sometimes.'' The simple reason is the average player does not really have deep game knowledge, game experience, game balance knowledge and so forth. The vast majority of player only know enough about the game to basically play and play their character. The worse reason is that as the players have a character invested in the game, they can't be trusted to make the right call or judgment. If they stand to benefit, there is a chance they might always vote the way that is good for them or gives them something.

The DM is the only one that can balance the game.

[Max_Killjoy]

It is inevitable, but not to the same degree as 3.X.

Just look at 4E for example. Balance isn't perfect*, but it is much closer than any other edition of D&D, just like 3.X is much further from every other edition.



*Although as I said earlier, I am not sure what perfect balance would look like, even from a philosophical perspective.


IMO perfect balance is perfectly hypothetical, as different tables and different campaigns will emphasize different things, and different players will be happy with different outcomes.

The only thing a game system can do is avoid is avoid gross inherent imbalance.


4th Ed didn't have balance, it had a sort of blandness, where almost everything felt like serial refluffling of the same mechanics over and over again.

[CharonsHelper]

4th Ed didn't have balance, it had a sort of blandness, where almost everything felt like serial refluffling of the same mechanics over and over again.

While I agree with your sentiment - 4e did have very solid balance. It just had balance through symmetry - which is the easiest way to balance but (IMO) the most boring way, especially in a long-term co-op sort of game like a TTRPG.

[Cluedrew]

On 4e: How was 4e not balanced? You are the first person I have heard to make that claim, most people just say it went to far to achieve that goal.

And Swordsage.

[Max_Killjoy]

On 4e: How was 4e not balanced? You are the first person I have heard to make that claim, most people just say it went to far to achieve that goal.


Is it really balance if it's the same thing over and over with different "paintjobs"?

[CharonsHelper]

Is it really balance if it's the same thing over and over with different "paintjobs"?

Yes.

It's just balanced in the same way that Chess or Go are balanced.

I think you're requiring there to be significant asymmetry to qualify which isn't how anyone else I know of defines it.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes.

It's just balanced in the same way that Chess or Go are balanced.

I think you're requiring there to be significant asymmetry to qualify which isn't how anyone else I know of defines it.

For an RPG, my personal requirements include variations and options for a broad range of characters... that is, the R ("role") in RPG is meaningful. A game that makes all "sides" exactly the same like Chess or Go is teetering on the edge of "not really an RPG" in my personal evaluation.

[Tanarii]

Is it really balance if it's the same thing over and over with different "paintjobs"?
Ah, the standard complete misrepresentation of 4e powers.

Edit: of course, claiming that 4e was 'balanced' because Powers is also a misrepresentation. 4e was not balanced. It was just imbalanced in different places from previous editions.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ah, the standard complete misrepresentation of 4e powers.


Well, that's how they read to me -- a lot of reskinned repeats of the same basic variations.

I was really hoping that 4e would be a fundamental improvement because of how it was presented, but it just turned out to be bad in different ways. It very much felt like an attempt to do a tabletop version of an MMO (and no, that's not based on reviews, I hadn't seen anyone else's comment along those lines when I reached that conclusion on my own).

[Quertus]

Hideouts & Hoodlums RPG, yet another superhero game?

By Lolth's bright blue panties why so many superheroes?

Heroes and Heroines. And, yes, superheroes. Why? Because that's what the people I knew owned. I once had the goal to play every RPG system I could, and to game with every group I could. I wanted to optimize my understanding of RPGs.

Although Hero and GURPS were generic, and I played modern and Fantasy games, not superhero ones. (or maybe "and superhero ones" in the case of Hero? I can't remember...)


How the Sam Hell do you remember all these disperate classes?

Did I remember something? Power of Names again, I guess.


CoC = Call of Cthullu (my second favorite RPG to GM), BDH = ???

"Big dumb heroes" maybe?

Big **** Heroes, yes. More like playing the Cthulhu monsters end of the game. :smallbiggrin:


As to the thread topic (sort of), in the TD&D I played we never got to high enough levels that "caster superiority" happened among PC's (though the were super powerful NPC Magic Users), what levels does "caster superiority" become an issue in 3.5 WD&D?

Never, so long as you're willing to tone down the Wizard (or its player is inept, as I've seen far, far too often), or add cheese to the Fighter to keep up.

Never, so long as the group balances to the group.

As soon as anyone can purchase a Candle of Invocation, anyone is infinitely unbalanced in groups with nothing to stop it.

Or what level does Pun-Pun come online again?

But, for the question you were asking... hmmm... some say Druid manages it from level 1. Give me a liberal enough GM, and I could manage it with a Cleric from level 1, too. But that's just "I (or, rather, my minions) fight better than a poorly optimized Fighter". As soon as the Fighter gets any money for armor, even the poorly optimized Fighter could tank better than the wolf, and survive enemy turning attempts better than my undead. And a well optimized Fighter puts the wolf to shame.


Except (in 3.X at least), casters can have the Silent Spell and Still spell meta magic feats, allowing them to still be able to cast, even while bound and gagged.....

I'm having trouble finding a feat that allows a martial character to swing a sword while bound and gagged....

Razor ring. Grappling. Monk.

If it were just bound, I'd add throat darts and biting.

Just gagged, well, that rarely impedes a Fighter.


You have made that abundantly clear in multiple threads, and I have repeatedly stated that such may work for you, but I have no interest in playing a game where all of the PCs are the same and my character has no weaknesses to define them.

Do you consider the differences between picking the lock, casting Knock, and chopping the door down with an axe to insufficiently define a character? :smallconfused:

Note that these differences all have their weaknesses (chance of failure (& slow, if taking a 20), finite resources, and loud (& slow?), respectively)


The various WoD games are the only systems other than D&D which I know well, I spend most of my time playing homebrew systems, either mine or someone else's.

The strict 3/5/7 5/9/13 layout of WoD makes me not consider it a point buy system.

There's several things a starting character could take in WoD to be extremely good or extremely bad, but for broken? How about the "cannot be harmed except by..." merit? Available to a starting character.


That's pretty weird.

Is it just a limit of DMs not letting you play the character you want or the character being too high powered for the system to handle, or do you want to play something really weird and esoteric?

I have trouble picturing a character you couldn't make in, say Mutants and Masterminds, and I personally have never encountered a fictional character that I couldn't make in my own Heart of Darkness system outside of those whose abilities are so ill defined that they are virtually incomprehensible.

Well, let's start with low-hanging fruit: try converting a D&D Wizard into such systems, and making it even remotely balanced with the party. I find it balanced generally at about 10x the points everyone else had.

Or, even lower hanging fruit: try duplicating Prestidigitation in a point buy system. Just how many points will that eat up? Try and tell me with a straight face that it'll be worth it.

IME, many systems aren't good for running shape shifters, or things that don't sleep, or things that lack brains, or even things with abnormal appendages. Power manipulation powers, power duplication powers, time manipulation powers, and immunities are often handled poorly (if at all). And heaven forbid you try to price flaws, like "can only cast memorized spells" or "ability requires a check to succeed, and failure may accidentally summon a demon".

Now imagine I'm trying to create a character that isn't just duplicating already published material, but actually has whole-cloth systems and abilities.


Because you rely on your players only doing things where they have a countdown hanging over their heads to balance the game. If they want to kick back and say, explore a tomb that has been abandoned for seven thousand years, how exactly are you going to stop them from taking an eight hour rest every few rooms? If you have villains constantly scheming to destroy them and time pressure is so tight that sleeping for a few extra days out of the month means certain doom, what are you going to do if the party decides to take a season off adventuring to help their parents on the farm?

Again, clearly, our games differ. What you described involves sleeping for years in my games.

And the "villains" rarely even know the PCs exist until the PCs change that fact. But the Duke has his plot, his (not necessarily known to him) timetable, and the PCs suffering from narcolepsy isn't going to magically change that. Now, the PC's actions may well change that timeline - I've had several PCs give the "BBEG" exactly what he needed way ahead of schedule, for example.

But, in the case of exploring the truly abandoned ruins? Hmmm... I suppose I'd have the players define their technique, ask them how they keep from starving to death, narrate any major hindrances, and sum up what they find after how long.


Hyperbole much?

No, that really is the optimal way to win an opposed match. Kill your opponent before the match, and you will never be beaten.


A well made team game allows everyone to contribute and rewards cooperation and diversity.

Here, we aggressively agree! :smallbiggrin:

I just say that "allowing everyone to contribute" means high versatility, no hard niche protection. And diversity through Open Lock vs Knock vs an axe.


In 3.5 you are literally better off telling the low tier characters to stay home and keeping their share of the loot and XP for yourself more often than not.

Funny, that's what the muggles keep telling my Wizards. Only that it's my Wizards who should stay at home, if only the Muggles had some way to get from place to place.

I really would love to play in a group where I could play a competent Wizard without risking overshadowing the party. I miss 2e Fighter superiority.


It was never about all those problems not being solvable. It was about all possible solutions going against at least one playstyle preference and therefore never going to get implemented.

Hahaha - oh deity of choice, "caster > mundane" is really just a play style problem?

That... makes so much sense, actually.


No, wizards really are not reliant on meat shield fighters. That is what undead/constructs/summons/hirelings are for. Even if we ignore all of those options, another fullcaster would be better at this job and could ccontribute more otherwise. Someone like a cleric or druid could without even building for that duty. "Wizards need fighters too" really boils down to nothing but "two PCs are better than one, even if one of the two happens to be a fighter"

I mean, it is nice to play an edition of D&D where the average party doesn't look like it was ripped straight out of Tolkien - double-digit fighters, one Thief, and me playing a Wizard.

Still, I'm guessing those with such sentiment never played with an übercharger. Or a competent Rogue.



Personally i like Shadowrun more than D&D. While it is also an old system with lots of baggage and its fair share of unbalanced or wonky rules it is actually better at letting everyone contribute. Also i don't mind half an hour solo actions where one character gets the spotlight. At least if it is not always the same character.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty about Shadowrun I enjoyed. And it absolutely does guarantee spotlight sharing - it just does so the same way 4e D&D guaranteed balance (by which I mean, in the worst way possible, sacrificing everything else in the process). Although I really need to give 4e a second chance.

Point is, style wise, unlike you, I am no longer willing to spend (x-1)/x of the time just twiddling my thumbs in a game. I prefer games that heavily favor contribution over ones that enforce spotlight time. Call it what you will, I think of it as teamwork - the difference between playing together and playing next to each other.



The semantics of this answer eludes me. Please explain again.

... I lack context here. I'll have to research it later.



I know it is possible to not have this problem. That doesn't help those who do at all.
So, what can they learn from your examples ?

Quertus : "If you play a full caster really tactically inept and thus hold back by using his powers only to a fraction of its potential, it is possible to not overshadow everyone else"

Hmmm ... still sounds like it is easier to just nerf wizards if they overshadow other PCs in your group.

Armus : "You can have fun with a mechanically really weak character if you have both ability and opportunity to contribute with player skill instead"

Hmmm ... that won't make the players feeling overshadowed any more happy as they obviously don't have enough player skill to compensate existing lack of character ability.

Ouch. Point. The characters I prefer to talk about are not exactly the paragons of such a solution. Still, wisdom can be extracted, even from their poor example.

Quertus is, indeed, me trying to roleplay some of the terrible players I've seen, who are still inept after playing the game for years or even decades. And he fails to match their ineptitude, as even he doesn't consider buffing the enemy a good plan.

A player could choose to act like a noob to balance a powerful Wizard, yes. But, to generalize, they could also choose to focus on Fire magic (something others have suggested forcing on the Wizard for balance), or properly buff the party, or spend all their money on really cool constructs (Quertus keeps his at home, to not risk their destruction in battle), or buy cool items rather than optimal ones, or pull a Duncan and never have the right spell memorized, or...

Armus runs on player skill. Yup. This is an encouragement for the more skilled players to play Armus, and the less skilled players to play stronger builds, until party symmetry is reached. And, IMO, for less skilled players to develop those player skills.



And the most obvious way for those with system mastery to forbid such imbalance is nerfing full casters, especcially wizards.

You know, ignoring D&D for a moment, I'd have to say, the most obvious answer is a handicap. You use the full golf bag, I'll just use my driver. Or, you know, the way golf actually does it, with a numeric handicap.

To translate that to D&D, then, the most obvious solution would be to give the stronger build to the noob, or give the noob more levels.

Experience (backed by stories on the Playground) says that the noob will still under-perform. I hate being that noob under a GM who doesn't get it, and only sees stats, not contribution. So that isn't enough of a solution for the noob, but it certainly solves "caster > mundane".

I haven't had experience with or heard stories about giving the underperformer more levels or more wealth. Actually... I take that back. I played an item crafter who did just that. And it worked... OK I guess. I was able, as a player, to lessen imbalance to a tolerable level, IMO.


While this is a nice idea, I don't think it is possible. If it was, there would not be a problem.

It is possible, and, yes, in groups where it happens, you're right, there is not a problem.


The thing is the players can't, or often won't, balance the game...and this is only worse in a game of ''all players, but one player is called dm sometimes.'' The simple reason is the average player does not really have deep game knowledge, game experience, game balance knowledge and so forth. The vast majority of player only know enough about the game to basically play and play their character. The worse reason is that as the players have a character invested in the game, they can't be trusted to make the right call or judgment. If they stand to benefit, there is a chance they might always vote the way that is good for them or gives them something.

The DM is the only one that can balance the game.

Try playing a game with a rotating GM. In that scenario (barring ties for greatest system mastery), (x-1)/x of the time, the GM is not the one with greatest system mastery.

The player having a character is one of the reasons that they're best suited to the job - they know when they're not having fun, and are more likely to understand why. So they are best suited to identify the problem.

But, you're right, they're not infallible, and greed is a thing. This is why it's not "a player" but "the group" that is optimal for fixing problems with the group.

[Cosi]

It's like the others are like toy robots that keep walking into a wall. The rule says X, they do X, even if it is just walking right into the wall again and again. Me, I don't even get near the wall and change things..oh, about a mile away from that wall.

Two things:

1. No one in this thread is against house rules. What people are against is your insistence that the DM should make ad hoc modifications to the rules because he thinks it will make the game more fun.
2. This thread is trying to figure out how you would make a (D&D-like) game that didn't have problems with caster/mundane imbalance. While your solution of "the DM fudges things dynamically" may solve the problem at your table, it's not a system level solution.


Still, I think it is almost unanimous amongst the community which classes rank where on the power scale, and when module after module has the same problems I don't think it is quite fair to blame the modules for the imbalance.

I don't see how this follows at all. Are the classes people think of as broken also consistent in their behavior?


Let us say there is a system where everything on your list is a power source. So you can be good by being sufficiently smart or charming or any other. So lets say you build you "strong or charming or smart or clever and still magical" character. Compared to the strong and charming and smart and clever but not magical, it might actually be underpowered. A character that is just smart will probably fall behind on that is (equally) smart and also strong. One that is magical and clever might fall behind on that is smart, strong and charming.

You're missing the point. The problem with caster/mundane imbalance isn't at low levels, it's at high levels. Mundane characters have a power ceiling, generally around "what a peak human could plausibly do". That's inherent to the concept, because otherwise "mundane" doesn't actually mean anything. But that very limitation means that eventually, you will find yourself in a situation where you have all the mundane abilities your concept allows, and you still have to pick new abilities. At that point either you stop being mundane, or the guy who is "like you, but also with magic" eventually picks up all the abilities you have plus some magic.

Maybe a mechanical example helps? Suppose, for simplicity's sake, that the system currently works like things:

1. There are 10 mundane abilities and 20 magical abilities.
2. Each character gets one ability per level.
3. Mundane and magical abilities are of equal value.
4. Mundane characters can't take magical abilities (or perhaps they can, but you don't want to).

The problem is (hopefully) obvious -- your mundane character runs out of abilities at 10th level, but my mage doesn't. Your solution is basically that we write some additional mundane abilities, which isn't necessarily terrible, but clearly doesn't solve anything in any real sense. And, of course, many of the simplifying assumptions we made aren't actually true. Characters get more than one ability per level, and mundane abilities are conceptually less powerful than magical ones. Not mechanically, conceptually. "Stuff you could imagine Captain America doing" is simply less good than "stuff you could imagine Doctor Strange doing".


There is of course there is one assumption here that D&D 3.5 violates entirely. And that is that that each power source counts equally. Their limitations may be different, they take drastically different forms, but I think you should be able to get significant things done with each. And that is where D&D fails. Fixing that is the first step to making magic and not magic meet.

But the power sources aren't equal. They're really obviously not equal. You can constrain things so that you stop at or below the ceiling of mundane power sources, but "fire magic" is simply able to do more and better things than "being very strong".


Knock is better in that it is absolute. Knock doesn't care about how skilled you are at Picking Locks. Knock doesn't really care how difficult the lock is to pick.

Sure, but ultimately irrelevant. Different approaches to different problems are going to have different effects and care about different things. cloudkill doesn't care how big your AC is. Flurry of Blows doesn't care how much spell resistance you have. Sneak Attack doesn't care what your Fortitude save is. And so on. It is not inherently impossible for different approaches to be balanced.


Unlike a rogue-type, a wizard merely needs to decide, at some point, to pick up knock, and they'll always be just as able to open any particular lock as the rogue will. They won't have to devote skill points to it, or particularly try to maintain it, unlike the rogue. They'll also be able to do loads of other things, if they wish, and still come back to knock.

So what? Just because you always have an option doesn't make that option imbalanced. A Wizard that learns burning hands will always have burning hands as an option. And I don't think it's really fair to say that the Rogue "has to keep investing in it" -- Open Lock is still a cost of "one skill" for the whole game.


But at the end of the day, by way the game was designed, it is something that magic can do that a mundane never can: open any lock without any effort.

Again, so what? Mundanes have the ability to do something magic can never do -- open more than N locks in a day where N is the number of spell slots they have of 2nd level or higher. They're different abilities. They should be different. What exactly do you want here? For knock to work exactly like Open Lock? For knock to not exist? For knock to be a really big bonus to Open Lock checks? All of those seem bad because they all reduce the variety of solutions that exist. That makes the game less interesting.


This is absolutely true- however, consider, that this means the balance is maintained not because a Wizard cannot do the rogue's job, but because the wizard recognizes that they don't need to.

You're still looking at this wrong. You're acting like "balance" is purely about effect. It's not. It's also about cost. The costs of knock are real and significant -- you lose a casting of a very powerful offensive spell. That's not trivial. What you describe as "the Wizard recognizing that he doesn't need to" is actually "the Wizard recognizing that the Rogue has comparative advantage in solving this problem" which is a good thing. The fact that sometimes it will be correct to have the Wizard cast knock and sometimes it will be correct to have the Rogue roll Open Lock is a good thing.

Also, if multiple classes can solve a problem, it means there are less constraints on party design, which is another good thing.


The rogue should be roguing because they are absolutely better than the wizard at it, and the wizard isn't choosing to not step in and do their job for them.

No. That makes the game boring. You shouldn't have a setup where there are "Rogue Problems" that you point the Rogue at and "Wizard Problems" that you point the Wizard at. You should have a setup where there are "Problems" where several (if not all) of the members of the group have some kind of relevant ability and the group has to decide which is most cost-effective. Should the infiltrate the castle using the Bard's social contacts, or the Wizard's teleportation magic? Should they use the Fighter's soldiers as labor to fortify the pass, or the Druid's wall of stone? Things like that. If the game is just matching party members to problems, you've lost any semblance of actual strategy and you should start over.


But he can prepare it when he knows he will likely need it.

Sure. The Wizard's effectiveness is a function of information, while the Rogue's is largely constant. But that's a good thing. It means that the characters respond differently to different challenges, and a DM can compensate for one player over or under performing appropriately. If the Wizard relies on information to make good decisions, the DM can help out a poor Wizard player by giving the player good information ("the catacombs are full of zombies").


