Shadowdweller00
Adventurer
Awwww, man. What am I going to do with all this popcorn now?
The final word on DPR, feats and class balance
Warpiglet
Adventurer
No disrespect to the OP...at all. But emergent play is really illuminating in this regard. When you use spells or sneak past a threat you do not need to fight, you see the value of other abilities vis a vis MOAR damage.
I am not discounting martial or damage prowess but think thI OP is overlooking other factors. Sometimes it is better to fly, disguise self, sneak, pick a lock or disappear than stab.
Frankly if the OP would drop SS or GWM from games he might find his criticisms overblown entirely.
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
While true, the main issue for the OP is that his primary concern is changing the metagame environment in which we all discuss these issues. Fixing his own game isn't really the priority.
Warpiglet
Adventurer
Uh...but we like our game.
As an aside is all of this about the inclusion of optional rules (hint, hint)?
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
Tony Vargas
Legend
Well, I'm guessing you didn't actually mean to make that claim when you said:
... but, that's really the only way to take it. You present the continued play of the game by many people as proof that not only Zapp's observations of imperfection in the system are false, but that, by implication, any/all other criticisms must also be dismissed.
It's fallacious reasoning.
It's not necessarily a wrong conclusion, though, not technically - I'm not trying to 'prove imperfection' (I don't think it's really necessary, but it's not what I'm doing), but if you did want to support it, you'll need something stronger than a classic fallacy.
I'm glad to hear that's not what you were going for, though.
I don't think there can be a final word while there's denial - and I think the title was chosen caustically, because of that.Got me. You could ask him, I guess, but this WAS the final word.
But, if we'd just nod and go "Yeah, Zapp, that's true, here's what we did to fix it..."
(...personally, I don't use feats or MCing, for instance, so no GWM/SS or SorLocks to distort DPR curves at my table.)
... then maybe, he'd give it a rest. Or not, it really seems like his goal is to browbeat WotC into 'fixing' the system. They're not going to - systems don't sell, well, not good systems, anyway.
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Tony Vargas
Legend
I have to wonder what your definition of balance is. As Moonsong & others pointed out, Chess is not quite perfectly balanced, because white has an advantage in going first, in a game with, potentially, a great many moves between that first one and victory and much potential for depth of play that can shift momentum to black. Tic-tac-toe, OTOH, is very short game - 9 turns maximum, 5 of them going to X - so the advantage of X, going first, is much greater. That, alone, renders it imbalanced (really, unfair, more than imbalanced, which can be addressed by playing an even number of games until one player wins more than the other - good luck with that).
Now, the definition of balance I've seen that seems to work best for RPGs goes something like this: a game is better-balanced the more choices it presents to players that are both meaningful and viable.
Tic-tac-toe presents X with 9 initial choices, obviously. However, 6 of them are meaningless: it doesn't matter which corner or side you place your X in, the game's potential results set will be the same, regardless (there's nothing special about the top/bottom/left/right of the grid, it could be rotated with no effect on play). There's three meaningful choices for X: center, corner, or side. One of those, choosing a side square, is decidedly inferior to the others, the choice of corner square is clearly the best (again, it's a solved game, so we know that X starting in a corner & playing optimally leaves O only two paths to stalemate, both of which start with the center square). On his first move, O would seem to have 8 choices, but, if X has played corner & is playing optimally, has only one viable choice: center, the others result in certain victory for X.
If X is playing optimally, O can force a draw by playing optimally, but, if O makes one mistake, X can force a win. OTOH, if O is playing optimally, X must make two mistakes to allow O a chance at victory.
Not remotely balanced, sorry.
But, it does illustrate why imbalance is bad for games, including RPGs. It's really the same as the issues D&D has had with 'class Tiers' and 'must-have feats' and '5MWDs' and "the greatsword is strictly superior to the greataxe because 0.5 DPR" and the like, just with D&D (thankfully) having a thick insulation of complexity to keep it from being entirely solved in the sense tic-tac-toe has been.
