Can we build the math from the ground up? (And does Vancian help or hurt that?)

[Kyutaru]

Speaking of narrow design space, what of the class descriptions? Should the system promote narrow definitions the way D&D does to allow for splatbooks on top of splatbooks of option bloat? Or should the system encourage broad definitions such that a fireball wizard, an alien stormtrooper, a telekinetic psychic, and a western gunslinger are all the same class?

[Kyutaru]

And until 3E D&D was all about the improve too.

In olden days, or just with that type of DM, my martial character could do things like shoot and arrow and cause the tapestry on the wall to fall on top of the evil cleric, trapping them under it for three rounds.

Of course, in modern 5E with a modern DM I just get told "your character can't do that" because they don't have the specific abilities of 'cut tapestry off wall' and 'entangle foe in tapestry'. The even worse DMs will let me do that action, but then just laugh and say "nothing happens you wasted your turn".

That's a terrible DM. A gamist DM who denies anything but the letter of the abilities. Such a DM probably denies spells imposing a condition they don't otherwise state despite a change in the environment that would cause them. It's also completely untrue of 5E or of 3E as both have rules for adjudicating such actions in the DMG, primarily centered around ability checks (and skills checks when applicable). Yet too many DMs forget such things exist or view the game as a board game with a fixed set of actions when their handbook literally says the opposite.

I'm sorry you had that experience but YMMV is a fact of life with tabletop games.

[NigelWalmsley]

And until 3E D&D was all about the improve too.

Please, tell me where 3e says "no improvising". All the "3e ruined AD&D's balance/variety/whatever" complaining is just grognard nonsense. What 3e did was add coherent rules for things, which allows you to push back when your DM says "no you can't do that" by saying "I have an ability that says I can do that".

[Mechalich]

Speaking of narrow design space, what of the class descriptions? Should the system promote narrow definitions the way D&D does to allow for splatbooks on top of splatbooks of option bloat? Or should the system encourage broad definitions such that a fireball wizard, an alien stormtrooper, a telekinetic psychic, and a western gunslinger are all the same class?

There are pros and cons, but arguably, if you're going to have classes at all, you want those classes to have tightly defined ability suites, because the entire advantage of classes is that you can utilize them to conglomerate whole groups of abilities for things like balance, niche protection, generalized party role, and overall character concept. Overly generic classes don't really do anything and provide extremely limited utility because they don't produce any recognizable meaning either mechanically or in the fluff.

Many of D&D best balanced and most robustly functional classes are the most narrowly defined, such as the half-caster classes produced late in the run of 3.5e like Dread Necromancer. Or to go into Core, classes like Bard, Druid, and Monk are very weird, but their abilities are well-understood and their roles well-defined (the druid's abilities tend to be over-powered and the monk's under-powered, but that's mostly a matter of specific mechanical choices). Meanwhile, highly generic classes like 'Fighter' and 'Wizard' are all over the place.

Having narrowly designed classes is also a way of saying 'these are the PC concepts our game supports, anything outside those concepts is not a PC.' It's perfectly reasonable for a game to have all sorts of other types of characters in a game world, but at the same time to declare that you aren't playing one of them. This is very obvious in terms of a game like VtM, which begins with 'you a re a vampire, here are certain kinds of vampires you can play,' but it's important for games like D&D too, where a viable PC is something that interacts with the core principle of going on a certain kind of adventure.

[Kyutaru]

There are pros and cons, but arguably, if you're going to have classes at all, you want those classes to have tightly defined ability suites, because the entire advantage of classes is that you can utilize them to conglomerate whole groups of abilities for things like balance, niche protection, generalized party role, and overall character concept. Overly generic classes don't really do anything and provide extremely limited utility because they don't produce any recognizable meaning either mechanically or in the fluff.

I've seen the opposite function in a few places. In a game like City of Heroes the classes are split up based on role. All the characters I listed are "ranged damage dealers", aka Blasters. There's a class for supports, a class for tanks, a class for brawlers, a class for controllers. D&D originally went this route too with classes like Barbarian, Monk, and Sorcerer being subclasses of Fighter or Wizard. You could have Ranger and Paladin be their own unique class or you could make them Fighter variants centered around the same basic Role.

The pros to this system is that every role is preserved uniquely. No one steps on another's toes because no one can do what another class does. You might dabble in healing as a Paladin but you are NOT a Cleric or Druid by any means. Druids were once merely alternate priests, Warlocks alternate mages. A bit less griping about magic vs martial happened because they had distinct advantages and disadvantages, especially given the plethora of casting penalties 2E mages faced that 3E erased from existence.

The con to this system is that things are a little more homogenized. When every class stems from the same core class you have a lot of ability overlap between the subtypes. Naturally that means it's a little less special and flavorful compared to super unique classes but it's also easier to balance or produce a niche because you're not having to compare it to every class in the game, only to the ones that match the same role. D&D makes things very weird with classes that can perform every role and min-max to be better at one of them or with classes like the Hexblade that get way too much for their role and begin to overshadow other classes in terms of viability.

[Mechalich]

I've seen the opposite function in a few places. In a game like City of Heroes the classes are split up based on role. All the characters I listed are "ranged damage dealers", aka Blasters. There's a class for supports, a class for tanks, a class for brawlers, a class for controllers.

I would consider that to be fairly tightly defined. If a class is structured such that it permits only a specific functional role, then it has a tightly defined ability set, mechanically, even if you allow the cosmetics to vary widely. The four character archetypes you listed would all be different classes in other systems. For instance, in Star Wars Saga a 'fireball wizard' could be a Noble (with the Force Sensitive Feat), an 'Alien Stormtrooper' could be a Soldier, a 'Telekinetic Psychic' could be a Jedi, and a 'Western Gunslinger' could be a Scout. Or not, because Saga's classes are so broad that you could build each of those concepts using pretty much any of the Five classes if you wanted to (some builds would be less efficient that others of course).

