Older Editions and "Balance" when compared to 3.5

[Melkor]

So I know people have issues with how 3.5 was "balanced," and subsequent products like Pathfinder and Trailblazer attempt to "fix" some of the apparent issues that caused headaches for some gaming group.

My question to you folks is: How well were the older editions "balanced?"

I know my gaming group and I have played together since the late 80's, and our longest campaigns of AD&D lasted years, but we only got to around 10th level. We never, at the time, noticed that the game had "balance" issues in play, but then again, none of our players are really power gamers, and we largely ignored the Skills & Powers stuff.

Our experience with 3rd Edition was roughly the same. We played for a decade, but would either start new adventures or take long breaks, so our characters never got above 10th level, and we never noticed major issues with balance in our games. Again, none of the players really looked for loopholes to exploit either.

All of that said, I have heard horror stories of 3rd Edition games at high levels that just got out of hand, the CoDzilla stuff, etc.

That just made me wonder if "balance" in the older editions (pre 3E) was a factor, of it was something that noone ever noticed or worried about, and the game was just played and enjoyed without all of the angst.....and if so, is it possible to do the same thing with newer editions - throwing "balance" to the wind?

This is an honest question, and not in any way an attempt to start an edition war. Please leave that kind of thing out of this discussion, and just focus on your experience and opinions with regards to balance of older editions (or lack thereof), and how you feel that compares to balance in the 3rd Edition.

Thanks.

 

[steeldragons]

Thanks for posting this. I am (was) a "gamer" from pre-3e myself and from looking at various boards in recent months I've really wondered this myself...so now I'll throw in my 2 coppers.

I don't recall us EVER having debates or complaints about "balance."..and we DID get into some higher levels...think my high school group was averaging levels in the mid to high teens...that's what I think of when I think "high" levels.

All of the time and energy and product after product after product, forum after thread after forum, talking and gravely concerned with "balance." It just baffles me.

The game is (or should be) balanced among the players (and DM) themselves. Everyone's good at something different...the fighter fights, the cleric clerics, the thief thiefs, etc. etc. I understand "Oh gods, the mages get soooo powerful."...Yeah, I guess they could be...when (if ever) they're over 8th-10th level or so. (or used to be...who knows what level with the game as it is now?) And it took, if memory serves, PAINFULLY FOREVVVVER to even get to 5th!

At the same time, at/around 7th-8th level, the fighter was laden with magical armor, weapons, massive hit points and most likely strength enhancing magic items. Thieves had a bevy of items (probably something for invisibility or flying or climbing or silence...if not all of the above), greatly heightened stealth skills and (probably) amassed riches they could have accrued by then. Clerics got their butt-kicking spells too (along with the magic armor and weapons and items)...soooo who was so much more powerful/unbalanced than whom?

I don't see how mages were so outrageously "overpowered" or making the game "unbalanced" as seems to be the common consensus.

BUT, as I've said before, I am sorely out of the loop when it comes to actual game play for a few "editions" now...so I'll leave that kinda analysis to the mechanics & rule-mavens to hash out.

For me, the game (D&D or AD&D or OD&D or however you want to label...pre-3-3.5) was always more about imagination, story telling and character CREATION (as in developing a Character, capital "C", not just the rolling stats & pick a name part) than feats, scores, "balance" or character BUILDS...Oh yeah...and FUN. It was about fun and being social too. "Balance" never really entered the equation.

Just my thoughts.
SD, the great and powerful, has spoken.
That is all.

 

[Odhanan]

"Game balance" is not the same thing as "rules balance". Rules balance is just one of the many components of actual game as-it-is-being-played balance, which also includes various GM skills, collaboration between the participants of the game, spotlight given to characters and the situations that allow such spotlights, play styles (game balance between thespian players will not mean the same thing as game balance between tactical players) and so on and so forth.

The rules are not the game. The game is not the rules.

Rules balance being the be-all end-all of game balance, and thus requiring near-perfection, is a fallacy.

When you realize that, you can free yourself from the present paradigm and look at older editions of the game as what they are: very well-crafted, entertaining games indeed.

