Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?

Evenglare said:

How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.

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I don't scrutinize the individual numbers, but I do notice when they all add up to too much.

When I played 3e, for example, we had in the party a half-dragon fighter type who was something like +22 to hit and +24 damage at (8th? 10th? I forget, but somewhere 'round there) level...that's too much no matter how the numbers get there.

Lan-"the saving grace was that this same fighter had pathetic h.p. for its level and thus died off before it got completely ridiculous"-efan

I notice the broken stuff, but generally don't care. I'm looking to model PC concepts, not break the game open like a quail's egg.

I strongly suspect that the computer game designer and the math whiz in our group HAVE to see the broken bits, as do the guys who play a lot of M:tG and/or poker. So that leaves out maybe...2-3 guys?

But it doesn't seem to impact the game in any obvious way, probably because of playstyle. The one who could most easily break the game is the math whiz. In the nearly 30 years I've played D&D with him, I know he favors Wizards above all other classes- at least 85% of his PCs are some kind of wizard. And his characters' spell lists look pretty close to the ideal lists you see floating around on the Internet. But the variations on his lists and his playstyle keep him from being "Angel Summoner" in a group of "BMX Bandits."

Yeah I don't particularly care. Every edition has had vast imbalances in player power in certain circumstances and it generally doesn't matter if the DM is doing a decent job and the players are not jerks. If player A absolutely kills encounters with dragons then make sure some encounters have dragons but they don't all so others can shine.

Also my group has a few more experienced number crunchy players who help the others with leveling up choices if they want it, why would they not? This is a co-op game with a living breathing referee not a MMO. Adjustments can always be made on the fly to keep the game fun and interesting for everyone at the table.

It took about an hour for my group to notice how different 3e was from 2e. Another hour or so to work out how and why it was so different. Of course, we had the advantage that we'd converted 10th level characters across (according to the conversion document), several of them were multiclassed Elves, and we were actually playing the game to see how it differed so repeated the adventure we'd run the previous week in 2e, so the changes were extremely obvious from the start.

Then we went back and finished the campaign in 2e.

Evenglare said:

I guess that's why I have never had problems. hmmm. I'm sure someone people wouldn't like it but that's how we have played for what... going on 15 years now. Right before 3rd came out.

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It helps. But even rolling for stats doesn't fix the problems. In fact, it can make it worse depending on what people roll. Most of the problems come from combining choices during the game.

For instance, my character who was a Warmage/Dragon Slayer/Spellsword/Eldrich Knight who bought a +6 to all stats item from a splatbook. His class features let him cast 9th level spells while wearing full plate with no arcane spell failure. He had a feat that let him swap spell slots for bonuses to hit and damage. So, he could swap a 9th level spell for +9 to hit and +9d4 damage for the round. He got 4 attacks per round. He could also cast a swift spell that let him resolve all attacks in one round as touch attacks. Which allowed him to power attack for a huge amount and still hit with all 4 attacks.

What his starting stats were was rather insignificant to the build.

It's rather likely that you either didn't play at high level or your players didn't delve that deeply into the rules. If your players are of the type who only took feats from the PHB, chose them for role playing reasons, single classed most of the time and chose spells somewhat randomly, you could easily make a 20th level character who was balanced or even somewhat weak for their level.

It is broken only at the DM's wish. I have seen it a lot, where them DM just allows the player to play whatever they want without looking at how it is going to be impacting their games. It is the DM's job to think about balance and what he is allowing the players to bring to the table.

Just saying, if you are going to allow giant-slayers in your game, there better be giants in your game.

Evenglare said:

How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.

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If you didn't notice 3.XE's broken-ness, then yeah, you're not going to notice this sort of stuff.

I think it's a lot to do with individual mind-sets, and where your background is, and also whether enjoy genuinely analyzing things, or prefer to either ignore the details, or generalize about them.

If you're from any kind of gaming background where rules-mastery actually matters, and where rules change with some frequency, or are very very complex, then you probably have had to develop some degree of ability to analyze rules, to think of the consequences of rules, and to look at the maths behind the game.

That would include most TT wargames, but not really stuff like chess, where the actual rules are relatively simple.

I think with RPGs, another factor is how much you've been exposed to the consequences of badly-made rules - particularly where those consequences aren't just a "common sense" issue, but are a math issue, or something that is so fantastical that "common sense" approaches don't easily apply. If you've never had a game get messed up because a designer clearly didn't understand the consequences of a rules-design he made, you're much less likely to be keen on analyzing them.