The con to this system is that things are a little more homogenized. When every class stems from the same core class you have a lot of ability overlap between the subtypes. Naturally that means it's a little less special and flavorful compared to super unique classes but it's also easier to balance or produce a niche because you're not having to compare it to every class in the game, only to the ones that match the same role. D&D makes things very weird with classes that can perform every role and min-max to be better at one of them or with classes like the Hexblade that get way too much for their role and begin to overshadow other classes in terms of viability.

The big thing about classes that inherently define a mechanical role is that they tend to rend character concept as merely aesthetic gloss on top of the mechanical structure. MMOs are often explicit about this, where the shape and type of your weapon and armor is totally irrelevant to what your character does with it, and things like reach, or even the fact that one character might be literally one third the height of another character (ex. Lalafels in FFXIV), are mechanically meaningless.

Part of the problem D&D has is that there are a large number of fiddly effects like base speed and spears vs. swords vs. bows and the like that absolutely do matter at the lower end of its functional power scale, but become almost totally pointless at the upper end.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The big thing about classes that inherently define a mechanical role is that they tend to rend character concept as merely aesthetic gloss on top of the mechanical structure. MMOs are often explicit about this, where the shape and type of your weapon and armor is totally irrelevant to what your character does with it, and things like reach, or even the fact that one character might be literally one third the height of another character (ex. Lalafels in FFXIV),

Two things--some break that convention (ie FFXIV classifies people exactly by their weapon). And second, #PopatoLivesMatter.

[Quertus]

The problem is that set-to buffs like that are very narrow design space, and make being applicable to allies utterly superfluous because they usually won't actually do anything. They also face versimilitude issues in that set-to buffs make for extremely pathetic bystanders abruptly turning into comparable combatants to the party. And perhaps more importantly, an enemy with them will be capable of exploiting it to have infinitely disposable "munitions", because any random idiot off the street will have just the same damage output once buffed.

The point is simply that buffs (and the rest of the things you mentioned) do not *have* to have such flaws.

Break away from one specific implementation, and discuss the concepts for themselves, not for just that one implementation.

It also doesn't solve the excess versatility problem, in fact it makes it worse because the relevant capability can be completely ignored as opposed to left to smaller investment. If the buffs include staple requirements like survivability, then the rest of the party can promptly ignore that and put everything into actively solving a wider range of problems.

Yeah, I'm not following you.

Let's suppose we have 2 parties, both with 4 characters. In each party, each character can solve/participate X amount, with no overlap between PCs, so each party can solve 4X.

For the challenge of "get from point A to point B", it just so happens that both parties have a level-appropriate answer. For the first party, one party member has the ability to teleport everyone. For the second party, one party member has the ability to buff everyone to teleport themselves.

Now, there's lots of variables to manipulate to make those abilities even. Or they might not be even - one might be a larger share of its character's X than the other.

My question is, why is one worse for versatility than the other?

The issue that you seem to have difficulty grasping is that they are other goddamn people. Them being trivially replaced as a class feature means the world is factually bending itself in pretzels for the sake of your character concept working, because of that concept hinging so utterly on treating other in-world people as tools. This board is overwhelmingly D&D slanted, and people focusing there generally look for simulationist mechanics. This goes double for those concerned with "feel" rather than raw numeric balance, as they care they can do a thing without browbeating the DM far more than if that thing is strictly useful to do.

I'll not deny that the "feel" of some of the abilities we can discuss in this thread might well irk me, as well. But whether a participation implementation is *desirable* (to either of us) is beside the point of whether or not it is *possible* to create a particular type of mechanical balance. If it *is* possible (and I'm not certain either way yet), *then* we can talk about optimizing the play experience (or abandoning the notion of a "balanced" game if it's either mathematically impossible, or undesirable).

However, this particular ability doesn't *have* to be as nonsensical as you make it sound. After all, if the US President lost his secret service guards and his vice president, don't you think that those would get replaced? So this "has allies" ability could represent something where we say, "well, of course those would get replaced".

And I think that covers your last paragraph, as well.

[Morphic tide]

The point is simply that buffs (and the rest of the things you mentioned) do not *have* to have such flaws.

Break away from one specific implementation, and discuss the concepts for themselves, not for just that one implementation.

The initial statement I made was that buffs have balance traps, common strains of issues that are inherent risks of design, with two listed categories of either permitting over-specializing or permitting over-broadening. I have been discussing the concepts themselves because the issues I'm talking about are how the concepts are difficult to balance. Not impossible, but something you have to actually put in additional effort to accomplish because the concept itself so easily lends itself to those failure states.

My question is, why is one worse for versatility than the other?

If you'd pay attention to my example cases, the relevant thing is when you can give a buff that's a universal need. If one character can give two others automatic set-to level X defenses, then those two party members can ignore their own defense investment and instead invest in some additional ability or double down on offenses, getting to have the output of a glass cannon without the fragility. It's not saying that it must become a problem, but that it's a serious risk that needs deliberate design compensating for it.

Basic structural properties turn into increasingly convoluted design processes, and as such the more options there are, the harder balance becomes, which is exaggerated with more differences between options. If you have one class using Tome of Battle, one using Magic of Incarnum, and one using Shadowcasting, balancing them against eachother requires a wide array of play assumptions worked out, because they each have different resource schemes that result in different tolerable combats and different sustainable adventuring days.

And so you have to actually mandate encounter schedules for your math to work out, because shifting how many fights per day there are massively swings the Shadowcaster's power level, while differing duration of individual fights swings the Initiator's use, and yet these are almost entirely irrelevant to the Meldshaper. If the DM steps outside your schedule, the game breaks down, and there's nothing that can be done to fix this if you have differing resource structures because the entire point of pen and paper is that the rules aren't hard.