Encounters don't happen as series of random events without prior information. The way wizards can prepare from all the spells in their book allows them to be nearly as effective as if they could choose them spontanously if they make good informed guesses. And if the guesses didn't work, there is the option to retreat and prepare something else. And this even ignores divination to prepare the right stuff as some people use.

"Good information" is not nearly as valuable as you seem to think. Not only are the penalties for missing quite bad (ray of stupidity wins against animals, but is close to useless if your enemies have more than 3 INT), but the rewards aren't that large. It information allows you to narrow the field by half, that's the equivalent of someone else choosing twice as many abilities -- and that assumes you have the same lists, and they don't have other advantages (e.g. the Beguiler). If people are using divinations, that's just spending resources to spend future resources more effectively, a trade that is not in principal unbalanced.


For knock specifically, it is usually not a good choice at level 3 but you won't really miss the web/glitterdust at level 13 and it is still effective against high level locks.

Well, if the ability is balanced at low levels, then becomes imbalanced at high levels, isn't that potentially an indication that Rogues should be getting more high level utility abilities?


But even at level three, if the wizard has knock in the book, the group can get through the well locked and really sturdy door with at most another day rest where otherwise they might need to get back to town and pay some high level rogue hireling. That is a power that is there just from the spell sitting in the spelbook.

That sounds great! The party was able to solve a problem with their abilities. How is this a loss to you?


Three, it has occurred to me to add to me elsewhere posted thoughts on differences between gaming sub-communities; again IMO, the D&D sub-community may still suffer for a lingering perception that they should be able to write up a character and sit down at any table anywhere playing that version of D&D, and use that character without concern or modification (level differences aside), which is related to the repeatedly seen (sometimes implied, sometimes overt), "It worked at my table, if it wouldn't work at your table you're doing something wrong" or "we never had that problem in our games, if you had that problem then you're doing something wrong".

Character portability is one of the biggest advantages of using a single ruleset.


It may not cost daily resources, but it does cost build resources: skill points, gp for theives' tools, and possibly feats. What's worse about it is that if you built a rouge to be the greatest lockpick possible (Halfling Rogue 3, 20 DEX,(+5), max ranks (+6), masterwork tools (+2) Skill Focus (+3), Nimble Fingers (+2); total +18), he will still be outperforned by knock when it comes online (even if he Takes 20, he can't open an Amazing (DC 40) lock, but knock can).

And knock can't open two Very Simple locks in a row, while he can.


While this is a nice idea, I don't think it is possible. If it was, there would not be a problem. The thing is the players can't, or often won't, balance the game...and this is only worse in a game of ''all players, but one player is called dm sometimes.'' The simple reason is the average player does not really have deep game knowledge, game experience, game balance knowledge and so forth. The vast majority of player only know enough about the game to basically play and play their character. The worse reason is that as the players have a character invested in the game, they can't be trusted to make the right call or judgment. If they stand to benefit, there is a chance they might always vote the way that is good for them or gives them something.

It sounds like you're just playing with bad people. If your goal is "stomp on the rest of the group" of course you won't make good decisions, but you're not going to be a whole lot of fun to play with even if you don't have any power. And, of course, there's no way of being sure you picked the right DM.


On 4e: How was 4e not balanced? You are the first person I have heard to make that claim, most people just say it went to far to achieve that goal.

There are a number of broken builds in 4e. I never really got into the 4e CharOp scene (because I never really go into the game to begin with, because I didn't think it was very good), but there were things the the Orbizard (which was pretty much a 3e style Save or Die Wizard) and the Yogi Hat Ranger (which is, relative to the threats in its edition, one of the hardest D&D characters to put down). I could probably find more if you really wondered. Also, beyond straight up imbalance, there were some serious numerical problems early on. Skill Challenges didn't work out of the box, and were never really fixed despite something like a dozen revisions. Monster numbers (particularly for, IIRC, high level Solos) were out of whack until close to the end of the edition. I've also heard bad things about the treasure system, though I don't remember the complaints in detail.

[Tanarii]

Well, that's how they read to me -- a lot of reskinned repeats of the same basic variations.They're quite wildly different between classes. The thing they have in common is they almost always do damage, and they all use a common set of base rules. As opposed to multiple sub-systems.


I was really hoping that 4e would be a fundamental improvement because of how it was presented, but it just turned out to be bad in different ways. It very much felt like an attempt to do a tabletop version of an MMO (and no, that's not based on reviews, I hadn't seen anyone else's comment along those lines when I reached that conclusion on my own).I liked it, but I've liked every edition of D&D so far. And they all have flaws, visible at the time and after the fact. Of course, groupthink making things out to be suck that actually are fine, and rose-colored glasses after the fact, both distort the flaws and benefits.

When 3e first came out, it was clearly an attempt to bring Diablo 2 to the tabletop, and more generally clearly designed with future computer games in mind. NwN came out two years later, confirming that. When I started WoW F&F Alpha in 2003, coinciding with the release of 3.5, that was reinforced.

That's not to say I was right. But I felt that D&D 3e (and even more so 3.5) was very clearly an attempt to do a tabletop version of CRPGs.

So I take "4e feels like MMOs" with a grain of salt. I mean, yeah, it kinda does. But that's hardly surprising. CRPGs and D&D already had a history of a feedback loop. Before complaints about during 2e were about it being too "boardgame". Which is hardly surprising ... Both CRPGs & Boardgames work best on by playing up the strict-rules & wargame side of RPGs.

[Cazero]

Well, that's how they read to me -- a lot of reskinned repeats of the same basic variations.
You've described 80% of the monster manual, 90% of the damage spells and half of the non-damage spells of all other editions.*
And that's why I never got that complaint about 4e.

*numbers may or may not have been made up on the spot. Please nitpick the point and not the numbers.

[Talakeal]

Again, so what? Mundanes have the ability to do something magic can never do -- open more than N locks in a day where N is the number of spell slots they have of 2nd level or higher. They're different abilities. They should be different. What exactly do you want here? For knock to work exactly like Open Lock? For knock to not exist? For knock to be a really big bonus to Open Lock checks? All of those seem bad because they all reduce the variety of solutions that exist. That makes the game less interesting.

I personally handle this by requiring knock be cast with a higher level spell slot to open particularly high DC locks and give casters more spell slots base but make them harder to recover mid adventure so that using a spell to solve the problem is always a tough choice.


I really would love to play in a group where I could play a competent Wizard without risking overshadowing the party. I miss 2e Fighter superiority.

So do I, so do I. More aggressive agreement? I thought your whole premise was that you liked how the 3.X T1 casters were so OP because it gave you more options.

Even so, I wouldn't say 2E had any one class as superior. True, we didn't have the internet forums to analyze it for us, but there was a lot of debate back then as to which class was the best, which meant it wasn't really so clear cut.


IMO perfect balance is perfectly hypothetical, as different tables and different campaigns will emphasize different things, and different players will be happy with different outcomes.

The only thing a game system can do is avoid is avoid gross inherent imbalance.


4th Ed didn't have balance, it had a sort of blandness, where almost everything felt like serial refluffling of the same mechanics over and over again.

I don't like 4E. But it is a class based system which is a lot more balanced than other editions of D&D just like 3E is a class based system which is a lot less balanced than other editions of D&D.

My point was that while perfect balance may be impossible, you can still take steps to minimize it in a D&D like game.


Do you consider the differences between picking the lock, casting Knock, and chopping the door down with an axe to insufficiently define a character? :smallconfused:

Note that these differences all have their weaknesses (chance of failure (& slow, if taking a 20), finite resources, and loud (& slow?), respectively)

And that is cool. That is a good way to set up a game. BUT if I want to play, say, my abjurer character she lacks access to any of those three things. Which is not to say that a door is an impossible obstacle, she just won't be able to directly brute force her way through it.

I think a system where most characters have a way to get past most obstacles with varying costs is a good one.

What I don't think is that every character should have a direct way to get past every obstacle. I also don't like how in 3.X the best way to bypass a problem is invariably a spell and thus generalist casters tend to monopolize the problem solving, but that isn't hard to fix.



The strict 3/5/7 5/9/13 layout of WoD makes me not consider it a point buy system.

It is a point buy, its just you that at the first part of character creation your points are divided up into multiple pools. Once you get past that and into freebie / experience points it becomes more or less pure point buy.



There's several things a starting character could take in WoD to be extremely good or extremely bad, but for broken? How about the "cannot be harmed except by..." merit? Available to a starting character.

Its a pretty decent merit, and in a game like D&D it probably would be broken, but I don't think it is much of an issue in WoD. Direct combat is rare and most everyone has some way to disable you without inflicting direct damage. And even if you are invincible, your allies and resources aren't.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure there are a few broken things in WoD, just not broken to the same level as many of the things in 3.5.


Well, let's start with low-hanging fruit: try converting a D&D Wizard into such systems, and making it even remotely balanced with the party. I find it balanced generally at about 10x the points everyone else had.

Or, even lower hanging fruit: try duplicating Prestidigitation in a point buy system. Just how many points will that eat up? Try and tell me with a straight face that it'll be worth it.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe, just maybe, that's because a wizard who can solve every problem except another wizard with a single spell and knows a potentially limitless number of spells which they can swap out and recharge relatively trivially is indeed an OP character.

As for prestidigitation I believe in Mage it is a 1 point merit.

Now, I don't innately believe that a D&D style mage is a broken archetype. In my playtest group for Heart of Darkness one of the people is playing a versatile caster who can replicate just about every spell in D&D, arcane and divine alike. Its just that the system is set up in such a way that her spells aren't as powerful as those cast by a specialist wizard and she can't simply regain her powers with a nap (or use Gate / Shapechange to ignore the spell slot limitations entirely).


IME, many systems aren't good for running shape shifters, or things that don't sleep, or things that lack brains, or even things with abnormal appendages. Power manipulation powers, power duplication powers, time manipulation powers, and immunities are often handled poorly (if at all). And heaven forbid you try to price flaws, like "can only cast memorized spells" or "ability requires a check to succeed, and failure may accidentally summon a demon".

Now imagine I'm trying to create a character that isn't just duplicating already published material, but actually has whole-cloth systems and abilities.

Most of those things would be trivially easy to pull off in WoD and I know how to do all of them except for power duplication in my own system.

Now yes, trying to play a character who plays by a wholly original sub-system is going to take a ton of house-ruling, but that is true of any game system regardless of what it is; sub-systems that aren't in the game aren't in the game is a pretty basic tautology.



Again, clearly, our games differ. What you described involves sleeping for years in my games.

And the "villains" rarely even know the PCs exist until the PCs change that fact. But the Duke has his plot, his (not necessarily known to him) timetable, and the PCs suffering from narcolepsy isn't going to magically change that. Now, the PC's actions may well change that timeline - I've had several PCs give the "BBEG" exactly what he needed way ahead of schedule, for example.

But, in the case of exploring the truly abandoned ruins? Hmmm... I suppose I'd have the players define their technique, ask them how they keep from starving to death, narrate any major hindrances, and sum up what they find after how long.

The current game I am running is a hex-crawl. There isn't an overarching plot. There is a war with a neighboring kingdom in the background that will probably eventually develop into a plot, but that is years away at this point. The PCs might make a few enemies, but they don't have any yet. The game doesn't have a BBEG and most of the smaller villains are just doing there thing, hoarding treasure, raiding villages, researching foul magics, etc. It is the same stuff that they have been doing for years if not centuries, a few months longer isn't going to fundamentally change the nature of encounters with them.

If I allowed the PCs to rest in the dungeons to recover spells it would cripple the challenge of the game, especially with spells like "create food and water" which would simply remove the entire survivalist and resource management elements of the hex-crawl.

Furthermore, resting an extra six times over the course of each dungeon wouldn't add up to more than a few months over the whole course of the campaign, and if the game were on that tight a timetable me rolling a few extra blizzards on the weather table would also doom the party as they would spend that amount of time snowed in and unable to travel.



I just say that "allowing everyone to contribute" means high versatility, no hard niche protection. And diversity through Open Lock vs Knock vs an axe.

I agree. I am just arguing about where the definition of "high" and where the line should be drawn.

[Quertus]

There are a number of broken builds in 4e. I never really got into the 4e CharOp scene (because I never really go into the game to begin with, because I didn't think it was very good), but there were things the the Orbizard (which was pretty much a 3e style Save or Die Wizard) and the Yogi Hat Ranger (which is, relative to the threats in its edition, one of the hardest D&D characters to put down). I could probably find more if you really wondered. Also, beyond straight up imbalance, there were some serious numerical problems early on. Skill Challenges didn't work out of the box, and were never really fixed despite something like a dozen revisions. Monster numbers (particularly for, IIRC, high level Solos) were out of whack until close to the end of the edition. I've also heard bad things about the treasure system, though I don't remember the complaints in detail.

So, playing with only the original printing of the core books (was there a 4.5?), giving 4e a second chance probably isn't a good plan, then?

[Calthropstu]

For those discussing knock, I like how PF did it honestly. The knock spell in PF is not an auto success, but instead you pit your caster level against the dc of the lock. I believe it is 10 + caster level + d20 vs lock dc. Not as good a chance as a pick locks specialty rogue (who can easily get skill ranks + 30.)

[Quertus]

I thought your whole premise was that you liked how the 3.X T1 casters were so OP because it gave you more options.

My whole premise? No, I'm far too complex for my whole premise to fit in one short sentence. :smalltongue:

Now, part of my premise is, I love having a truly fantastical world. I want, to use my patent-pending example, "underwater portals to other planes, with invisible incorporeal guardians" to be a thing. Nobody tells the epic tale of overcoming a locked door. Unless you're watching Cinderella. Or Sneakers.

Point is, I like for characters to be versatile enough to be able to contribute to handling such fantastic circumstances. The Wizard passes that test.


Even so, I wouldn't say 2E had any one class as superior. True, we didn't have the internet forums to analyze it for us, but there was a lot of debate back then as to which class was the best, which meant it wasn't really so clear cut.

I mean, at "even I would never play this character at an actual table" TO levels of optimization, the 2e Wizard (or Psionicist) are clearly superior one-trick ponies at first. But, at actual PO optimization levels, the Fighter wins, hands down, for playable levels.


And that is cool. That is a good way to set up a game. BUT if I want to play, say, my abjurer character she lacks access to any of those three things. Which is not to say that a door is an impossible obstacle, she just won't be able to directly brute force her way through it.

I think a system where most characters have a way to get past most obstacles with varying costs is a good one.

What I don't think is that every character should have a direct way to get past every obstacle. I also don't like how in 3.X the best way to bypass a problem is invariably a spell and thus generalist casters tend to monopolize the problem solving, but that isn't hard to fix.

If the caster is wasting their limited resources on something that could be solved through more mundane methods, I don't exactly consider that optimal.

If the 5-minute work day is a thing at your table, then balancing by being limited isn't a thing, and I advocate making all spells at will, and balancing them accordingly.

But you advocate instead... doing what?


As for prestidigitation I believe in Mage it is a 1 point merit.

IIRC, each individual effect is a 1-point merit. I honestly don't expect a WoD Mage game to last long enough for a character to even be able to duplicate the effects of Prestidigitation.

[Cluedrew]

Is it really balance if it's the same thing over and over with different "paintjobs"?That would bring it closer to perfect balance than it is. Which is not to say it is fun, but that is a different matter.


You're missing the point. The problem with caster/mundane imbalance isn't at low levels, it's at high levels. Mundane characters have a power ceiling, generally around "what a peak human could plausibly do".Well you completely missed my point so... call it even?

As far as I can tell you are arguing that a magical character's abilities are a superset of a mundane character's abilities and therefore will be stronger because they have more (and often more powerful abilities) to draw on. Completely correct but I believe it is irrelevant.

Because what I am arguing that there are characters who are neither mundane (possible in real life) nor a caster (use occult forces/secrets). Take a Kung Fu master, and not one of the "chi energy ball" comic book ones, but the more old fashioned ones that could pick up a plow blade and ward off a rain of bullets with it. Yes I see something impossible, so its not mundane, but I don't see a spell. No chanting, no wall of force, no distortion of time and space.

That is someone who has passed the limits of our world through physical conditioning and training. Leave


So I take "4e feels like MMOs" with a grain of salt. I mean, yeah, it kinda does. But that's hardly surprising. CRPGs and D&D already had a history of a feedback loop. Before complaints about during 2e were about it being too "boardgame". Which is hardly surprising ... Both CRPGs & Boardgames work best on by playing up the strict-rules & wargame side of RPGs.Until D&D drops the tactical side of the game, it will always have those war games and video games. But until D&D drops the tactical side of the game, I think that is a good thing because a lot of those games do tactics quite well. Some better than D&D even.

[Talakeal]

If the caster is wasting their limited resources on something that could be solved through more mundane methods, I don't exactly consider that optimal.

If the 5-minute work day is a thing at your table, then balancing by being limited isn't a thing, and I advocate making all spells at will, and balancing them accordingly.

But you advocate instead... doing what?

And I have said repeatedly that D&D magic isn't too unbalanced if you don't allow for the 15MWD.

But again, once you get high level spells spell slots cease to be a meaningful limitation as you can just summon up / turn into something that can cast whatever spell you need as an SLA.

Now let me ask you a question, if knock was an at-will spell, would it not be the clearly superior to either of the other two options?


I personally give 4x spell slots at the start of the adventure and don't let people regain spells during it barring special circumstances. You could also balance an at-will knock by making it one of a very limited number of spells known, but that would limit versatility.



IIRC, each individual effect is a 1-point merit. I honestly don't expect a WoD Mage game to last long enough for a character to even be able to duplicate the effects of Prestidigitation.

Wow, so it is. Scratch that.

Still, in Mage the very nature of the game allows for a tremendous amount of variety within your sphere, and you can easily make a character who utterly eclipses a D&D mages abilities to pull of parlor tricks. You may or may not explode from paradox from doing so, but that's because not being showy with your magic is part of the game.

[digiman619]

More "can excel at anything" than actually does excel at everything.
And it can change its "anything" everyday, and once you get high enough you can excel in multiple things at a time.


The Fighter kills it dead in one hit, the blasty wizard kills it dead twice over in one hit? I'm not really seeing how that makes a difference.
Because the blasty wizard gets AoEs, so it can take out multiple enemies at once. The Fighter is lucky if it gets 2. I mean, sure, if you had a Great Cleave build and you get a lot of weak enemies to stand in a line, then maybe, but otherwise the wizard has damage on lockdown.


And this is a good thing. Now, if we could just make Fighters necessary, too.
Forgive my vehemence, but this needs to be said: NO, THAT IS NOT A GOOD THING! If you want magic to be essential to adventuring, everyone needs have magic. It would be like a setting where everything is resolved in iajutsu duels, but only half the classes got swords.


Um, what? The Rogue can't open locks until the Wizard gets Knock at 3rd? My Avorial or Pixie can't fly until 5th? My commoner can't get sucked through a gate until 9th?
Knock doiesn't let you do anything new, picking a race is a major part of your build, and the last bit is GM fiat, not an abiilty the players had.


That implies that they have a "job". Sounds like orc mischief niche protection to me.
Not to go all 4th edition, but having a role in combat makes sense, even if it isn't an offical niche; just being an archer means that you probably shouldn't be in close combat, for example.


Fair enough (in 3e, at least - this thread is in the general role-playing forum, after all).
Fair enough, but we're talking about the "Caster > martial" paradigm, and that paradigm was strongest in 3.X


Point. Few of them are strictly cooperative. But, it is still a non-zero number. So it can be done.
And if soemone handicaps themselves, how does that affect the rest of the players?

[Cosi]

So, playing with only the original printing of the core books (was there a 4.5?), giving 4e a second chance probably isn't a good plan, then?

