Actually you are punishing them by removing their uniqueness in order to make them "the same" (=balanced) as everyone else.
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How balanced should a game be?
Actually you are punishing them by removing their uniqueness in order to make them "the same" (=balanced) as everyone else.
Celebrim
Legend
This is another expectation that monsters are passive, sitting around in a lair waiting for the PC's to show up. This is typically how monsters are written with few exceptions. The most famous is probably Strahd Von Zoravich, who basically plays something scry/buff/port game versus the PC's.
I meant what I said, because often you could say, "more than 50% human" and still be accurate in your description of many popular styles of 3e play. Charm Person is another low level gambit that does differentiate between humans and dogs and rats. And 'Living' doesn't adequately cut it because both 'Color Spray' and 'Sleep' are mind-effecting spells, which mean we must differentiate between humans and vermin and oozes. So for example, if you are trumpeting how Color Spray and Sleep are great options at 1st level, you are probably not expecting to face a room full of skeleton warriors, a scarab beetle swarm, a grey ooze, an animated statue, and a spear trap. You are also probably not expecting to be attacked by kobold archers in a cave from beyond 120' and outside of your light range. Or for foes whose plan on encountering the party is run away and then use Track/Scent/etc. to follow them 12 hours later. And my expectation is that a player who thought first level Wizards dominated over non-spellcasters who was thrust into my game would be angry.
Additionally, the reason I cite humanoid rather than dogs and rats, is that it is precisely humanoids that are most over estimated by the CR system and most likely to when defeated glut the PCs and the spell-casters in particular with the sort of Christmas tree items that they need to be effective at low level (at high level, it reverses and its the fighters that need the Christmas tree). So its best of both worlds for the player. You face a target which has less effective CR than the rules state, and after you are finished with them your effective EL is higher than stated by the rules. If the DM tries to fix this by not giving the NPCs a Christmas tree, it just gimps their actual CR further. This isn't a problem if the DM is throwing dire lions at the PC's rather than lone 5th level humanoids. Incidentally, color spray and sleep are also still more effective against the 'CR 5' humanoid than they would be against the CR 5 lions on account of the fact that animals and the like typically have more HD than their CR.
So, humanoids. I know of what I speak.
If you are trying to deal with monsters with a weapon that has only 15' of range, then no, terrain is not a caster's best friend. Spell-casters require spells to deal with terrain, which if they have only a limited number of spells, limits their offensive options. Terrain only gets to be a friend to the caster when they have multiple long range attack options and their typical foes do not. That certainly happens at high level, but its not the typical experience at low level, where using color spray in terrain is problematic and employing either color spray or sleep against a foe with a terrain advantage means not getting many foes in the burst. And in the case of sleep it might mean that the foes you didn't get just wake up their friends (which is incidentally exactly what PC parties do when attacked by sleep spells). Or course if terrain beyond a corner or a column is not your typical experience of play, then you don't know what I'm talking about.
Your expectations are based on the expectation that asymmetrical advantages are all in the party favor.
You are making assumptions about the rules of hexcrawls. A typical 1e hexcrawl meant multiple wandering encounters per day whether you went one hex or many. As such, going one hex per day increased the number of potential problems rather than decreased them. Gygax always punished players for slow play. But what he does at largely a metalevel can also be done at the level of simulation.
Hard core dungeon crawling is definitely one example. But its enough to have the expectation, "There will be dungeons." And to that, "There is a sandbox.", and "The NPCs are characters too.", and it gets shakier.
Which says a lot about how our experiences of play differ that you think because the BoED or the PHB2 was published, that they are a part of the experience of play by default instead of a set of optional rules extensions that - particularly in the case of the BoED - are likely to be mocked rather than adopted.
Precisely my point. Because in my experience the fighter might well survive a critical at least long enough to get patched up. The wizard goes directly to -10 or less after being critted and dies. Until the wizard gets bracers of defense, rings of protection, belts of health and so forth to reduce their squishiness, they are not only more likely to straight up die to an unlucky critical, they are more likely to receive a critical.
Examples:
a) Party makes a mistake and steps out into a T intersection of a darkened corridor without proper scouting. What they don't know is that there is a hobgoblin guard post with 10 hobgoblins in the dark 120 feet down the corridor. The hobgoblins have surprise because the party needs a light source to see, lighting themselves while the hobgoblins are still in the dark. Between the surprise round and a poor initiative roll, the wizard happens to catch a couple of longbow arrows and one of them crits - 6d8+6 damage in the volley and the wizard is dead dead dead. No other member of the party taking that same damage would have died, and no other member of the party was as vulnerable flatfooted.
b) Party triggers a fear trap and the wizard unluckily fails the save and panics along with another player - straight into a previously unrevealed rolling boulder trap that does 6d6 damage. Again, while the wizard was among the least likely to fail the save, no other member of the party was actually rolling 'save or die' against the expected damage. The other player hit by the boulder survived, if just barely.
c) Split party due to a party mistake, and the sorcerer is in a situation with no meat shield and brute enemies on 4 sides (basically 2nd level raging barbarians). Color spray only takes out one side of your enemies at best. Sleep, had it been applicable, isn't really better against distributed foes. Surrounded and dead. The 'barbarian' caught in the same situation almost made it out. This is an interesting case study of my typical game, because arguably had the barbarian moved to the sorcerer and protected him they both could have made it out. Each had something the other lacked, but by abandoning the sorcerer and trying to rely on his 'fast movement' to bust his way out and back to the rest of the party it meant that the sorcerer was basically helpless. But conversely, had it been two melee type PC's at least one would have certainly survived and probably both would have coordination or not.
