Why do all classes have to be balanced?

[Neonchameleon]

Hmm... if the challenge wants to go into Pathfinder, I'm looking at throwing a Summoner into the mix.

I'm even wondering how the summoner would do without the Eidolon given that the summoner's first move every fight would then be to summon D3+1 augmented Mud Elementals (attacking at +7 and inflicting a DC14 entrap attack with every hit - second entrap makes the victim helpless, a good reason to carry a longspear), or D3+1 Lemures because Damage Resistance is good (even if the Lemure isn't). Or using water or air elementals if appropriate... Or even Hyenas.

And ExploderWizard, the input of the person at the table is very relevant at the table. It is also not the responsibility of the game designers. It's not a balancing factor - especially when IME smart, creative, and detail focussed people gravitate to classes that reward intelligence, creativity, and attention to detail.

The problem I'm seeing is scenarios that are built to always favor the argument.

There are so many factors that come into play during a game that you can't really get a solid opinion. I see that Stinking Cloud is mentioned, well what happens if you memorize Stinking Cloud and you come up against a lot of undead, well that spell is useless. Fly is cool, but enemies can fly, cast spells, and have ranged attacks.

If the enemies can fly and have ranged attacks, the fighter is simply a target. This isn't helping your case. And if you're expecting undead don't prepare Stinking Cloud. If it's a mix of living and undead, use Stinking Cloud on the living. If the DM isn't giving ou any thematic consistency or forewarning then your DM is very different to mine.

 

[CroBob]

You are the one sitting down to play a game. You are the one that has a good time or doesn't. These are the facts and whats on a character sheet doesn't change them. Call me a loon if you like but I find the input of the person at the table to be very relevant to the play of the game.

It has plenty to do with how much fun you have and how interesting your character is, but when discussing mechanical balance, things unrelated to the mechanics of the game is irrelevant. I could have fun playing a 3.5 commoner, but to claim he's mechanically balanced to the party's Druid, or that the imbalance does not matter, simply because he's a fun character is outright silly.

 

[B.T.]

I'm not going to slog through this thread. Too many pages and posts for me to care. Instead, I'm going to answer the question posed in the thread title: "Why do these crazy new school players obsess over balance?" (A slight exaggeration, but sometimes I feel the same way about it even though I started playing with 3.5 and tend to obsess over balance.)

The reason is simple. Many of us come from the post-2e world of feats and classes and trap options. In 3e, you could easily make a character who sucked by taking the wrong feat or class or spell. Given that 3.0 was a huge push toward D&D's focus on the combat encounter, combat effectiveness was king. If you weren't at a certain power level, you were dead weight (or, worse, just dead). And some of us witnessed this power imbalance and were troubled by it.

I'm big on fairness in games. To me, balance is about fairness. It's about giving everyone an opportunity to shine. When the wizard can turn into a dragon and teleport and cast spells completely invalidate the fighter (or eliminate him on a failed Will save), the game isn't fair. It's not right. And nerds tend to obsess over things. Thus, we started obsessing over balance.

To answer your question directly--"Why should classes be balanced?"--it's about fairness.

1. I don't want to play in a game where my character is awful because I made a wrong decision at chargen. I don't want to play in a game where others are punished for making a wrong decision at chargen. Some exceptions to this exist, but wrong decisions (like Int 9 wizard or 4 Str fighter) in this vein should be glaringly, obviously wrong.

2. I don't want to play in a game where new players are "punished" for not knowing the game. This goes with #1. I don't want to have to look over my players' shoulders to ensure they're not gimping themselves by writing "fighter" on their character sheet instead of "cleric."

3. I want relatively balanced encounters. It's not fun trying to design an encounter for characters with wildly divergent power levels. Not every encounter needs to be perfectly balanced--some should be an easy victory and others should be very difficult--but if I'm planning an encounter, I'd like to have a roughly even power level for all players. When one player curbstomps the encounter, it's less fun for me (and the other players, I suspect).