Personally I'm pretty good at picking up "Potential Offenders", but I'll always have some "false positives" and miss some offenders too. As Mistwell has noted in other threads, a lot of stuff simply won't show up as fine or broken until the game is actually played.

[MENTION=371]Hand of Evil[/MENTION] - That's the problem we're discussing, you seem not to understand that. First off, is it the DM's job to think about balance when determining what PCs can pick race/class-wise? Not everyone would agree - some would suggest that if it's in, say "The Basic Set" or "The Official Book", it should already be balanced, and the DM shouldn't have to take precautions.

This was discussed at some length earlier in 5E's history, when some people felt that potentially-dangerous classes and races should be clearly labelled as such.

But that leads to another problem - many RPG authors are terrible at balance and do not know it. So they add something to a game, and don't understand how broken it is. If these professionals can't do it, why would we expect normal DMs to?

Some of us can, of course, but a lot of DMs just don't recognise balance problems, and few RPGs, certainly not earlier editions of D&D, train you to recognise them, because they usually operate on the basis that the RAW are pretty solid (which they often are not). I mean, here I am, highly experience with dozens or hundreds of rules-sets, understanding design principles, maths, and so on, extremely good at reasoning out the consequences of rules (by typical standards), and enjoying rules-analysis, and even I'm missing a lot of stuff, so to expect the average DM to be able to reliably pick out balance-issues before the game even starts? I don't think that's reasonable.

I won't even get into how DMs who feel the need to "balance" stuff aggressively but don't understand the rules very well often end up making things even less balanced.

EDIT - 5E proposes a VERY interesting solution to this, in the whole "Living Rules" concept, where they will apparently be monitoring the game regularly via surveys and the like to attempt to determine if stuff is seen as out-of-whack, but where they will, unlike 4E, be taking player sentiment into account, rather than just rules-designer analysis of whether something is functioning correctly (this is also unlike most on-going computer games, where typically player sentiment is largely discounted in favour of developers deciding "where they want the game to go" and so on).

I think I agree with you. Very few of the nightmares I read about have actually evidenced themselves in my games. Although I will say that a few of the "bigger" things did: way back in 2e the rules didn't actually support the whole epic story thing very well, in 3e it was the massive workload for the GM (me), and in 4e the game was like that "Everything is Awesome" song from the Lego movie and it was very hard to bend out of that feel.

However, all those little things like feat taxes or CaGI and whatnot never really rose up. CoDzilla kinda touched my game, but everyone was multiclassing like mad so not as much as you might think. I think its also very group dependent. If no one is prowling gamer forums, the game tends to be better off.

Dannyalcatraz said:

I notice the broken stuff, but generally don't care. I'm looking to model PC concepts, not break the game open like a quail's egg.

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To quote Will Smith - "My attitude is: Don't start nothin', won't BE nothin'." If you look for something, of course you'll find it. The question is whether you need to look for it.

Long ways back, I was playing in a White Wolf Mage game. For those of you who are not familiar with old World of Darkness games, the cracks in the system that players can manipulate make most of D&D's issues look like pretty little butterflies. And we had a local player who was very, very good at finding the exploits. We are talking about a guy who now does this professionally, for the military - he designs and administrates wargame exercises for a living.

Our GM went to this player, and told him to make a group of Wyrm-tainted nasties, and he'd guest star as our enemies. When the regular party (including me) heard this, we were kind of scared. The guy was *good*. He knew the rules up, down, and sideways, and we'd made little effort to min-max our characters. We'd gone for concepts and a bit of coolness, not outright power.

To our surprise, and his, and the GM's, we mopped the floor with him. It took some effort, we took a little damage, but he didn't come close to killing any of us. The difference - we were four minds who had been playing together for years. We knew each other's styles and competencies (the monster-player knew us, but didn't know our characters at all). The term "well oiled machine" came to mind. We used better tactics, avoided putting ourselves in a toe-to-toe slugfest (which we'd have lost horribly, I expect), and so on. It was an awesome session.

Which is to say, I'd prefer a game in which you outthink the enemy in play, not in character build. Far more satisfying, to me.

We don't really play with the old skool "skilled play" mindset with my group. Nor, do we usually play very high level. A long campaign might get up into the very early double digits in terms of level. Maybe. Most don't go that long.

And the one confirmed min-maxer in our group needs it as a handicap. His characters tend to die an order of magnitude more frequently than the rest of ours put together as it is.

As far as we're concerned, 3.x isn't broken at all. It's a poor game at higher level, though.