D&D 5th Edition Announced

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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Spoonist »

Civil War Man wrote:
Spoonist wrote:Who else would fix things?
Nobody will argue that it's not the responsibility of the DM to make the story inclusive to all players. The contention is over whether it's also the DM's responsibility to fix the broken mechanics in the system. That's all well and good for someone who has been playing for decades and has the free time and disposable income to invest in and explore a wide variety of systems and the experience to catch and compensate for game breakers. Not everyone is in that situation.
I think we were like that from the beginning. Even in our early teens we always modded any rpg system to fit our wants and needs. It had nothing to do with age or money. I'd think that it was because we had no money - we had to change it to make it work. That includes the meta talking - if someone is not having fun it will ruin it for the rest of us - so you gotta talk about it.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Solauren »

This is why I think that no matter what route they go with 5th edition, it needs to be playtested rather publically for a while, so that people can look for the 'breaks' and ways can be come up with to fix them pre-publication.

i.e "The Epic Magic system is horrible, it let me...."
Followed by refinements to the rules, or a new subsystem all together.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Bakustra »

Stofsk wrote:I don't really see why balance is such a big issue in a role-playing game. In a computer RTS, sure I can see it. One overpowered unit can unbalance a delicate match-up. But in a social game that uses everyone's imaginations where collaborative storytelling is the goal and objective? Whining about wizard's being too powerful strikes me as absurd.

I will say that as far as balance is concerned, the only thing that matters is making sure every player has a chance to shine.
There are two parts to balance, or rather two kinds, that are important to pencil-and-paper role-playing games. The two ultimately are interrelated, but the first is simple. I shall call it the balance of choices. What this is is that for every major decision available to players that involves the core of the game, the choices available should be of roughly equal effectiveness or at least clearly labeled if they are obviously suboptimal or better. D&D 3.5 fails this before we even get to the tiers of classes, because the basic design method of "system mastery" encouraged the creation of traps in the form of spells, feats, and magic items which looked cool or useful but were actually terrible (e.g. Toughness).

But let's set that aside for now and talk about what this implies for design. The first thing that this implies is that you should carefully consider what your game is about. The second thing is that you should carefully limit choices so that a balance (a sub-balance) is struck between exploding, entirely unpredictable combinations and binary decisions, in a realm where all of the choices are at least viable and none are overtly better or worse. The third thing is that you should work out what your game will do when played. Because the biggest reason clerics went to the top in D&D 3.5 was unforeseen in development- you could cast buff spells on yourself now, combined with the general boost spellcasters received. This ties back into the second thing, because limiting choices (or refining choices so that they can be treated as compositions and superpositions of each other more easily) renders this a humanly possible task, as does a willingness to errata, difficult as it may be to distribute.

Of course, these refer to what's important to the core of the game, so this requires further explanation. The game Dogs in the Vineyard seems to be unbalanced at first glance, as your characters can easily start the game out with traits that allow them to succeed at a wide variety of tasks almost instantly. However, the game assumes that PCs can basically do anything that they want- the core of the game is not whether they will succeed, but how far they're willing to go to get what they want, what they believe is right or wrong, and the tension between winning and losing, because losing is what gives you experience under the rules. Stuff that isn't part of the core can be as "imbalanced" as you like, because it's really only peripheral to the game.

So now we come to the second kind, the balance of focus. That is, the game shouldn't neglect or gather focus on specific players beyond a certain point. That is, there shouldn't be a situation where only one player has something to do ever. This is fodder for breaking out the DS/iPod/PSP/crossword puzzle and disengaging from the game. People who suggest that D&D (or really any game) should have social-only "party faces", skill-only "trap guys", and combat-only "fighters" (and wizards are capable of being all three) are fucking idiots who you should never listen to, for their dhamma is a false one that will only lead you further away from role-playing enlightenment.

