D&D 5E How much should 5e aim at balance?

[pemerton]

Why can't my character have waeknesses and strengths? Why can't I make a non-combat character without breaking the system?

Who is saying that PCs can't have weaknesses? If you've got 4e in mind, PCs have weaknesses. The fighter is weak at ranged combat and socially. But probably fit. The wizard is weak in melee and mediocre socially. But probably learned. The ranger is strong at either melee or ranged, but typically not both, and is weak socially. But probably strong in exploration.

If by "weaknesses" you mean "inability to effectively/meaningfully contribute", that's a different matter. D&D has some distinctive features - its very strong emphasis on party play, and its typical stakes being "win or die" - that I think make an inability to meaningfully contribute tricky for any major field of activity. And because D&D has always, mechanically, prioritised combat as a site of conflict resolution, non-combat PCs will tend to "break the system". Of course, if you play the game ignoring the bulk of the action resolution mechanics, then a non-combat PC might be viable (and 4e offers a novel, metagaming take on the non-combat PC via the "princess warlord" build).

But personally, if I wanted to run a game which wasn't focused on combat as a primary site of combat resolution, I wouldn't run D&D. I'd look for a game which doesn't place so much emphasis on combat in PC build and action resolution.

To a certain degree, "mechanical" balance in terms of combat effectiveness is only really a priority in design if you believe that your players treat combat effectiveness as a primary vehicle of "fun" play, or place a high priority on the emotional satisfaction they receive by being combat effective.

Mechanical effectiveness can extend beyond combat, though. Assuming there are non-combat action resolution mechanics.

If D&D Next really manages to bring the 3 pillars to shine (combat, social and exploration) and be equally relevant, then I think it's perfectly fine if the Fighter dominates combats. Such a system will probably mean that even tougher combats are over in 15-30 minutes at worst, and that's probably a "spotlight" time that every group could deal with. And it would imply balance, if a 15 minute fight is followed by a 15 minute exploration where the Rogue shines and a 15 minute social interaction where the Bard shines or whatver.*

But if it works like 3E, Pathfinder and 4E, and combats can take one or more hours, and many adventures containing multiple combat encounters followed by an exploration or social "piece" as binding glue, then a Fighter shining in combat and everyone playing second fiddle will not be much fun.

I agree with this. "Balancing across pillars" requires, at a minimum, that each of the pillars be meaningfully present in the default mode of play. To date, what they have said about this (in L&L, in the playtest documents) has been a bit disappointing.

Better at what?

Fighting? Diplomacy? Stealth? Ancient Lore? Spell casting? Riding? Climbing?

From what I can tell, your definition (and many if not most 4e-enthusiasts' definition) of balance is, "Total balance between characters in combat damage output and battlefield effectiveness."

Given that 4e is expressly designed so that PCs have quite different damage outputs, I don't think this is true: the fighter in my 4e game does 1d8+13 on an at-will hit; the sorcerer's at-will burst 2 does 1d4+27, or nearly twice the damage against mltiple targets. The difference is that the fighter exercises a huge amount of battlefield control, whereas the sorcerer has comparatively little.

More generally, who upthread from the "4e/balance" camp has defined balance in terms of combat effectiveness? People talk about mechanical effectiveness; why assume that that is limited to combat? The invoker in my 4e game has two skill training feats, Linguist and Arcane Familiar to get a Book Imp: none of those are combat abilities. They're about making the PC the preeminent scholar in the party, and probably in the gameworld also.

If by "unbalanced" you mean "breakable by a horde of min/maxers", you are describing virtually any game.

If anything, an rpg system that can't be abused isn't much of an rpg.

I don't think HeroWars/Quest is vulnerable to abuse, or being broken by hordes. RuneQuest and Traveller are both fairly resilient, also.

Part of the issue is how far you have to drift the game to break it. One of the issues with 3E is that some players break the game without trying, just because they try out the stuff that a druid, wizard or cleric can do, under the (as it turns out, mistaken) apprehension that they're playing the class as written. Heck, in the second session of 3E that I ever GMed we discovered that Summon Monster was broken - with a 3rd level spell the PC could either summon a Thoqqua, or summon a Triton that could then use its own Summon Nature's Ally to summon a Thoqqua. And that wasn't even trying - that was just a player looking at his PC's spell list and the corresponding monster stats.