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AmerginLiath
Adventurer
It strikes me that the problem here, and in most of these discussions, is that RPGS over forty-plus years have interacted with multiple generations of players and multiple ge erations of gaming zeitgeist (both on the table and off it), so different people have vastly divergent ideas over where the refereeing of RPGs should be done — is the concern simply internal consistency on a given table or does a rule set have to cover as many considerations as possible in a product sold and played globally. The argument has certain similarities to the debate in professional sports over electronic strike zones versus umpires and the increased use of insta t replay (and going to the stadium or league booths versus relying on initial referee call). As we grow more connected in terms of communication and information, the sense of which authority to appeal to broadens among many (that many are coming to RPGs from broadened systems like MMORPGs rather than the local basement table nowadays has an impact here).
On the question of whether balance is good or bad in RPGs, I side with it being irrelevant in of itself. Some games are defined by balance and structured accordingly. 4e is a good of that, is as much as the design of different classes was kept so deliberately consistent for that very purpose. For the sake of tactical game, it was a brilliant system, but many found it limited it what it could create. By comparison, approaching other editions of D&D from a strictly balance perspective resulted in this odd catechism of builds and tiers by those trying to impose a different order than there often was (3.x indeed played very strongly into the concept of defining rulesets rather than allowing the referee to make judgement calls, which made for an expansive system in a specifically mathematical sense).
Maybe it’s a matter of coming to 1st edition as a child and understanding by necessity that it was a toolset (because I couldn’t figure out Weapon Speeds and AC modifiers by Weapon), but I remain with the idea “play how you want, but don’t take it so seriously; every edition is awesome in its own way because it tried something new and fiddled with something it thought didn’t — so feel free to do the same in your game because life’s too short to argue about looting goblins.” In terms of complex rules and spreadsheet-like balance, I always remember the sage advice that Kevin Siembieda (creator of Rifts and other overly-complex Palladium RPGs) gave to some friends playing with him at a con: “I can never remember all those complex rules I wrote, so I usually just roll a die. If it’s high, you succeed; if it’s low, you didn’t; if it’s in the middle, eh, I roll again!” A d20 can be “balance” enough.
On the question of whether balance is good or bad in RPGs, I side with it being irrelevant in of itself. Some games are defined by balance and structured accordingly. 4e is a good of that, is as much as the design of different classes was kept so deliberately consistent for that very purpose. For the sake of tactical game, it was a brilliant system, but many found it limited it what it could create. By comparison, approaching other editions of D&D from a strictly balance perspective resulted in this odd catechism of builds and tiers by those trying to impose a different order than there often was (3.x indeed played very strongly into the concept of defining rulesets rather than allowing the referee to make judgement calls, which made for an expansive system in a specifically mathematical sense).
Maybe it’s a matter of coming to 1st edition as a child and understanding by necessity that it was a toolset (because I couldn’t figure out Weapon Speeds and AC modifiers by Weapon), but I remain with the idea “play how you want, but don’t take it so seriously; every edition is awesome in its own way because it tried something new and fiddled with something it thought didn’t — so feel free to do the same in your game because life’s too short to argue about looting goblins.” In terms of complex rules and spreadsheet-like balance, I always remember the sage advice that Kevin Siembieda (creator of Rifts and other overly-complex Palladium RPGs) gave to some friends playing with him at a con: “I can never remember all those complex rules I wrote, so I usually just roll a die. If it’s high, you succeed; if it’s low, you didn’t; if it’s in the middle, eh, I roll again!” A d20 can be “balance” enough.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Necessary but not sufficient, is how I'd see it, at worst. Games need to be balanced to avoid being terrible, non-functional, or boring (like tic-tac-toe, above), but they can still be all three, in spite of being balanced.
The greater the depth and scope the game attempts, the more important balance becomes to keep all those elements meaningful & viable, and thus more than just window-dressing for a storyteller's backdrop or chaff for system masters to winnow away.
RPGs often try for tremendous scope and have the potential for great depth of play by their very natures. Balance is thus critically important to deliver on that. If the game doesn't provide it, the players have to, by some sort of informal agreement or voluntary restraint (as in Freestyle RP), or the DM has to impose it by fiat (as in classic D&D or 5e). Otherwise, so much of that potential depth & scope is lost. What's left might still be pretty significant, though: put a group of equally-capable powergamers together to play 3.x/PF, and there's still a lot of game left for them to use, it's not just X-in-the-corner, O-in-the-center, every time. ;P
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Paul Farquhar
Legend
Balance is A): Impossible
and
B) Undesirable
Gandalf is not "balanced" with Bilbo Baggins.
and
B) Undesirable
Gandalf is not "balanced" with Bilbo Baggins.
