Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?

[pawsplay]

...okay. You throw out an undefined acronym in an attempt to shut down an argument, then when directly asked to define the acronym, you go into this meandering piece of sophistry, while still refusing to define your own term.

If this isn't trolling, I don't know what is.

Actually, he defines it every time he posts.

 

[bardolph]

Actually, he defines it every time he posts.

Ah, it was in the sig. My apologies, RC.

 

[Gentlegamer]

If this isn't trolling, I don't know what is.

You don't know what trolling is.

 

[ExploderWizard]

No, rather my complaint is that immediately after the chart is the suggestion that, rather than rolling on the table, maybe the encounter should be role-played instead, which calls into question the whole point of the chart in the first place.

How was one to gather the real point of your complaint from " The Assassination Table"?

A suggestion is just that. Page 42 of the 4E DMG is just a table which is a suggestion for handling the mechanical effects of stunts.

Magic Missile had almost no valid uses. 1d4+1 damage just wasn't enough to justify a spell slot.

I will try and keep that in mind the next time we plan our foray into the frozen tomb of incorporeal undead horror. Then again I would hate having to explain that the reason I cast sleep at the wraith was that magic missile wasn't worth the spell slot.

OK, that's two useful spells in the entire list. However, note that a cleric who regularly marches into battle armed with "Command-Disrobe" is a pretty silly notion in itself. Not from a usefulness standpoint, but rather from a why-does-every-encounter-turn-into-sketch-comedy standpoint.

Silly but effective. Getting an armored fighter to ditch plate mid conflict seems fairly worthwhile to me.

That was just off the top of my head. Other spells have thier uses. The light spell had great utility because it could be used as a light source or an effective offensive spell.

Problem is that his "niche" was to roll against a chart that was insanely stacked against him, usually leading to an early death.

I never said the niche was a very good one, or that I cared for it.

And why was "studded-leather-plus-shield" considered equivalent to "scale mail" from an armor-piercing standpoint?

Shields added to any armor changes the game. Also, the modifier to the hit roll did not represent only the pierce or punch factor just as an attack roll did not represent a single swing of a weapon. The modifier was intended to represent the overall effectiveness of a given weapon against an opponent equipped with the listed gear. If it was only about the pure punch factor than every weapon would have massive bonuses against unarmored opponents.

It's not that it's overpowered, it's just cumbersome, as was all multiclassing. It was just weird that, when the cleric-part-of-my-personality advanced a level, I had to roll 1d8/3 for my hit points, for example.

I'll take the division of a d8 roll by 3 any day over managing the powers for a paragon tier single classed character. Talk about cumbersome!

I agree. However, flavor was all it ever was, since it's doubtful the author ever intended that real PCs would ever progress that far.

The monk was even more useless than the thief, as far as I'm concerned. A melee combat focused character who was not allowed to wear armor? This class is pretty much designed to be dead on arrival.

The avenger is a 4E melee fighter limited to cloth armor. Are they useless?

The entire saving throw chart was arbitrary and weird, and the fact that the column names kept changing from edition to edition only reinforced its weirdness. Poison, Petrification, and Death Magic? An entire column dedicated to Dragon Breath? Really? I guess the name of the game is Dungeons & Dragons, but...

Arbitrary and weird? Quite possibly.

Nope, I still don't get it.

AD&D "to hit" adjustments generally modified the AC of the target rather than the raw die roll of the attacker. The repeating 20 kept a certain range of AC's from becoming hit proof.

Lets match hit probilities mapping AD&D to the much more intuitive ascending AC system:

1E
AC Target Number
3 17
2 18
1 19
0 20
-1 20
-2 20
-3 20
-4 20
-5 20

4E
AC Target Number
17 17
18 18
19 19
20 20
21 FATAL EXCEPTION
22 FATAL EXCEPTION
23 FATAL EXCEPTION
24 FATAL EXCEPTION
25 FATAL EXCEPTION

 

[Raven Crowking]

A printed list of playtesters is evidence. That's why I mentioned it in the first place.

And I have shown the problems with this as "evidence"....sufficiently well, I think, for the average person. To be a bit clearer:

(1) The quantity of playtesters does not evidence either the amount of playtesting done, nor the quality of playtesting done.

(2) Evidence that cannot be checked, produced by a person or entity that has reason to cause you to draw a specific conclusion, fails the standard of evidence. I would have thought that the tobacco companies taught us all this long ago.