D&D 3.5 also fails this because, for example, wizards and other casters have so much more baked-in detail to their abilities that they're naming magic spells at a minimum, where the fighter is saying "oh, I full attack if I actually get a turn this battle" and pulls from her bottle of scotch again at a minimum. By default the wizard is more engaged because they have more detail. Then, too, they are capable of, by-default, contributing in virtually all scenarios while other characters cannot, meaning that they by default will have more time in the spotlight unless a) played solely as a damage-dealer or b) played so as not to overshadow other characters.

So, in conclusion, D&D 3.5 is a terrible game for a variety of reasons, balance is important, and if D&D 4e leaves you cold I can recommend other good games that fit what you're looking for. Just give me examples of what you want!
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by lance »

S.L.Acker wrote:
Also, any spell caster will be powerful next to a fighter and, frankly, D&D doesn't function as intended without spell casters. So unless you nerf and straight jacket the spell casters to make the fighter worth using you end up with a game that doesn't work. This is a point you seem to ignore about attempting to play D&D.
Shadowcaster, healer, and truenamer say hello

DMs have some responsibility to fix games and to keep balance, but a game should not have the power range difference of a CW samurai and a T1 full caster. At this point 3.5 has a ton of fixes that have been discussed, and rediscussed.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

Shadowcaster and Healer you have a case for; Truenamer is on a scale that has only two settings (weakass and out right broken).
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Stofsk »

RE: Bakustra

Well I won't argue the point that 3.5 was great because I never played it long enough to form that view. I only ever played as a fighter and a monk and those campaigns either ended shortly or didn't progress far enough for me to witness how overpowered the spellcasters were. But even so, I'm still kind of ok with that because in the setting spellcasters would be extremely powerful; i.e. it doesn't seem out of place for me, even if they overshadow the other players. Maybe that's a problem that can be addressed mechanically via the ruleset, but I also have to think a part of it comes from the players themselves.

Balance of choices and balance of focus are interesting concepts, and while I haven't thought about it in quite the detail you have I do agree that in every gaming session every player needs to shine. I kinda like Saga edition for this, as all the classes seemed like they could shine in different ways and in different scenarios, while at the same time Jedi weren't 'nerfed' to do so.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Bakustra »

Ron Edwards wrote, controversially, that shitty role-playing games could actually damage the brains of those people who played them, by impairing their ability to think about stories coherently. The sheer number of people who take "wizards > fighters" as implicit lends a lot of credence to that.

EDIT:RE:Stofsk:the movie
I'll whip up a more substantive reply tomorrow but we basically agree.:D
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Simon_Jester »

Bakustra wrote:Ron Edwards wrote, controversially, that shitty role-playing games could actually damage the brains of those people who played them, by impairing their ability to think about stories coherently. The sheer number of people who take "wizards > fighters" as implicit lends a lot of credence to that.
It is something of a narrative convention in fiction, though. Think about the basic source materials for 20th century fantasy.

Gandalf is just plain stronger than Aragorn- in terms of personal power, Gandalf could overpower the 'fighter' characters he's associated with almost at will. Yes, yes, he's a supernatural being... but this is not made explicit in the novels to a great degree. It's almost taken for granted on Middle-Earth that "wizards" are rare, powerful, mysterious beings who live almost forever and are nearly invincible except against the greatest and most terrible of all enemies.

Conan is physically robust and tough-minded compared to the wizards he fights in many of his stories, but much of the drama revolves around how hard it is for him to come to grips with those wizards and cope with their supernatural protections and minions.

We can go through other cases- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Anderson's The Broken Sword, and so on. Magical power and swordplay aren't mutually exclusive for characters in those stories, but you can always be confident that any given character with magic will have great advantages over any character without them.

And this fits our intuition. Imagine a character which has mastered the ability to warp the laws of nature and manifest fire, summon demons, or use mind-controlling magic. Surely, such a character will have an advantage over a man with a sword who has no such power...