4. I don't want to have to ban or nerf material. Write me a solid product. The less makework I have to do, the more time I can devote to playing the game.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

In 3e, you could easily make a character who sucked by taking the wrong feat or class or spell. Given that 3.0 was a huge push toward D&D's focus on the combat encounter, combat effectiveness was king. If you weren't at a certain power level, you were dead weight (or, worse, just dead). And some of us witnessed this power imbalance and were troubled by it.

I'm big on fairness in games. To me, balance is about fairness. It's about giving everyone an opportunity to shine. When the wizard can turn into a dragon and teleport and cast spells completely invalidate the fighter (or eliminate him on a failed Will save), the game isn't fair. It's not right. And nerds tend to obsess over things. Thus, we started obsessing over balance.

This is something that should not be implemented in rules because it is highly highly subjective. Nobody is ever dead weight in 3rd edition. Everyone has a way to contribute to the party whether it's through combat or out of combat. Everyone views party contribution differently. 3rd edition gives you the freedom to mechanically build almost any type of character that you want, just saying it isn't goo enough for a good many people.

4th edition made the mistake of trying to tell people how to play and they tried to focus on telling people that if their PC didn't contribute enough in combat then they were pretty much playing it wrong. While the designers didn't directly say this, the rules of the game made this clear.

Balance has nothing to do with party contributions and having characters "shine". This concept is different for everyone so rules for it are not a good idea.

 

[billd91]

It has plenty to do with how much fun you have and how interesting your character is, but when discussing mechanical balance, things unrelated to the mechanics of the game is irrelevant. I could have fun playing a 3.5 commoner, but to claim he's mechanically balanced to the party's Druid, or that the imbalance does not matter, simply because he's a fun character is outright silly.

This all assumes that making the classes mechanically balanced is really what's important. While I find some general balance to be a worthwhile goal, it's not so important that I'm willing to give up too much D&Dishness. That's why I don't consider 4e a well designed D&D game.
Too much focus on mechanical balance between classes leads to an unbalanced game.

 

[hanez]

Why are we restricting this challenge all of a sudden?

If the existence of a Druid completely invalidates the entire article labeled 'fighter' in the PHB, doesn't that prove the point that everyone is saying? That Fighters are a terrible choice for a character from a power level perspective, and that they will feel marginalized and useless very quickly, which is a bad thing from a personal satisfaction perspective (and from a corporate marketing perspective, since unhappy customers rarely buy things).

I assure you, the existence of a Druid does NOT invalidate the Wizard. In point of fact Druids love having Wizards along.

It's simply that Wizards are far more of a party animal than Druids. Because they are so very bad at inflicting damage repeatedly, they love having other party members along.

As an example, the Wizard glitterdusts the Ogre, which blinds it. The ogre now can barely hit anything, and gets massive penalties to defense which guarantee it will shortly be dead. But the Wizard still has to, well... kill it. And that consumes spells. And therefore, without a way to constantly damage things with a renewable resource, they are forced to consume spells rapidly and enter the '5 minute workday' paradigm.

The Druid can just Blinding Spittle the Ogre to shut it down, then beat it to death with their claws. Same with the Cleric, except slightly less so until they find Divine Metamagic, then slightly moreso (it kinda varies). Anyway, Cleric, Druid, Wizard x 2, fairly invincible party. The Wizards shut everything down, the Cleric and Druid beat it to death in short order, and if the Wizards are shut down for a bit, the Cleric and Druid have so much backup power it's insane. Also the Druid can immediately become an army whenever, and the Cleric can probably beat an army in single combat if he needs to.

Well theres a few reasons I am putting in restrictions and it depends exactly on what we are testing.

First off, I commonly see on these boards that the fighter is the servant of the wizard, so the wizard is a good test case to prove whether or not thats true. You happened to mention 6th level, which I believe the fighter would dominate at in most circumstances, the wizard would probably start gaining an edge at higher levels > 12 or so. But if we tested it as you said, with multiple at level encounters, with healing in between encounters but NO resource replinishment I believe the fighter would be on par or have the advantage (itd be close over 20 levels).

