In all fairness, it doesn't take much experience to notice when something is wrong.
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D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)
- Thread starter XunValdorl_of_Kilsek
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In all fairness, it doesn't take much experience to notice when something is wrong.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Huh? I don't know many games that don't require expertise in order to play them.
Yes, but it can take some experience to figure out exactly what is wrong, and even more to fix it properly. And there the issue isn't in the fixing, but in understanding the consequences of the fix, which could be worse than the original problem...
Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a for...
Really?
Really?
I have had players in the past who had these crazy combos that I wasn't aware of and I simply asked them to explain to me how they came to the conclusion and how it worked.
Simple
My point is that "not concerned with balance" does not equate to "immune to balance issues". That you don't care about it does not mean it can't bite you on the butt. In fact, avowed lack of concern is a great way to develop a blind spot to issues, so that one may not recognize the root cause of a problem.
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Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a for...
New gamers have no experience. And spotting it in advance - rather than during play - is something that I, a 30+ yr gamer, can be caught out on.
I'm a firm believer that the hobby should encourage new participants. Requiring experience or expertise (or any other barrier) is the opposite if what I want my hobby to do. It has a hard enough time recruiting as it is, without adding self- imposed barriers.
Personally, I find the whole "It's simple!" with it's attached subtext of "if you don't find it so, you are a lesser gamer" to be unwelcoming to new gamers.
New gamers have no experience. And spotting it in advance - rather than during play - is something that I, a 30+ yr gamer, can be caught out on.
I'm a firm believer that the hobby should encourage new participants. Requiring experience or expertise (or any other barrier) is the opposite if what I want my hobby to do. It has a hard enough time recruiting as it is, without adding self- imposed barriers.
Personally, I find the whole "It's simple!" with it's attached subtext of "if you don't find it so, you are a lesser gamer" to be unwelcoming to new gamers.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Try playing a game of poker without knowing what the cards are and which combinations are better, let alone how betting works. Or play a game of (American) football without having a detailed understanding of what is allowed to be done with the ball and when and why. Or play a game of chess without knowing how the pieces move and what their relative value is.
Unless you're defining expertise differently than I am, it seems to me that most games require quite a bit of it. To the point, I don't judge D&D by how it plays in the hands of people who lack expertise.
Warbringer
Explorer
As much as I like a balanced ruleset, and as much as I believe in enabling player narrative power, and the end of the day, have to completely agree with this.
The rules are just models of how to "do things" in game that the player "has in mind", and like all models they generally fail on edge cases. The reason is simply that despite the simplicity of the rules, they end up operating in a high complexity system: read all outcomes are unpredictable.
That means the outcome needs to be removed, enter DM fiat.
The only real contention I have with this is its not "DM fiat", its "table fiat". If the players don't care something is out of whack, I don't, I simply adjust, which as DM is simple to do.
SageMinerve
Explorer
This is of course a figure of speech, but I think you would just have lost your life right there.
I, like everybody else and as Umbran wrote upthread, cannot in any way put numbers on how many people think combat balance through the classes is important. All I can tell you is that combat balance was, in my play group, a VERY big "two thumbs up". I'm thinking especially of one guy who has played lots of RPGs but has never really read the rulebooks. He likes to choose strange choices because he feels that's how he can be more unique, the problem being that he tends to picks classes that are not as well supported or not as well known as the mainstays like the basic classes.
Just to give an example, he made a character with the goal of becoming a Horizon Walker in a 3.x campaign. Well, I'm sorry to inform you that after playing that character for about 15 levels, he was disgusted by how ineffective he was in combat compared to other PCs.
Because of combat balance, that never came up in a 4th ed game.
Of course, my experience is as anecdotal as anyone else's, but it goes to show that calling this a "myth" is simply an error.
XunValdorl_of_Kilsek said:
Singling out one element out of 4th edition and saying that edition's failure is due to it is a fallacious argument. Otherwise, you could single out any other element unique to 4th and attribute its failure to it.
Now, if your argument is "Combat balance shouldn't be the be-all, end-all objective of D&D Next", then I am right there with you. But if you're saying that combat balance would doom Next because it has doomed 4th ed before, well count me out.
Combat balance IS important IMO, but it's not the only important thing.
And at the risk of being controversial, I'll even go as far as saying that combat balance is MORE important in D&D than in a lot of other RPGs because combat is such an important part of the system, no matter what edition you're playing.
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