It's not necessarily true, of course. We can imagine divinely empowered paladins, or knights whose devotion to the chivalric code gives them resistance to hostile magic. Or warriors whose martial techniques give them supernatural prowess, to fight back against those demons and fireballs and mind control spells on equal terms.

But I don't think it's out of line for people to assume that magic-users in an RPG setting will be more powerful than those who use no magic. You have to go a bit out of your way to keep that from being true.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by lance »

S.L.Acker wrote:Shadowcaster and Healer you have a case for; Truenamer is on a scale that has only two settings (weakass and out right broken).
Whats broken about it?
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

lance wrote:
S.L.Acker wrote:Shadowcaster and Healer you have a case for; Truenamer is on a scale that has only two settings (weakass and out right broken).
Whats broken about it?
There are some builds that can get the Truespeak skill up to 102 meaning they can cast their best utterances 10 times without needing to worry about having less than a 100% chance to get the effect off. Now I don't know all the ins and outs of the class, but I hear they have a few effects that can ignore saves and they already dodge SR. They can also go nuts with UMD and bluff cheese while still doing the above.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Torchship »

Spoonist wrote:Yes, but you ignored the "or quit playing D&D. Why stay in a crappy system if it upsets you?" part. You also missed the TALK ABOUT it part. Which kinda was the key points.
If a GM insists on playing a crappy system "straight" then rejects responsibility for making that crappy system fun for the group and refuses to talk about it - then you have a baaaaad situation.
I've been playing RPG's since a year after the basic kitcame out. Trust me ALL RPGs are exploitable - some less so than others, but still. So you need to talk about that in any gaming group. If you can't even play 3.5 without understanding how to handle spellcasters - move on or get a DM who can.
As I said before, I quite enjoy 3.5 and have no real wish to swap. That doesn't mean that it is my responsibility to fix 3.5's aburdly gigantic issues, however. When I purchase a product, I expect it to come fully functional out of the box, not for 1/3 of the classes to be stupid-good compared to the other 2/3. A certain amount of imbalance is to be expected because of practical issues, but 3.5 goes way, way beyond this.
Talking about the issues mitigate them somewhat, but they most certainly do not eliminate them. Even if players can be convinced to not become pissy when their favourite character is scrapped and rewritten again and again (a small miracle in and of itself), the DM is still forced to eliminate and rewrite a huge number of spells, classes and feats as their overpowered nature becomes apparent in play.
Spoonist wrote:Back to context please. Your analogy is gargantuanly flawed.
But to run with your flawed analogy, you refusing not to fix said toaster and insisting that your friends use it, then yes, it is your responsibility.
But that analogy just comes off wrong full with loaded arguments.
How is the analogy flawed? I suppose you could claim that an exploding toaster carries a risk to life and limb that an unbalanced RPG system does not, but you can change the analogy to a toaster that randomly ceases to function without losing any of the fundamental components of the analogy.
If I enjoy the toaster despite its random episodes, then I am perfectly justified in sharing the toaster with my friends, as I paid good money for the toaster. It is not the toaster-owner's responsibility to trawl through the internet for hours on end looking for a small novel of mechanical changes that must be made to the toaster to stop its random failures, regardless of the number of people that the toaster owner wishes to share their toaster with.

Spoonist wrote:You are running in circles here.
I've already stated that the system doesn't matter, a good GM adapts and overcome. I've played campains where we picked the world from one setting and the game system from another, etc. Its not hard unless you are a rookie.
And if you are a rookie then simple systems like old D&D is really fun to start out with - they only break at higher levels any way.
I agree; a good DM can adapt and overcome the failings of the system. But that does not mean that it is a good DM's responsibility to do so. The product was purchased on the assumption that it would meet a certain minimum level of class balance (and the product never stated that the game was unbalanced in any major way at any point) and totally failed to do so. Just like it is not my responsibility to fix my toaster out-of-the-box, it is not the DM's responsibility to fix 3.5 out-of-the-box.
As I said before, a small number of adjustments to the system for personal preference are perfectly legitimate (and I'd probably agree with you if you tried to define them as a 'responsibility' of the DM), but the absurd number of changes that must be made to balance 3.5 are not. DnD is a hobby, not a job, and it is not the responsibility of each and every DM to put a job-like amount of effort into performing the basic balance changes that WotC should have.