Thus do we run into 4e, because the only way to be sure the game is mathematically balanced is to make it have minimal variance. Everyone has to have the same resource scheme, or else the DM might push the party through a wringer and the Crusader comes out smelling like roses while the Artificer now needs a solid month of downtime to fix and recharge his gear.

I'll not deny that the "feel" of some of the abilities we can discuss in this thread might well irk me, as well. But whether a participation implementation is *desirable* (to either of us) is beside the point of whether or not it is *possible* to create a particular type of mechanical balance. If it *is* possible (and I'm not certain either way yet), *then* we can talk about optimizing the play experience (or abandoning the notion of a "balanced" game if it's either mathematically impossible, or undesirable).

Okay, you seem to be stubbornly missing the point I'm making because you keep talking about Non-Specific Possibility Space and I'm talking about what comes up when you finally sit down and make a game, particularly a swords-and-sorcery one due to the slant of the forum. One specific game, that has to have all these parts line up, and function for roleplay rather than just raw numeric balance. Over and over we see enduring products shine on the back of fluff, not mechanics. Over and over we see astonishing messes of mechanical absurdity become quite popular, d20 being a wondrous example of this exact thing, because the mechanics hold a basic functional framework for a highly evocative experience.

The actual math on blunt combat D&D Necromancy gets insane, but it's very rarely used because those numbers don't do much else, have huge swaths of limitations, and most importantly roleplaying around having a giant undead horde or massive rotting behemoths becomes very nasty because they grind anything where they need actions enumerated to a crawl and have a huge host of complications with the world interactions.

When you're making a roleplaying game, the first priority by the precedent of what's been commercially successful is pinning down flavor, not having good math, because the math needs to support the flavor to be a good system. Ludonarrative resonance is the lifeblood of an RPG, much more so for pen and paper that can throw any part of the rulebook out the window, and so you need to figure out what you want the math to be doing before you actually get started on what the math is.

[PhoenixPhyre]

And to add to Morphic Tide's great response (and to the last sentence there):

The more tightly interconnected the math is, the more fragile it is. It's like curve fitting--sure, you can exactly fit that curve with enough free parameters. But in doing so, you make it unable to predict anything outside the training set--it's become fragile.

More interacting, different subsystems means more points where things can go wrong. Either by breaking assumptions (which are a necessary part of design) or by someone changing one little thing that ripples through the system, or by overlooking one of the combinatorial explosion of interacting parts.

So you really have to have a hard idea of what you want to support and what's outside the scope of the system. And then lock down some really basic "facts" for the system's math. 5e's Bounded Accuracy is a (partially successful, at a cost) attempt to do this--they assume that certain numbers just won't grow very much from 1-20. In turn, this makes action economy king (and means that summons and summoners have to be squashed heavily to avoid breakage). But you have to start with these core assumptions and build everything from there. And those assumptions have to rest on what kind of game you want to build.

Generic isn't always better--focused is often easier to balance. You can (sort of) balance OWoD Mages against each other. You can't effectively balance OWoD Mages vs OWoD vampires or werewolves. The fundamental assumptions about gameplay and thematics are too different. Same goes for a D&D-like--if you want godlike mages, you can't also have totally mundane characters. Etc. Theme comes first, then basic power level. Math grows out of all of this.

[Quertus]

So, *if* I'm reading things correctly (which, apparently, I've recently failed at doing), these last two posts are very much on topic, and attempting to answer the topic with "no, because" and "yes, but" answers.

So, we cannot allow everyone to participate most of the time, because most noncombat actions typically involve a single character solving them, rather than the group all participating in the solution. So my original idea seems to have been answered "no".

Giving everyone an equal sized piece of the pie is impossible, because it requires the GM to very carefully tailor the encounters to everyone's specialities, else the balance breaks.

And Vancian casting (and other variations to timing on abilities) means that the game balance is fragile, and the game must be run at exactly the prescribed pacing, else the balance breaks.

So, we have our answer: balance is impossible, outside very strict requirements for samey pacing on contrived encounter design.

So, therefore, people complaining about balance should come to realize that asking for balance requires asking for samey encounter pacing with contrived encounter design, and either accept that, or accept imbalance.

Unless the Playground has anything further to add.

[PhoenixPhyre]

@Quertus

It's not a hard no, but my position is "it's theoretically possible, but not likely to work well due to the compromises you'd need to make." And that's inherent in an open system. You can balance a board game using math, because you completely control all the possibilities. It's closed. Hard (mathematical) balance in a TTRPG requires removing a lot of agency, especially in character creation.

For example, let's consider MMOs.

FFXIV is (for an MMO) very balanced. The differences in output and utility, despite lots of people whining, are pretty minimal. Any job can participate at the highest levels and the "meta" compositions are strategy dependent. This comes at a very high cost. There's almost literally no character customization (mechanically). Every single Samurai will have the exact same rotation, exact same gear, because anything else is highly suboptimal. There's no selectable talents, no options at level up. Everyone gets the same things at the same times. And even more, the healers and tanks have been heavily homogenized--all healers have 2 main dps buttons and a similar selection of healing stuff and play pretty similarly.

On the other hand, old-school WoW was highly imbalanced, but with lots of customization. And over time, they had to chop a lot of out the customization because it became clear that only one set of talents was actually getting chosen--the rest were just phantoms, there to trick the newbies.

So hard balance and customization are in tension. And then when you move away from scripted battles (like MMOs have) and let the players actually affect the world...hard balance becomes extremely difficult. You can do it if you focus your product down to a tiny sphere of action and basically remove any ability to act freely. But that's a cost I'm not willing to pay.

Now that doesn't mean that balance isn't important at all. Getting the math right so that anyone who wants to (and doesn't optimize away those abilities) can have some chance of success at most things, can "contribute" to most situations is important and doable. Encouraging scenario design that can't be solved by one action of one person, that requires a team working together means everyone must contribute and is great. I've found that in 5e, the balance is such that with the effort on my part to not put single-action-solution challenges in as anything other than speedbumps, it's good enough. Helps that I don't generally play with hardcore optimizers, so they're not really testing the limits of the system.