 

[Hussar]

I'm really curious where this idea comes from that the only people who could possibly have balance issues were power gamers. I mean, the groups I played with in latter half 1e and 2e weren't power gamers. I'm discounting my earlier experiences with AD&D because, well, we were twelve years old and heh. Good times.

But seriously, why do people assume that only power gamers have balance issues? We played pretty high rp games and we had balance issues all the time. Campaign after campaign blew up under the weight of serious mechanical balance issues.

But, I think that the myth that balance is somehow mythically achieved by special role players who didn't care about the mechanics they used really needs to be taken out behind the barn and beated with chickens.

 

[Umbran]

My question to you folks is: How well were the older editions "balanced?"

To my mind, poorly.

I'm not saying that the games were not playable or fun. I'm saying that the rule structure placed a greater burden on the GM to make sure all the PCs had effective and cool stuff to do in the game. Balanced design takes some of that burden off the GM, and makes it inherent to the system.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've always been concerned with balance. I remember playing in 2e D&D games in the early 90s where some PCs were much more powerful than others, and seeing it as a problem - casters overpowering non-casters (even extending to PvP) because we only had one or two encounters each day, people cheating on their stat rolls, some PCs having like twenty magic items and cheated stats while others had two magic items and rolled stats - there could be a huge disparity.

In one particular AD&D 2e game, starting at 1st level, the DM banned one PC after the first session, because he had 18/00 strength and full plate armor, while the next strongest PC had something like a 17 strength. The 18/00er was thus doing about twice as much damage as the next best character. The reason the 18/00 PC's strength was so high was that his player, Stan, used to have a folder full of characters he had 'rolled up' and played in games back in his home town. He only used the best chars from the folder, or perhaps a char had to have very good stats just to make it into the folder. I dunno, I never looked at its horror. The rest of us folderless fools just rolled up our chars then and there and took what we got, so Stan had a significant advantage. Another player in my wider play circle at that time, Russell, was the most appalling cheat, I don't think he ever actually rolled a dice, he'd just place them.

In the mid-80s I played in a Champions 1e game where one PC was built on 300 points, and had something like a 20d6 attack, while the rest of us were 200 pointers and had 10d6 attacks. The player, Benny, had paid for the 300pts with numerous disadvantages such as lots of Berserks, with predictable consequences. There always seemed to be lots of PvP when Benny was a player, I think he regarded killing other players' PCs as a sign of skilled play. Fortunately he mostly used to GM.

EDIT: To be fair, in my teens I was a filthy cheat too. When we made up high level PCs for Against The Giants I 'rolled' 18/99 for my strength (I thought it would be that little bit more plausible than 00) and I also 'rolled' up a two-handed sword of giantslaying in the tables in Dragon. I recall also reading the module beforehand and using that knowledge to my advantage.

 

[FireLance]

(Slightly modified from an old post of mine.)

I don't think that older editions were poorly balanced. Rather, the point of reference for balance has shifted over the years.

The primary point of reference for 1E and earlier editions appears to be the ongoing game. Players are expected to have multiple characters, and/or characters are expected to die or retire and be replaced in the course of the game, so even if you are lucky (or unlucky) enoiugh to get a really good (or bad) character now, there is no guarantee that your next character will be the same. The game thus emphasizes equality of opportunity during character creation because there are assumed to be many opportunities to create characters. This paradigm can break down if the players are expected to create a single character and then play it over the course of an extended campaign.

2E's primary point of reference is the campaign. Certain races and classes were more effective at low levels and others were better at high levels, and certain classes were more effective in certain situations and less so in others, but this was expected to even out over the course of an entire campaign spanning many levels and incorporating many different types of challenges. However, this paradigm can break down if the campaign ends after only a few levels, or if the DM does not include challenges that enable all the characters to shine.

3E's primary point of reference is the adventuring day. Characters with daily abilities are expected to manage their resources carefully, and at low levels, when they have fewer uses of their abilities, this means that they will use few or none of them in certain fights. Even at higher levels, when they had access to more uses, it meant that they would have to go through some fights using only lower-level abilities. However, this paradigm can break down if the PCs fight only one or two encounters per day.