Just like before, I don't really see how I'm 'running in circles'. Can you elaborate?
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by lance »

S.L.Acker wrote:
lance wrote:
S.L.Acker wrote:Shadowcaster and Healer you have a case for; Truenamer is on a scale that has only two settings (weakass and out right broken).
Whats broken about it?
There are some builds that can get the Truespeak skill up to 102 meaning they can cast their best utterances 10 times without needing to worry about having less than a 100% chance to get the effect off. Now I don't know all the ins and outs of the class, but I hear they have a few effects that can ignore saves and they already dodge SR. They can also go nuts with UMD and bluff cheese while still doing the above.
So in other words you don't really know anything about the class?
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

lance wrote:So in other words you don't really know anything about the class?
This is one I'll have to drop, it's a class I only have second hand knowledge of. From what I've heard the class ranges from useless due to the way the DC's it needs to meet scale, to broken due to what it can do if you get around those limits.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Erik von Nein »

The problem with Truenamer is that, aside from Gate at 20th level, even if you get their Truename check high enough to reliably use their abilities their spells really aren't that useful, anyway. See here.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

Erik von Nein wrote:The problem with Truenamer is that, aside from Gate at 20th level, even if you get their Truename check high enough to reliably use their abilities their spells really aren't that useful, anyway. See here.
Thanks for the link.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

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Torchship wrote:As I said before, I quite enjoy 3.5 and have no real wish to swap. That doesn't mean that it is my responsibility to fix 3.5's aburdly gigantic issues, however. When I purchase a product, I expect it to come fully functional out of the box, not for 1/3 of the classes to be stupid-good compared to the other 2/3. A certain amount of imbalance is to be expected because of practical issues, but 3.5 goes way, way beyond this.
Talking about the issues mitigate them somewhat, but they most certainly do not eliminate them. Even if players can be convinced to not become pissy when their favourite character is scrapped and rewritten again and again (a small miracle in and of itself), the DM is still forced to eliminate and rewrite a huge number of spells, classes and feats as their overpowered nature becomes apparent in play.
Torchship wrote:
Spoonist wrote:You are running in circles here.
I've already stated that the system doesn't matter, a good GM adapts and overcome. I've played campains where we picked the world from one setting and the game system from another, etc. Its not hard unless you are a rookie.
And if you are a rookie then simple systems like old D&D is really fun to start out with - they only break at higher levels any way.
I agree; a good DM can adapt and overcome the failings of the system. But that does not mean that it is a good DM's responsibility to do so. The product was purchased on the assumption that it would meet a certain minimum level of class balance (and the product never stated that the game was unbalanced in any major way at any point) and totally failed to do so. Just like it is not my responsibility to fix my toaster out-of-the-box, it is not the DM's responsibility to fix 3.5 out-of-the-box.
As I said before, a small number of adjustments to the system for personal preference are perfectly legitimate (and I'd probably agree with you if you tried to define them as a 'responsibility' of the DM), but the absurd number of changes that must be made to balance 3.5 are not. DnD is a hobby, not a job, and it is not the responsibility of each and every DM to put a job-like amount of effort into performing the basic balance changes that WotC should have.
Just like before, I don't really see how I'm 'running in circles'. Can you elaborate?
Sure, I'll elaborate.
First, the running in circles, this was refering to you stating that you think that D&D is fun and don't wish to switch from it. On the other hand you think that the system has 'absurdly gigantic issues'. But you don't think that the DM has any responsibility for making amends for broken characters due to the crappy system spoiling said fun for the gaming group. So the circle would be system>broken>less fun>don't change>continue in system>still broken>less fun>etc. The only one who has the power to change that circle is either the DM or divine intervention.

