TSR Q&A with Gary Gygax

lkj · Jun 30, 2006

Col_Pladoh said:
Those puns made me fairly moan, so I got your message.

Cheers,
Gary

A moan from the great Gary Gygax! You've made my day. But I'll leave the last to you, before this poor thread gets totally swarmed. I mean it. I'm done.

Cheers. And sorry. Was in a punny mood today, apparently.

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Col_Pladoh · Jun 30, 2006

To take account of things here:

We were in the red, but it's moved to the black. So keep your antennas point in the right direction as all good pupas of insect punning should, a mandibleatory requirement.

Cheers,
Gary

merelycompetent · Jun 30, 2006

Col_Pladoh said:
To take account of things here:

We were in the red, but it's moved to the black. So keep your antennas point in the right direction as all good pupas of insect punning should, a mandibleatory requirement.

Cheers,
Gary

Apparently, my last post got eaten by the Internet Ghods. So to keep anyone else from bugging me about it, here is the royal plan nesting in my mind:

I think I'll print out the entire page containing my question and Mr. Gygax's answer, sign it, and FedEx it along with a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola to my friend. It should be nice and fizzy by the time he gets it

There, that should sweeten the deal, if you follow the trail of my thinking. Now, doubtless you are all tired of hearing me drone on and on about an old friend. Surely by now, we've hatched enough puns and are in danger of tunneling into other threads, where they may already be formic a basic defense against our primary weapon. We can soldier on en masse and overwhelm them by sheer numbers. We have to be careful of anti-tank fire, but we can probably feeler way through.

airwalkrr · Jul 1, 2006

Col_Pladoh said:
Simply put, it was all for game balance, and it worked reasonably well, I opine. Classes in game design will be held here on my front porch

So in other words, it was felt by you and the other designers that classes like the paladin (which typically required more XP per level) were more powerful than classes like the thief (which was the power-leveller of the game) and that they needed to level at different rates to remain equivalent? Was that the rationale, or is there another element of balance I am missing?

Treebore · Jul 1, 2006

airwalkrr said:
So in other words, it was felt by you and the other designers that classes like the paladin (which typically required more XP per level) were more powerful than classes like the thief (which was the power-leveller of the game) and that they needed to level at different rates to remain equivalent? Was that the rationale, or is there another element of balance I am missing?

Not only did they feel like the Paladin was, they were right! It gets a lot more powerful when/if they ever get the Holy Avenger.

Personally, I like the different xp for each class approach instead of trying to keep each class equally balanced so you can have one xp chart. So take the two extremes. If I remember correctly, at high lev3els the wizard takes 375,000 xp to level up. The weakest character class was either the Thief or the cleric, and took something like 225,000 xp to level up. So the weakest class earned darn near two levels for every one the Wizard earned, keeping the thief in the "power level" ballpark.

This makes a lot more sense to me than to try and say a 10th level rogue in 3E is just as powerful as a 10th level wizard. Stripped of all magic items and just class abilities versus class abilities I would bet the wizard comes out alive and the rogue comes out fried 10 times out of 10.

Differing the xp requirements, and therefore rate of advancement of the powerful classes, is the closest your ever going to get to a fair and equitable balance of power between classes that are inherently on different scales of power to begin with.

Then, once you get that worked out, how do you balance the powers of magic items when possessed by a character? You can't. The only thing a rational DM can strive for is a close approximation.

I don't even want to talk about how feats complicate things even more. Or certain skills. The idea of evenly balanced classes is a goal that is a mythical dream. It does not exist in D&D, or any other system that I am aware of. It is only something that we can only get close enough to that everything works well enough that we play it.

All these discussions of balanced and unbalanced are funny to me. There is no "true" balance, only a close approximation.

Col_Pladoh · Jul 1, 2006

airwalkrr said:
So in other words, it was felt by you and the other designers that classes like the paladin (which typically required more XP per level) were more powerful than classes like the thief (which was the power-leveller of the game) and that they needed to level at different rates to remain equivalent? Was that the rationale, or is there another element of balance I am missing?

Properly, there were no other designers involved in this regard, and it was my sole decision, mostly my sole creative input in fact.

I do believe that the millions of persons that played and enjoyed the AD&D game demonstrate the correctness of my design choice,much of it based on playing the D&D game intensley for four years, averaging about 20 or more hours of DMing and play a week over that period.

Cheers,
Gary

Col_Pladoh · Jul 1, 2006

Treebore,

I pretty well concur with what you state, and most of the AD&D game audience certaoinly does. All character classes are not equal, but the differing advancement requirements helps to keep them relatively so.

