Older Editions and "Balance" when compared to 3.5

[Raven Crowking]

"Oh, it would never happen that way in my campaign" is just another way of saying, "Oh you're doing it wrong." Onetruwayism at its best. If I don't play exactly by your playstyle, suddenly all my balance issues are 100% my fault and not the fault of the system. If everyone would simply play the way you play, then we have no balance issues. Nice.

This is probably the tiredest of tired canards. Don't you think it is time to retire it? Not just for you, but for all of us? I mean, is there any purpose to it apart from attempting to godwin the thread?

If a game is balanced on the assumptions of X, regardless of game, and regardless of X, divergence from X is going to alter the balance. That isn't "onetruewayism" -- it is common sense. It is like saying if a car is designed to run on regular gas, you might experience problems with leaded gas or diesel. Ya think?

Gee, I know 4e is balanced around combat encounters and specific formulae for skill challenges, but I don't use said formulae, and resolve everything by skill challenges. I don't use the combat rules at all. Heck, I don't use the rules, or the advice given in the rulebooks. I want to play it with my own playstyle!

Yet I am having balance problems.

And you dare claim it isn't the fault of the rules?!?!?!

Onetruewayism!



Really, when someone points out something common-sensical, like "rules are balanced based on a game's play assumptions", do you imagine that "onetruewayism" is an autowin? If so, time to go back to plinking away with darts, methinks!

Can we give spurious cries of onetruewayism a rest? Please?


RC

 

[Diamond Cross]

This is probably the tiredest of tired canards. Don't you think it is time to retire it? Not just for you, but for all of us? I mean, is there any purpose to it apart from attempting to godwin the thread?

If a game is balanced on the assumptions of X, regardless of game, and regardless of X, divergence from X is going to alter the balance. That isn't "onetruewayism" -- it is common sense. It is like saying if a car is designed to run on regular gas, you might experience problems with leaded gas or diesel. Ya think?

Gee, I know 4e is balanced around combat encounters and specific formulae for skill challenges, but I don't use said formulae, and resolve everything by skill challenges. I don't use the combat rules at all. Heck, I don't use the rules, or the advice given in the rulebooks. I want to play it with my own playstyle!

Yet I am having balance problems.

And you dare claim it isn't the fault of the rules?!?!?!

Onetruewayism!



Really, when someone points out something common-sensical, like "rules are balanced based on a game's play assumptions", do you imagine that "onetruewayism" is an autowin? If so, time to go back to plinking away with darts, methinks!

Can we give spurious cries of onetruewayism a rest? Please?


RC

Being right is serious business on the internet.

 

[S'mon]

D&D is not -- or, historically, has not been -- just a series of fights. Certainly it does not have to be, regardless of edition used.

Agreed - I think the design intent is that every PC can contribute meaningfully over the course of a typical session, which pre-3e is likely to be at least 80% non-combat, especially at lower levels since fights are fast and PCs cannot survive a lot of them. In a typical adventure most time is spent on exploration, not combat rolls. A typical dungeon-delve session of 4 hours
might involve a couple easy fights, where the smart M-U doesn't use his spell, an encounter with undead where the Cleric comes to the fore, and a major encounter where the M-U can employ Sleep or Charm Person to good effect, possibly saving the party. Out of 240 minutes play time, only about
40 to 50 minutes would be spent on resolving the 4 combats. IME, YMMV etc.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I do not remember it saying all ELs should be close to APL.

Can someone look up and post the specifics please? I remember the 3.0 DMG suggesting a spread of suggested ELs with most hovering around APL but I remember the high end being very high like APL +5 or so to the point where avoiding/running away/negotiating/super prep should be preferred to straight on fighting.

Now that the specifics have been posted so I can remember them....it suggests that 65% of all encounters be between APL to APL+4, with another 5% at APL+5. It suggests only 10% of encounters be below the APL of the group. With another 20% easy only if fought properly(assumably these encounters are EL=APL or higher with some mitigating factor that can make the battle easier if the players figured it out).

The rules we used for LG encounter generation was that the average of the encounters in an adventure needed to be APL+2. So, you could use an EL=APL encounter, a APL+2 encounter and an APL+4 encounter in the same adventure and it would be legal. But never more than APL+4 unless you got explicit permission from the higher ups, since it was a living campaign and using APL+5 encounters was basically certain death.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

With that being said, let's look at Table 3-2 on pg. 49. Here we find that the appropriate encounters for a party vary from "EL lower than party level" to "EL 5+ higher than party level".

I agree that 90% of the encounters should be EL=APL or higher(with 20% of them having some "key" to winning that makes them as easy as an EL<APL encounter).

It does say 10% of them should be lower. However, every DM I played with quickly got rid of the idea of running any encounters with EL<APL. They were always so easy that it wasn't worth our time to roll for initiative. It was likely the PCs wouldn't take any damage at all unless the monster(s) was(were) extremely powergamed(and due to the nature of EL calculation, the more monsters there were, the easier they were).

In LG, most authors abandoned the idea of using them as well, for the same reasons. That, and the rule in LG that required the average Encounter be APL+2 meant that if you used too low an encounter, you had to balance it with something WAY too hard later.

So when you say that "they should all be close to the EL (sic) of the party", it's like saying "everyone west of the Mississippi lives close to Los Angeles". It's just flat-out wrong.

Well, 90% of them should be between APL and APL+5. So, let's assume that is the "standard range" and anything else is statistical outliers. Also, since the game goes to level 20, you need EL25 encounters to throw up against those level 20 PCs. So, 90% of the time you are using a 6 level range out of 25 possible levels. And one of those levels is supposed to only be used 5% of the time, so the vast majority of the time, it is only a 5 level spread in 25 levels. And 50%-70% of all encounters are supposed to be EL=APL, meaning 1 level in 25.