At a minimum, if the game is going to break that easily I want (i) the designers to tell me where the break points are, and (ii) to show me where they think the viable game can be played without hitting those points. Burning Wheel does a pretty good job of this, so it's not like WotC have to come up with the idea all on their own.

 

[Alzrius]

Okay, your RPG gaming experience does consist primarily of really heavily unbalanced d20 system games. I am pretty confident now that you have never really played enough truly balanced games to be able to see how much of a difference balance makes.

What's funny about this is that fully half of the games I listed (BESM, Munchkin, and MunchkinQuest) aren't d20 games at all. Likewise, your statement further demonstrates that you think your opinions are objective truths.

Balance (or the lack, thereof) is something that can be clearly demonstrated. By now, the sheer amount of evidence that D&D 3E (and by extension Pathfinder) is hideously unbalanced.

In that case, I challenge you to make a positive affirmation of this statement - list a "balanced" game that you've played, and explain how it's balanced.

I can assure you, it won't survive this thread's critique very long.

Determining whether a game is balanced is rather simple actually: just let loose a horde of min-maxers on the system and watch to see how badly they break the game. If they can break it, they will. The balanced and unbalanced parts of the game will make themselves known. This process is generally called playtesting.

Clearly it's not that simple, since you seem to be under the impression that there are "balanced" as well as "unbalanced" games out there that both had playtesting.

As such, whether or not a game is balanced is a matter of fact that can be backed up by evidence, not mere opinion.

You don't seem to have read through the thread - again, plenty of people right here have posted varying definitions of what "balance" can mean. Simply saying "that it was playtested" is not only a very thin definition, but is also self-contradictory, since games that have been playtested (e.g. Pathfinder) are, according to you, "unbalanced."

To put it another way, you list the criteria for balanced games, then list games that meet that criteria that are still unbalanced.

What is the basis for this opinion? All opinions can be backed up with argument and evidence.

WOW, is that a loaded statement. "All" opinions can be backed up with arguments and evidence? All opinions about everything? I strongly recommend you never discuss controversial social issues with people.

Merely citing your personal experience with a handful of game systems is hardly convincing.

If you believe in your opinion, prove that it has meaning.

This is the quintessential "pot calling the kettle black" statement.

That person is joking. Balance just means that player skill has meaning. The better the balance, the more player skill matters.

Please don't tell me you are being serious here, since it is a rather ridiculous statement your are paraphrasing. It is obviously a joke.

If that's your opinion, then prove that it has "meaning."

 

[Ahnehnois]

And where is the line between abuse and balance? You speak as if it is obvious. Whereas I look at the 3.5 SRD and compare the Druid to the Monk. Playing a druid straight out of the PHB and just picking Natural Spell, a good animal companion, a few good spells, and Wild Shape is going to beat the tar out of even the most abusive monks going.

Except those encouraging and enabling it. And where does the abusive line start and end? A 3.5 PHB only Druid or Wizard using abilities all in relatively obvious ways could be seen as abusive and was certainly broken.

Part of the issue is how far you have to drift the game to break it. One of the issues with 3E is that some players break the game without trying, just because they try out the stuff that a druid, wizard or cleric can do, under the (as it turns out, mistaken) apprehension that they're playing the class as written. Heck, in the second session of 3E that I ever GMed we discovered that Summon Monster was broken - with a 3rd level spell the PC could either summon a Thoqqua, or summon a Triton that could then use its own Summon Nature's Ally to summon a Thoqqua. And that wasn't even trying - that was just a player looking at his PC's spell list and the corresponding monster stats.

At a minimum, if the game is going to break that easily I want (i) the designers to tell me where the break points are, and (ii) to show me where they think the viable game can be played without hitting those points. Burning Wheel does a pretty good job of this, so it's not like WotC have to come up with the idea all on their own.

These are the kinds of perspectives that I struggle to reconcile with the experiences of everyone who has played 3.X in some form for a decade now and not had that kind of experience. Even if those events happen, I find it difficult to believe that it is the rules' fault. Is the contention really that these kinds of experiences are an inherent product of picking up a 3e PHB? Or even typical? If so, how do you explain the number of people playing it?

The only games where you can have two characters that are exactly equal in power are either character-sheet less (e.g. Fiasco, Dread) or where you have identical character sheets (most likely in games like 3:16)

By the standards of several people who posted in this thread, I believe you have just described a perspective in which 4e is not balanced. (Along with most rpgs). Do you disagree with this conclusion (or with their standards)?