(3) We do not know what qualifies as being a "playtester" in either 1e or 4e. If someone gains a credit in 4e for playtesting, said playtesting being of a type or quantity which would not grant a credit in 1e, the size of the list itself provides no evidence as to who would be on either list if the same criteria were applied. In neither case do we know what criteria were applied.

[qote]Also note that you have declined to produce any evidence to support the opposing side of the argument.[/quote]

I do not need to provide evidence to reach the conclusion, "Not proven". No one does. For instance, were you to say, "It is not proven that 1e were designed for game balance" you would not need to provide evidence.

You throw out an undefined acronym in an attempt to shut down an argument

(1) It doesn't matter what the acronym means. I can write a 1-page game, X, and list 999 pages of playtesters with (relative) ease. Such a list, produced by the person producing the game, has no meaning in and of itself.

What X is has no bearing on whether or not this is true.

(2) It doesn't shut down the argument; it merely demonstrates that a line of reasoning is false.

(3) Look at my .sig.

EDIT: I had to drive my partner & her brother to the mall between writing & posting. I see you are now aware of what RCFG means. If you will follow the link, I think you will see that there is a lot of 3e and 4e inspiration.....If I thought 1e was perfect, that's what I'd be playing!


RC

 

[bardolph]

How was one to gather the real point of your complaint from " The Assassination Table"?

I was assuming a context that, as it turns out, wasn't obvious. The assassination table's main flaw was that it was unclear what the table actually represented, or how to use it. Do you roll on the table after rolling a successful hit? Do you roll it instead of a hit roll? Does the table assume an unaware or helpless opponent? Does the table replace the entire encounter, from infiltration to assassination (I believe this is the case). What are the consequences of failure on this roll? Can NPC assassins use this chart against PCs? Does this mean that a PC can simply "wake up dead" one morning without any chance of survival?

A suggestion is just that. Page 42 of the 4E DMG is just a table which is a suggestion for handling the mechanical effects of stunts.

Agreed. However, the endless array of subsystems each with their own set of rules doesn't exactly lend itself to playability.

Shields added to any armor changes the game. Also, the modifier to the hit roll did not represent only the pierce or punch factor just as an attack roll did not represent a single swing of a weapon. The modifier was intended to represent the overall effectiveness of a given weapon against an opponent equipped with the listed gear.

Better would be to list the specific gear, rather than the AC value on a chart. Another example: why did leather armor +3 have the same properties against specific weapons as chain mail?

And if the chart did not represent "pierce or punch factor," then what the heck did it represent?!

I really don't think these questions were thought through before going to press.

The avenger is a 4E melee fighter limited to cloth armor. Are they useless?

No, because they are given alternative ways of improving their armor class. Monks weren't even allowed to include their Dexterity bonus into their AC calculation!

AD&D "to hit" adjustments generally modified the AC of the target rather than the raw die roll of the attacker. The repeating 20 kept a certain range of AC's from becoming hit proof.

This makes some sense, but still does not explain why the AC chart starts at "ten."

And I have shown the problems with this as "evidence"....sufficiently well, I think, for the average person.

The most compelling "evidence" in my opinion, is the quality of the game itself as it plays over the table in my personal experience. 4e runs very smoothly, with very little need for DM fiat to resolve encounters. 1e, not so much. While not evidence in a strictly objective sense, it was enough to convince me.

If you do a google search on "D&D 4th edition playtesting" you can find plenty more evidence of 4e playtesting. However the NDA that playtesters were required to sign limits the results quite a bit.

 

[bardolph]

Wow. RCFG is a lot of material. Looks like I'll be reading for quite a while!

 

[pawsplay]

This makes some sense, but still does not explain why the AC chart starts at "ten."

At AC 10, a fighter needs a 10 or higher to hit.

 

[bardolph]

At AC 10, a fighter needs a 10 or higher to hit.

It would then follow that at AC 11, a fighter would need an 11 or higher to hit.

But it doesn't work out that way. And once you take levels and non-fighter classes into account, the formula breaks down completely.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It would then follow that at AC 11, a fighter would need an 11 or higher to hit.

But it doesn't work out that way. And once you take levels and non-fighter classes into account, the formula breaks down completely.

Why would that follow?
If you need a 10 to hit AC 10 in a descending AC system then an AC 11 would be hit on a 9.

What formula would break down? Improvement means that you hit AC 10 on less than a 10 and if your combat ability was not on par with a standard fighter you would need more than a 10 to hit AC 10.