In D&D damage doesn't kill you - burst damage kills you. Since there is an expectation that the size of the burst you are likely to see is based on party level, in every version of D&D it's been the Wizard with the least margin of error in terms of surviving a burst. It just takes one mistake or one bad roll, and you are dead. In 1e, with likely no hit point bonuses from CON and at most +2 per level if you were lucky enough to have one, I honestly never believed anyone ever leveled up a M-U unless the DM was using real kid gloves all the time. I don't see how it was possible. At least its possible in 3e, but in practice I've never seen it happen.
Sure. But we are talking about how the fighter compares to the cleric in melee and combat generally.
At low level this is at best partially true. Again, with a typical cure light wounds you are only negating one monster attack.
You'd probably be surprised about how fast I caught that mistake and fixed it at my table. It was probably owing to the fact as a player I had owned a ring of regeneration in 1e, which - for a more reasonable price - gives you a similar effect. But, now we are getting into how to fix the problems you are rightly raising, rather than saying they aren't problems. Yes, I agree that the Wand of CLW is one of the most significant oversights in 3e, although by the same token it means that a rogue with a few ranks in UMD is a cleric.
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I can agree with squishy wizards. In our first 3e campaign, my 1st level half-orc barbarian killed an 18th level wizard in the first round of the first encounter of the campaign. It set the tone for my PC, so for me, that was great.
From a game design standpoint, all I can say is wizards are squishy.
... the Hell? Did you crit with a scythe against a wizard with 4 Con or something? Because that's about the only way I see this working.
Enh, one of the few things I like about the 3.whatever cleric is that you're not forced to be a walking self-aware first aid kit for the melee classes, and can in fact do other things with your time. I'm not a fan of how they pulled this off, but I am a fan of the idea.
Still don't understand this mindset!
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Invisibility, move to the corner. Summon Monster II. Move to another corner if the DM thinks the spell centers on you, Hide. Doable at level 3.
In Pathfinder, Vanish, move to the corner. Stealth. Summon Monster I. Doable at level 1.
Yes, this is two of your highest spell slots in a single encounter, but in a campaign where the wizard gets singled out as everyone's primary target 100% of the time, it's worth doing. And besides, keeping yourself alive also helps keep your party alive.
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Bedrockgames
Legend
I basically agree with all your points and this conclusion.
If the only way I could balance two weapons (or races, classes, whatever) was by making them "the same", I'd give up game design and find something else to spend my time on.
The idea of balanced weapons is that each has its own pros and cons. Some might be more accurate, or cause more damage, or have better reach, or have better armour penetration, or be concealable, or provide a better defence, or be throwable, etc - but that might be balanced against requiring two hands, or being slower to draw, or heavier for encumbrance purposes, or dangerous to nearby allies, or more easily broken, etc.
Each weapon is different, but they're all viable options for a character concept.
Its actually very easy to understand.
With this mindset being weaker in combat than a other player character is just an other defining trait of the character your play just like the race or gender is. And how this character deals with this trait during his adventure is part of playing this role. By ensuring balance (something impossibly to do anyway unless you reduce the whole RPG experience to just a small subset of what is possible, like combat) you remove one of the defining traits of this character.
Of course this mindset only works when your reason for playing an RPG is the role playing itself and not for example by earning XP to levelup or other metagame reasons which can only be achieved by successful combat.
This is not balance unless you also limit the RPG to an arena style game with only combats. Otherwise the setting will break this balance instantly. When the group spends all the time moving among nobles and doing an intrigue style game the concealable weapons will be flat out better than all others, so you have unbalance again. But in a war setting where they regularly face knights on the battlefield, concealment is useless and armor penetration and reach matters more.
But your biggest problem is that you think a character needs to be powerful in combat to be viable. Viable for what? Earning XP and loot? Is that what you think role playing is about?
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Quartz
Hero
At a guess: raging barbarian doing d12+5 x3 for crit and rolled a 12. Thereby doing 51 HP damage, and invoking the Massive Damage rule and the wizard failed the save.
I applaud your sense of priority. It doesn't apply to the characters that were discussed previously - "why should a dervish swordsman be worse than a BSF" - but still.
That said, why not play a character who's still good in combat but in ways that other characters don't cover? For example, your character is terrible as a swordsman but is skilled at persuasion and can talk their enemies down better than the other characters, provided they don't get stabbed to death first. No, you're not doing damage to their HP, but you're still contributing at all times.
Conversely, why should the guy who's good at combat be useless outside of combat? Noble warriors of many cultures were as much philosophers and poets as they were deadly combatants. Why can't I play that, and instead if I want to be good at swordplay I must play Grok the Sword Orc, whose most complex thought this week boiled down to what he wanted for lunch one day?
Every character should have something to contribute at every "section" of the RPG. If the RPG is as simple as having "combat" and "non-combat", then all characters should be good at both. If it's divided further into "physicality", "socializing", "education", "mysticism", and "subterfuge" then it's harder, but everyone should still have something to do at any given time. Sitting at a table for an hour, watching other people do things while you wait for the narrative to move back in your direction, tends to not be very fun for most people.
You may have fun being the party's wheelbarrow, but that's probably not something most people enjoy.
Why shouldn't he? There are many in game reasons you can use like weaker armor and having trouble to penetrate heavier armor with his fighting style.
And what when there is no chance to talk the enemy down or it doesn't make sense? Will you as DM make sure that this never happens and deny the player to explore this part of his character? Or do you keep track and will railroad the players into an situation that can only be overcome by talking?
Where did I say something like that? That rather fits your way of thinking where combat ability has to be bought with non combat usefulness in order to be "balanced" on paper.
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