 

[Alzrius]

Heck, in the second session of 3E that I ever GMed we discovered that Summon Monster was broken - with a 3rd level spell the PC could either summon a Thoqqua, or summon a Triton that could then use its own Summon Nature's Ally to summon a Thoqqua. And that wasn't even trying - that was just a player looking at his PC's spell list and the corresponding monster stats.

To be fair, the 3E game rules do state that summoned creatures cannot summon other creatures via any means (e.g. innate powers, spells, magic items, etc.).

That said, that may not have been as readily apparent as it should have been (particularly in the early days of 3E). But it was in there.

EDIT: Okay, looking at the 3.0 SRD, it says (in the Schools of Magic file; emphasis mine):

Summoning: The spell instantly brings a creature or object to a place the character designates. When the spell ends or is dispelled, a summoned creature is instantly sent back to where it came from, but a summoned object is not sent back unless the spell description specifically indicates this. A summoned creature also goes away if it is killed or dropped to 0 hit points. It is not really dead. It takes 24 hours for the creature to reform, during which time it can't be summoned again.

When the spell that summoned a creature ends and the creature disappears, all the spells it has cast end (if they haven't already). A summoned creature cannot use any innate summoning abilities it may have, and it refuses to cast any spells or use any spell-like abilities that would cost it XP.

This is ambiguous, in that "innate summoning abilities" could be read to mean spell-like and supernatural abilities only, rather than including spellcasting abilities also (and the bit about it including magic items that they appeared with that could also summon creatures isn't addressed at all; though I suspect that's because there are virtually no creatures that are written to have such items)...but I know what GM call I'd make in such a situation.

 

[Underman]

Heck, in the second session of 3E that I ever GMed we discovered that Summon Monster was broken - with a 3rd level spell the PC could either summon a Thoqqua, or summon a Triton that could then use its own Summon Nature's Ally to summon a Thoqqua. And that wasn't even trying - that was just a player looking at his PC's spell list and the corresponding monster stats.

Interesting, I never thought of that. In those shoes, I would have self-regulated myself to not have the PC summon a Triton. And if I didn't, I wouldn't resist whatsoever if the DM made a ruling. I could justify this in several ways.

At a minimum, if the game is going to break that easily I want (i) the designers to tell me where the break points are, and (ii) to show me where they think the viable game can be played without hitting those points.

I guess I get that, but to me, this feels like asking the game to hold my hand. It depends, though, how far the designers go to highlight the breakpoints. Like online errata, a continuously updated DMG guide available separately online wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[Emerikol]

But the only person so far to offer a narrow definition (in terms of damage), that I can recall, is [MENTION=10638]Emirikol[/MENTION] - who is in the "fun over balance" camp rather than the "balance underpins fun" camp.

Just to clarify. I feel the quest for balance can ruin a game. I give you 4e. But I don't think balance is inherently bad. I would agree that 3e could be more balanced and if more balanced it might be more fun. Hating 4e doesn't make me a 3e or Pathfinder lover.

So I agree with both your statements. More balance can make a game more fun. It can also make it less fun if the mechanisms used to achieve balance harm other parts of the game.

 

[Emerikol]

Even a fairly balanced game that is really complex is going to be breakable in some way. The DM is totally within his right to ban or change anything for the sake of his game. I change things purely for flavor reasons. I'm master of my campaign. I don't let RAW master me. As a player I prefer DMs who are.

 

[pemerton]

My frustrations reading pemerton's posts arise from the fact that he's not always clear just how much theoretical and practical knowledge he relies on for his way of playing 4e that is not in the 4e DMG. When I claim to be analyzing 4e, I'm just looking at the text itself; I'm not crossreferencing it with Burning Wheel or Maelstrom Storytelling (never even heard of this one). To me, 4e doesn't really support any metagame agenda -- gamism or narrativism -- well out of the box. The DMG presents it as essentially an adventure path system. If you follow the adventure creation guidelines then you end up with a boring piece of crap like the Keep on the Shadowfell. The DM plans a series of 10 encounters at a time, some being battles and some being skill challenges, and then the players work through it linearly with very little wiggle room for differing rewards based on skilled play or risk tolerance. It's bloodless and perfunctory. It has no metagame agenda "spark" at all; pretty much all of the entertainment value has to come from the work the DM puts in to make the encounters narratively interesting. In GNS terms the only creative agenda I see this as supporting is high concept sim -- aka play through the DMs story as new powers get unlocked now and then. I think most 4e groups play the game this way. I think this playstyle has a pretty brutal prepwork to fun ratio and limited ability to draw in new players from other forms of gaming and I don't want to see it presented as the default way to play D&D ever again.