Then the big elaboration. PnP RPGs as a genre is always going to be exploitable, the more fantastic and complex the setting & rules the more there will be loopholes to exploit. The only non-exploitable PnP RPGs are free-form, ie no system only a setting and the GM. Even those can be abused by favoritism, but that is beside the point. Why is that so? Well its down to money and time. PnP RPGs don't have the massive amount of profit that proper testing of every idea would need to be perfectly balanced. Top that of with every gaming group playing the system with their own style, so that one group will see it as a feature and another as a bug. So it is impossible to make a "perfect" system. So designers foucs on 'content' instead - ie what they think will work. This means that most systems leave a lot of stuff up to the GM, in D&D the trend has been the reverse, more tables, more spells, more fluff & stuff has been the rule. Where other systems have left the scenarios to the GM, D&D usually added a random table. So much so that it is one of the few PnP RPGs that don't require a GM, you can play it straight as a PnP boardgame if you wish. (This was how it all started as well - the first D&D was a glorified board game). Which also means that D&D players have had more power vs their GM than almost any other system, by evoking rules. This meant that in a lot of playing groups the DM was less "storyteller" and more "rule arbiter". But since D&D was the first & biggest this was concidered "the norm". This led to lots of sillyness where players played the "system" instead of role playing, ie rules-lawyering.

You can even see the difference in ideology back when D&D had a spin-off in AD&D. Where D&D left a lot up to the DM and focused on the world and setting, AD&D focused on rules, lists and tables. Guess which one was more 'broken'? Yupp, AD&D (with casters being better back then as well). Once WoTC took over guess which one got continued and which got scrapped - yupp the one with the potential of most books sold - ie (A)D&D 3E. Which then led to the 4E since they needed to streamline things. *sigh*
So with each edition, revision, version and supplement TSR and then WoTC has been trying to make the system work better for what they thought their audience did to it. Their designers and playtesters have agreed every time. "This is better than ever".

Which brings us back to that D&D has been a broken boardgame from the beginning. The RPG parts was an add-on for what the rules didn't cover. It was never intended to be fair - it was intended to be fun. Any fairness would be up to the DM. Fast forward some 35+ years, that still holds true. But nowadays people expect the old system to suddenly be fair when it never was and no amounts of revisions have changed the core of the game.
So if you love all the tables, the lists of spells, the thousand choices of class and profficiencies, the rows upon rows of magical items and monsters - then congratulations such a system will be broken regardless of the intentions of the designers. I would even postulate that it is because they tried to do the impossible ie keep all the lists, options etc and build a more fair system that they broke it completely with 4e.

Look at how much time and money is spent by WOW and they don't get it right if we judge by forums and patches - so how come a PnP with a fraction of that time and money would?
No, it will always be up to the GM to fix things post factum to keep the fun going.

Does it have to be like that? Nope, when they focus on the setting and let the system derive from the setting then the 'flow' of the game will always be better. And with a better flow you are usually more forgiving for flaws that are there because of the setting. But when you let the system dictate the setting - like the stupid 4e daily powers - the flaws are not forgiven becasue they don't follow the setting.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Spoonist »

I wrote that late yesterday and thought it might need a clarfication.
If my budget as a RPG designer is limited then I have to make a choice betwen writing new content, testing and rewriting old content. Those choices are not equally valuable to the market. Instead new content will generate new sales, while testing will usually not. So its not strange that the big RPGs focus on a lot of content and very little testing of that content in combination with the rest. The company will rely on the designers to think of the most obvious faults.

Take CCG as another example, like Magic. For each expansion there is new content - how that content will mix with all previous content is very hard to test. So if WoTC would focus on testing they could not release as many cards and expansions as they do now. Do you really think that would make sense both from a consumer and a producer standpoint? Of course not. Everyone favors more content over extensive testing.
Sometimes that means some cards are broken in combination.