[Morgaln]

The aim of balance is not to have everyone participating equally all the time. It's to have everyone be able to contribute in a way that levels out to roughly equal spotlight over several scenes. D&D fails in that regard, because its classes are inherently imbalanced. You have classes whose features only contribute to combat (e.g. fighter); you have classes who contribute to combat just as well as fighters but also contribute to non-combat (e. g. rogue); and then you have the classes that can contribute to combat just as well as the other classes, contribute to non-combat and have the ability to emulate and overshadow the features of other classes (e. g. wizard). That is where balancing needs to come in.

[Kyutaru]

It's not a hard no, but my position is "it's theoretically possible, but not likely to work well due to the compromises you'd need to make." And that's inherent in an open system. You can balance a board game using math, because you completely control all the possibilities. It's closed. Hard (mathematical) balance in a TTRPG requires removing a lot of agency, especially in character creation.

Heck, even rule-strict tabletop games centered around the math can be beyond the capacity for control.

Warhammer 40k is one of the longest standing tactics games in modern history. It attempts to be balanced with a codified set of rules that are uniform across tabletops with different armies having varying levels of customization and role. You can see each army as a class, that set of abilities you mentioned a while back, and they vary as much as D&D classes do. Yet it's still imbalanced and frequently lends to specific meta compositions despite the clear attempts at curbing old abuse and coming up with more streamlined systems. Past editions had the same problems as 3e D&D, full of stacking exploits. They went with 5e's method recently of narrowing the field of possibilities to keep the game balancing easier while still offering a wealth of options to choose from, slightly more homogenized as they are. Editions before that even had the same problem as 1e/2e D&D where some units were flat out immune to other units and it led to this tactical arms race meta of who can invalidate the most enemy options while still being tactically relevant. Dice rolling isn't even the problem in that game because you roll so many dice that values are much more averaged out than D&D.

With D&D offering player agency (40k is a permissive ruleset and you can't do anything that isn't explicitly defined), limitless customization (40k enforces point limits to curb picking strong options vs weak ones), few cross-class limits (40k severely limits inter-faction cooperation), DM interpretation (40k participants have to follow identical official interpretations), and subjective mechanics (40k establishes exact rules for every element unlike skill checks), it's even harder to attempt to balance all sides without hand-waving the imbalance as intentional and up to the subjective whims of the DM to fix if desired.

[Kyutaru]

The aim of balance is not to have everyone participating equally all the time. It's to have everyone be able to contribute in a way that levels out to roughly equal spotlight over several scenes. D&D fails in that regard, because its classes are inherently imbalanced. You have classes whose features only contribute to combat (e.g. fighter); you have classes who contribute to combat just as well as fighters but also contribute to non-combat (e. g. rogue); and then you have the classes that can contribute to combat just as well as the other classes, contribute to non-combat and have the ability to emulate and overshadow the features of other classes (e. g. wizard). That is where balancing needs to come in.

So this is a touchy subject for me because it reflects the path D&D has gone down has deviated from the roots that actually did attempt to have this sort of balance.

Fighters were THE combat class. There was simply no equal and they made a terrifying show of it. Rogues were NOT good in combat. Back then they could backstab for a multiplier which was weak while putting themselves in harm's way with a significantly lower AC (we didn't have dex abuse, Str was better). Wizards meanwhile were potent as generalists if you allowed them access to everything in the book, which by default they could not obtain due to the necessity for scroll learning. The spells in the player's handbook represented only the index of possibilities you could include in your world. You still had to actually give casters the scrolls you wanted them to be able to learn and withhold any you didn't want them having access to. Since not everyone understood this, they moved towards encouraging specialist wizards with about two banned schools each and extra spell slots only for their specialty. This was meant to limit casters and focus them on a particular role instead of being "I can do everything" generalists. If you can't cast fireball AND haste AND mirror image AND knock then you're much less in danger of overshadowing other classes. This did nothing to stop divine casters, who had access to every spell under the sun by default (and grew more powerful with splatbooks) but they were weak in other ways and their spells were worse. Being primarily defensive in nature meant they weren't treading on other class roles by buffing and healing (it was using those buffs selfishly that did that). All of this plus the much more penalized spellcasting system of older days kept the roles in check and removing much of these distinguishing differences led to the situation you're referring to.

There definitely was a time when everyone having their own unique flair and time to shine was the goal of the system and they all got their roughly equal time in the spotlight. Fighters hacked their way through monsters, rogues solved obstacles and hazards, wizards offered rule-bending support to the party's attempts, and priests kept everyone alive.

[Hytheter]

Dice rolling isn't even the problem in that game because you roll so many dice that values are much more averaged out than D&D.

You say that, but I'm still salty about a match I had years ago. All I needed to win was a single 2+, but alas, seven ones...

[Ignimortis]

The aim of balance is not to have everyone participating equally all the time. It's to have everyone be able to contribute in a way that levels out to roughly equal spotlight over several scenes. D&D fails in that regard, because its classes are inherently imbalanced. You have classes whose features only contribute to combat (e.g. fighter); you have classes who contribute to combat just as well as fighters but also contribute to non-combat (e. g. rogue); and then you have the classes that can contribute to combat just as well as the other classes, contribute to non-combat and have the ability to emulate and overshadow the features of other classes (e. g. wizard). That is where balancing needs to come in.

I would agree, but for that a few more minigames like combat need to exist. As it is now, D&D is a combat simulator with everything outside of combat being treated very poorly by the rules. See Shadowrun, where there are at least three minigames, possibly four (combat, matrix, astral, driving/chase scenes).

P.S. I tend to zone out of threads for a few days when I go to work, and then I go back and see that the thread has evolved a few more pages further.

[Kyutaru]

You say that, but I'm still salty about a match I had years ago. All I needed to win was a single 2+, but alas, seven ones...