I agree with you that the adventure design advice in the 4e DMG is worthless. I don't think it's radically different from that in 3E, which also seems to support a very high degree of adventure path play (especially looking at Paizo's business model). The last really good scenario design advice I can think of from a D&D book is in Moldvay Basic.

But I don't think the adventure design advice exhausts the 4e DMG. And the whole thing is not entirely coherent. Other parts of the game - eg player designed quests, and the commentary on story elements in Worlds & Monsters - point in a different direction.

And as far as I can tell, there are other posters on this board who have stumbled, independently of me (and vice versa, with one exception) on more-or-less the same way of running 4e: [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], [MENTION=25643]ca[/MENTION]pmbell, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], and (before he drifted 4e into his current hack) [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] (who is the exception noted above - my approach to 4e was heavily influenced by his actual play posts from back in the early months of 4e).

It's hard to tell exactly what Chris Perkins does in his games, given that his play reports are written up and edited for publication on a commercial website, but he also seems to be running something more than a bloodless adventure path.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think I'm as deviant as you think.

I'm pretty sure I'd like playing in a 4e game run by pemerton.

Thanks. That's kind of you to say so.

to get to an experience even remotely reaching pemerton's "gonzo, narrativist D&D 4e that's fun"--even now, when I might actually consider it--the work load is pretty much a non-starter.

That hasn't been my experience. 4e, in keeping with D&D tradition, has lots of lists - of monsters, maps, skill challenge ideas etc - that can be run without prep. (I run monsters from books without prep all the time.) And the cosmology is there in the books (a lot of it in just the PHB and DMG). Apart from that I just use the standard techniques for encounter-driven narrativist play. (Very thematically light - or, if you prefer, hackneyed - narrativist play in my own case.)

My own campaign notes, after (I would guess) 70-odd sessions, are 4 A4 pages of background, about the same length of "campaign diary", plus probably a few dozen pages of printed out monster stats, plus the typical scratch sheets, battlemaps etc produced in the course of actual play. Not all that onerous.

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] (along with extremely few others of which [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION] is one) has, I suspect, a talent for taking pretty much any rpg system you can think of and making out of it a game that you and I would both gladly take a seat in.

Now you're just making me blush. And what you say is pretty unfair to Piratecat, I think. I don't do very good NPC voices, or very vibrant descriptions. And with me and three other dads in our Sunday afternoon games, our sessions double as "D&D creche"! (Another bit of 4e DMG advice that we ignore.)

Anyway, for what it's worth, I admire you as one of the few consistent posters advocating for classic D&D play: multiple parties in the same world; stables of PCs; intraparty contracts for the division of loot; and the like. I tried to GM in that Gygaxian style when I was first starting out, but sucked at it. My main influence as a GM is Chris Claremont's X-Men (both the good and the bad - just as Claremont's X-Men collapsed under the weight of its own plotsand background in the early 90s, my first uni campaign ended up suffering the same fate a few years later). And my other main technique - that I learned, somehow, GMing Oriental Adventures (AD&D version) is to trust my players. Follow their leads, frame scenes in response, and see what happens. If nothing else, this is a cure for the bloodless adventure path play that Libramarian rightly criticises.

 

[Lwaxy]

T
See, here's the problem. That extreme charop board min/maxing is not playing the game. It's D&D's version of cheating. Antisocial behavior and its effects are not products of the game system, nor should the system be designed around trying to prevent abuse. Abuse and balance are unrelated concepts.

While some groups would consider charop cheating, certainly groups exist where it is the norm and everyone still has fun. There is nothing antisocial about charop as such.

In my groups, it's not wanted. But it is agreed upon by everyone not just the GM. If I'd get players who'd all want to charop, I'd allow it.

 

[pemerton]

A beginner finds in 4e a system that forces them into a much narrower design space than previous editions, preventing them from creating any character that is outside the AEDU, limited multiclassing, standard modifier box.

What is important in PC difference? Mechanical minutiae, or the nature of the effects that their actions have on the fiction? Different players answer this different ways.