Cheers,
Gary

SuStel · Jul 2, 2006

airwalkrr said:
So in other words, it was felt by you and the other designers that classes like the paladin (which typically required more XP per level) were more powerful than classes like the thief (which was the power-leveller of the game) and that they needed to level at different rates to remain equivalent? Was that the rationale, or is there another element of balance I am missing?

I don't think it was so much about keeping the classes equivalent. It was more about providing appropriate challenges for the classes. A magic-user had more powerful tools to accomplish his goals, so he needed to acquire more experience points to make the adventure challenging enough.

If you've ever played the Dungeon! board game, you know that Heroes need only 10,000 gold pieces to win the game, while Wizards need 30,000. Wizards are clearly superior to Heroes in almost every respect, but the challenge is in getting three times as much gold. The principle is the same in D&D.

Orius · Jul 2, 2006

Col_Pladoh said:
Hmmm...

I wonder if the folks at WotC understand that all RPGs are driven by the GMs that run the games. Without them, they will have no paper game property. Telling players to give their DMs a hard time is most counter-productive.

I'd say the article seems to be presented slightly out of context. One of the gists seems to be that sometimes players and DMs approach the game with different sets of assumptions.

I think it really depends on the style of both players and DMs. On one hand there are the sadistic killer DMs who like throwing very hard encounters and give them rewards along the lines of a few coppers or burnt-out ioun stones.

That might be fun for the DM, but the players aren't going to enjoy that if that's what they get on a regular basis. On the other hand there are players who expect everything handed to them, and don't go out of the way to bother looking for anything. I've ran games in the past where the PCs wouldn't bother to look for treasure and often overlooked the occasional hoard. If those players came up with me with a character audit, I certainly wouldn't tell them where they missed treasure in the past, and I'd probably be hesitant to tell them they missed it at all, because I don't want the adventures to devolve into killing every monster in the room, then spending the next 6 hours in game rapping the walls for hidden compartments, ripping up the stones in the floor, or gutting the monsters to see what they might have swallowed, then moving on to the next dungeon room and repeating the process ad nauseam.

However, I do agree with the article when it ays the current edition was designed with certain wealth levels in mind. But it's really the DM's place, and not the place of the players to decide whether or not the players are behind on resources and adjust accordingly. More XP isn't necessarily the answer either, because that will just increase character advancement and not solve the resourse probelm, but make it worse. But I think what's really needed is a fair-minded DM who is wiling to reward the player for heroic action, and not the killer type who uses DMing as a power trip.

airwalkrr · Jul 2, 2006

Col_Pladoh said:
Properly, there were no other designers involved in this regard, and it was my sole decision, mostly my sole creative input in fact.

I am corrected then. Consider me chastised for my ignorance.

I simply did not wish to do others a disservice if they helped come up with the idea in question. This brings up an interesting question for me though, since I was born after D&D was invented. I know you are credited with "creating D&D" and I certainly don't question that. But just how much was 1st edition your sole work and how much of it was inspired or suggested by others? 90% or greater? I mean, although you might be deific compared to such mortals as I, you did have help obviously with such a monumental task of creating a brand new game and getting it marketable. It is my current understanding that you were the primary designer and Dave Arneson collaborated. Was Rob Kuntz's contribution early on limited to DMing? What kinds of things did Dave Arneson help with? Others?

Col_Pladoh said:
I do believe that the millions of persons that played and enjoyed the AD&D game demonstrate the correctness of my design choice,much of it based on playing the D&D game intensley for four years, averaging about 20 or more hours of DMing and play a week over that period.

Oh obviously. I find AD&D an incredibly well-designed and well-thought out system. I am not trying to tell you that you could have done a better job or anything. I am just seeking to make some adjustments to coincide with my tastes and the tastes of my group and was trying to be circumspect about the consequences of "changing the rules."

Col_Pladoh said:
Treebore,

I pretty well concur with what you state, and most of the AD&D game audience certaoinly does. All character classes are not equal, but the differing advancement requirements helps to keep them relatively so.

Cheers,
Gary

That is what I figured the reason was. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. Thanks a lot!

TSR Q&A with Gary Gygax

lkj

Hero

Col_Pladoh

Gary Gygax

merelycompetent

First Post

airwalkrr

Adventurer

Treebore

First Post

Col_Pladoh

Gary Gygax

Col_Pladoh

Gary Gygax

SuStel

First Post

Orius

Legend

airwalkrr

Adventurer

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