Secondly, we often see on these boards is that the fighter is the servant to magic users, as if ALL the magic users are better then the fighter. As if the at will fighter and any Vancian/daily magic user could never be balanced (we heard this specifically with the launch of 4e). So to test whether thats true or not, we need to find just one vancian class that would be balanced, not every class has to be balanced to test this assertion.

For me the question ISNT "is the fighter equal to the druid in 3.x?". The question I am most concerned with is "can we make a game with atwill type martial types and vancian style magic users that preserves most of D&Ds sacred cows and is relatively balanced?" I believe the answer is yes because I have DMd that game, sure with some houserules but nothing major.The 3rd edition druid shapechange had holes in it. It needed to be patched (and was in pathfinder but I don't know how well), so its not a good test case. This fault can be fixed in two ways:

1 - the problems can be fixed, patched, refined, updated etc. Plenty of minor and some major modifications to make classes closer to balanced

2 - we can ditch the entire system and make a whole new game with classes that are much closer in similarity to eachother and slap the D&D name on it.

4e took option 2 and I as well as many others believe it was the wrong choice. My argument here is that option 1 is doable, sure there were imbalances in 3e, but they werent that bad, they werent on the level of the fighter being a candle holder for the average player. Sure this happened sometimes, it might of happened in your experience, but I would argue it was either with specific optimized builds that can be fixed, or the game was run by bad DMs. And most importantly the problems are easily FIXABLE. They were fixable in 3e by competent DMs, and players that werent jerks, fixable with simple houserules, encounters that challenge ALL classes and the occasional directed magic item to bump up a player lagging behind and I have no doubt that they can and will be fixed in 5e.

 

[CroBob]

This all assumes that making the classes mechanically balanced is really what's important. While I find some general balance to be a worthwhile goal, it's not so important that I'm willing to give up too much D&Dishness. That's why I don't consider 4e a well designed D&D game.
Too much focus on mechanical balance between classes leads to an unbalanced game.

Exactly what aspect of the game got removed such that it's no longer like older editions? Vancian casting? Fighters having more to do that hit things with sharp stuff? What is it, exactly?

 

[hanez]

Exactly what aspect of the game got removed such that it's no longer like older editions? Vancian casting? Fighters having more to do that hit things with sharp stuff? What is it, exactly?

3e had Tome of Battle that gave fighters similar options, the presence of that choice for martial types was a welcome addition in 3e AND 4e. But the removal of the choice to be a simple traditional D&D fighter in 4e WAS a problem. I can think of two players in my campaigns (one always plays a dwarven fighter, the other always plays a half orc barbarian) that had problems with 4e forcing them to use a complicated "spell list". So I might ammend your quote to be "Fighters being forced to do more then hit things with sharp stuff and now manage "fight- spells" was a problem.

Nevertheless I think core D&D NEEDS a fighter with choices/spell lists similar to the 4e version, call him the warlord or the ritualfighter or something, make him a choice for the player who wants to play a more complicated martial type, there are plenty of players who want that choice. But DONT take away the simple 5 attacks a round fighter either because there are plenty of players who consider that a staple of D&D.


Oh and removing the option at playing vancian, a staple of D&D, that too.

 

[pemerton]

Nothing in D&D is under the player's control.

I don't think this is true at all.

In Gygaxian AD&D the players control their party composition, their equipment and their mapping (see the discussion in the concluding pages of Gygax's PHB).

In 4e the players control their PC builds (see the PHB, plus the wishlist guidelines for magic items in the DMG).

Maybe there are no elements of 3E D&D that are not under the players' control - I don't know the game well enough.

 

[Akaiku]

But the removal of the choice to be a simple traditional D&D fighter in 4e WAS a problem. I can think of two players in my campaigns (one always plays a dwarven fighter, the other always plays a half orc barbarian) that had problems with 4e forcing them to use a complicated "spell list". So I might ammend your quote to be "Fighters being forced to do more then hit things with sharp stuff and now manage "fight- spells" was a problem.

Essentials slayer says hi.

There power list is hit with sword and hit with sword harder. Occasionally utilitys that do something else.

Also, one can argue that a fighter could have simply not used any powers. You would just suck compared to one that did. Is that a problem?