The math is at its worst in early 4e, but 4e has fundamental problems that go way beyond the math. The most obvious thing is that characters just don't have all that much to do. Out of combat you have a couple of rituals, and a skill challenge system that just doesn't work (at least, not in any of the incarnations I've seen). In combat, characters simply do have very many abilities. It's arguable whether a 4e character gets more abilities than a 4e Fighter, and he's certainly nowhere close to a Warblade or Warmage, let alone a Wizard. Combat tends to be boring, because you have more powers than turns to use them and inevitably end up spamming your at-wills. To top all that off, the abilities you do get often involve pushing around small numbers with non-standard durations, so combat is much more effort intensive than it has any right to be. There's just very little 4e does that can't be done better with some other system. It's not interesting enough as a tactical simulator to justify the lack of strategic depth. It's not simple enough to function as a rules-lite game.


Because what I am arguing that there are characters who are neither mundane (possible in real life) nor a caster (use occult forces/secrets). Take a Kung Fu master, and not one of the "chi energy ball" comic book ones, but the more old fashioned ones that could pick up a plow blade and ward off a rain of bullets with it. Yes I see something impossible, so its not mundane, but I don't see a spell. No chanting, no wall of force, no distortion of time and space.

I think that is magic. As far as I'm concerned, the magic/mundane dichotomy is total. If you aren't magical, you are mundane.


And it can change its "anything" everyday, and once you get high enough you can excel in multiple things at a time.

High level characters having a wider variety of areas of competence sounds like an excellent way of distinguishing them from low level characters. It seems like the game would be better if more classes worked that way, and we should be striving to move towards that model instead of trying to weaken the classes that behave that way.


Because the blasty wizard gets AoEs, so it can take out multiple enemies at once. The Fighter is lucky if it gets 2. I mean, sure, if you had a Great Cleave build and you get a lot of weak enemies to stand in a line, then maybe, but otherwise the wizard has damage on lockdown.

I think that this is right in the specific, and I assume it's making a specific point about 3e, but it's not right in general. It's perfectly possible for "do lots of damage to one enemy" and "do less damage to more enemies" to be balanced choices.


Forgive my vehemence, but this needs to be said: NO, THAT IS NOT A GOOD THING! If you want magic to be essential to adventuring, everyone needs have magic. It would be like a setting where everything is resolved in iajutsu duels, but only half the classes got swords.

Isn't this what you want to do with knock? Opening locks seems like a pretty major part of operating in dungeon environments, and you seem fairly upset about broadening the classes with access to that capability.

[Cluedrew]

Well, let's start with low-hanging fruit: try converting a D&D Wizard into such systems, and making it even remotely balanced with the party. I find it balanced generally at about 10x the points everyone else had.Grod had a very good article about porting D&D to M&M that might be relevant.

I would also Mutants and Masterminds for mimicking Prestidigitation. Variable (7 points) or an array (X+5 where X might work out to 2, so maybe also 7) could do it and 7 out of the standard 150 starting points is quite reasonable. Although looking at it, that feels like it is also a low hanging fruit about how the convince is just wrapped in spells. I can just here someone saying "Well we don't want to bog down the spell list with flavour spells, so lets put all of them in one spell." I mean I'm glad they put such "daily life spells" in the book... but where are the fighter's daily life feats and why can't they afford to take them?

Also what is a razor ring, because if it is what it sounds like how does it help you fight while bound by chains?

To Cosi: Well I don't think that is the most useful way to phrase it, but I can live with that. However in that case: fighter > mundane as well.

[Darth Ultron]

Try playing a game with a rotating GM. In that scenario (barring ties for greatest system mastery), (x-1)/x of the time, the GM is not the one with greatest system mastery.

The player having a character is one of the reasons that they're best suited to the job - they know when they're not having fun, and are more likely to understand why. So they are best suited to identify the problem.

And this is my point and the source of a lot of the problems.

It is bad enough to just have a casual DM with very little game system knowledge and mastery...and this can be a whole thread really. And it's only worse when you have a group of all players, all with very little game system knowledge and mastery, that rotate being ''DM for a while''.

It is bad enough that most players will automatically vote in favor of anything that is good for their character and not care about it's effect on the game, game balance or anything else. Ask a player ''do you want your character to get max hit points every level'' and just about all players will say yes. And worse, that player who is just playing at being DM this week, will say yes too; after all next week they will be back to being a player and will want their character to get the thing too.

And on top of all this, if no one has any real amount of game system knowledge and mastery, then the votes are random and people just vote on feelings.

Very few people, and very few players ever really know anything about why something is or is not......this is just a basic human problem.



1. No one in this thread is against house rules. What people are against is your insistence that the DM should make ad hoc modifications to the rules because he thinks it will make the game more fun.
2. This thread is trying to figure out how you would make a (D&D-like) game that didn't have problems with caster/mundane imbalance. While your solution of "the DM fudges things dynamically" may solve the problem at your table, it's not a system level solution.

1.Yes, I get the Everyone Collective thinks there is some other, magical, perfect way to do things. I'm saying there is not and that is a fantasy. The DM control of the game is the best way.
2.Well, if it works at my table, why would it not work at yours or anyone else?



It sounds like you're just playing with bad people. If your goal is "stomp on the rest of the group" of course you won't make good decisions, but you're not going to be a whole lot of fun to play with even if you don't have any power. And, of course, there's no way of being sure you picked the right DM.


Half of the world is bad people.

And Picking the Right DM could be a whole thread.


For those discussing knock, I like how PF did it honestly. The knock spell in PF is not an auto success, but instead you pit your caster level against the dc of the lock. I believe it is 10 + caster level + d20 vs lock dc. Not as good a chance as a pick locks specialty rogue (who can easily get skill ranks + 30.)

A good 3X D&D fix is to get rid of all the silly absolutes in the spells. By RAW the dinky little spell knock can open any one door with a lock. So if the characters are on Olympus and the door has a DC 100 to open, dinky little knock spell can open it in a couple seconds.

Making knock, and all other absolute spells have limits is a good thing for the game, and one I use in my own game.


Now, part of my premise is, I love having a truly fantastical world. I want, to use my patent-pending example, "underwater portals to other planes, with invisible incorporeal guardians" to be a thing. Nobody tells the epic tale of overcoming a locked door. Unless you're watching Cinderella. Or Sneakers.

Point is, I like for characters to be versatile enough to be able to contribute to handling such fantastic circumstances. The Wizard passes that test.


I love such a world too and really make my world truly fantastical and not ''like old tyme Earth''.

And my answer to giving mundanes nice stuff is adding details that give everyone more to do. Just take portals. I love them, so I have them everywhere. And I have, oh, twenty or so pages of homebrew rules for them that allow any character to use/abuse/control/alter/destroy or such a portal. Stuff that never made it into the 3X/P rules. When you play the game by-the-book, the only way to close a portal is if a spellcaster casts a spell or two to do so....all other characters just sit back and do nothing. And I have a simple enough fix for that: if a character destroys the portal frame, that will close the portal. And, amazingly, just like that, any character can at least try to do that action.

[RazorChain]

Well, let's start with low-hanging fruit: try converting a D&D Wizard into such systems, and making it even remotely balanced with the party. I find it balanced generally at about 10x the points everyone else had.

See here lies the root of the problem. In a point buy system the D&D wizards costs 10x more than the fighter in points. Doesn't that tell us anything?

Other systems will just make you roll a less powerful wizard that can play alongside the fighter and there area good ways to to do this by specializing the wizard or make some laws of magic.

When you reach the higher levels in D&D as I have often mentioned then your wizard has become a superhero with loooots of superpowers and as has been mentioned he has to be kept under ridiculous time constraints if you are going to deprive him of his resources. If the fighter or the mundane is going to play alongside the wizard then the mundane has to become superpowered as well and at that point the mundane isn't a mundane anymore.

Let's take a point from 5e which I was playing for the first time some days ago. We were playing at level 12 and I brougth a monk into a group of 2 full casters, one halfcaster and one mundane. The guys had explained how the casters had been balanced from 3.5. But when the Bard/Warlock was flying around out of harms way blasting eldritch blasts that did more damage than my monk attacks, I started to feel irrelevant and just to add insult to injury the monster would just use legendary resistance to invalidate my stunning attacks which kinda is the monks shtick.

When the climax came where a fight against a orc tribe of 600 orcs and some bosses. My monk could on average kill 1 orc per round without using his ki which he was kinda saving for the big bads. He had a 85% hit chance and could make 3 attakcs per turn doing d8+5 against the orcs 15 HP. Then the wizard would throw one fireball and kill more orcs than my monk would kill the whole battle and that was just one of his 20 spell slots. So of course my monk got turned into a T-Rex as he wasn't holding his own. Luckily the Wizard had a couple of pet elementals that he had bound with planar binding and had as pets the next 10 days.

Now of course I'm only discussing the combat minigame but just the versatility of casters makes the mundanes irrelevant. So you might think that the monk would be a good meatshield? Not quite because the Wizard had more HP because he only needed Int so he put all his other ASI in Con. So while my monk had to have both Dex and Wis the wizard was gaining 8 HP per level while my monk was gaining 7 per level.



Or, even lower hanging fruit: try duplicating Prestidigitation in a point buy system. Just how many points will that eat up? Try and tell me with a straight face that it'll be worth it.


Prestidigitation could be covered as a minor illusion with some minor telekinesis which could be covered easily in others systems. But let's take a system that has a proper Laws of magic like Ars Magica. You would have to use 12 or so of the 15 techniques and forms which would give you a stupidly high penalty on your casting roll. This is because you have to focus your spell and you can easily do all these effects in Ars Magica but using a spell that does everything at the same time isn't viable. Ars Magica is a game where you can play a stupidly powerful wizards and even in a game about stupidly powerful wizards the D&D wizard outdoes the Ars Magica magus at higher level because the D&D magic system is one of the most stupid magic systems ever written.

The D&D magic system is like technology of convenience from Star Trek that has become canon. Why do people teleport in Star Trek? Because it was the cheapest way to move the cast to different planets. So there is no thought behind the magic system, no limits or laws, It's just slapping a level on some power or effect. Why don't you have bigger fireballs to incinerate whole armies?



IME, many systems aren't good for running shape shifters, or things that don't sleep, or things that lack brains, or even things with abnormal appendages. Power manipulation powers, power duplication powers, time manipulation powers, and immunities are often handled poorly (if at all). And heaven forbid you try to price flaws, like "can only cast memorized spells" or "ability requires a check to succeed, and failure may accidentally summon a demon".

Now imagine I'm trying to create a character that isn't just duplicating already published material, but actually has whole-cloth systems and abilities.

A lot of systems don't have rules or aren't meant to include those things but those who do have rules over these things don't seem to have much problem with most of those powers or abilities.





No, that really is the optimal way to win an opposed match. Kill your opponent before the match, and you will never be beaten.



Sun Tzu will teach you otherwise. The most optimal way would be to make your opponent your ally and therefore add his strength to yours.

[Cluedrew]

Sun Tzu will teach you otherwise. The most optimal way would be to make your opponent your ally and therefore add his strength to yours.I, who am friends with everybody, have no enemies. Unfortunately, not me personally.

It was an almost parody of all the "I, [with really strong skill], have no enemies." line , which aren't common but I've heard enough. I think it is more true than any of them.

And that story sums up what seems to be the problem with D&D Wizards. The players don't seem to be particularly optimizing anything, nor to be out to get you (the T-Rex thing could have been them trying to help you, I wasn't there so I can't judge the intent), but they still overwhelmed the situation by dint of wizard.

[Quertus]

Now let me ask you a question, if knock was an at-will spell, would it not be the clearly superior to either of the other two options?

An excellent question.

In my opinion, if Knock was at will, it would be clearly superior, but not strictly superior. That is, picking the lock has the advantage of being quiet, and the axe has the advantage of not having to worry about that door being locked behind you.

That having been said, some would call me an idiot for holding this position, and claim that the stealth value and surprise factor make picking the lock still the superior option, even if Knock was at will. Picking the lock is still far more versatile in its applications than Knock.


See here lies the root of the problem. In a point buy system the D&D wizards costs 10x more than the fighter in points. Doesn't that tell us anything?

Prestidigitation could be covered as a minor illusion with some minor telekinesis which could be covered easily in others systems. But let's take a system that has a proper Laws of magic like Ars Magica. You would have to use 12 or so of the 15 techniques and forms which would give you a stupidly high penalty on your casting roll. This is because you have to focus your spell and you can easily do all these effects in Ars Magica but using a spell that does everything at the same time isn't viable. Ars Magica is a game where you can play a stupidly powerful wizards and even in a game about stupidly powerful wizards the D&D wizard outdoes the Ars Magica magus at higher level because the D&D magic system is one of the most stupid magic systems ever written.

Well, you've just proved my point. I started with the premise, "to make the Wizard balanced", yet you ran with, "clearly, the Wizard isn't balanced". And even tried to claim Prestidigitation was some über-powerful spell.

It's no wonder one can't create a balanced D&D Wizard in point-buy systems, let alone that this debate about caster > mundane rages eternal.


Sun Tzu will teach you otherwise. The most optimal way would be to make your opponent your ally and therefore add his strength to yours.

Control Magic is my favorite MtG spell. But... Ok, yes, you could apply this to my example by having the "opponent" throw the match. Not quite the same thing, but close enough.

[Max_Killjoy]

See here lies the root of the problem. In a point buy system the D&D wizards costs 10x more than the fighter in points. Doesn't that tell us anything?


Even using a combination of Variable Power Pool with change-out constraints and Charges with restoration constraints, building the equivalent of a D&D mid-level wizard in HERO gets expensive in a heroic-scale game.




Other systems will just make you roll a less powerful wizard that can play alongside the fighter and there area good ways to to do this by specializing the wizard or make some laws of magic.

When you reach the higher levels in D&D as I have often mentioned then your wizard has become a superhero with loooots of superpowers and as has been mentioned he has to be kept under ridiculous time constraints if you are going to deprive him of his resources. If the fighter or the mundane is going to play alongside the wizard then the mundane has to become superpowered as well and at that point the mundane isn't a mundane anymore.


That's two of the repeatedly-detailed laundry list of options -- make spellcasters less powerful or non-spellcasters more powerful.




Prestidigitation could be covered as a minor illusion with some minor telekinesis which could be covered easily in others systems. But let's take a system that has a proper Laws of magic like Ars Magica. You would have to use 12 or so of the 15 techniques and forms which would give you a stupidly high penalty on your casting roll. This is because you have to focus your spell and you can easily do all these effects in Ars Magica but using a spell that does everything at the same time isn't viable. Ars Magica is a game where you can play a stupidly powerful wizards and even in a game about stupidly powerful wizards the D&D wizard outdoes the Ars Magica magus at higher level because the D&D magic system is one of the most stupid magic systems ever written.

The D&D magic system is like technology of convenience from Star Trek that has become canon. Why do people teleport in Star Trek? Because it was the cheapest way to move the cast to different planets. So there is no thought behind the magic system, no limits or laws, It's just slapping a level on some power or effect. Why don't you have bigger fireballs to incinerate whole armies?


Part of the problem with D&D magic is that it's all "black boxes" that each "do the awesome thing". As you say, there's no underlying structure, no system of theory or belief, no laws of magic. D&D as a system has fastidiously and steadfastly avoided any questions of what magic actually is, how it works, and why it does things the way it does.

It seems the most we have is Gygax's professed love of Vancian magic and the "open secret" that D&D was inspired more by weird future and pulp prehistory than by the historical adaptation its trappings might suggest.

Yes, the various settings have tacked on fluff, but that's always been a retro-justification for the system (the cart leading the horse) and/or a story element that's been almost entirely disconnected from the mechanics.

[Quertus]

Now yes, trying to play a character who plays by a wholly original sub-system is going to take a ton of house-ruling, but that is true of any game system regardless of what it is; sub-systems that aren't in the game aren't in the game is a pretty basic tautology.


Missed this earlier - balance issues aside, this is another reason why I can't play the characters I want, even in point-buy: because they require the creation of sub-systems the point-buy games do not support.


And it can change its "anything" everyday, and once you get high enough you can excel in multiple things at a time.

Awesome. Now, teach the Fighter to walk and chew gum at the same time, and we'll have a functional party. That is what this thread is about, right?


Because the blasty wizard gets AoEs, so it can take out multiple enemies at once. The Fighter is lucky if it gets 2. I mean, sure, if you had a Great Cleave build and you get a lot of weak enemies to stand in a line, then maybe, but otherwise the wizard has damage on lockdown.

I was about to say, "I think our record was 27", but then I remembered we had an army slayer Fighter who was killing 100+ creatures per round. So, no, Fighter still seems plenty capable when built competently to me. What more do you want from the class?


Forgive my vehemence, but this needs to be said: NO, THAT IS NOT A GOOD THING! If you want magic to be essential to adventuring, everyone needs have magic. It would be like a setting where everything is resolved in iajutsu duels, but only half the classes got swords.

So, it's safe to put you down for "absolutely no niche protection"? Like, if every class doesn't have a way to handle locked doors, then there can't be any locked doors in the setting?

Personally, I like the idea that if you fight diversity - if you "burn all the witches", for example - your society will be inferior, and ultimately destroyed by your more accepting neighbors. That if you purge all the Theives, your neighbors will assassinate you. Etc. I like the idea that diversity is a necessity, on a national scale.

I dislike the idea that diversity is absolutely required at a party scale. I don't want to need 1 netrunner, 1 rigger, 1 wizard, 1 engineer, 1 face, etc, in order to have a functional party.


Not to go all 4th edition, but having a role in combat makes sense, even if it isn't an offical niche; just being an archer means that you probably shouldn't be in close combat, for example.

I feel like I really ought to be poking harder at this bit. I feel that there's some nugget of wisdom that I'm missing here. So pardon me while I ramble.

Back in 2e, my characters (or, at least, the ones with any tactical sense - Quertus was obviously exempt from this) would inquire of new potential party members what their capabilities were, what their role was. One of my characters liked to describe himself as "a sorcerer of some skill".

Past a certain level (ie, 5th), being a Wizard meant Fireball. It meant AoE death, at least once per day. As others have put it, it meant being artillery. My Wizards who could not cast Fireball (opposed school, just didn't know the spell, whatever) would always make that fact known, to dispel any false expectations on their capabilities.

Versatile characters - Wizards who could stealth if needed, Archers who could melee if needed, Meat Shields who could talk if needed - were considered a good thing. It made the "what the **** do we do with this random collection of heroes" minigame much less taxing than trying to force square pegs into round holes. Of course, the challenging combinations made for a fun minigame, too, but often unintentionally put the rest of the game on Hard Mode.

And, that's my phone. Maybe I'll ramble at this again later.


And if soemone handicaps themselves, how does that affect the rest of the players?

Done right, it allows for equal contribution, and makes the game the proper level of challenging - as opposed to them hogging the spotlight with their superior player skill and/or making the game a snoozefest. Can take a bit of calibration to get the handicap right at times, but, IMO, it's well worth it - and clearly better than the alternative of not having the potential for a handicap in the first place.

[lesser_minion]

"Magic is poorly defined and has no real rules surrounding what it actually is" is one of the biggest problems with D&D and one of the main roots of the whole "caster beats mundane" paradigm. And yes, the same does go for most 'absolute effects', such as unbreakable forcecages and walls of force, incorporeal creatures being immune to all non-magical damage, and so on.

[Talakeal]

Missed this earlier - balance issues aside, this is another reason why I can't play the characters I want, even in point-buy: because they require the creation of sub-systems the point-buy games do not support.

Point buy gams offer significantly more freedom than a class based game, but they don't offer infinite freedom.

Wanting to play a specific system that a game doesn't support isn't really a statement about the quality of a game or its attributes.


An excellent question.