Same thing for PnP RPGs, when content is king something else will break.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Gunhead »

Content will more likely break a game if content = more rules. I'm always leery of a new supplement to any game that tries to inject more rules into an existing system. Each spell/spell like ability/special ability comes with it's own rules that you have to know and to apply. But the same applies to other systems that introduce new skills / abilities to an existing system. Good content adds to the existing system without introducing all together new rules and thus it is far less likely to break anything.

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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Spoonist »

Ah, you are right. I should have made a distinction between system content and setting content.
Adding setting fluff like a gameworld with cities etc usually doesn't break stuff. But adding a new class with new abilities and spells probably will.

For the purpose of the posts above it should be assumed that I refer to system changing content.

But there is a thin line there, like if I add items to an equip list that are there as a setting boost, that could break stuff on the system side.
Also if I'm spending my time & budget on nice fluff, that means less time for system & testing.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Erik von Nein »

It depends on what you mean by "broken." Do you mean imbalanced for game mechanics purposes? Or broken as in "that does not function within the game's current ruleset"? Interestingly enough, I think the later supplements to D&D 3.5 is actually a lot more well balanced as far as comparing to core classes and later supplement classes. Tomb of Battle helped make melee fighters more in line with spell casters like Beguilers, Warmages, Dread Necromancers and other list casters, while Magic of Incarnum introduced pseudo-magic users also on the same level of usefulness as the previous examples.

Weirdly enough, the worst examples of imbalance are in core and the earlier supplements. It seemed like the people working on those later books learned from the system's wonky rules and were finally making some decent effort toward better balance, which is why I hope they bring those people back for the new system.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Gunhead »

Invariably, if the core system is good and flexible the extra material made for it will have a higher chance of being non game breaking. You start hitting snags if you need to supplement core rules with additional releases. Equipment balancing is another thing to consider but if equipment gets game breaking stats I tend to blame the designers, I mean how many AK47s of +2 does a system really need? The thing to watch out is supplement power creep.

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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Torchship »

Oh, I'm well aware why 3.5 is so poorly balanced, I just don't believe that that reason defers responsibility for balancing onto the end user. A toaster with all the bells and whistles (and a random fault) may sell better than a plain, fully functional toaster, but it certainly isn't the toaster owner's responsibility to fix it. You bring up Magic, which is an excellent example of this. Yes, it makes excellent economic sense for WotC to release as many poorly balanced decks as they can... but it is not every player's responsibility to scour through all the available cards to eliminate the most gamebreaking ones. It would be nice if they did, but that does not make it their responsibility.

DnD is, in essence, a hobby. The DM is subject to an implicit agreement with players to maximise their fun and has a "responsibility" to fulfil this agreement, but this must absolutely be considered in the context that DnD is, and always will be, a hobby. The DM has a responsibility to perform game-balancing within this extremely limited context, not to perform many, many hours of reading and editing in order to fix the system. That task is comparable in size to a job (y'know, the one WotC was paid to perform), which is well out of the context of the hobby.
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Spoonist
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Spoonist »

@Torchship
I think that you are putting too much into the concept of "fixing broken characters". Its not "many, many hours of reading and editing" beyond what a DM would normally do. Instead its when the group notice that something ruins the fun, then the DM applies his "existing" knowledge of the game and tries to make amends. If you are creative it doesn't have to change the system anything at all, instead it could simply be a setting change. In my experience most issues can usually be fixed with a plot change, like my example of a noble title above. Sometimes its just bringing the issue up that will solve it within the playing group. To reuse Simon Jesters example above, in LoTR Gandalf is overpowered, that doesn't mean that the others don't have their moments or their purpose. This is partly because Gandalf let the others shine.

