I hate game balance!

[WayneLigon]

I've never played in games where the 15-minute adventuring day was the norm, where the fact spells are a limited resource didn't matter, or where you had unlimited amounts of time to buff your character, either.

Then I'll say that you've had a good GM who knows when to say 'no' and played with players who don't seek to abuse the system, then. Not everyone is so fortunate.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

I HATE GAME BALANCE!

I don't know about 4E, but ...

I have never subscribed to the idea of balance, in D&D.
I believe in and have always used the balance of imbalances concept.

Edena_of_Neith

 

[Remathilis]

Nice strawman there.

Maybe it's that many people don't mind that some classes are more powerful than others, especially at high levels? Some people don't want flavor and style sacrificed for pure mathematical equality between classes.

High level wizards should be nigh-godlike terrors on the battlefield who can devastate armies in seconds and rewrite reality in seconds out-of-combat, their only real weakness is physical frailty that means that unless they have prep magic up, a fighter of far lower level can come and whack them down quickly, but if they are prepared even a far higher level fighter has no chance against him. That 4e has nerfed the wizard down to a pigeonholed predetermined combat niche and handed all the reality-rewriting into rituals anybody can do with just a feat (and that means less in 4e than 3e with getting more feats and feats being weaker).

And that's WONDERFUL if your the DM. Or the guy playing the wizard. What about everyone else? I've played in (2nd edition) games where the wizard(s) overruled everything. One wizard is strong, 2-3 of them makes everyone else superfluous. At the end of the day, everyone ended up a mage (via new pcs, dual classing, or character rewriting) because, well, there was no reason to stay a fighter, thief, or even cleric.

I guess the game is balanced if EVERYONE is playing the wizard. Or the Jedi. or whatever. You get the point.

 

[Greg K]

Then I'll say that you've had a good GM who knows when to say 'no' and played with players who don't seek to abuse the system, then. Not everyone is so fortunate.

Couldn't that have been achieved by the PHB telling players not to be asshats by abusing the system and for the DMG to teach DMs how and when to say no to players?

 

[WayneLigon]

But 2d edition had it right. Yes, a mage became very powerful at upper levels, but his mighty magical power was for naught in a melee fight. And spells? Well, he never got them automatically and had to search and adventure to find even the least powerful of spells.

Mages sucked in melee right up until they introduced the stoneskin spell. If they ever get that spell or one or two similar things, their fear of fighters is gone because by the time the fighter can beat down their defenses they've already killed him.

The DM was able to control the power level of the wizard simply by restricting access to spells.

Up until the first time you have a mage as an opponent for the party. Unless things go horribly wrong, when you defeat that mage then the party mages are going to take his spellbook, hole up for a week and use write to write all his spells into their books. You gave him disintergration, lightning bolt and passwall? Well, now the PC's have it, too.

This is one reason that virtually all magical opponents in early 3E adventures were sorcerers, because they didn't have a ready-made store of mage-power-up on hand.

And what about "spells per day?" I seem to recall that a wizard had very few spells each day in his arsenal.

That's true until he hits about 8th level.

And there is the '15-minute adventuring day' phenomenon that still existed to a lesser extent in 1E; once the mage or (especially) cleric was out of spells, play stopped unless the GM was able to arrange things otherwise. Thus, it didn't really matter how many spells per day he had; he'd effectively have them all for every major encounter area.

This is before he finds things like a ring of wizardry, pearl of power or scrolls.

Notwithstanding any of the foregoing, isn't this a "roleplaying" game? Why are we talking about "game balance" for such a creature?

No matter how much immersion and roleplaying you're doing, it's still a game and constructed like a game. It still sucks when someone is so vastly superior to you that your PC might as well be a pack mule.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

I am once again reminded of the scene from Peter Jackson's ROTK.
Gandalf, behind the crumbling gates of Minas Tirith: 'Remember that you are soldiers of Gondor! No matter what comes through that gate, you will stand your ground!'

The Morgul Host is not interested in balance, or in granting rests to characters with low hit points and exhausted spell repetoires.

As DM, I'm not going to be anymore interested, and my players understand this at the beginning of the campaign.

Character Rule 1: It is up to the characters to find the way to survive and succeed. Period. Finis. Life is not fair. Death is even more unfair. Deal with it.

 

[WayneLigon]

Couldn't that have been achieved by the PHB telling players not to be asshats by abusing the system and for the DMG to teach DMs how and when to say no to players?

It does. Every edition of the DMG has had words to that effect.

The people who are going to be asshats never listen to that advice, for some reason. And there have been tons of articles written on how to be a good GM, almost all of them reinterating the same advice. I have not seen an appreciable effect on the GM population.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I loved the fact a fighter could kick the snot out of a mage at melee, and a mage could destroy a fighter with a spell, and a ranger could kill both of them from 100 yards away.

Sadly, the situation you describe has never been the case in D&D.

The wizard can do anything. In particular he stamps all over the thief's niche*. His weaknesses can be completely circumvented with defensive spells and the 15 min day. A 3e fighter can be just as good an archer as the ranger, arguably better. A wizard's fireball has longer range than a longbow. And CoDzilla stamps all over everyone.

Multiclassing, which is very easy in 3e and, imo, too easy in 1e and 2e, also goes completely against niche protection.

Even if class niche protection was sacrosanct in D&D, and it wasn't, this would have led to the 'Decker' problem, where each PC is off playing his own mini-game and there's no interaction.

4e's much stricter rules on multiclassing actually do a better job of supporting the game you prefer.

It is true that everyone can do anything now, just not equally well. But those differences in ability - such as the defender's higher AC and the striker's higher damage output - result in classes that play very differently on the battlegrid.


* Which makes sense when you consider the wizard, or magic-user, predated the thief. There was no room for the thief when he arrived in '75, the magic user already occupied his niche. A similar problem occurs with the cleric/paladin, they were too much alike. D&D classes - broken from 1975 to 2008.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Whether it is a good game or not, 4th Edition will not make players behave reasonably.
The players must police themselves. In my experience, this is the only way that has ever worked.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Wild guess. You are a player more often than a DM?

No a DM far more than a player, and I'll say up front that I think 4e is garbage and am not impartial by any means. I never had a bit of problem running 3e all the way into epic levels or the types of abilities removed from 4e. As a DM I liked the that I could use summoning, illusions, enchantment, necromancy, and shapeshifting for all sort of unique effects to throw at the PCs. Now those are gone in favor of bland mechanically near-identical pap. As a player I always ran wizards and focused on unusual sets of spells, never once a howitzer mage, and now that's impossible. They've removed all the interesting effects from the game. I let my players use COBoard builds at the table and it was a riot for all involved including me as a DM. So do not presume to hit me with a CODzilla argument, I've seen the worst out there and had no problem with it.

Balance is over-rated. I would far rather have an interesting but not very well balanced game than a game balanced so well it sucked the life and ingenuity out of play in favor of versimilitude breaking mechanical equality and thoughtless gamism.