I use examples like that every time someone gripes about probability in a game. The odds of something like that happening are immense, almost unthinkable. But they have physically happened. They are just one possibility out of sometimes millions of possibilities and one of those millions is guaranteed to happen every time. An individual roll may have a low chance... but combined with every other roll that also has a low chance you have a pretty high chance of getting a roll with a low chance.

The dice hate me too. I need to switch to Chessex.

[Man_Over_Game]

So this is a touchy subject for me because it reflects the path D&D has gone down has deviated from the roots that actually did attempt to have this sort of balance.

Fighters were THE combat class. There was simply no equal and they made a terrifying show of it. Rogues were NOT good in combat. Back then they could backstab for a multiplier which was weak while putting themselves in harm's way with a significantly lower AC (we didn't have dex abuse, Str was better). Wizards meanwhile were potent as generalists if you allowed them access to everything in the book, which by default they could not obtain due to the necessity for scroll learning. The spells in the player's handbook represented only the index of possibilities you could include in your world. You still had to actually give casters the scrolls you wanted them to be able to learn and withhold any you didn't want them having access to. Since not everyone understood this, they moved towards encouraging specialist wizards with about two banned schools each and extra spell slots only for their specialty. This was meant to limit casters and focus them on a particular role instead of being "I can do everything" generalists. If you can't cast fireball AND haste AND mirror image AND knock then you're much less in danger of overshadowing other classes. This did nothing to stop divine casters, who had access to every spell under the sun by default (and grew more powerful with splatbooks) but they were weak in other ways and their spells were worse. Being primarily defensive in nature meant they weren't treading on other class roles by buffing and healing (it was using those buffs selfishly that did that). All of this plus the much more penalized spellcasting system of older days kept the roles in check and removing much of these distinguishing differences led to the situation you're referring to.

There definitely was a time when everyone having their own unique flair and time to shine was the goal of the system and they all got their roughly equal time in the spotlight. Fighters hacked their way through monsters, rogues solved obstacles and hazards, wizards offered rule-bending support to the party's attempts, and priests kept everyone alive.

But we're transitioning to a culture where players are playing their characters, rather than a group of friends hanging out. Part of this is because technology is making people feel more emotionally distant, since you don't need to physically hang out with people as the only means of spending time anymore.

And on top of that, we've had the chance to play good games, not just what everyone was playing. Turns out, people don't like being useless 70% of the time to own the spotlight the other 30%. They like consistency, not explosiveness, partially because consistency encourages player expectation and strategy. You can plan around boring, you can't plan around chaos.

Lastly, tables are learning to use the system to suit their needs, rather than adapting/leaning towards that system.

I think the ideal of having a "balanced" asymmetrical system (Fighters fight, Rogues solve dungeons, Wizard is a flex) doesn't work anymore, as the value of each "pillar" (such as Combat and Noncombat) of a TTRPG are no longer being decided by the TTRPG developer anymore. One table wants more politics, another wants the monsters to kill the players, while another may want monsters that act realistic to the world. Heck, the players might have different expectations from the same table!


So I propose two solutions:

1. Have a rigid structure, where the value of each pillar (such as "Exploration", "Socialization" and "Combat") are explicitly laid out, along with expected costs/gains of each, and each character option is budgeted against each pillar after accounting for these balance decisions.
   • Effectively, the devs predefined the goals.
2. Each character option addresses each pillar equally (so a Fighter has as many/as powerful noncombat features as the Wizard, and vice-versa), as this ensures that each character option is balanced regardless of the relative value of each pillar at a table.
   • Effectively, it doesn't matter what your goals are since everyone can reach any of the goals equally.

With option #2 being the clear winner, since it involves not telling the DM what his priorities should be.

That's why I think the real challenge should be "Balancing the Fighter's noncombat features to the Wizard", since combat aspects of most games just comes down to numbers that can be tweaked as-needed for that system. But designing a game where a soldier's Soldier Powers lets him manipulate the world as much as someone who can create a literal portal to another world is a really difficult thing to implement, which is exactly why you'd want to do it first.

I think that's what should happen for a truly balanced system, but I'm hoping someone could explain where I'm off.

[Kyutaru]

But we're transitioning to a culture where players are playing their characters, rather than a group of friends hanging out. Part of this is because technology is making people feel more emotionally distant, since you don't need to physically hang out with people as the only means of spending time anymore.

This is so true that it depresses me. The meme generation needs it to be all about them.

Each character option addresses each pillar equally (so a Fighter has as many/as powerful noncombat features as the Wizard, and vice-versa), as this ensures that each character option is balanced regardless of the relative value of each pillar at a table.

So if you're going to go down this route then just make each pillar a separate aspect of classes. There needs to be a column for combat, a column for social, and a column for world. Choose abilities from each, not just from Combat. I'm already doing this in my own game because Body Mind and Soul reflect the three pillars quite well.

The issue with D&D is that they treat social and exploration tools as separate from how they treat combat. This is partly because they are very different things and it lets roleplaying be more free while combat can be primarily about math. But when their relation to classes as a whole is barely noticeable and it's more of a systemic feature then it can't receive the level of balance you're expecting. You can't balance Fighter noncombat options by saying "Look, here's Athletics, it uses Strength but ANYONE CAN TAKE IT" and expect min-maxers not to see the obvious flaw.

But designing a game where a soldier's Soldier Powers lets him manipulate the world as much as someone who can create a literal portal to another world is a really difficult thing to implement, which is exactly why you'd want to do it first.

No need for them to be identical, just affecting different aspects. Take the four elements: Fire, Air, Water, Earth. These are NOT equal. Some of these come into play way more than others or have more widespread use. This is especially noticeable in Shadowrun where it's almost impossible to find a source to summon a fire elemental. But you can still make a game where each class focuses on one because they have equal shares of their own domains. It's not the game's fault the domains are imbalanced in your campaign.