In my opinion, if Knock was at will, it would be clearly superior, but not strictly superior. That is, picking the lock has the advantage of being quiet, and the axe has the advantage of not having to worry about that door being locked behind you.

That having been said, some would call me an idiot for holding this position, and claim that the stealth value and surprise factor make picking the lock still the superior option, even if Knock was at will. Picking the lock is still far more versatile in its applications than Knock.

In earlier editions knock made noise, this is not the case in 3E, so its just the verbal component you are worried about? I am pretty sure with at-will spells you could use Silent Spell or just cast Silence to get around people hearing verbal components, it is slightly situational though.


Out of curiosity, how does this at-will caster work?

Does he get to cast everything in his spell book whenever he wants or does he only get to memorize a certain number of spells each day? How does this interact with metamagics?

[RazorChain]

I, who am friends with everybody, have no enemies. Unfortunately, not me personally.

It was an almost parody of all the "I, [with really strong skill], have no enemies." line , which aren't common but I've heard enough. I think it is more true than any of them.

And that story sums up what seems to be the problem with D&D Wizards. The players don't seem to be particularly optimizing anything, nor to be out to get you (the T-Rex thing could have been them trying to help you, I wasn't there so I can't judge the intent), but they still overwhelmed the situation by dint of wizard.

Nah nobody was out to get me, I was playing with old friends. The T-Rex was to help me and in the fight.

Well the casters saved the day

[digiman619]

Awesome. Now, teach the Fighter to walk and chew gum at the same time, and we'll have a functional party. That is what this thread is about, right?
No one is saying that the fighter has to be as bad as it is and that it shouldn't be raised. I am just of the opinion that wizards need to be lowered as well.


I was about to say, "I think our record was 27", but then I remembered we had an army slayer Fighter who was killing 100+ creatures per round. So, no, Fighter still seems plenty capable when built competently to me. What more do you want from the class?
I'm assuming that this is from 2nd Edition? Because I never really messed with it (before my time) so this could be entirely true or a complete load and I have no way to tell the difference. I'm going to assume that you're not lying, so let's just say that that stopped being a thing after that edition.


So, it's safe to put you down for "absolutely no niche protection"? Like, if every class doesn't have a way to handle locked doors, then there can't be any locked doors in the setting?
Ha, no. I said that everyone ought to be able to handle a large-but-not-complete portion of tasks; 70% was the number that came up. So while in such a paradigm it'd be okay that the wizard can also do a rogue thing because there is about a third of the game that he has to rely on other for, which wasn't at all the case in 3.X and is still iffy in later editions (again, I can't speak on earlier editions because I didn't play them).


Personally, I like the idea that if you fight diversity - if you "burn all the witches", for example - your society will be inferior, and ultimately destroyed by your more accepting neighbors. That if you purge all the Thieves, your neighbors will assassinate you. Etc. I like the idea that diversity is a necessity, on a national scale.

I dislike the idea that diversity is absolutely required at a party scale. I don't want to need 1 netrunner, 1 rigger, 1 wizard, 1 engineer, 1 face, etc, in order to have a functional party.
Again, that's where the "large-but-not-absolute" idea comes from; as long as at least one or two members of the party are able to handle a given role, you get that diversity. Assuming that everyone handles an equal-but-different area, of course. If one has 80% of everything covered and the other 3 members have a mostly overlapping 15%, it stops being fun.


I feel like I really ought to be poking harder at this bit. I feel that there's some nugget of wisdom that I'm missing here. So pardon me while I ramble.

Back in 2e, my characters (or, at least, the ones with any tactical sense - Quertus was obviously exempt from this) would inquire of new potential party members what their capabilities were, what their role was. One of my characters liked to describe himself as "a sorcerer of some skill".

Past a certain level (ie, 5th), being a Wizard meant Fireball. It meant AoE death, at least once per day. As others have put it, it meant being artillery. My Wizards who could not cast Fireball (opposed school, just didn't know the spell, whatever) would always make that fact known, to dispel any false expectations on their capabilities.

Versatile characters - Wizards who could stealth if needed, Archers who could melee if needed, Meat Shields who could talk if needed - were considered a good thing. It made the "what the **** do we do with this random collection of heroes" minigame much less taxing than trying to force square pegs into round holes. Of course, the challenging combinations made for a fun minigame, too, but often unintentionally put the rest of the game on Hard Mode.

And, that's my phone. Maybe I'll ramble at this again later.
For what it's worth, the "Good at specialty, decent at most other things" is a good paradigm; if all classes had that, there'd be much less complaining (because this is the internet, so someone will be butthurt about it no what happens). The problem is that some classes are way more powerful than others, when they shouldn't be. The way you show "Character A is stronger than Character B" in a class-and-level game like D&D is levels (though a case for Prestige classes as a measure of power could be made), not the class. A person of a given level who gets power from their god should be of equivalent power, but a Cleric 7 > a Favored Soul 7 > Divine Mind 7, even if they are getting their power from the same god!


Done right, it allows for equal contribution, and makes the game the proper level of challenging - as opposed to them hogging the spotlight with their superior player skill and/or making the game a snoozefest. Can take a bit of calibration to get the handicap right at times, but, IMO, it's well worth it - and clearly better than the alternative of not having the potential for a handicap in the first place.
I haven't played any of your games, so I am working blind here, but in your cooperative, player-can-handicap-themselves-for-the-good-of-the-group games, they only have one overarching goal, don't they? Something along the lines of "Get X points" of "Find X pieces before the timer runs out"? And by handicapping themselves, they make the goal easier to reach (fewer points to get, more time/turn to find stuff in, etc)? I need a framework to make my arguement here.

[Psyren]

In earlier editions knock made noise, this is not the case in 3E, so its just the verbal component you are worried about? I am pretty sure with at-will spells you could use Silent Spell or just cast Silence to get around people hearing verbal components, it is slightly situational though.

I'd say it's not situational at all. Locked doors, and enemies whom you'd rather not overhear you trying to open them, are fairly ubiquitous in fact. As for silencing your attempt - a silence spell keeps you from casting Knock at all, whereas Silent Spell is going to either require a feat and a 3rd-level slot (at the levels where locked doors are actually obstacles, this is relevant) or a rod (the price of which is also relevant at locked-doors-are-obstacles levels.)

[Talakeal]

I'd say it's not situational at all. Locked doors, and enemies whom you'd rather not overhear you trying to open them, are fairly ubiquitous in fact. As for silencing your attempt - a silence spell keeps you from casting Knock at all, whereas Silent Spell is going to either require a feat and a 3rd-level slot (at the levels where locked doors are actually obstacles, this is relevant) or a rod (the price of which is also relevant at locked-doors-are-obstacles levels.)

We are talking about a hypothetical scenario where all spells are at will.

Due to the nature of silence it is pretty easy to get it so that the person you are trying to keep from hearing you is in the area of emanation but the caster is not, again depending on the specific layout.

Also, it seems like you are saying there will never be a situation where you need to get something open but dont care if someone hears you do it, which is clearly ridiculous.

[RazorChain]

Well, you've just proved my point. I started with the premise, "to make the Wizard balanced", yet you ran with, "clearly, the Wizard isn't balanced". And even tried to claim Prestidigitation was some über-powerful spell.

It's no wonder one can't create a balanced D&D Wizard in point-buy systems, let alone that this debate about caster > mundane rages eternal.




You can make easily make a balanced 1st level D&D wizard in probably all point buy systems, it's probably around level 9+ that things start to fall apart then you are out of standard/heroic fantasy and can create your wizard in a supers game.

The problem lies within trying to create a high level D&D wizard in a point buy game means that the other players will get as many points as your wizard which means that they aren't making fantasy heroes but super heores as you have to give them options to spend those points.

So yes I run with clearly the wizard isn't balanced...in D&D. Balancing the Wizard is simple and easy: Open up your D&D book at the magic section and tear out the pages. Now sit down and make a functional magic system that isn't an amalgalm of some slottable powers slapped to the rest of the system with a shoestring and glue. Balance the new magic section with the rest of the system and you are ready to go.

The thing is that you want to play games with the D&D wizards power and utility so the other way around would be to give the barbarian super strength and super toughness and paint him green, the assassin can teleport short distances at will and the fighter gets and hammer that returns to his hand and calls down lightning.

There are only two ways to do this and that is to downgrade the wizard or upgrade the mundanes. The problem mostly lies in the wizard player doesn't want to relinquish his powers and the mundane player wants to stay mundane and not become super powered. So in essene the clash is that one wants to play a superhero game and the other wants to play heroic fantasy.

So how to balance the classes is clear as day. The only thing standing in the way are people screaming "Don't you dare nerf my wizard!" and "Don't you dare make my mundane hero magical!"

Most other system will explain what genre and power level you'll be playing while D&D just inadvertantly shoehorns multiple power levels into the same game without ever explaining itself. Which means that most of the campaign settings in D&D don't make any sense, the setting is completely disjointed from the system mechanics.

The balancing factor that is supposed to balance the wizard is number of encounters per day and I'll be darned if only the most hardcore gamers can be bothered with playing through 4-6 encounters a day solely because the wizard spell slots must be depleted!! So if you are playing through meaningless combat encounters just so the wizard can't go full nova in fights then the design principle of the game is really really bad as it limits playstyles severly just to balance the wizard with the other classes.


As for Prestidigitation, no one claims it's a uber powerful spell, it just proves D&D lazy design principles and lack of rules and laws of magic. All the effects it aims for are viable and easiliy replicated in for example Ars Magica just not all at once as magic is much more versatile while being more focused.

[Tanarii]

So yes I run with clearly the wizard isn't balanced...in D&D. Balancing the Wizard is simple and easy: Open up your D&D book at the magic section and tear out the pages. Now sit down and make a functional magic system that isn't an amalgalm of some slottable powers slapped to the rest of the system with a shoestring and glue. Balance the new magic section with the rest of the system and you are ready to go.

Or go back and play AD&D 1e starting at level 1 without power leveling, and enforce all the casting in combat, long memorization times, and other rules that kept AD&D wizards in check.

[RazorChain]

Or go back and play AD&D 1e starting at level 1 without power leveling, and enforce all the casting in combat, long memorization times, and other rules that kept AD&D wizards in check.

I could do that but I started gaming in '87 and never played 1e. I kinda went from BECMI straight to 2e. Then I drifted into some other stuff and had a brief fling with 3.x and now to 5e. But I have come to realize that D&D just isn't the right system for me.

[Satinavian]

Or go back and play AD&D 1e starting at level 1 without power leveling, and enforce all the casting in combat, long memorization times, and other rules that kept AD&D wizards in check.
That might help slightly with the power but the old magic system is the same inconsistent convoluted eclectic mess. And the rest of the system is really dated. There are so many non-D&D systems out there.

[Cluedrew]

Balancing casters and martials by converting them to point buy, I give you Grod_The_Giant's D&D in M&M (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?279503-D-amp-D-in-M-amp-M-a-new-approach-to-rebalancing-3-5-PF). So it can be done, although mimicking spell preparation can't be enforced inside of the rules, so you have to turn to GM intervention to pull that off.

On Balance Point: I say we* balance with "mundane" at level 0, say within plausible human limits for low levels, break out into extraordinary characters in the mid-level and balance with the "I got a spell for that wizard" as we get into high levels. Cosi had a thing about bringing back 4e tiers with explicate transition points that sounds pretty good. Although I think (more than Cosi last time we talked about it) there is more you can do to pump up martials than just give them spells.

* Yeah who is we.

[Quertus]

Out of curiosity, how does this at-will caster work?

Does he get to cast everything in his spell book whenever he wants or does he only get to memorize a certain number of spells each day? How does this interact with metamagics?

Don't know, I was merely suggesting it as the easier way to balance things. But, why not, I'll take a stab.

So, for the set of all challenges, each character should be X competent at Y% of them. Now, we all disagree on the "correct" values of X and Y, and on how many "tiers" of competence there should be (both in terms of "solo" vs "assist" vs "can't contribute", and in terms of "BDH" vs "Hard Mode"), but let's ignore that for the moment, too. Let's just say that every character who gets the ability to deal with something has some predetermined "level" of ability.

With me so far? So, let's take the example of the epic challenge of a locked door.

To make balance easier, we've already said we're removing the "at will" vs "limited use". So, what other distinctions do we have? Well, quiet vs loud, fast vs slow, whether it's reversible, whether it damages the door, whether it leaves a trace, versatility of target... and there's probably other things we could add. We assign each of these a value, and get points to spend when building a class feature based on this particular class's faculty with this challenge.

So, for the purpose of this example, let's invent a new Corrupter class. The Corrupter is a Cleric-like class that can actually deal with doors. They deal with doors by making things (ie, the locking mechanism) corrode. So, this is quiet/subtle, slow, not reversible, damages the lock but not the door, and somewhat telling (especially when used repeatedly), and inapplicable vs incorruptible materials.

Alternately, if we wanted to, for fun or balance, we could add in a whole new subsystem. We could create a table of materials vs Corrupter level, which would determine the length of time it takes a given Corrupter to corrupt a given locking mechanism, the probability/DC of anyone noticing the process / the odds of it producing a loud "snap" when it decays. Why, if we find the Corrupter to be too weak at dealing with this challenge, we could even add in extra advantages (always, or to the table), like the ability to corrupt locks at range, or more quickly, or as a delayed effect, or to sense such complex, delicate mechanisms even when they aren't immediately visible. That last one is probably more giving them "find/remove traps". Heck, maybe the Corrupter is just a reskinned Rogue, who trades speed and "can't handle high DC" for "can't handle certain materials", and reduced loot value, and lack of ability to reset challenges. Hmmm... this isn't sounding like a fair trade.

Which choices we make affects what the Corrupter's actual role in dealing with the Epic challenge of the locked door actually is. And affects the feel of the class, and should tie into an overall theme.

So, how does this tie back into balancing the Wizard class? Well, as I see it, we have three options:

* all Wizards know the same spells, and can use them all at will;
* Wizards have a finite pool of points with which to learn spells, but can use them all at will;
* Wizards have a finite pool of "prepared" spells, and can use those at will.

How large these pools are is determined by what value we place on variety. More on this in a moment.

Mind you, this is the same choice we have to make for each class. In fact, to ensure we never again have to hear "caster > mundane", let's not make the choice - let's make all 3 versions of each class. So, the Wizard who needs his scrapbook to change spells overnight? He's paralleled by the monk who needs a bit of fermented banana to change to drunken monkey style with 24 hour notice, and the thief who needs a 24 hour refresher on how to pick locks (complete with a need for sample locks, and only if that's a skill they've ever picked up in the first place, of course). But there's also the totally unbalanced Sample Wizard, who has his static list of spells already picked out for him, to parallel the Sample Rogue with a 2e-style "thieves table", and a Sample Monk with a static martial arts style. And the Skills and Powers style "pick your own slots" version of each.

So, now that we've achieved perfect symmetry and balance to our classes, what value do we place on the utility of variety? Well, IMO, the difference between the first two is related to how confident we are in the balance of the system we've created. And how much we need to shrink the third is a measure of how valuable information is in the game. And both are affected by how same-y our encounters are compared to the full breadth of the possible encounter space. Thus, the closer we keep them to the same size, the more adventures are encouraged to diversify their challenges.

So, if we do it right, we've achieved the perfect balance through symmetry of 4e, without the horrid same-y feel while retaining each class's distinctive feel.

What more could you want out of a game?


I'm assuming that this is from 2nd Edition? Because I never really messed with it (before my time) so this could be entirely true or a complete load and I have no way to tell the difference. I'm going to assume that you're not lying, so let's just say that that stopped being a thing after that edition.

No, it's a 3e build.


Ha, no. I said that everyone ought to be able to handle a large-but-not-complete portion of tasks; 70% was the number that came up. So while in such a paradigm it'd be okay that the wizard can also do a rogue thing because there is about a third of the game that he has to rely on other for, which wasn't at all the case in 3.X and is still iffy in later editions (again, I can't speak on earlier editions because I didn't play them).

Again, that's where the "large-but-not-absolute" idea comes from; as long as at least one or two members of the party are able to handle a given role, you get that diversity. Assuming that everyone handles an equal-but-different area, of course. If one has 80% of everything covered and the other 3 members have a mostly overlapping 15%, it stops being fun.

For what it's worth, the "Good at specialty, decent at most other things" is a good paradigm; if all classes had that, there'd be much less complaining (because this is the internet, so someone will be butthurt about it no what happens). The problem is that some classes are way more powerful than others, when they shouldn't be. The way you show "Character A is stronger than Character B" in a class-and-level game like D&D is levels (though a case for Prestige classes as a measure of power could be made), not the class. A person of a given level who gets power from their god should be of equivalent power, but a Cleric 7 > a Favored Soul 7 > Divine Mind 7, even if they are getting their power from the same god!

I've tried incorporating a lot of these ideas into my at will stuff, above. Anything I missed?


I haven't played any of your games, so I am working blind here, but in your cooperative, player-can-handicap-themselves-for-the-good-of-the-group games, they only have one overarching goal, don't they? Something along the lines of "Get X points" of "Find X pieces before the timer runs out"? And by handicapping themselves, they make the goal easier to reach (fewer points to get, more time/turn to find stuff in, etc)? I need a framework to make my arguement here.

I'm broadening my criteria here. In some of them, yes, the group gets something for you playing on hard mode / losses points for your handicap. Personally, I both prefer and find more utility from the ones where that is not the case. Where difficulty level gives no advantages beyond more fun from the game being balanced to the players' skill.


We are talking about a hypothetical scenario where all spells are at will.

Due to the nature of silence it is pretty easy to get it so that the person you are trying to keep from hearing you is in the area of emanation but the caster is not, again depending on the specific layout.

Also, it seems like you are saying there will never be a situation where you need to get something open but dont care if someone hears you do it, which is clearly ridiculous.

Um, actually, I think the point was valid for 3e, especially as we haven't gotten to the concept of metamagics in this new system yet.

Simply put, "Silent Knock" is more powerful than Knock, and changes the "tier" of both the ability, and the Wizard with access to it. So, unless "open locked doors" is one of the Wizard's specialities, "Silent Knock" just isn't possible.

Or maybe it is, as a 5-hour ritual. Why not?

Point being, in a system with the type of balance point I'm describing, where everyone's abilities are all at will, you need to be able to ask yourself whether this particular door calls for picking the lock, corrupting the mechanism, a loud knock, or whether it gets the axe. There need to be different situations where each is optimal. Silent Knock breaks the game.

EDIT: note, however, that the rogue can "take 20", effectively trading "fast" for "accurate". So, I suppose, for balance's sake, the Wizard should be allowed to "take 20", silently drawing glowing magic runes on the target for 20 rounds to remove the "loud" descriptor from their spells. Just like the Fighter can take 20 swings to chop down doors with the "too sturdy to destroy in one blow" descriptor. Good catch on how the Wizard's Knock wasn't actually up to par yet.

[Max_Killjoy]

Balancing casters and martials by converting them to point buy, I give you Grod_The_Giant's D&D in M&M (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?279503-D-amp-D-in-M-amp-M-a-new-approach-to-rebalancing-3-5-PF). So it can be done, although mimicking spell preparation can't be enforced inside of the rules, so you have to turn to GM intervention to pull that off.


If one wants "spell prep", it is explicitly possible with a Variable Power Pool and the right Charges limitation in HERO.

Each spell would be set up as a single Charge that can only be regained with sufficient downtime / prep-time.

The size of the VPP would represent how many spells can be prepped at once, and it would be set up to only allow changes to what's in the Pool during downtime.