This shouldn't be complex or hard unless you overthink it.
Torchship wrote:You bring up Magic, which is an excellent example of this. Yes, it makes excellent economic sense for WotC to release as many poorly balanced decks as they can... but it is not every player's responsibility to scour through all the available cards to eliminate the most gamebreaking ones.
:wtf: That was a point vs content>testing.
If you are playing Magic with friends, don't you think its dickish to use a tournament deck vs a beginner/amateur? If you are the one inviting the friends over to play Magic and one guy always brings these boring overpowered 1st or 2nd turn combokill tournament decks when all your other friends bring themed soft and slow 'fun' decks, don't you think you should talk about that he is ruining the fun for everyone.
How about its all your cards (you are the DM after all) and one guy insists on always picking out the best deck/powercards, leaving less good decks/cards for the rest of your friends. Shouldn't you talk about it?
No, instead you demand that WoTC should never create those cards or combos and instead create all cards to be equal. So that whichever choices you make when putting the deck together they will all end equally good.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Gunhead »

Spoonist wrote:@Torchship
I think that you are putting too much into the concept of "fixing broken characters". Its not "many, many hours of reading and editing" beyond what a DM would normally do. Instead its when the group notice that something ruins the fun, then the DM applies his "existing" knowledge of the game and tries to make amends. If you are creative it doesn't have to change the system anything at all, instead it could simply be a setting change. In my experience most issues can usually be fixed with a plot change, like my example of a noble title above. Sometimes its just bringing the issue up that will solve it within the playing group. To reuse Simon Jesters example above, in LoTR Gandalf is overpowered, that doesn't mean that the others don't have their moments or their purpose. This is partly because Gandalf let the others shine.

This shouldn't be complex or hard unless you overthink it.

Characters builds are a part of the system so in essence a system is broken if it allows builds that are overpowered or imbalance the game to favor certain types builds over others. This is a flaw of the system and while a GM can do whatever to correct this, it doesn't make the system better as is. The Gandalf example is pretty flawed too at least in this case. If a system allows one character to be Gandalf and other to be, say Pippin with both being same level character the system is pretty borked. Now of course characters will have different strengths and weaknesses and a GM has to take this into consideration when running the adventure so everyone gets a little time in the spotlight. Having Gandalf's player "let" other characters shine is a pretty shitty proposition too, since it simply relies on the player to not steamroll over encounters leaving rest of the party to twiddle their thumbs or the GM has to remove Gandalf from encounters to allow other players to do something useful too which usually leads to stupid railroading by the GM. Of course the GM should have a clear idea what kind of a campaign he's going to run and rule out character types that will have nothing to do, but this has nothing to do with the system in use.
Spoonist wrote:
Torchship wrote:You bring up Magic, which is an excellent example of this. Yes, it makes excellent economic sense for WotC to release as many poorly balanced decks as they can... but it is not every player's responsibility to scour through all the available cards to eliminate the most gamebreaking ones.
:wtf: That was a point vs content>testing.
If you are playing Magic with friends, don't you think its dickish to use a tournament deck vs a beginner/amateur? If you are the one inviting the friends over to play Magic and one guy always brings these boring overpowered 1st or 2nd turn combokill tournament decks when all your other friends bring themed soft and slow 'fun' decks, don't you think you should talk about that he is ruining the fun for everyone.
How about its all your cards (you are the DM after all) and one guy insists on always picking out the best deck/powercards, leaving less good decks/cards for the rest of your friends. Shouldn't you talk about it?
No, instead you demand that WoTC should never create those cards or combos and instead create all cards to be equal. So that whichever choices you make when putting the deck together they will all end equally good.
Well basically WoTC is enabling the 1 to 2 turn combokill decks and this again is a flaw in their game, but I think comparing a card game to a RPG is a pretty bad analogy as is, since RPGs are governed by a single person who has the power to change rules and his ruling is always final. Torchship is right saying it's not the responsibility of an individual card player to root out game breaking combos, this is what WoTC should do. Being a dick is not a measure of how a certain rule set works. When comparing game systems you are not discussing some relative concept of fun, you are discussing how well a system gives results in given situation and how it measures up to another.