[Asmotherion]

My perspective:

-Single target damage spells should have a duration where they can be cast again. They should always deal the same damage as a nonmagical character of the same level would, or substitute part of the damage for a seccondary effect.

-An AoE should never cause more damage than half that of a single target Damage Spell.

-An effect spell should always have a non-magical way to counter it, with very few exceptions.

-An utility spell should only be able to accomplish faster something a character of that level could otherwise accomplish. For example, a Fighter that knows a magical diagram that calls creatures, should, given the time, be able to draw it manually, and in this case, the spell would only be able to draw it in one turn rather than, say, 1 hour.

-Not exactly a balancing factor, but more emphasis should be given to the preparation of the spells. Perhaps some penalty or bonus depending on components used?

-A more general approach would be, distribute abilities among all classes equally, or even don't use classes as a core leveling mechanic; I tend to value classless systems more that class restricted ones, because they offer more character customisation. Or use class features as feats.

-Finally, attempt to make all powers, abilities and spells have a similar magnitude of impact. My favorite approach to this, is using leveling up as a customisation source, and never as a way to gain more power, were min/maxing would be pointless. Every character does a specific amount of damage depending on their level, and what changes is how they deal it. This is just an example.

[NigelWalmsley]

So, we cannot allow everyone to participate most of the time, because most noncombat actions typically involve a single character solving them, rather than the group all participating in the solution. So my original idea seems to have been answered "no".

I mean, that's not written in stone. If you had a version of Skill Challenges that encouraged player participation rather than discouraging it, you could do this easily. Also, I'm still not really convinced this is an accurate model of non-combat encounters. Not only is deciding on the appropriate approach a meaningful decision point, but no one thinks it's an issue that only one guy makes any particular attack role. If non-combat challenges have multiple parts, multiple people can contribute to them.

Giving everyone an equal sized piece of the pie is impossible, because it requires the GM to very carefully tailor the encounters to everyone's specialities, else the balance breaks.

That seems like a strawman definition of "balanced". People who want the game to be balanced don't want it to be perfectly balanced, they want it to be more balanced. To use an analogy, just because every piece of software in the world has bugs in it doesn't mean trying to develop bug-free software is a bad goal. It's just hard. You should still try to do it, because trying makes for better software than not trying, but no one expects you to be perfect.

And Vancian casting (and other variations to timing on abilities) means that the game balance is fragile, and the game must be run at exactly the prescribed pacing, else the balance breaks.

No, daily abilities do that. It's important to be precise in your terminology here. You get the same dynamic with the Sorcerer (who casts spells spontaneously), the Psion (who has a daily pool of power points), or the Spirit Shaman (who has a hybrid system). Whereas if the Wizard prepared spells then cast them at will or per-encounter, that would be fine while still being recognizably Vancian.

This is so true that it depresses me. The meme generation needs it to be all about them.

"Young people are ruining X" was a bad take when applied to all the other subjects it's been applied to. It's not a better take when applied to gaming.

[Man_Over_Game]

So if you're going to go down this route then just make each pillar a separate aspect of classes. There needs to be a column for combat, a column for social, and a column for world. Choose abilities from each, not just from Combat. I'm already doing this in my own game because Body Mind and Soul reflect the three pillars quite well.

The issue with D&D is that they treat social and exploration tools as separate from how they treat combat. This is partly because they are very different things and it lets roleplaying be more free while combat can be primarily about math. But when their relation to classes as a whole is barely noticeable and it's more of a systemic feature then it can't receive the level of balance you're expecting. You can't balance Fighter noncombat options by saying "Look, here's Athletics, it uses Strength but ANYONE CAN TAKE IT" and expect min-maxers not to see the obvious flaw.

[...]

No need for them to be identical, just affecting different aspects. Take the four elements: Fire, Air, Water, Earth. These are NOT equal. Some of these come into play way more than others or have more widespread use. This is especially noticeable in Shadowrun where it's almost impossible to find a source to summon a fire elemental. But you can still make a game where each class focuses on one because they have equal shares of their own domains. It's not the game's fault the domains are imbalanced in your campaign.

I agree with your first bullet. I don't think you necessarily need to do it that way in such an organized, tight-knit manner, but it'd be good to do that for a draft and then remove the dividers to make it appear seamless and organic.

For example, the "Beastmaster" suite lets you talk to animals, gives you an animal to control in combat, and makes friendly animals willing to accompany you to support you with non-threatening tasks. Despite it granting very specifically an element of gameplay in each of the 3 pillars, it could easily be rewritten in a way where it comes off as a singular "Beastmaster" power.



I'm not sure what you mean by the second point, though. In the Beastmaster example above, it might not see as easily used in a civilized area, but it is still something that can be regularly relied on. Talking to rats, having a monkey-thief as your companion, using crows as scouts and messengers, these are all ways a Beastmaster could utilize his powers.

Something like a Barbarian's Super-Strength sounds like it'd work the same way, but there's actually not much you could consistently do with it outside of random chores or working hard labor. Or maybe it could, as long as the game is designed around it being used as such (for example, allowing someone to bend metal to create a tool).

Thinking about it, it's not necessarily that power levels aren't allowed to fluctuate, but how regularly used those powers can be used should not. You should always be relevant, even if you can't always be at 100%.

[Kyutaru]

I'm not sure what you mean by the second point, though. In the Beastmaster example above, it might not see as easily used in a civilized area, but it is still something that can be regularly relied on. Talking to rats, having a monkey-thief as your companion, using crows as scouts and messengers, these are all ways a Beastmaster could utilize his powers.

Something like a Barbarian's Super-Strength sounds like it'd work the same way, but there's actually not much you could consistently do with it outside of random chores or working hard labor. Or maybe it could, as long as the game is designed around it being used as such (for example, allowing someone to bend metal to create a tool).

Thinking about it, it's not necessarily that power levels aren't allowed to fluctuate, but how regularly used those powers can be used should not. You should always be relevant, even if you can't always be at 100%.