[Tanarii]

That might help slightly with the power but the old magic system is the same inconsistent convoluted eclectic mess. And the rest of the system is really dated. There are so many non-D&D systems out there.
The entire AD&D 1e system is an inconsistent convoluted eclectic mess. I was being sarcastic about actually going back and playing it, because only a few die hard fans are going to do that. But the idea that somehow "magic > mundanes" is inherent to D&D ignores that this wasn't true until 3e, or if you both house-ruled out the rules that kept it in check (sadly common). And assumed fairly high levels (10+) were quick to achieve, as opposed to taking years.

[digiman619]

Don't know, I was merely suggesting it as the easier way to balance things. But, why not, I'll take a stab.

So, for the set of all challenges, each character should be X competent at Y% of them. Now, we all disagree on the "correct" values of X and Y, and on how many "tiers" of competence there should be (both in terms of "solo" vs "assist" vs "can't contribute", and in terms of "BDH" vs "Hard Mode"), but let's ignore that for the moment, too. Let's just say that every character who gets the ability to deal with something has some predetermined "level" of ability.

With me so far? So, let's take the example of the epic challenge of a locked door.

To make balance easier, we've already said we're removing the "at will" vs "limited use". So, what other distinctions do we have? Well, quiet vs loud, fast vs slow, whether it's reversible, whether it damages the door, whether it leaves a trace, versatility of target... and there's probably other things we could add. We assign each of these a value, and get points to spend when building a class feature based on this particular class's faculty with this challenge.

So, for the purpose of this example, let's invent a new Corrupter class. The Corrupter is a Cleric-like class that can actually deal with doors. They deal with doors by making things (ie, the locking mechanism) corrode. So, this is quiet/subtle, slow, not reversible, damages the lock but not the door, and somewhat telling (especially when used repeatedly), and inapplicable vs incorruptible materials.

Alternately, if we wanted to, for fun or balance, we could add in a whole new subsystem. We could create a table of materials vs Corrupter level, which would determine the length of time it takes a given Corrupter to corrupt a given locking mechanism, the probability/DC of anyone noticing the process / the odds of it producing a loud "snap" when it decays. Why, if we find the Corrupter to be too weak at dealing with this challenge, we could even add in extra advantages (always, or to the table), like the ability to corrupt locks at range, or more quickly, or as a delayed effect, or to sense such complex, delicate mechanisms even when they aren't immediately visible. That last one is probably more giving them "find/remove traps". Heck, maybe the Corrupter is just a reskinned Rogue, who trades speed and "can't handle high DC" for "can't handle certain materials", and reduced loot value, and lack of ability to reset challenges. Hmmm... this isn't sounding like a fair trade.

Which choices we make affects what the Corrupter's actual role in dealing with the Epic challenge of the locked door actually is. And affects the feel of the class, and should tie into an overall theme.

So, how does this tie back into balancing the Wizard class? Well, as I see it, we have three options:

* all Wizards know the same spells, and can use them all at will;
* Wizards have a finite pool of points with which to learn spells, but can use them all at will;
* Wizards have a finite pool of "prepared" spells, and can use those at will.

How large these pools are is determined by what value we place on variety. More on this in a moment.

Mind you, this is the same choice we have to make for each class. In fact, to ensure we never again have to hear "caster > mundane", let's not make the choice - let's make all 3 versions of each class. So, the Wizard who needs his scrapbook to change spells overnight? He's paralleled by the monk who needs a bit of fermented banana to change to drunken monkey style with 24 hour notice, and the thief who needs a 24 hour refresher on how to pick locks (complete with a need for sample locks, and only if that's a skill they've ever picked up in the first place, of course). But there's also the totally unbalanced Sample Wizard, who has his static list of spells already picked out for him, to parallel the Sample Rogue with a 2e-style "thieves table", and a Sample Monk with a static martial arts style. And the Skills and Powers style "pick your own slots" version of each.

So, now that we've achieved perfect symmetry and balance to our classes, what value do we place on the utility of variety? Well, IMO, the difference between the first two is related to how confident we are in the balance of the system we've created. And how much we need to shrink the third is a measure of how valuable information is in the game. And both are affected by how same-y our encounters are compared to the full breadth of the possible encounter space. Thus, the closer we keep them to the same size, the more adventures are encouraged to diversify their challenges.

So, if we do it right, we've achieved the perfect balance through symmetry of 4e, without the horrid same-y feel while retaining each class's distinctive feel.

What more could you want out of a game?
Of your three at-will solutions, the second one is probably the best as the first and third can lead to a lot of same-iness and difficulty differentiating the capabilities of two equal-level wizards much more difficult. All in all, I'll put this in the "Sounds good, but balancing it will be tricky" pile.


No, it's a 3e build.
Really? You had a fighter build kill a hundred people a round? Care to post a stub of that build? Because while I don't claim to be an expert optimizer, I have doubts about that being possible.


I've tried incorporating a lot of these ideas into my at will stuff, above. Anything I missed?
That in addition to making Wizard equivilent to Fighter (or vice versa), you need to make it so that two Wizards can be in the same party and still be substantively different.


I'm broadening my criteria here. In some of them, yes, the group gets something for you playing on hard mode / losses points for your handicap. Personally, I both prefer and find more utility from the ones where that is not the case. Where difficulty level gives no advantages beyond more fun from the game being balanced to the players' skill.
And if you friends just want to play a game of Castle Panic or some other co-operative game and you decide to limit yourself for 'fun' and lose the game, then what? Especially if you would have won without your self imposed limitation?



Um, actually, I think the point was valid for 3e, especially as we haven't gotten to the concept of metamagics in this new system yet.

Simply put, "Silent Knock" is more powerful than Knock, and changes the "tier" of both the ability, and the Wizard with access to it. So, unless "open locked doors" is one of the Wizard's specialities, "Silent Knock" just isn't possible.

Or maybe it is, as a 5-hour ritual. Why not?

Point being, in a system with the type of balance point I'm describing, where everyone's abilities are all at will, you need to be able to ask yourself whether this particular door calls for picking the lock, corrupting the mechanism, a loud knock, or whether it gets the axe. There need to be different situations where each is optimal. Silent Knock breaks the game.

EDIT: note, however, that the rogue can "take 20", effectively trading "fast" for "accurate". So, I suppose, for balance's sake, the Wizard should be allowed to "take 20", silently drawing glowing magic runes on the target for 20 rounds to remove the "loud" descriptor from their spells. Just like the Fighter can take 20 swings to chop down doors with the "too sturdy to destroy in one blow" descriptor. Good catch on how the Wizard's Knock wasn't actually up to par yet.
I agree with this; if and when we ever make a new magic system, having a subsystem like that seems like n interestin and varied idea.

[Satinavian]

The entire AD&D 1e system is an inconsistent convoluted eclectic mess. I was being sarcastic about actually going back and playing it, because only a few die hard fans are going to do that. But the idea that somehow "magic > mundanes" is inherent to D&D ignores that this wasn't true until 3e, or if you both house-ruled out the rules that kept it in check (sadly common). And assumed fairly high levels (10+) were quick to achieve, as opposed to taking years.Didn't recognize the sarcasm as there actually are enough of those nostalgic die hard fans on this board.

Personally the first D&D version i ever played was AD&D2 some time after the Infinity engine games came out. We didn't stay long as even then we found the system vastly inferior to other systems we used before.
But my memory suggests that casters already ruled in this early edition. And also that some of the limits regularly mentioned in this thread did not actually exist there and must have been lifted earlier already.



Really? You had a fighter build kill a hundred people a round? Care to post a stub of that build? Because while I don't claim to be an expert optimizer, I have doubts about that being possible.I remember one of my groups had a character with a War Hulk build and several reach increasements who could do that (well, if he had enough low level targets). There are probably other ways too.

[Talakeal]

Don't know, I was merely suggesting it as the easier way to balance things. But, why not, I'll take a stab.

So, for the set of all challenges, each character should be X competent at Y% of them. Now, we all disagree on the "correct" values of X and Y, and on how many "tiers" of competence there should be (both in terms of "solo" vs "assist" vs "can't contribute", and in terms of "BDH" vs "Hard Mode"), but let's ignore that for the moment, too. Let's just say that every character who gets the ability to deal with something has some predetermined "level" of ability.

With me so far? So, let's take the example of the epic challenge of a locked door.

To make balance easier, we've already said we're removing the "at will" vs "limited use". So, what other distinctions do we have? Well, quiet vs loud, fast vs slow, whether it's reversible, whether it damages the door, whether it leaves a trace, versatility of target... and there's probably other things we could add. We assign each of these a value, and get points to spend when building a class feature based on this particular class's faculty with this challenge.

So, for the purpose of this example, let's invent a new Corrupter class. The Corrupter is a Cleric-like class that can actually deal with doors. They deal with doors by making things (ie, the locking mechanism) corrode. So, this is quiet/subtle, slow, not reversible, damages the lock but not the door, and somewhat telling (especially when used repeatedly), and inapplicable vs incorruptible materials.

Alternately, if we wanted to, for fun or balance, we could add in a whole new subsystem. We could create a table of materials vs Corrupter level, which would determine the length of time it takes a given Corrupter to corrupt a given locking mechanism, the probability/DC of anyone noticing the process / the odds of it producing a loud "snap" when it decays. Why, if we find the Corrupter to be too weak at dealing with this challenge, we could even add in extra advantages (always, or to the table), like the ability to corrupt locks at range, or more quickly, or as a delayed effect, or to sense such complex, delicate mechanisms even when they aren't immediately visible. That last one is probably more giving them "find/remove traps". Heck, maybe the Corrupter is just a reskinned Rogue, who trades speed and "can't handle high DC" for "can't handle certain materials", and reduced loot value, and lack of ability to reset challenges. Hmmm... this isn't sounding like a fair trade.

Which choices we make affects what the Corrupter's actual role in dealing with the Epic challenge of the locked door actually is. And affects the feel of the class, and should tie into an overall theme.

So, how does this tie back into balancing the Wizard class? Well, as I see it, we have three options:

* all Wizards know the same spells, and can use them all at will;
* Wizards have a finite pool of points with which to learn spells, but can use them all at will;
* Wizards have a finite pool of "prepared" spells, and can use those at will.

How large these pools are is determined by what value we place on variety. More on this in a moment.

Mind you, this is the same choice we have to make for each class. In fact, to ensure we never again have to hear "caster > mundane", let's not make the choice - let's make all 3 versions of each class. So, the Wizard who needs his scrapbook to change spells overnight? He's paralleled by the monk who needs a bit of fermented banana to change to drunken monkey style with 24 hour notice, and the thief who needs a 24 hour refresher on how to pick locks (complete with a need for sample locks, and only if that's a skill they've ever picked up in the first place, of course). But there's also the totally unbalanced Sample Wizard, who has his static list of spells already picked out for him, to parallel the Sample Rogue with a 2e-style "thieves table", and a Sample Monk with a static martial arts style. And the Skills and Powers style "pick your own slots" version of each.

So, now that we've achieved perfect symmetry and balance to our classes, what value do we place on the utility of variety? Well, IMO, the difference between the first two is related to how confident we are in the balance of the system we've created. And how much we need to shrink the third is a measure of how valuable information is in the game. And both are affected by how same-y our encounters are compared to the full breadth of the possible encounter space. Thus, the closer we keep them to the same size, the more adventures are encouraged to diversify their challenges.

So, if we do it right, we've achieved the perfect balance through symmetry of 4e, without the horrid same-y feel while retaining each class's distinctive feel.

What more could you want out of a game?

Ok, let me dissect this for a moment.

I think that you would end up with a game that is a lot like 4E but even more bland and bloated. It might work for you, but it isn't a game I would like to play.

Problems I see:

People would be solidly defined by their class rather than as individuals, which IMO is a very bad thing, and it means that any party that is not perfectly balanced is utterly screwed. If two people want to play a wizard and no one wants to play a rogue the party is really hurting and the second wizard will be sitting around twiddling their thumbs most of the time.

How are you deciding what obstacles require a separate method for each class? There are limitless potential obstacles, and if you make the means of getting past each component standardized you are cutting out most of the player freedom and skill from the game.

This is going to take a ton of work to come up with a separate drawback for every challenge for every class and trying to keep them fresh and balanced. I would say if you have more than a handful of classes it borders on impossible.

A lot of abilities will negate drawbacks, making them meaningless. Silence negates noise, mend negates object damage, cure negates HP damage, etc. etc.

You either can't have abilities that create or manipulate objects and still have an economy. At will fabricate or minor creation or PoA makes the idea of any sort of economic system ludicrous and catapults the game into post scarcity.

You can't really have games based on attrition. Wearing down the party's HP when you have at will cure spells just won't work, and every little trap, hazard, and random encounter has to be, by itself, potentially game ending for it to have any meaning.

So you have the cleric who destroys the lock, the wizard who opens the lock loudly, the rogue who takes a long time to open the lock, and the fighter that takes a long time to loudly destroy the lock. While there is no clear winner here, I can still see a clear loser.



Um, actually, I think the point was valid for 3e, especially as we haven't gotten to the concept of metamagics in this new system yet.

Simply put, "Silent Knock" is more powerful than Knock, and changes the "tier" of both the ability, and the Wizard with access to it. So, unless "open locked doors" is one of the Wizard's specialities, "Silent Knock" just isn't possible.

Or maybe it is, as a 5-hour ritual. Why not?

Point being, in a system with the type of balance point I'm describing, where everyone's abilities are all at will, you need to be able to ask yourself whether this particular door calls for picking the lock, corrupting the mechanism, a loud knock, or whether it gets the axe. There need to be different situations where each is optimal. Silent Knock breaks the game.

EDIT: note, however, that the rogue can "take 20", effectively trading "fast" for "accurate". So, I suppose, for balance's sake, the Wizard should be allowed to "take 20", silently drawing glowing magic runes on the target for 20 rounds to remove the "loud" descriptor from their spells. Just like the Fighter can take 20 swings to chop down doors with the "too sturdy to destroy in one blow" descriptor. Good catch on how the Wizard's Knock wasn't actually up to par yet.

Ok, but I wasn't talking about 3E, rather a hypothetical at will system.

I don't think Knock is a problem spell in 3E unless you are playing the game in such a manner that spell slots or not a limiting factor (15 MWD, gate abuse, etc.)

I also think that the idea that needing to worry about someone overhearing your chanting when casting knock being ubiquitous rather absurd. While some of the situations in which I can imagine needing to unlock a door have this limitation, it is by far the minority, even when in enemy territory.

[Tanarii]

Didn't recognize the sarcasm as there actually are enough of those nostalgic die hard fans on this board.Yup that was my bad I should have used some blue text.


Personally the first D&D version i ever played was AD&D2 some time after the Infinity engine games came out. We didn't stay long as even then we found the system vastly inferior to other systems we used before.
But my memory suggests that casters already ruled in this early edition. And also that some of the limits regularly mentioned in this thread did not actually exist there and must have been lifted earlier already.2e had the same dangers with casting in combat being difficult unless you used very low level spells (interrupted by attacks that won initiative automatically), and memorization times being long (10 minutes per spell level memorized, after 8 hrs of rest).

I distinctly remember when I first started 3e, I was amazed at how awesome it suddenly was to be able to cast a spell safely in combat, with a mere concentration check! And a single hour or less to prepare all your spells memorized? Amaze-balls!

[Cosi]

To Cosi: Well I don't think that is the most useful way to phrase it, but I can live with that. However in that case: fighter > mundane as well.

He could be, but in practice he isn't. Practically, I don't think there's anything the Fighter does that isn't something Captain America could do.


1.Yes, I get the Everyone Collective thinks there is some other, magical, perfect way to do things. I'm saying there is not and that is a fantasy. The DM control of the game is the best way.

And you are flat out wrong about that. It is (among) the worst ways of running a game, because it gives up a huge amount of what makes TTRPGs different from other things you could be doing.


2.Well, if it works at my table, why would it not work at yours or anyone else?

Because I care about the experiences of all the players, instead of just the guy who happens to be sitting in the chair marked "DM".


See here lies the root of the problem. In a point buy system the D&D wizards costs 10x more than the fighter in points. Doesn't that tell us anything?

Again, you can't get an absolute from an inequality. It tells us that Wizards are better than Fighters. But we already knew that.


Other systems will just make you roll a less powerful wizard that can play alongside the fighter and there area good ways to to do this by specializing the wizard or make some laws of magic.

I notice a lot of ways to make the people who want to play mundane Fighters happy, but nothing that would solve the problem of people who want to play at the power level Wizards are at by powering up martials.


If the fighter or the mundane is going to play alongside the wizard then the mundane has to become superpowered as well and at that point the mundane isn't a mundane anymore.

So what? You advanced a bunch, and you gained different abilities that changed how your character works. Isn't that exactly what advancement should do? If what you want is a character who has less than X power, isn't the obviously correct solution for you to personally play campaigns that end at or before level X, rather than warping the entire system around that need? For that matter, consider the converse of what you're saying. If giving your Fighter enough abilities to compete with a superpowered Wizard makes him "not mundane anymore" and therefore not the character you wanted, wouldn't taking enough powers away from a superpowered Wizard to make him equal to a mundane Fighter also change that character in ways that could plausibly cause someone who wanted to play "superpowered Wizard" to claim the game wasn't fulfilling his concept?


Let's take a point from 5e which I was playing for the first time some days ago. We were playing at level 12 and I brougth a monk into a group of 2 full casters, one halfcaster and one mundane. The guys had explained how the casters had been balanced from 3.5. But when the Bard/Warlock was flying around out of harms way blasting eldritch blasts that did more damage than my monk attacks, I started to feel irrelevant and just to add insult to injury the monster would just use legendary resistance to invalidate my stunning attacks which kinda is the monks shtick.

When the climax came where a fight against a orc tribe of 600 orcs and some bosses. My monk could on average kill 1 orc per round without using his ki which he was kinda saving for the big bads. He had a 85% hit chance and could make 3 attakcs per turn doing d8+5 against the orcs 15 HP. Then the wizard would throw one fireball and kill more orcs than my monk would kill the whole battle and that was just one of his 20 spell slots. So of course my monk got turned into a T-Rex as he wasn't holding his own. Luckily the Wizard had a couple of pet elementals that he had bound with planar binding and had as pets the next 10 days.

Now of course I'm only discussing the combat minigame but just the versatility of casters makes the mundanes irrelevant. So you might think that the monk would be a good meatshield? Not quite because the Wizard had more HP because he only needed Int so he put all his other ASI in Con. So while my monk had to have both Dex and Wis the wizard was gaining 8 HP per level while my monk was gaining 7 per level.

This sounds like a problem with your abilities being kinda crappy, not with the casters being too good. If we scaled everything to you, that fight with the orcs would take something like 150 rounds (600 orcs / 4 PCs killing one per round). Shouldn't the game have given you some kind of cool abilities to allow you to chew through the orcs faster?


"Magic is poorly defined and has no real rules surrounding what it actually is" is one of the biggest problems with D&D and one of the main roots of the whole "caster beats mundane" paradigm. And yes, the same does go for most 'absolute effects', such as unbreakable forcecages and walls of force, incorporeal creatures being immune to all non-magical damage, and so on.

Disagree. Shadowrun has very tightly defined magic, and a Shadowrun mage would still invalidate a D&D Fighter in pretty much the exact same way and for the exact same reasons a D&D Wizard does.


You can make easily make a balanced 1st level D&D wizard in probably all point buy systems, it's probably around level 9+ that things start to fall apart then you are out of standard/heroic fantasy and can create your wizard in a supers game.

But there are Wizards (or magical characters) that are as powerful as a 9th level Wizard in fantasy stories. Kind of a lot of them actually. Dresden Files, Traveler's Gate, even the Warcraft novels. If your fantasy game can't handle that, it's failed as a fanrasy game.


So yes I run with clearly the wizard isn't balanced...in D&D. Balancing the Wizard is simple and easy: Open up your D&D book at the magic section and tear out the pages. Now sit down and make a functional magic system that isn't an amalgalm of some slottable powers slapped to the rest of the system with a shoestring and glue. Balance the new magic section with the rest of the system and you are ready to go.