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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Torchship »

Spoonist wrote:@Torchship
I think that you are putting too much into the concept of "fixing broken characters". Its not "many, many hours of reading and editing" beyond what a DM would normally do. Instead its when the group notice that something ruins the fun, then the DM applies his "existing" knowledge of the game and tries to make amends. If you are creative it doesn't have to change the system anything at all, instead it could simply be a setting change. In my experience most issues can usually be fixed with a plot change, like my example of a noble title above. Sometimes its just bringing the issue up that will solve it within the playing group. To reuse Simon Jesters example above, in LoTR Gandalf is overpowered, that doesn't mean that the others don't have their moments or their purpose. This is partly because Gandalf let the others shine.

This shouldn't be complex or hard unless you overthink it.
The problem is, it really is a difficult problem to overcome thoroughly. I suppose you could ban options immediately when they were revealed as OP (an almost zero-work option), but that's going to leave gaping holes in your game and leave many archetypes completely unplayable.

Take Fly (and related spells) for example. If you get tired of players totally ignoring many of your challenges and just flatly ban Fly, suddenly no-one can play the massively popular archetype of a flying Wizard (or flying anyone). Might work in certain circumstances, but I doubt many people would find that acceptable.
So, instead of banning Fly, you decide to re-work it. Now you have a lot of questions to answer. What level should your new Fly come in? How do you make Fly more available to non-casting classes, so as to make them more than passengers in any situation where Fly is used to solve a problem? What counters should be available to Fly? What duration should it have, what investment of resources should it require? You're going to have to answer all these questions (and more, probably) if you wish to turn Fly into a non-gamebreaking spell... and that's a lot of work. And then, once you've done that, you get to do it again for the next gamebreaking spell, feat or class that's turned up!
Or take the Truenamer. If a player wants to play that archetype (which is a surprisingly common one in fantasy novels) and actually wants to contribute, then you're practically going to have to redesign the class from the ground up. What's an appropriate DC scaling for the skill check? What's an appropriate duration for certain utterances (many are contradictorily defined)? What's an appropriate range and radius for certain utterances (same)? How do you redesign many of the utterances so they aren't useless or almost useless at the levels which they are acquired? These are all questions you're going to answer, and answering them thoroughly is a significant time investment.
Even taking the Gandalf example; how do you reliably convince the Gandalf player not to use any of their absurdly good powers without making them feel resentful? Additionally, how do you keep up the tension in a campaign with Gandalf in it; there is very little risk of failure because Gandalf can just step in and win the day alone if the party fails. Granting IC advantages to certain characters may work from time to time, but I doubt the majority of Fighters are going to be happy being a Baron if they still totally fail to contribute in combat.
Spoonist wrote: :wtf: That was a point vs content>testing.
If you are playing Magic with friends, don't you think its dickish to use a tournament deck vs a beginner/amateur? If you are the one inviting the friends over to play Magic and one guy always brings these boring overpowered 1st or 2nd turn combokill tournament decks when all your other friends bring themed soft and slow 'fun' decks, don't you think you should talk about that he is ruining the fun for everyone.
How about its all your cards (you are the DM after all) and one guy insists on always picking out the best deck/powercards, leaving less good decks/cards for the rest of your friends. Shouldn't you talk about it?
No, instead you demand that WoTC should never create those cards or combos and instead create all cards to be equal. So that whichever choices you make when putting the deck together they will all end equally good.
That's not what I said at all. I was specifically objecting to characters which unintentionally break the game, not players who intentionally bring gamebreaking characters to the table. You can tell people off for bringing intentionally overpowered characters to the table, but you can't tell people off for bringing unintentionally overpowered ones.
Additionally, I don't know where you got the idea that I want "all cards [classes] to be equal". Perfect game balance is unattainable and rather boring; but this has precisely no relevance to the confused mess that is 3.5. What I want is a game where you can't have a Truenamer - who is barely capable of fulfilling their own class role without significant optomisation - in the same party as a Druid who is more like two-and-a-half characters. Not wanting the class power variance to be huge is not the same as wanting it to be zero.
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