So the example before was that wizards could open portals to another dimension while the fighter has servants. In a sense, the wizard's domain is the planes while the fighter opens doors in a figurative sense to more mundane organizations. They do different things that may handle differently or be useful at different times but you can still strive as a DM to be inclusive of both by allowing for alternate routes to the same destination. The best RPGs are the ones with multiple paths leading to the same conclusion. What's important is not true player agency but the illusion of choice even when all roads lead to Rome.

Beastmasters and Super-strength Barbarians to me sound like superheroes I know with the exact same powers. They can be found fighting alongside each other often and by some miracle the episode always has something both parties can lend their talents towards. Even if it seems like lifting things might not come into play very often, the strong hero has lifted no less than 7 things by the end of 22 minutes. The DM sometimes even chucks pieces of building in their path just so the strong hero has something to lift. Because the strong hero built his hero to lift things and he enjoys games where he gets to lift a lot of things. Despite me being able to list hundreds of Batman and Superman episodes where talking to animals would NOT have mattered or even been useful, every episode involving a hero capable of doing so inevitably has animal-talking be of central importance to the plot.

In a free-form RPG where settings can vary wildly, you can't ever create mechanics that accommodate all players equally. Your adventure may take place on the moon. Good luck finding a use for Knowledge (History) up there. The DM is always the first line of defense against player boredom and needs to know his group and how to engage each member. The best we can do through design is give him easy tools to understand how to do that.

[RedMage125]

Please, tell me where 3e says "no improvising". All the "3e ruined AD&D's balance/variety/whatever" complaining is just grognard nonsense. What 3e did was add coherent rules for things, which allows you to push back when your DM says "no you can't do that" by saying "I have an ability that says I can do that".

Nigel and I don't see eye to eye on a lot, but here I agree wholeheartedly. Hard yes.

IMO, hard-coded mechanics PROTECT players from fickle DM fiat. In 2e, if you wanted to jump a 6 foot gap, but rolled a 4 on the dice, your DM may just decide you fell in. In 3e, you could add your ranks in Jump and your STR modifier, and if you could prove, conclusively, the number of feet you were able to jump.

That's just one example, but the spirit of that is in so many other facets of the RAW.

[Pex]

Nigel and I don't see eye to eye on a lot, but here I agree wholeheartedly. Hard yes.

IMO, hard-coded mechanics PROTECT players from fickle DM fiat. In 2e, if you wanted to jump a 6 foot gap, but rolled a 4 on the dice, your DM may just decide you fell in. In 3e, you could add your ranks in Jump and your STR modifier, and if you could prove, conclusively, the number of feet you were able to jump.

That's just one example, but the spirit of that is in so many other facets of the RAW.

True, but you have to be careful in both directions. Lack of rules has you worry about fickle DMing, such as my infamous 5E complaint about DM fiat and climbing trees. However, too many rules can lead to stifling game play options. 3E/Pathfinder suffer this problem with feats. If you don't have the feat you can't do it. Rather, you can but there are so many obstacles in your way it's not worth trying. The purpose of having the feat is to be able to ignore those obstacles.

[NigelWalmsley]

Something like a Barbarian's Super-Strength sounds like it'd work the same way, but there's actually not much you could consistently do with it outside of random chores or working hard labor. Or maybe it could, as long as the game is designed around it being used as such (for example, allowing someone to bend metal to create a tool).

Sure there is. Hercules diverts a river to clear out the Augean Stables. There's all kinds of crazy crap you could do with super-strength, you just need to let people do crazy crap with super-strength. There's no reason your super-strength can't let you carve roads through mountains, or log entire forests for lumber, or build fortresses overnight (any of which are easily the equivalent of spells like Fabricate or Major Creation). It just doesn't let you do that, because martials don't get to have nice things.

So the example before was that wizards could open portals to another dimension while the fighter has servants.

As I've said, that's the wrong way of looking at things. If you start by saying "Wizards do portals, Fighters do armies", inevitably one of those things ends up being better than the other. Usually dramatically. In D&D, that's typically portals, because "the adventure is on another plane" tends to be more common than "the bad guy has an army you need to punch to death". But in other stories, the reverse could easily be true (e.g. in A Practical Guide to Evil most of the challenges are of the form "there's an army the protagonists need to defeat"). You've got to start with the challenges. What problems are the PCs expected to be able to solve? Once you've done that, you can set about dividing them up among whatever character concepts you'd like to support.

Despite me being able to list hundreds of Batman and Superman episodes where talking to animals would NOT have mattered or even been useful, every episode involving a hero capable of doing so inevitably has animal-talking be of central importance to the plot.

That's true, but there is a limit to this (the Simpsons Kinightboat gag springs to mind). Having one episode where Squirrel Girl's ability to talk to squirrels lets her solve the mystery is fine. But if every episode has Batman's detective work hit a dead end where the only witness is a squirrel, that gets stupid really quickly. DMs can definitely do a lot to make players feel useful, but the game has to provide a certain level of groundwork for that to be feasible.

3E/Pathfinder suffer this problem with feats. If you don't have the feat you can't do it. Rather, you can but there are so many obstacles in your way it's not worth trying. The purpose of having the feat is to be able to ignore those obstacles.

"Make it a feat" was a stupid design paradigm. A lot of things that should have just been skill uses were made into feats. That said, I still think D&D is past the point where trying to appeal to "ask your DM" works. If you want to rely on that as your system for "doing stuff", you need to do what things like Fate do, and allow players some measure of direct authorial control.

[Kyutaru]

Nigel and I don't see eye to eye on a lot, but here I agree wholeheartedly. Hard yes.

IMO, hard-coded mechanics PROTECT players from fickle DM fiat.