Man, that would be pretty silly. It's probably a good thing nobody said that, right?

That's certainly your prerogative. But it is also incontrovertible fact that the CR system was not designed so that every single encounter could have an EL equal to the party's average level. Those using the tool for that, or anything remotely resembling that, are explicitly not using the tool in the way it was meant to be used.

I'm saying that although it wasn't meant to have every encounter equal to EL, that it was meant to keep the vast majority of the encounters very close to EL.

I'm telling you that I've been told directly by the campaign staff of Living Greyhawk that its explicit purpose was to make encounters close to EL=APL so as to make them challenging, but not too challenging. And that as the "default" campaign for 3/3.5e D&D, we needed to adhere to the rules as closely as possible by WOTC order(the same order that prevented us from banning any spells or feats from the PHB, since they were Core D&D and MUST be allowed in their flagship campaign).

 

[S'mon]

The 3e DMG suggestion is that 5% of encounters be "5+" EL over APL, not +5 over APL. The point being that this 5% of encounters be overwhelming and the party should run away or otherwise evade the encounter. Obviously Living Greyhawk was doing it 'wrong', or at any rate not as per Monte's suggested encounter level distribution.

 

[S'mon]

Incidentally, an EL of +2 over APL encounter is supposed to be a very tough one per the RAW, which should use up 50%+ of party resources and be a good 'boss fight'. Maybe there's some slippage due to min-maxed PCs & highly optimised play, or maybe you (Living Greyhawk) used classed NPCs whose level rarely matches their nominal CR.

A EL = party level should use up 20-25% of party resources for a 4-PC party. In practice for a single monster this means a monster roughly equal to half the party, since it'll be putting out half as much damage and has half the hp, it should drain 1/4 of party resources before going down. Since an NPC of level = APL is only about as tough as 1/4 of a party, his effective CR is usually actually Level -2, not the nominal CR = Level.

This means that an encounter 2 NPCs of level = party level will nominally be "EL = APL+2", but in fact will only drain ca 25% of party resources.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Incidentally, an EL of +2 over APL encounter is supposed to be a very tough one per the RAW, which should use up 50%+ of party resources and be a good 'boss fight'. Maybe there's some slippage due to min-maxed PCs & highly optimised play, or maybe you (Living Greyhawk) used classed NPCs whose level rarely matches their nominal CR.

Yeah, in practice it never resembled how the rules described it at all. Which was my main beef with the EL system. An encounter with EL=APL+2 could very in range from extremely easy to impossibly hard. It was simply a matter of whether there was only 1 monster or many monsters, WHICH monsters you used, did the monsters have templates or levels, or were they just NPCs with levels.

The rules told us that it didn't matter. If you used 8 level 3 fighters, it was an EL 9 encounter. Which was just as easy to defeat as that Level 9 Fighter, that CR 9 monster, or that CR 7 monster with 3 levels of sorcerer, a level of monk, a level of warrior, a template that didn't increase CR, terrain that favored it(terrain doesn't factor into CR or EL, although the books say to reward more xp for especially hard terrain), and a large number of useful magic items or effects(Magic items don't factor into CR or EL).

In practice, a APL 7 party would defeat 8 level 3 fighters without taking any real damage, they'd beat the level 9 fighter almost as easily, any individual CR 9 monster could vary from super easy to a TPK, and they'd come near TPK with the multiclass templated creature of death.

The practice of abusing this system in LG came to a head the day we played an adventure where all of the monsters were buffed with a list of 12 different spells cast by a 20th level caster before the beginning of the combat. The spells came from 3 different classes. They weren't factored into the EL of the encounter because spells cast by creatures don't increase or decrease EL.

When I asked the author how they could have gotten that many buffs from 3 different classes right before the battle started(some of which had a personal area of effect), he said "There's ways to do it, some Ioun stones and other items let you store spells and cast them on yourself even if you aren't the appropriate class".

When I pointed out that none of the creatures in question were carrying any of those items and there were no indications that anyone else in the entire building had them, he told me that "They were demons about to go to war with devils, they just plane shifted in the round before the PCs get there. They have powerful demons willing to cast buffing spells on them before they go."

 

[Raven Crowking]

Yeah, in practice it never resembled how the rules described it at all.

Agreed.

It was an attempt to rewrite the 1e Monster Level system that, simply put, both failed to be as accurate as the original and made caluclating XP more difficult. As a result, the 4e system (if I understand correctly) works more like 1e, where the first step in determining difficulty is determining XP.


RC

 

[ExploderWizard]

D&D is not -- or, historically, has not been -- just a series of fights. Certainly it does not have to be, regardless of edition used.

This assumption that the whole of the game is just one big combat encounter is the primary reason that some see balance in such a skewed fashion.

Lets take a look at 3E and the wonderful balance we have there outside of combat. Joe fighter is tough, strong and good with a sword.
Lets plop him into an exploration scenario for a bit. Oh wow look at those skill points, and that selection! Assuming we need to constantly jump,climb, swim or ride we shall let Joe do his thing. Meanwhile Felix the rogue is doing all kinds of cool stuff like searching, picking locks, deciphering strange writing, disarming traps..... and hey if a fight does break out he can do damage on par with Joe thanks to getting to constantly sneak attack without having to be very sneaky at all.

Oh yeah, that's balanced. Maybe later in the campaign things get better for poor Joe............nope, the future looks even worse.