This is not remotely necessary. Having consistent and well thought out "magic physics" is cool, but it is in no sense necessary to balancing the game. It is entirely possible to have balanced grab-bag systems (I'm sure that whatever you think the balance point of 3e is, there is at least one magic user there, and they're all grab bags), and to have unbalanced rule based systems (I can't think of any off the top of my head, but you could trivially imagine "what if Shadowrun powers cost half the BP/Karma?" and that would probably be broken).


there is more you can do to pump up martials than just give them spells.

Once again, this depends, at least in part, on what you think "spells" means. Clearly "whatever the Wizard does" counts as "spells". "Whatever the Sorcerer does" and "whatever the Cleric does" probably count too. But what about the Psion? What about the Binder? The Incarnate? The Truenamer? The Warlock? The Warblade? Is at-will fireball a spell? What about an at-will cone of acid? What if it's fluffed as being some kind of chemical explosive? What if it has that fluff, but is a Supernatural ability? A spell-like ability?

I'm 100% in agreement with the notion that you don't need to make the Fighter a Wizard to make him balanced. But you probably need to (and definitely should) give him some kind of ability to select abilities off a list, and it's not necessarily clear whether that's something that falls under your definition of "spell" or not.

[2D8HP]

....When you reach the higher levels in D&D as I have often mentioned then your wizard has become a superhero with loooots of superpowers.... .
I'd describe it as Robin Hood with Doctor Strange.

What is right, true, beautiful, and proper on the other hand is after Hristomilo casts his wicked spell, he meets Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser's blades (Yes, my ideas of how D&D should be pretty much begin and end with Leiber's works (https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg030.pdf))!


Let's take a point from 5e which I was playing for the first time some days ago. We were playing at level 12.....
That's one level more than I've played 5e at.

At 11th level, things just seemed a bit wonky, HP (for one) is too high. Hard to relate.


Or go back and play AD&D 1e starting at level 1 without power leveling, and enforce all the casting in combat, long memorization times, and other rules that kept AD&D wizards in check..
:smile:

Sounds good!


The entire AD&D 1e system is an inconsistent convoluted eclectic mess. I was being sarcastic about actually going back and playing it.....
Oh.

:frown:

I was thinking you were proposing bringing back some Magic User nerfing action to WD&D.

But your right AD&D was hard to Grok (as was OD&D). More or less the only version of D&D that I used all of it was the 48 pages of the 1977 "bluebook", everything else waa suggestions that we picked and choosed from.


Didn't recognize the sarcasm as there actually are enough of those nostalgic die hard fans on this board....
Hey.

How's it going.


Yup that was my bad I should have used some blue text.....
Bluetext is an abomination, that should never ever be used

[Tanarii]

Oh.

:frown:

I was thinking you were proposing bringing back some Magic User nerfing action to WD&D.It probably wouldn't fly, based on feedback I got when setting up my current campaign. There aren't enough players willing to play that kind of game out there to make a real campaign out of it. Using the word the old way.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: It's been getting a little heated in here. May I suggest everyone calm down? Perhaps sit down and frame your own argument, instead of what someone else (or "Everyone Else") is saying?

[Cluedrew]

While trying to be cool and calm:


If one wants "spell prep", it is explicitly possible with a Variable Power Pool and the right Charges limitation in HERO.That sounds in keeping of what I know of HERO. Which isn't actually that much. I'd be curious to see what D&D in HERO looks like, but we would need someone with knowledge of HERO, D&D and a lot of free time.


He could be, but in practice he isn't. Practically, I don't think there's anything the Fighter does that isn't something Captain America could do.Yeah, that is the way things have been, but I have no interest in keeping them that way. I feel that separating the fighter (class and archetype) from the idea of "as in real life" is important, at least at higher power levels. As for spell, it mostly actually comes down to the thematic feel of it. Which is just more than just flavour text, it is also about what implies about the ability.

As a simple example, an ability that can be used 3 times a day ... feels like a video game ability. But it feels more spell-like than an ability you can use 2 times a day for free, but every use after inflicts some bit of exhaustion on your character, which feels like the character is physically exerting themselves. Of course in isolation that isn't enough to decide it, but it hopefully gives you an idea.

I should also state that I consider a spell to be "A pattern that manipulates occult forces or entities towards a predictable (but not always deterministic) result". I just made that up so I might have to refine it later. So it does not include some of the more freeform magic abilities out there, although I don't think those are a great fit for the fighter either.

[Milo v3]

Making wizard casting in Mutants and Masterminds isn't hard, it's just weird :smalltongue:

Power Loss Complication (Cannot refill spell slots without his spellbook), then have one power for each spell level you want the wizard to possess. Each Spell Level Power would be a Variable power which is limited to effects that you have previously studied during downtime to sufficient degree (so the GM would decide if you've done that long enough), and has the Slow Drawback. All powers aside from Cantrips must have the unreliable drawback, each Spell Level must have less than 3/4ths the Power Points invested in it than the level below it, and all your highest level spells must have Tired drawback.

Gamesmasters should specify Power Level limits for each Spell Level before the game, and are free to certain effects to require a higher Spell Level than power level limits make (for example, having long distance teleportation require the wizard to have at least 6th level spell slots)

[RazorChain]

Again, you can't get an absolute from an inequality. It tells us that Wizards are better than Fighters. But we already knew that.

That's true I guess Quertus just grabbed the number from thin air but it's an indication of the power/versatility difference between a mundane and a wizard.




I notice a lot of ways to make the people who want to play mundane Fighters happy, but nothing that would solve the problem of people who want to play at the power level Wizards are at by powering up martials.

I don't think that both parties can be happy. If the mundane is going to reach the power level of the wizard then the only way is to get magical or superpowered, you just can't keep pace with the wizard if you are going to stay the guy at the gym.




So what? You advanced a bunch, and you gained different abilities that changed how your character works. Isn't that exactly what advancement should do? If what you want is a character who has less than X power, isn't the obviously correct solution for you to personally play campaigns that end at or before level X, rather than warping the entire system around that need? For that matter, consider the converse of what you're saying. If giving your Fighter enough abilities to compete with a superpowered Wizard makes him "not mundane anymore" and therefore not the character you wanted, wouldn't taking enough powers away from a superpowered Wizard to make him equal to a mundane Fighter also change that character in ways that could plausibly cause someone who wanted to play "superpowered Wizard" to claim the game wasn't fulfilling his concept?

I have no problem with it the mundane becoming magical if it fits with what I'm playing. If I am playing at a power level where you can punch out the sun I know that showing up with guy from the gym is stupid. The problem lies within the structure of the game (D&D) where you advance through different power levels, from a guy that is killing rats in a basement to fighting the gods. The player that wants to play Conan will have a problem when the Wizard player is manipulating time, creating his own plane of existence, mind controlling and summoning creatures to do his bidding that are more powerful than Conan. The Conan player wasn't signing up for such a game, he wanted to play Conan and kill the bad guy and rescue the maiden.

It's just like Quertus and 2D8HP, they have different expectations. 2D8HP wants to play Fafhrd, a northern barbarian and expert swordsman wielding his not so magical sword Greywind in a sword & sorcery game while Quertus wants to play a wizard and tackle invisible spectres guarding a dimensional portal at the bottom of the ocean. While both of them may want to play the same system they still want to play at different power level where there is different power disparity between the wizard and the mundane.





This sounds like a problem with your abilities being kinda crappy, not with the casters being too good. If we scaled everything to you, that fight with the orcs would take something like 150 rounds (600 orcs / 4 PCs killing one per round). Shouldn't the game have given you some kind of cool abilities to allow you to chew through the orcs faster?


That is one way to look at it. The systems I usually play my character would have been fleeing from 600 Orcs. With bounded accuracy in 5e my monk would never have survived the fight against 600 orcs without the wizards, so it looks like most classes are crappy that aren't wizards......or maybe it's just that the wizard is way more powerful and versatile?




But there are Wizards (or magical characters) that are as powerful as a 9th level Wizard in fantasy stories. Kind of a lot of them actually. Dresden Files, Traveler's Gate, even the Warcraft novels. If your fantasy game can't handle that, it's failed as a fanrasy game.

This is where you are wrong my friend. A low fantasy game hasn't failed if they don't portray high fantasy characters. A lot of systems have much tighter focus and smaller scale than D&D and don't go from zero to superhero. It' like saying that Cyperpunk 2020 has failed as a sci-fi game because it doesn't include space combat with star destroyers. Some people see the large scale of D&D as a bug others see it as a feature.





This is not remotely necessary. Having consistent and well thought out "magic physics" is cool, but it is in no sense necessary to balancing the game. It is entirely possible to have balanced grab-bag systems (I'm sure that whatever you think the balance point of 3e is, there is at least one magic user there, and they're all grab bags), and to have unbalanced rule based systems (I can't think of any off the top of my head, but you could trivially imagine "what if Shadowrun powers cost half the BP/Karma?" and that would probably be broken).

Given that most superhero games have kind of grab-bag powers I guess you are entirely right.

[Talakeal]

I don't think that both parties can be happy. If the mundane is going to reach the power level of the wizard then the only way is to get magical or superpowered, you just can't keep pace with the wizard if you are going to stay the guy at the gym.

IMO its not about what you can do but rather how you do it.

In AD&D or 5E a fighter is more or less the same as they are in 3E, they are still limited by things you could see Captain America doing, as mentioned up thread. They just aren't quite as gimped as 3E fighters, they have really good saves, they aren't gimped by the Full / Iterative Attack system or Cross Class Skills, and they don't need to be quite so hyper-specialized in one area to keep up in combat, but they are fundamentally the same.

Likewise AD&D and 5E wizards can still do all the same stuff; they can still shape-change and teleport and summon allies and conjure meteor swarms. They just can't do it all day everyday and have a lot more built in limits.


3.X has such a wide degree of optimization that these discussions only really have meaning if we spend a lot of time laying out the ground rules. Its true that T1 casters can break the game more easily than others, just even a level 1 commoner can utterly utterly break the game beyond all recognition and become an over-deity with enough TO mojo.

So when you say you need to buff a martial to keep up with a caster, where do we mean? If you take a wizard who takes care not to break the game and play like the designers appear to have envisioned, a versatile blaster with some crowd control, than your Captain America fighter can keep pace just fine. But if you are going with even a moderately optimized 3E caster who is willing to use all the little tricks and activate some of his NI loops then no, not even a gestalt of Goku, Superman, and Thor can keep pace with him.

There is actually a very narrow band of wizards across the editions of D&D where you can give a martial character "super powers" and think that allows him to keep up with a caster; he will blow a low up caster away and a moderate to high op 3E caster will leave even a super powered fighter in the dust.

[2D8HP]

....The problem lies within the structure of the game (D&D) where you advance through different power levels, from a guy that is killing rats in a basement to fighting the gods. The player that wants to play Conan will have a problem when the Wizard player is manipulating time, creating his own plane of existence, mind controlling and summoning creatures to do his bidding that are more powerful than Conan. The Conan player wasn't signing up for such a game, he wanted to play Conan and kill the bad guy and rescue the maiden.

It's just like Quertus and 2D8HP, they have different expectations. 2D8HP wants to play Fafhrd, a northern barbarian and expert swordsman wielding his not so magical sword Greywand in a sword & sorcery game while Quertus wants to play a wizard and tackle invisible spectres guarding a dimensional portal at the bottom of the ocean. While both of them may want to play the same system they still want to play at different power level where there is different power disparity between the wizard and the mundane....

....A lot of systems have much tighter focus and smaller scale than D&D and don't go from zero to superhero.....
That's a key insight. Much to my shame, I went decades before realizing that you don't have to play all the levels.

Hate that your PC can be killed by a housecat at first level in TD&D?

Skip first level.

Don't want to play (or with) a PC that has Doctor Strange level reality-bending superpowers?

Stop before you get to those levels.

One "variant" (that's what we called "house-ruled" long ago) of D&D that my table used decades ago (I think I got the idea from Different Worlds magazine) was to make CON = total HP no matter the level, which made low level PC's less "squishy" and high level PC's more down to earth.


...It's like saying that Cyperpunk 2020 has failed as a sci-fi game because it doesn't include space combat with star destroyers. Some people see the large scale of D&D as a bug others see it as a feature...
FWLIW the most fun for me "Cyberpunk" RPG session that I've ever played involved a chase through city streets, no "speculative fiction" elements at all really, more of a crime-action genre like The Warriors.

Hmmm... a little more "sci-fi" but wouldn't Escape From New York make a great RPG adventure?

[lesser_minion]

Disagree. Shadowrun has very tightly defined magic, and a Shadowrun mage would still invalidate a D&D Fighter in pretty much the exact same way and for the exact same reasons a D&D Wizard does.

I said that it's one of the roots of the problem. There are other factors in play, naturally, but the badly-defined magic in D&D is definitely significant.

[Quertus]

Spoiled for length.



You can make easily make a balanced 1st level D&D wizard in probably all point buy systems, it's probably around level 9+ that things start to fall apart then you are out of standard/heroic fantasy and can create your wizard in a supers game.

The problem lies within trying to create a high level D&D wizard in a point buy game means that the other players will get as many points as your wizard which means that they aren't making fantasy heroes but super heores as you have to give them options to spend those points.

So yes I run with clearly the wizard isn't balanced...in D&D. Balancing the Wizard is simple and easy: Open up your D&D book at the magic section and tear out the pages. Now sit down and make a functional magic system that isn't an amalgalm of some slottable powers slapped to the rest of the system with a shoestring and glue. Balance the new magic section with the rest of the system and you are ready to go.

The thing is that you want to play games with the D&D wizards power and utility so the other way around would be to give the barbarian super strength and super toughness and paint him green, the assassin can teleport short distances at will and the fighter gets and hammer that returns to his hand and calls down lightning.

There are only two ways to do this and that is to downgrade the wizard or upgrade the mundanes. The problem mostly lies in the wizard player doesn't want to relinquish his powers and the mundane player wants to stay mundane and not become super powered. So in essene the clash is that one wants to play a superhero game and the other wants to play heroic fantasy.

So how to balance the classes is clear as day. The only thing standing in the way are people screaming "Don't you dare nerf my wizard!" and "Don't you dare make my mundane hero magical!"

Most other system will explain what genre and power level you'll be playing while D&D just inadvertantly shoehorns multiple power levels into the same game without ever explaining itself. Which means that most of the campaign settings in D&D don't make any sense, the setting is completely disjointed from the system mechanics.

The balancing factor that is supposed to balance the wizard is number of encounters per day and I'll be darned if only the most hardcore gamers can be bothered with playing through 4-6 encounters a day solely because the wizard spell slots must be depleted!! So if you are playing through meaningless combat encounters just so the wizard can't go full nova in fights then the design principle of the game is really really bad as it limits playstyles severly just to balance the wizard with the other classes.


As for Prestidigitation, no one claims it's a uber powerful spell, it just proves D&D lazy design principles and lack of rules and laws of magic. All the effects it aims for are viable and easiliy replicated in for example Ars Magica just not all at once as magic is much more versatile while being more focused.

M&M handles versatility well. In M&M, a Wizard can take Prestidigitation without totally killing their build. In most other systems (WoD actually being one of the worst for this), a Navy Seal will reach epic levels of talent in a variety of abilities while the Wizard is still scrounging for the XP to finish off the effects of Prestidigitation.

The point was, simply, that it's easy to create two different characters, even in most point buy games, whose contribution is nowhere near equal. Attempting to replicate the D&D Wizard was just an example both that I happened to be familiar with, and that I figured most Playgrounders could grok.

On a different note, it needn't be combat encounters, but, yes, the entire design principle behind limited slots assumes multiple encounters. This is exactly why I suggested making all spells at will.




Of your three at-will solutions, the second one is probably the best as the first and third can lead to a lot of same-iness and difficulty differentiating the capabilities of two equal-level wizards much more difficult. All in all, I'll put this in the "Sounds good, but balancing it will be tricky" pile.


That in addition to making Wizard equivilent to Fighter (or vice versa), you need to make it so that two Wizards can be in the same party and still be substantively different.

I agree that it could be tricky to balance. In fact, I can all but guarantee that there'll be people who complain that it's unbalanced, no matter how it's built, due to the differences in their experiences and expectations.

As to your concerns, well, early editions of D&D, the Rogue Thief followed the first version. Every Thief had the same progression of abilities that they followed. It wasn't until Skills & Powers that the Thief could trade out abilities for alternates. So, personally, I'm arguing that the first having no meaningful statistical differentiation between two characters of the same class, is not a bug, and is as designed. Among other things, it allows noobs to theoretically play any class; or, perhaps more accurately, it allows anyone who doesn't enjoy the character creation minigame to play any class.

Obviously, it's not my first choice. But it has its advantages, and is the easiest to implement.

There's one I seem to have missed, that actually only provides minimal differentiation. In v1.5, every instance if a given class is still the same at its base, but gets a very small number of points of differentiation. "Oh, you're Azores, unseen Wizard of the Silent Knock, aren't you? Your reputation precedes you. I am Argus the Blue, master of the Stunning Thunder." Beyond their few specialties, they are identical under the hood to their base classes.

This is also relatively easy to implement, and gives characters a point or two of uniqueness. But, it's prone to issues where one player's distinctive feature(s) are significantly more aligned with the adventure, while another's doesn't come up at all. And strong opinions (right or wrong) regarding one particular advantage as "optimal", or even "broken", will doubtless surface.

I've lost this post twice, so I'll just say, my idea was, every class exists in every version; i.e., there's a static wizard, a "pick your static powers" wizard (ie, a 3e sorcerer), and a change your powers wizard. Oh, and, I suppose, a "static but pick a specialty" wizard.


Really? You had a fighter build kill a hundred people a round? Care to post a stub of that build? Because while I don't claim to be an expert optimizer, I have doubts about that being possible.


I remember one of my groups had a character with a War Hulk build and several reach increasements who could do that (well, if he had enough low level targets). There are probably other ways too.

As I've said, I don't really post my builds online. That having been said, there's no fewer than 5 Fighter builds I'm aware of which could pull off 100+ kills in a round; only two of which can do so consistently. All are reliant on attack rolls, none are expected to kill 100 equal-CR Tanks. And all, of course, require 100+ foes to be so kind as to cluster.

Happily, S has posted an idea which sounds equivalent to one of the builds I know (the best one wasn't mine, so I can't say "my" builds).


And if you friends just want to play a game of Castle Panic or some other co-operative game and you decide to limit yourself for 'fun' and lose the game, then what? Especially if you would have won without your self imposed limitation?

Then we lose an enjoyable game, rather than winning a boring one.

When you play a war game, or MtG, or a sport, well, one side losses. Always winning isn't exactly a requirement to have fun.

Nor, mind you, is living on the razor's edge a requirement for fun. But being able to set your handicap allows you to choose the correct level of challenge for your group. Being able to set it individually allows you to compensate for player skill, and calibrate the (in)equality of contribution.




Ok, let me dissect this for a moment.

I think that you would end up with a game that is a lot like 4E but even more bland and bloated. It might work for you, but it isn't a game I would like to play.

Wow. I go for flavor, even talking about including custom tables for various class powers, and you hear bland & 4e. Ouch. I clearly need to work on my presentation skills.


Problems I see:

People would be solidly defined by their class rather than as individuals, which IMO is a very bad thing, and it means that any party that is not perfectly balanced is utterly screwed. If two people want to play a wizard and no one wants to play a rogue the party is really hurting and the second wizard will be sitting around twiddling their thumbs most of the time.

Wow, this chunk is so content rich, I'm sure I'll miss things as I try to reply.