HeroQuest revised advertises itself as being a universal system for adventure RPGing, yet every PC is mechanically identical but for the descriptors in front of the numbers. Diverse, as it claims? Or limited, as you describe 4e? There is obviously no single answer to that question, but I think it's a mistake to assume that 4e is narrow in character concepts just because of its uniform structure. It's just that those concepts are expressed in different terms - for example, doing radiant damage rather than fire damage, or untyped damage, is very signficcant in the narrative of play (because of the vulnerability of undead to radiant, and the association of radiant damage with divine PCs), but is not the sort of difference you seem to be advocating.

Even if the result is increased "balance" (which I remain unconvinced of), it's exclusionary.

And vice versa. I can't build the PCs I want to build in 3E, nor GM the game I want to GM.

If I can't create a functioning version of every D&D character, monster, spell, etc. from earlier editions (because it isn't "balanced"), the goal of the unity edition has not been met.

"Functioning" is another contentious term. I think 4e does have functioning versions of the story elements of earlier versions of D&D. There mechanical expression is sometimes different, but this is neither here nor there - and in some cases, like hobgoblins, gnolls and many demons and devils, I think 4e has overwhelmingly superior mechanical expressions of the relevant story elements.

Thusfar, 5e has not taken that approach; it seems to be erring on the side of letting people play what they want and not imposing such profound restrictions on them (despite its many other problems thusfar). Can I conclude that you are in the camp that doesn't think 5e will or should appeal to the 4e diehards because of this?

I think D&Dnext, as best I can project it via the playtest documents, the blogs and the L&L columns, lacks many of the features that make 4e appealing to me as a fantasy RPG. The only thing that keeps me remotely hopeful about it is [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION]'s posts on this forum, which often show new ways whereby what looks to me like a clunky simulationist mechanic might be tweaked or dialled or added to in order to support a different playstyle.

These are the kinds of perspectives that I struggle to reconcile with the experiences of everyone who has played 3.X in some form for a decade now and not had that kind of experience. Even if those events happen, I find it difficult to believe that it is the rules' fault. Is the contention really that these kinds of experiences are an inherent product of picking up a 3e PHB? Or even typical? If so, how do you explain the number of people playing it?

I postedmy explanation upthread (in response to Ratskinner and others): I think that 3E is written to appeal to a simulationist aesthetic, but to be played something like 2nd ed or (fairly lighthearted) classic D&D.

It is only when its simulationist character is taken at face value, and players start exploring it on its own terms rather than within an AD&D framework; or when people push the gamist aspect in a harder way (as [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] describes in several posts upthread) that it starts to break.

When I read the posts of those who haven't experienced the breakage (eg your own, or [MENTION=9037]Elf Witch[/MENTION]) I see at least hints of very strong social contracts, plus quite a high degree of GM exercise of force, to stop that sort of drifting happening. Which is not entirely surprising - that sort of play was pretty crucial to mainstream 2nd ed AD&D, etc, so is arguably a D&D norm.

Interesting, I never thought of that. In those shoes, I would have self-regulated myself to not have the PC summon a Triton. And if I didn't, I wouldn't resist whatsoever if the DM made a ruling. I could justify this in several ways.

Underman, I hope you don't mind if I present this as an example of (i) strong social contract, and (ii) a certain sort of readiness to use at least a degree of GM force.

Although in any event the exploit may not work:

To be fair, the 3E game rules do state that summoned creatures cannot summon other creatures via any means (e.g. innate powers, spells, magic items, etc.).

<snip>

This is ambiguous, in that "innate summoning abilities" could be read to mean spell-like and supernatural abilities only, rather than including spellcasting abilities also

So maybe what we actually discovered is that the rules are poorly written! This happened in the course of actual play, and I'm pretty sure we weren't hunting through the book to find the general rules for summonings.

I guess I get that, but to me, this feels like asking the game to hold my hand.

I want them to hold my hand - in the sense of, tell me what they think they've given me. Look at Gygax's DMG and PHB - he doesn't hold back. He tells you what he thinks his game is, and is for. It's only later D&D rulebooks that have become more anodyne.

I think that the Burning Wheel books are excellent examples of a designer telling you how and why he thinks his game works, and telling you what he thinks will break it. And in my view that's not any sort of condescension - it's saving me the trouble of learning the hard way!