4E's primary point of reference is the (usually combat) encounter. Character abilities are designed so that characters will be able to contribute more or less equally to the party's success over the course of an encounter. This does not mean that they deal equal amounts of damage - Leaders buff and heal, Defenders draw attacks and Controllers shape the battlefield and inflict conditions on the enemies. This paradigm doesn't seem to have broken down yet, but it has been criticized for being dull, boring and repetitive.

 

[Dausuul]

If you never go past 10th level, you won't ever see most of 3E's really heinous class-balance issues; the main power differential between PCs is going to be between the system-savvy and the system-ignorant.

Even at high levels, the problem may not come up. A tolerably well-built fighter will have no problem keeping up with a blaster wizard and a healbot cleric. It's when wizards discover the wonder of save-or-lose and utility magic, and clerics decide to buff themselves up because they want to take a more active hand in combat, that fighters and rogues get left in the dust.

Before 3E, casters still had an advantage at high levels, but not nearly as much of one, for a couple of reasons. First, saving throw mechanics didn't allow for save DCs; your chance to save against an archmage casting finger of death was the same as against an apprentice wizard casting charm person, and a powerful foe was likely to shrug off both. So you didn't get the phenomenon of save-or-lose spells dominating the game. (On the other hand, lower hit point totals and the tendency for hit points to plateau past 9th or 10th level meant blasting magic was quite a bit stronger.)

Second, each class had its own experience table, and casters typically leveled much slower than non-casters once they got up around level 10-12. So a 15th-level caster might dominate a 15th-level fighter, but you wouldn't see them in the same party.

Third, just as saving throws didn't have variable DCs, magic resistance was a fixed percentage. A foe with 90% magic resistance shrugged off 90% of spells, period. It could get to be a real headache.

Finally, you just didn't get as many spells per day in older editions.

 

[Melkor]

But seriously, why do people assume that only power gamers have balance issues?

Hi Hussar,

It wasn't my intention to insult anyone who considers themselves to be 'power gamers.' and I wasn't saying that somehow, the players in my gaming group were superior roleplayers with no need for 'that powergaming crap.'

Rather, I was just stating that in my own experience, we never really worried about tried to play the most powerful build of character we could generate, and my long-term DM never sought to create enemies that did the same thing, so I have no experience with that style of play....and that style of play, I have noted over the years of 3rd Edition, has exposed several rules that people feel are 'unbalanced.'

Again, in 25+ years of playing, I have NEVER had a character over 10th level, so a lot of perceived balance issues with any edition were never something I personally experienced.

My real point in posting was to wonder if 'balance issues' in older editions were the same as they are in 3rd edition - in other words, there is a possibility for major issues to crop up in previous editions just as much as in 3.5, but having played older editions for nearly two decades, and not having any problems, would it be just as feasible to play 3.5 at high levels with my gaming group without ever experiencing the balance issues experienced by others?

 

[Dragonbait]

I started playing D&D during the 2ed era, and looking back I'd have to say that things were horribly balanced as time went on.

My last 2ed campaign utilized all the Player Option's books, along with the Planescape and all the race and class guides. We all assumed that if it was published by TSR, it should work with a D&D game without problems. I had the group encounter a great wyrm green dragon with maximum hit points. The aasimar swordswoman with grand mastery and whatever other powers her dual katanas had tacked on killed the dragon in a single round (I'm throwing out fake names. It's been something like 15 years so I can not recall the actual rules the character used).

That was when I realized that some books, powers, and such did not always work smoothly with all other books. I learned about power creep and game inbalance that day. I started seeing it a lot as we used more books, like the Complete Psion, Ninja's handbook and the like.

As for the uclass imbalance, I only recall that most monsters were no longer a challenge by the time PCs reached level 10 to 12. Only one player complained about how weak his character was after about 9th level, and he was playing a 2ed bard. So in my personal experience, class imbalance was not an issue.