Hmmm... You're mostly right about the feel of the system. The actual feel that I was subconsciously going for, it seems, is actually "unless you're playing Ocean's Eleven, and hand-picking a very large number of specialists, your party is always ****ed. And that's fine." That is, you can almost always find some way to handle any challenge, but you can rarely handle any challenge in an optimal way. So you are always choosing which downside(s) you want to deal with.

As I say below, I'm discussing rules, not player skill.

I want version 1,1.5,2,&3 of each class to all exist in the system. Yes, I agree that two version 1 Wizards would overlap completely - that's kinda the point. Now, Wizards have Knock, a win button for locked doors, whereas a backup Rogue Thief in 2e was great - if the 1st Thief failed, try the second. Two version 1 Wizards would have an experience to the 2e Thief's skills on, say, Knowledge skill checks, where they have a chance of failure, and a backup Wizard is handy (whereas a Bard might have a Win Button for knowledge checks, but only be able to gain certain classes of information). But, because of the brevity of the example, there are several things missing.

The first missing thing is one which you don't care about, but which is vital to me: contribution. Actually, the Fighter has it in the example: a large number of Fighters can contribute to chopping down a particularly obstinate door faster. Every class should have a good number of skills / buttons / obstacles where they are able to contribute, where doubling (or tripling, or...) up on the class is obviously a good thing for clearing that obstacle.

The second missing thing was, I believe, originally your example: the locked door, the boulder, and the prisoner. As each character should be able to contribute to the majority of challenges, well, just because one foo is doing something doesn't by any means imply that there isn't something for a second foo to be doing right now, too. So, no, a second foo shouldn't be just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, so long as the classes are versatile.


How are you deciding what obstacles require a separate method for each class? There are limitless potential obstacles, and if you make the means of getting past each component standardized you are cutting out most of the player freedom and skill from the game.

Yes, I'm discussing the rules, not the mother may I portion of the game.

How much of the game the rules cover seems independent of how you write the rules.

If you disagree with this assessment, please explain the nature of your position.

That having been said, it is best looked at as follows: it is the class, more than the obstacle, that determines whether or not new subsystems are required. That is, you ask, "how does class foo respond to obstacle bar?" Then you create new subsystems as appropriate to maintain the flavor of the class. Thus the notion that, if the Corrupter always being slow makes it too bad at this task (or, from another PoV, if it had points left to spend on this class feature), one solution would be to create a custom table of materials vs Corrupter class level, to allow it to treat different materials differently (rather than just pass/fail), and get faster as it levels.


This is going to take a ton of work to come up with a separate drawback for every challenge for every class and trying to keep them fresh and balanced. I would say if you have more than a handful of classes it borders on impossible.

Agreed. Each class is a labor of love. On the plus side, the system is, um, designed to sell lots of supplements? :smallwink:


A lot of abilities will negate drawbacks, making them meaningless. Silence negates noise, mend negates object damage, cure negates HP damage, etc. etc.

Some abilities would be broken (and, thus, not allowed, like a Silent Spell metamagic with no equivalent drawback (such as the drawback of extra time & glowing runes)).

Silence is an interesting case, as it has its own way of making your actions obvious. Sure, people can't tell what you're doing, but, when things magically go silent, they know someone's doing something, and go on alert. With proper world building, if Silence is common, guards have "silent alarms", so to speak. So, all Silence gains you is mild obfuscation of your actions, at the cost of increasing the odds that people go on alert. Well, depending on where you use it, of course.


You either can't have abilities that create or manipulate objects and still have an economy. At will fabricate or minor creation or PoA makes the idea of any sort of economic system ludicrous and catapults the game into post scarcity.

This was already true, even before we removed "at will".


You can't really have games based on attrition. Wearing down the party's HP when you have at will cure spells just won't work, and every little trap, hazard, and random encounter has to be, by itself, potentially game ending for it to have any meaning.

Happily, the Dragon Shaman exists, to demonstrate that healing can be not only at will but automatic in an AoE and still ****.

So, I'm confident that it's possible to balance at-will healing.


So you have the cleric who destroys the lock, the wizard who opens the lock loudly, the rogue who takes a long time to open the lock, and the fighter that takes a long time to loudly destroy the lock. While there is no clear winner here, I can still see a clear loser.

Good. I'm not aiming for exact equality between the class for each challenge. To put arbitrary numbers to it, I want each class to have spent points to clear 60% of the obstacles with abilities in the 20-25 point range. Perhaps this is an example of the Fighter having only spent 20 points here.

That having been said, note that the Fighter is still optimal for dealing with doors that you don't want closed behind you, as he can destroy some in one round, whereas, by default, the Corrupter is Slow. Also, the Fighter is optimal for the odd case where you want people to know which way you went - including yourselves, if getting lost is a thing.


I also think that the idea that needing to worry about someone overhearing your chanting when casting knock being ubiquitous rather absurd. While some of the situations in which I can imagine needing to unlock a door have this limitation, it is by far the minority, even when in enemy territory.

...? Not a fan of gaining surprise rounds on opponents who are unaware of you? Not used to the idea of hiding that you're a caster? Ubiquitous? No. But awfully important in both your classic dungeon crawl, and for stealth during illicit activities, even for Wizards who are as obvious as my signature academia mage.




That's true I guess Quertus just grabbed the number from thin air but it's an indication of the power/versatility difference between a mundane and a wizard.

It's easy to assume that - that's kinda standard on the internet. But, no, in this case, long ago, I tried to write the D&D Wizard progression in several point buy systems. I asked myself, "at what point does this character contribute equally to a 'normal' character from this system?", and my answer was at somewhere around 10x the XP in some systems. In WoD, as previously demonstrated, the answer is "approximately never", if the Wizard starts with Prestidigitation.


I don't think that both parties can be happy. If the mundane is going to reach the power level of the wizard then the only way is to get magical or superpowered, you just can't keep pace with the wizard if you are going to stay the guy at the gym.

Not without going all captain hobo.


It's just like Quertus and 2D8HP, they have different expectations. 2D8HP wants to play Fafhrd, a northern barbarian and expert swordsman wielding his not so magical sword Greywind in a sword & sorcery game while Quertus wants to play a wizard and tackle invisible spectres guarding a dimensional portal at the bottom of the ocean. While both of them may want to play the same system they still want to play at different power level where there is different power disparity between the wizard and the mundane.

You're mostly right. The difference between that and the position I actually hold is, I want the Fighter to do the lion's share of dealing with these fantastical threats. I want the demigods who drink the lake, who hear the incorporeal footfalls on other planes, whose presence and reputation scare off or convert the guardians, etc.

Or, you know, the Fighter is free to accomplish something in a truly fantastical setting in whatever reasonable fashion they desire.

To generalize, I want to explore a truly fantastical setting. I don't want my setting limited by the inability of the party to participate. I want characters who can respond to arbitrary challenges with more than a shrug. Or, rather, to expect to be able to respond to some reasonable portion of arbitrary challenges with more than a shrug.

If the Fighter one envisions cannot do so, then that Fighter must, by necessity, be relegated either to the sidelines, or to a much more mundane world than I envision.


That is one way to look at it. The systems I usually play my character would have been fleeing from 600 Orcs. With bounded accuracy in 5e my monk would never have survived the fight against 600 orcs without the wizards, so it looks like most classes are crappy that aren't wizards......or maybe it's just that the wizard is way more powerful and versatile?

Oh, just to be sure I've been clear, personally, I want to be able to play characters who flee from 600 orcs, and characters who draw straws for who gets to kill them, all in the same system.


In short, wow, y'all gave me much more feedback on my "back of the napkin, proof of concept" idea than I was expecting. And, hopefully, I've corrected a few misconceptions on my ideas. But, um, if y'all want more detail or clarification on my crazy ideas for a system, I'll try, but I honestly wasn't prepared for more than "yes, I see what you mean" or "no, that'll never work". :smallredface:

[digiman619]

Then we lose an enjoyable game, rather than winning a boring one.

When you play a war game, or MtG, or a sport, well, one side losses. Always winning isn't exactly a requirement to have fun.

Nor, mind you, is living on the razor's edge a requirement for fun. But being able to set your handicap allows you to choose the correct level of challenge for your group. Being able to set it individually allows you to compensate for player skill, and calibrate the (in)equality of contribution.

That's only the case if everyone agrees to the limitation. If you cause your group to lose the game because you decided not to play archers in Castle Panic or otherwise limit yourself for 'fun' at the detriment of the group and against their will, then they will be justifiably angry with you.

And the difference between D&D and MTG is that MTG is a competitive game that is generally for only 2 players. There are plenty of archetypes in Magic that are unfun, but the different formats keep the various power levels apart so there isn't that level of imbalance. That and a game will only last 15-30 minutes tops, where a D&D campaign is a much more involved and will last dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete.

[NorthernPhoenix]

In many Anime, fighty types can often ruin any and all supernatural wackiness by flexing and believing hard enough. I've never understood why this can't work in trpg fantasy too. The fighter/warrior/whatever should have the best magic resistance/defence/whatever, not the worst, both active and passive.

[Max_Killjoy]

In many Anime, fighty types can often ruin any and all supernatural wackiness by flexing and believing hard enough. I've never understood why this can't work in trpg fantasy too. The fighter/warrior/whatever should have the best magic resistance/defence/whatever, not the worst, both active and passive.

I don't mind the general idea of giving non-casters better resistance to magic, especially magic that directly effects them (as opposed to resisting what amounts to a flamethrower that happens have magic instead of a nozzle at the base of the flame). But "flexing and believing hard enough" brings to mind a certain sort of anime wackiness I'd rather avoid in most games.

[Darth Ultron]

The Point Buy and Number of Encounters Per Day are two of the big problems with the way most people choose to play RPGs.

Point Buy makes for all super powered characters, and while this sounds good, it has huge problems. And that huge problem is the spellcasters. A high ability mundane character is just slightly better then an average ability mundane character. The fighter with high strength has a bit of a higher chance to hit, does a bit more damage and might be able to break things. A wizard with a high intelligence gets more powerful spells by DC, and gets more spells. Huge Imbalance.

And this is a easy and simple fix: have a game with no point buys. Except for the number crunching roll playing optimizers, normal players won't even notice when a character does ''only'' 10 points of damage, instead of 12. But the reduction in power of spellcasters is huge.

Encounters Per Day, is another one. A lot of games do the 2-3 encounters per day and the 15 minute day thing. And not just for the spellcasters, as lots of classes and abilities and other things have daily limits. So the players choose to want to use all the abilities all the time, as in every encounter. And the way to do that is to only have a couple of encounters per day.

But, if you increase the number of encounters, say to 10 or 20, now the player has to play differently. They have to accept that their character can't use the thing in every single encounter, and have to choose when they will use it. And this goes double or even triple of spellcasters. After all, a character with something like Rage or Smite can still fight and be very effective even if they don't use that ability. But a spellcaster that does not cast a spell is a whole other story.

I run long games with long times, in game, between days/rests. So a group of characters will be expected to be active, do things and fight for 16 hours, in game. A lot of players of spellcasters don't ''get'' this idea, and will burn out all their spells on the first six encounters or so. Though it does work out the same with a payer that saves their spells: the spellcasters don't dominate every single encounter. With 10 attack spells, they have to balance out that between 20 encounters...and that assumes one spell per encounter. And it works out of combat too. A spellcaster might have five knock spells, but they will encounter 35 locked doors.

It brings things back to more ''mundanes can use their abilities as often as needed'', but ''magic must be saved for special times''.

And this is just two changes of the way the game is played.

[Cosi]

I don't think that both parties can be happy. If the mundane is going to reach the power level of the wizard then the only way is to get magical or superpowered, you just can't keep pace with the wizard if you are going to stay the guy at the gym.

That wasn't the point. The point was that all of your solutions were focused on solving things towards the mundane's side.


I have no problem with it the mundane becoming magical if it fits with what I'm playing. If I am playing at a power level where you can punch out the sun I know that showing up with guy from the gym is stupid. The problem lies within the structure of the game (D&D) where you advance through different power levels, from a guy that is killing rats in a basement to fighting the gods. The player that wants to play Conan will have a problem when the Wizard player is manipulating time, creating his own plane of existence, mind controlling and summoning creatures to do his bidding that are more powerful than Conan. The Conan player wasn't signing up for such a game, he wanted to play Conan and kill the bad guy and rescue the maiden.

Then why is he playing a system that assumes advancement? D&D makes it quite explicit that you are expected to level up. The correct mental model is stories like Wheel of Time or various Xianxias where the protagonists grow more powerful as they adventure and eventually reach a point where they could easily crush their lower level selves. If the Conan player wanted to keep on playing the same Barbarian who is "pretty strong" and "kinda cunning", he should have either played a system that doesn't have baked in advancement or houseruled out some or all of the advancement D&D has.


That is one way to look at it. The systems I usually play my character would have been fleeing from 600 Orcs. With bounded accuracy in 5e my monk would never have survived the fight against 600 orcs without the wizards, so it looks like most classes are crappy that aren't wizards......or maybe it's just that the wizard is way more powerful and versatile?

Again, you're trying to prove an absolute from an inequality. I absolutely agree that the Wizard is better than the Monk. Qualitatively different even. The question is whether that means the Wizard is overpowered or the Monk is underpowered. And that question can't be answered until you define what the expected power level is.


This is where you are wrong my friend. A low fantasy game hasn't failed if they don't portray high fantasy characters. A lot of systems have much tighter focus and smaller scale than D&D and don't go from zero to superhero. It' like saying that Cyperpunk 2020 has failed as a sci-fi game because it doesn't include space combat with star destroyers. Some people see the large scale of D&D as a bug others see it as a feature.

That's why I didn't say "low fantasy". D&D is kitchen sink fantasy (witness, for example, the six different kinds of core-only aquatic humanoid). What's more, it's kitchen sink fantasy that has consistently claimed (or at least paid lip service to) the idea of playing characters who challenge the gods and conquer planes. The I in BCEMI stands for "Immortal", and that tradition has carried forward to every edition but 5e.


So when you say you need to buff a martial to keep up with a caster, where do we mean? If you take a wizard who takes care not to break the game and play like the designers appear to have envisioned, a versatile blaster with some crowd control, than your Captain America fighter can keep pace just fine.

This is not remotely true. Like, even a little bit.

1. This is factually false. Captain America cannot keep up with a Wizard, because that Wizard has the option to e.g. fly around all day (overland flight) while shooting blasts of fire at will (Fiery Burst). That's a 9th level Wizard, and not even a particularly optimized (within the "PO" band) one. He can already kill enemies that Captain America would struggle with or simply lose to with very little effort or risk on his part (e.g. any kind of melee brute). FFS, look at the enemies characters like Doctor Strange or Iron Man face versus the enemies Captain America faces. The idea that the characters are equal is laughable.
2. This is a bad comparison. The Wizard and the Fighter are specialized in different areas, of course it's going to take longer for any structural imbalance to be obvious. But think about what you're asking for. Effectively, you can't have any character whose better at fighting than Captain America is. Is that really reasonable? Of course not! There are lots of fantasy characters better at fighting than he is. For example, Thor, Anomander Rake, Simon (Traveler's Gate), or any number of other people with "sword magic".
3. This entirely misses the non-combat section of the game. Maybe you can somehow make the case Captain America is useful in combat. But out of combat he's got nothing. His best bet is that he can do some espionage footwork, while other characters can summon demons, make entire fortresses in minutes, or see events on the other side of the world. He can't pull his weight in high level non-combat encounters, which means he is not a high level character.

This idea you have that if we just let people play Captain America things would be fine is absurd. It's always been absurd and it will always be absurd, because Captain America is simply not all that impressive of a character. He's "pretty strong" and has a cool shield. That's not a 20th level character, and it's certainly not the equal of Doctor Strange.


I said that it's one of the roots of the problem. There are other factors in play, naturally, but the badly-defined magic in D&D is definitely significant.

And I still think you're wrong. "Well defined magic" is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve balance between casters and mundanes (at least, insofar as "well-defined" apparently means "consistent magic physics"). D&D is balanced in the E6 range, and magic is no more coherent there than it is in the rest of the game. Shadowrun mages are no more balanced with Fighters than D&D Wizards are, and Shadowrun has a remarkably consistent set of underlying rules for magic.

[Quertus]

Removes from spoiler, as I hope this is a valuable topic for all gamers.


That's only the case if everyone agrees to the limitation. If you cause your group to lose the game because you decided not to play archers in Castle Panic or otherwise limit yourself for 'fun' at the detriment of the group and against their will, then they will be justifiably angry with you.

And the difference between D&D and MTG is that MTG is a competitive game that is generally for only 2 players. There are plenty of archetypes in Magic that are unfun, but the different formats keep the various power levels apart so there isn't that level of imbalance. That and a game will only last 15-30 minutes tops, where a D&D campaign is a much more involved and will last dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete.

Sorry, this was so obvious to me, it never even occurred to me to explicitly state it. Of course this is a group thing.

Now, that having been said, the scenario determines who has what involvement in that decision. When I play chess against a 7-year-old, I determine my handicap, and tell them up front how I run that (at the start of the game, remove any 3 of my pieces. We'll play with this handicap until you beat me. Then my handicap will be two pieces. Etc.). In MtG tournament play, I play whatever sounds like fun, and so long as it's even remotely within sight of balance (I win at least one game against someone (that's one in a 2-out-of-3)), then I'm happy. Note that both sweeping every match and being swept every match are still things, so MtG is not this paragon of play balance you've described. In fact, I'd argue based on my experiences that the floor and ceiling are more desperate than in D&D. In a friendly MtG match, similar rules apply, and some decks get "banned" when they fall outside the group balance range. As decks in such a scenario are generally tied to individuals, "player skill" (and play style) is often wrapped into the deck, making this an easier equation to balance.

In an RPG, there are several ways that this balancing act can work. Perhaps the most common was, the GM reviews the character, and lets you know if it matches the group power level. This old-school technique worked fairly well, but still had a few issues, including GM bias, and not compensating for player skill, but, for a drop-in game, was about the only viable option. Another unfortunately common technique involves having boatloads of house rules created out of knee jerk reactions to past problems, in the hopes that this forces characters into some semblance of balance. This especially foolish method treats players like children, throws out many perfectly valid character options, and still fails to take into account player skill. With a group you know, the best methods, IMO, are for the players to individually balance their characters to the group, and, should problems arise (because not all players are going to always succeed at this benchmark), for the group to discuss it like adults.

As to a D&D campaign taking hundreds of hours to complete... IMO, a good D&D campaign will have plenty of opportunities for both success and failure. How many of each a properly balanced party should have will vary by group. And a good group should notice and discuss problems long before that hundreds of hours investment.

[Quertus]

Again, you're trying to prove an absolute from an inequality. I absolutely agree that the Wizard is better than the Monk. Qualitatively different even. The question is whether that means the Wizard is overpowered or the Monk is underpowered. And that question can't be answered until you define what the expected power level is.

Class power level isn't a point, it's a range, based on build (and player skill, and the personality being roleplayed). I contend that there exist instantiable instances of the classes where they are acceptably balanced. But, yes, defining the acceptable range of power is, indeed, the key first step.


That's why I didn't say "low fantasy". D&D is kitchen sink fantasy (witness, for example, the six different kinds of core-only aquatic humanoid). What's more, it's kitchen sink fantasy that has consistently claimed (or at least paid lip service to) the idea of playing characters who challenge the gods and conquer planes. The I in BCEMI stands for "Immortal", and that tradition has carried forward to every edition but 5e.

Immortal is, to me, about the point where we start actually playing the game, most of the time. Everything before that is just playing out the "backstory".

So, for me, 5e doesn't have game?


This is not remotely true. Like, even a little bit.