They also serve to tarnish the player's experience. In the post mortem Mike Mearls goes through the reasons for 5e's design choices and uses player feedback graphs depicting often contrary to common sense information that led to them. Strict mechanics very much served to get in the way of player enjoyment and their conclusion was that rules don't need to tell the group how to do something in many cases but serve as a tool to expedite it when appropriate.

Combat is where the game starts to bog down and simplicity had high combat satisfaction, with Fighters and Barbarians being at the top of the graph while Druids and Mages were at the bottom. The reason was that during combat your turn cycles are hamstrung by the time it takes each person to execute their actions and book referencing is thoroughly discouraged. This made simple classes with ready-to-go abilities they could fire off without much hassle high on the polls while classes that had mechanical complexity and depth to them polled lower. Players didn't have the time to open the books or consider all their options and playing a complicated class could even lead to selecting a less optimal choice which resulted in negative feelings when others pointed out decisions they would have made instead.

Out-of-combat the polls were flipped with Fighters and Barbarians being the least interesting according to player feedback owing to their limited available options while Bards and Rogues polled the highest with Mages and other casters slightly beneath them. The team discovered that when you have ample time to consult the book and consider creative solutions that complex classes were better received as they had more depth. Both this and the combat polls were the reverse of what they originally believed as well as the reverse of what 3e combat enthusiasts hold dear to. Most players do not want tons of crazy little tactical options and minutiae for their battles, that's a misconception propagated by tactical grognards. They want clear cut and easy to understand packaged options that speed them through the round and on to the next turn. Similarly, outside of combat they don't want rules limiting their creativity but gravitate towards classes that feature room for interpretation and ingenuity with the two skill monkeys in a very loosely defined system being the highest polling options.

There was also a neutral poll purely looking at class complexity and despite spells being fairly simple to understand, select and fire for the most part, casters were seen as the most complex classes. This in spite of Monks who have oodles of abilities to understand and sort through, a class that ranked only modestly in complexity. The bottom had the Fighter. What's important to note here is that having all those spell options was being viewed as a paralytic to players who found having clear cut and concise complex packages to be easier to digest and understand than simple one-dimensional abilities with a large assortment to choose from.

In short, personal opinion is what colors these views and the official feedback did not share yours. What some players fancy and believe to be essential to the game is NOT uniform across the playerbase and only serves to better create the game you personally want instead of the game that more financially viable and inclusive of the most potential players.

[Mechalich]

Beastmasters and Super-strength Barbarians to me sound like superheroes I know with the exact same powers. They can be found fighting alongside each other often and by some miracle the episode always has something both parties can lend their talents towards. Even if it seems like lifting things might not come into play very often, the strong hero has lifted no less than 7 things by the end of 22 minutes. The DM sometimes even chucks pieces of building in their path just so the strong hero has something to lift. Because the strong hero built his hero to lift things and he enjoys games where he gets to lift a lot of things. Despite me being able to list hundreds of Batman and Superman episodes where talking to animals would NOT have mattered or even been useful, every episode involving a hero capable of doing so inevitably has animal-talking be of central importance to the plot.

Any ability that simply expands the boundaries of things people already do constantly is inherently going to be used all the time. Super strength clearly falls into this category. Even people in fairly sedate office jobs utilize 'strength' on a regular basis, whether it's something as simple as lifting a box of printer paper or relocations a chair. Likewise people use all kinds of mechanical devices designed to augment their physical strength all the time, ranging from absurdly simple items like wheelbarrows to complex ones like forklifts, and can easily slot 'super strength' in to replace the use of those aids. Super-strength, super-speed, super-agility, these abilities all directly mediate a character's interaction with the environment, allowing them to be used literally all the time.

By contrast, abilities that provide some capability that humans do not normally possess is almost always situational (the big exception being forms of motion, but that essentially simply gives the character an entirely new environment to interact with), and this is doubly true is the ability requires some other subject's presence in order to function. 'Talk to animals' requires animals, 'Cyberkinesis' requires computers, and both animal and computer free environments are possible. Heck, even a character whose power is something like 'Earth manipulation' can end up in an environment without any ground and suddenly have access to no powers.

[Morphic tide]

The summation of my perspective on it is that "ground up" math doesn't function for starting from multiple mechanics, hard balance rapidly approaches the impractical as the functional difference between characters (and enemies) grows, and the general structure of solutions to the difficulties have proven highly undesirable in a roleplaying product context. In other words, if you're designing a game with multiple usage schedules, you can't do ground-up math because you have to decide on the relation between schedules arbitrarily, and the more schedules and areas of function there are, the more complex this math becomes. And trying to minimize the difficulties leads to either closed-in "skirmishing" games like 4e because there's a bundle of concepts shoehorned into a single mechanical framework, or you're stuck making highly focused products that aren't particularly usable outside their niche as seen with White Wolf games.

For a "ground up" design process, you require some arbitrary starting points, otherwise you have nothing to apply math to. Starting with a resource schedule like Vancian casting is actually a really good idea for this, because it means you can work on ratios between effects, action economy, challenge frequencies and magnitudes, and efficiency mechanics before touching even something as basic as character scores or monster durability, because the resources are non-fungible. And as a very high-level schedule of a full day, it's a pretty major framework for campaign module design because you literally have flat-out problems-per-day guidelines baked into the thing you started from.

And you can actually start with a single mechanical pillar here, such as just combat, then add-on any other pillar as a set of ratios and solve for a mechanically balanced play experience, though admittedly needing to arbitrarily define what the numbers mean as output and what those ratios are. Of course, this pattern of design is fundamentally fitting into the gaps of the previous work, so it inherently means stark limits on how much input pillars can have on eachother, especially in total, no matter how many pillars get added. Vancian's stark limit of Things Per Day helps here, as well.

But, as previously mentioned, it's extremely tedious and complicated because you have to first make a well-balanced system around the resource schedule with all of your desired breadth of effect, to the point of entire campaign modules, before you can even start to crunch out balancing a completely different resource schedule/subsystem/whatever for those modules that demonstrate the "expected" campaign.