1. This is factually false. Captain America cannot keep up with a Wizard, because that Wizard has the option to e.g. fly around all day (overland flight) while shooting blasts of fire at will (Fiery Burst). That's a 9th level Wizard, and not even a particularly optimized (with the "PO" band) one. He can already kill enemies that Captain America would struggle with or simply lose to with very little effort or risk on his part (e.g. any kind of melee brute). FFS, look at the enemies characters like Doctor Strange or Iron Man face versus the enemies Captain America faces. The idea that the characters are equal is laughable.

"Cap" could roughly duplicate that capability with a horse and a bow. Or a Pegasus and a bow.

Which also doesn't sound particularly optimized to me.


3. This entirely misses the non-combat section of the game. Maybe you can somehow make the case Captain America is useful in combat. But out of combat he's got nothing. His best bet is that he can do some espionage footwork, while other characters can summon demons, make entire fortresses in minutes, or see events on the other side of the world. He can't pull his weight in high level non-combat encounters, which means he is not a high level character.

For the record, if the Avengers was an RPG, I don't think Cap's player would feel like he failed at life outside of combat. I mean, sure, he failed a lot of his rolls, but, often, that was because he was the one getting to make the rolls in the first place. And, he did beat Iron Man at intel.



This idea you have that if we just let people play Captain America things would be fine is absurd. It's always been absurd and it will always be absurd, because Captain America is simply not all that impressive of a character. He's "pretty strong" and has a cool shield. That's not a 20th level character, and it's certainly not the equal of Doctor Strange.

Don't sell Cap short, he has numerous other traits, like agility and stamina and skills and determination. But, yeah, I'd rather play Doctor Strange.


And I still think you're wrong. "Well defined magic" is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve balance between casters and mundanes (at least, insofar as "well-defined" apparently means "consistent magic physics"). D&D is balanced in the E6 range, and magic is no more coherent there than it is in the rest of the game. Shadowrun mages are no more balanced with Fighters than D&D Wizards are, and Shadowrun has a remarkably consistent set of underlying rules for magic.

Nice job on the "necessary and sufficient" line of reasoning. Although I question whether E6 is really all that balanced - whether, at the "my first wizard" level of optimization, the first level Wizard has any chance of even remotely equal contribution.

[2D8HP]

.....The I in BCEMI stands for "Immortal", and that tradition has carried forward to every edition but 5e...

...D&D is balanced in the E6 range....

...Immortal is, to me, about the point where we start actually playing the game, most of the time. Everything before that is just playing out the "backstory"...

....I question whether E6 is really all that balanced - whether, at the "my first wizard" level of optimization, the first level Wizard has any chance of even remotely equal contribution..
While I did buy and play other games, I stopped buying TSR when they came out with Unearthed Arcana in 1985, and thus skipped the "Immortal" rules, and if I wanted to play PC's with that level of power I'd probably play Champions instead (if I could get over how tedious I find doing a point buy "build").

While I did buy the 3e PHB (and felt cheated when they came out with 3.5 soon after), I've only played Oe D&D, 1e AD&D, a little B/X and 5e WD&D.

I have little interest in "builds" and "Prestige Classes", nor in playing a Spell-caster, or in being the waterboy for one, but if I'm reading between the lines correctly with the mentions of "E6", 2e to 4e below 7th level would still feel like the game I know and enjoy?

[Satinavian]

I have little interest in "builds" and "Prestige Classes", nor in playing a Spell-caster, or in being the waterboy for one, but if I'm reading between the lines correctly with the mentions of "E6", 2e to 4e below 7th level would still feel like the game I know and enjoy?Probably. But it has still far more options as it gives out lots of feats, so it might go against your wish of a simple character creation and even simpler advancement.

I didn't try it. If i actually ever wanted to do Sword & Scorcery (which is not one of my favorite genres) i would still pick some specialized system like Barbarians of Lemuria instead. Or try out Zweihänder even if that aims for another genre. Or have a short and silly escapade with Dungeonslayer. Admittedly the systems i know best and use most don't do Sword & Scorcery too well so i wouldn't use any of those. But using D&D with all its baggage and then trimming down character options until they fit the genre ? Not a choice i would make.

[2D8HP]

...I would still pick some specialized system like Barbarians of Lemuria instead. Or try out Zweihänder even if that aims for another genre. Or have a short and silly escapade with Dungeonslayer.....
Thanks for the tips!

:smile:

I looked at some reviews, and those games look cool!

The thing is, I'm a bit scared by too many years of failing to get other people to play Pendragon, or Stormbringer, so I have a limited desire to be a "game evangelist", whereas 3.5/Pathfinder (and to a lesser extent 5e) have lots of open tables, and I can tell from this Forum the willingness to warp WD&D into another game ("house rules") seems boundless, unlike the limited willingness of people to play games called by other names.

[Talakeal]

@ Quertus:

A locked door is not a scene, it is an element of the scene. The problem with this approach is that you need to identify every individual element of every possible scene and give every class a hard counter to it. That is both prohibitively time consuming and very hard to keep flavorful and balanced.


On the knock spell, in my experience most locks are on treasure chest / vaults and are only opened after the enemies are dead. The scenario you describe is pretty rare, enemies on the other side of a locked door who can hear six seconds of chanting in a strong clear voice twenty feet on the other side of the door (and the accompanying wall) but would not be alerted by the entire party moving across said room. That's a pretty specific scenario.

Also, silence is a really good spell. Its a 20' emanation which lasts for a minute per level and can be cast on a mobile object. Silence stops all sound from passing through it. There is nothing to stop you casting silence on a marble, rolling the marble into a place where the zone of silence encompasses the door and a good potion of the wall but not the guards or the mage.



@Cosi:

Note that I am not saying Captain America *is* a level 20 character, or that a level 20 character *should be* Captain America. I would probably say Captain America would be somewhere in the level 5-10 range with very good ability score rolls and a single moderately powerful magic item.

I was agreeing with one of the posters up thread who said that there is nothing a level 20 fighter can do that one couldn't see Captain America doing.

I was further stating that in every edition of D&D except even moderately optimized 3.5 and most D&D like RPGs a level 20 fighter can still meaningfully contribute to the party without feeling helpless / useless. Of course balance isn't perfect, but it is close enough to have a fun game, and in some systems the imbalance even swings in the fighter's favor.

I know you insist that this isn't the case, but the majority of my experiences on forums indicate that yours is the minority opinion, and I have personally spent nearly three decades playing and designing games with versatile casters who do not completely overshadow mundanes.

[digiman619]

Removes from spoiler, as I hope this is a valuable topic for all gamers.
I only spoilered it because you spoilered your responce to me, though in restrospect it was obviously for length rather than privacy.


Sorry, this was so obvious to me, it never even occurred to me to explicitly state it. Of course this is a group thing.
Really? Because I remeber takling about team dynamics in your old "hard mode" thread and you never said that it was a group choice. If everyone in the group wants a harder experience, that's easy to do without having a "hard mode" class; just increase the difficulty of the monsters and traps and such.


Now, that having been said, the scenario determines who has what involvement in that decision. When I play chess against a 7-year-old, I determine my handicap, and tell them up front how I run that (at the start of the game, remove any 3 of my pieces. We'll play with this handicap until you beat me. Then my handicap will be two pieces. Etc.). In MtG tournament play, I play whatever sounds like fun, and so long as it's even remotely within sight of balance (I win at least one game against someone (that's one in a 2-out-of-3)), then I'm happy. Note that both sweeping every match and being swept every match are still things, so MtG is not this paragon of play balance you've described. In fact, I'd argue based on my experiences that the floor and ceiling are more desperate than in D&D. In a friendly MtG match, similar rules apply, and some decks get "banned" when they fall outside the group balance range. As decks in such a scenario are generally tied to individuals, "player skill" (and play style) is often wrapped into the deck, making this an easier equation to balance.
Except those are all competative games. They have a totally different framework from co-operative games, so judging it by that standards will give you faulty results like this.

In an RPG, there are several ways that this balancing act can work. Perhaps the most common was, the GM reviews the character, and lets you know if it matches the group power level. This old-school technique worked fairly well, but still had a few issues, including GM bias, and not compensating for player skill, but, for a drop-in game, was about the only viable option. Another unfortunately common technique involves having boatloads of house rules created out of knee jerk reactions to past problems, in the hopes that this forces characters into some semblance of balance. This especially foolish method treats players like children, throws out many perfectly valid character options, and still fails to take into account player skill. With a group you know, the best methods, IMO, are for the players to individually balance their characters to the group, and, should problems arise (because not all players are going to always succeed at this benchmark), for the group to discuss it like adults.

As to a D&D campaign taking hundreds of hours to complete... IMO, a good D&D campaign will have plenty of opportunities for both success and failure. How many of each a properly balanced party should have will vary by group. And a good group should notice and discuss problems long before that hundreds of hours investment.
As for this last bit, yeah, while we defineatly agree that problems from that should be handled OOC, but such problems would be minimized if that level of imbalance didn't exist in the first place.

[Quertus]

.
.
While I did buy and play other games, I stopped buying TSR when they came out with Unearthed Arcana in 1985, and thus skipped the "Immortal" rules, and if I wanted to play PC's with that level of power I'd probably play Champions instead (if I could get over how tedious I find doing a point buy "build").

While I did buy the 3e PHB (and felt cheated when they came out with 3.5 soon after), I've only played Oe D&D, 1e AD&D, a little B/X and 5e WD&D.

I have little interest in "builds" and "Prestige Classes", nor in playing a Spell-caster, or in being the waterboy for one, but if I'm reading between the lines correctly with the mentions of "E6", 2e to 4e below 7th level would still feel like the game I know and enjoy?


.
Thanks for the tips!

:smile:

I looked at some reviews, and those games look cool!

The thing is, I'm a bit scared by too many years of failing to get other people to play Pendragon, or Stormbringer, so I have a limited desire to be a "game evangelist", whereas 3.5/Pathfinder (and to a lesser extent 5e) have lots of open tables, and I can tell from this Forum the willingness to warp WD&D into another game ("house rules") seems boundless, unlike the limited willingness of people to play games called by other names.

Yes and no. E6 will come the closest to the muggle superiority that you're used to. But the gameplay is somewhat different. Here's a few examples:

Character creation is more of a chore. And so is leveling. And, by the books, leveling is much faster. So you'll be spending much more time on the chores and busy work per hour spent actually playing the game than you used to.

The System is much cleaner. No more "save vs obfuscated verbiage".

It's a trap! Trap options that look good but actually **** are a thing.

Diversity is just another word for losing. Sadly, many people consider bringing a suboptimal build to the table to be a cardinal sin. Because, clearly, the only thing that matters is winning. I played with a lot of horrible GMs back in the day, but I don't remember ever encountering this mindset before 3e. I don't think it's inherent to the product, though - I blame the internet.

Dealing damage is among the least useful things a Wizard can do - expect them to pull off much cooler (if, sometimes, less effective (Sleep allows a saving throw now)) tricks.

Magic items come from stores now. Good for game balance, and planning your build. Not nearly as cool as older editions. Gone ate the days of the Amulet of Caterpillar Control. :smallfrown:

I don't think I've played with a single new-school gamer who would consider cool props (like reading through newspapers looking for clues) to be a positive experience. Expect a heavy reliance on "playing the sheet" rather than player skills.

Most relevant to game balance, however, ate the following:

In 2e, more or less every party was unbalanced... and it was fine. In 3e, the range of possible builds for each class makes a balanced party a possibility, but, because of the range of power possible from each class, when the party is unbalanced, it can be worse than it every was in earlier editions (but only because I didn't actually play my TO builds at actual tables, mind you).

And, even if you go back to playing older editions with someone who gets 3e optimization, you'll likely find that they'll bring that mindset back with them, and consider 90% of 2e content "unplayably bad" compared to whatever they consider "optimal".

Hmmm... There's probably other important differences, but that's what comes to mind.

[2D8HP]

Yes and no. E6 will come the closest to the muggle superiority that you're used to. But the gameplay is somewhat different. Here's a few examples..:.


Thanks @Quertus, that was very informative. Much appreciated.

:smile:

I recently broke down and finally bought a 3.5 PHB, but I've only skimmed it so far.

[Cosi]

So, for me, 5e doesn't have game?

Honestly, 5e is just not a very good game. It has (or had at release) gaping holes in things like the stealth subsystem, and Bounded Accuracy means that even high level experts only beat low level amateurs a decent chunk of the time.


"Cap" could roughly duplicate that capability with a horse and a bow. Or a Pegasus and a bow.

I've mentioned this before, but I think there's a pretty clear difference between "things you can do with your gear" and "things you can do with your class abilities".


For the record, if the Avengers was an RPG, I don't think Cap's player would feel like he failed at life outside of combat. I mean, sure, he failed a lot of his rolls, but, often, that was because he was the one getting to make the rolls in the first place. And, he did beat Iron Man at intel.

Maybe? A lot of Captain America's contributions are in the form of him being "inspiring" or "good at tactics", which are valid roles in the abstract, but don't translate well to table top. The party is already presumably on board with whatever the adventure is, so inspiring them would need to be something closer to bardic music, and "good at tactics" can't really be protected as a niche since it could always be that the guy playing Doctor Strange or Iron Man was better at tactics at some particular table.


Although I question whether E6 is really all that balanced - whether, at the "my first wizard" level of optimization, the first level Wizard has any chance of even remotely equal contribution.

sleep, color spray, and silent image are all pretty sweet. It's certainly not as balanced as I would like, or balanced in the way I'd like, but it does pass the basic test of "you can justify the presence of a Fighter or a Wizard".


Probably. But it has still far more options as it gives out lots of feats, so it might go against your wish of a simple character creation and even simpler advancement.

For what it's worth, I've always felt that E6 should've put a hard cap on advancement at level 6, not had the trailing "and then a bunch of feats" afterwards. That's probably how I would run an E6 game (or any other kind of level capped game), with the exception of advancement through adventuring like acquiring loot or titles.


I didn't try it. If i actually ever wanted to do Sword & Scorcery (which is not one of my favorite genres) i would still pick some specialized system like Barbarians of Lemuria instead. Or try out Zweihänder even if that aims for another genre. Or have a short and silly escapade with Dungeonslayer. Admittedly the systems i know best and use most don't do Sword & Scorcery too well so i wouldn't use any of those. But using D&D with all its baggage and then trimming down character options until they fit the genre ? Not a choice i would make.

I agree that it sounds like you want something much more specialized than D&D is trying to provide. It's not a Swords and Sorcery game, and if you want to do that there are probably better systems.


I know you insist that this isn't the case, but the majority of my experiences on forums indicate that yours is the minority opinion, and I have personally spent nearly three decades playing and designing games with versatile casters who do not completely overshadow mundanes.

The first part is argument ad populum. The second part isn't disputing my position. I've never said all versatile casters are better than all mundanes. I've said that because "mundane" is a power cap, mundane characters are necessarily going to be unable to compete in a game that advances past whatever that cap happens to be, and further that the cap mundane characters are operating under is dramatically below many different characters people could reasonably want to play.

[2D8HP]

Honestly, 5e is just not a very good game. It has (or had at release) gaping holes in things like the stealth subsystem, and Bounded Accuracy means that even high level experts only beat low level amateurs a decent chunk of the time.....
I won't dispute the rest of your argument, but I like 5e's "Bounded Accuracy", it makes play more suspenseful, and I don't like any mortals being "undefeatable".


...I agree that it sounds like you want something much more specialized than D&D is trying to provide. It's not a Swords and Sorcery game, and if you want to do that there are probably better systems...


Nuh-uh!

They may indeed be games that better emulate Swords & Sorcery (Stormbringer comes to mind) but D&D's roots are Swords & Sorcery:

Dungeons & Dragons,
Book 1:
Men & Magic, 1974
"These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!
E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin"

Dungeon Masters Guide 1979
"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt."
Gygax
16 May 1979


That's a list strong in Swords & Sorcery!


...I've said that because "mundane" is a power cap, mundane characters are necessarily going to be unable to compete in a game that advances past whatever that cap happens to be, and further that the cap mundane characters are operating under is dramatically below many different characters people could reasonably want to play..
True, but personally I don't want to play at the "Doctor Strange" level. "Captain America" is quite enough for me!

[Quertus]

@ Quertus:

A locked door is not a scene, it is an element of the scene. The problem with this approach is that you need to identify every individual element of every possible scene and give every class a hard counter to it. That is both prohibitively time consuming and very hard to keep flavorful and balanced.

One again, you manage such a content-rich response. I'll do my best to parse it.

It's not a hard counter for each class for each element - each class need only have a counter for the arbitrary 70% of elements.

Balance certainly would be hard, if I were aiming for hard balance. I'm not. I'm aiming for, say, 60% of encounters elements to see a character having spent 20-25 build points on a counter. And, even when one class spent points such that they are a "clear winner" or "clear loser", but still in the 20-25 range, there should still be circumstances where the party chooses to not give their standard response. Now, yes, for something in the rare specialty ranges, well, that's that character's time to shine.

Flavorful? If I were actually trying to build it, I might be more concerned, but, as it stands, I trust my odds, especially if I've got a good team that can pull their weight on flavor, too.

Time consuming? Yeah, that's a feature, letting you keep pumping out new splat books, right? :smalltongue: Yeah, I can't deny that the "labor of love" nature of this system would likely be one its largest problems.


On the knock spell, in my experience most locks are on treasure chest / vaults and are only opened after the enemies are dead.

Wow. No wonder we differ here. I've been calling it "the Epic challenge of the Locked Door" for a reason. If you're not accustomed to infiltrating the enemy base, or searching the mayor's house at night to find (or plant) evidence, let alone finding locked doors in dungeons, then we can't really relate to one another here.


The scenario you describe is pretty rare, enemies on the other side of a locked door who can hear six seconds of chanting in a strong clear voice twenty feet on the other side of the door (and the accompanying wall) but would not be alerted by the entire party moving across said room. That's a pretty specific scenario.

Yeah, clearly not accustomed to the same scenarios I am. You don't send walking tin cans across the room - they cover the Thief with a bow, or cover the other exits. And/or hide inside that well-positioned Silence spell. :smalltongue:


Really? Because I remeber takling about team dynamics in your old "hard mode" thread and you never said that it was a group choice.

Again, so obvious, I never thought to mention it. :smallredface: But, in practice, much like character creation, the level and nature of group and GM involvement will vary by group.


If everyone in the group wants a harder experience, that's easy to do without having a "hard mode" class; just increase the difficulty of the monsters and traps and such.

It's not so much "the group wants a harder experience" as "Bob keeps dominating the game" or "Fred just can't seem to contribute". It'd be like forcing me to make a MtG deck entirely out of Red if I'm Bob, or letting me play racquetball with a tennis racket if I'm Fred.

The group just wanting harder (or easier) challenges is, agreed, a much easier problem to solve.


Except those are all competative games. They have a totally different framework from co-operative games, so judging it by that standards will give you faulty results like this.

"Faulty results like this"? So, when I play cooperative games, if I set people up such that they can contribute equally*, they seem to have more fun. I'm confused that you'd claim that this was a faulty result.

* or not, if that's their preference


As for this last bit, yeah, while we defineatly agree that problems from that should be handled OOC, but such problems would be minimized if that level of imbalance didn't exist in the first place.

Balancing for vastly different levels of player skill wouldn't be possible if those levels of imbalance didn't exist. And, at times, that level of imbalance isn't even sufficient to make up for truly vast gulfs in player skill.

So, it depends on how you look at it, and what problem(s) you're trying to solve.

[Arbane]

.
Nuh-uh!

They may indeed be games that better emulate Swords & Sorcery (Stormbringer comes to mind) but D&D's roots are Swords & Sorcery:

Dungeons & Dragons,
Book 1:
Men & Magic, 1974
"These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!
E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin"

Dungeon Masters Guide 1979
"The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt."
Gygax
16 May 1979


That's a list strong in Swords & Sorcery!


Unfortunately, D&D is rather bad at emulating its source material.