[L&L] Balancing the Wizards in D&D

[CasvalRemDeikun]

What would people think if the Wizard gets a feat at 1st level? They can use that feat to turn their cantrips at-will, or they can use it for whatever the heck else they want. Or perhaps instead of at-will cantrips, the wizard gains proficiency in crossbows and can use them well.

That way the people who don't want at-will cantrips(something both successors to 3.5E, 4E and Pathfinder, use BTW), while people who do want at-will cantrips are allowed to do so, at the expense of some versatility.

EDIT: Forgot something. I would also like to have cantrips be something that is decided at the beginning of the day (like they are in Pathfinder). You could choose three or four from a pretty short list of spells (Mage Hand, Prestidigitation, Ghost Sound, Magic Missile, an energy ray attack [one for each energy type, because, well, SCREW FIRE I WANT LIGHTNING!] and a few others).

 

[billd91]

Anyhow, you get the same question in RPGs. Part of the problem is that folks want different things (speed, safety, etc) out of their RPG. There is a certain amount of nostalgia, as well, but let's not overlook that some things that folks liked are getting sacrificed at the altar of improvements in other areas. Hopefully they'll also not willfully disregard that there were very good reasons to want those improvements, too.

Emphasis mine above.
I don't think there's any doubt, game design is a balancing act between competing demands of the players. And we're really seeing that now with 5e because I believe WotC has now realized that, while they lost sight of much of it in 4e. Frankly, I find this as much as anything else to be a good argument for incremental, evolutionary design (along the lines of 1e to 2e) rather than revolution (3e to 4e).

Back on the car analogy, there are even competing issues with respect to improvements in multiple areas, not just old-style features. Designing for fuel economy undermines improvements in safety because it generally necessitates lighter materials while heavier materials, even in the crumple zones, do a better job of absorbing energy rather than transmitting it to the passengers. And I think you can see the same in game design too.

 

[Hussar]

Out of curiosity Bill91:

(along the lines of 1e to 2e) rather than revolution (3e to 4e).

How would you characterize the design change from 2e to 3e?

I would call it very much revolutionary, since 3e is at least as different from 2e as 4e is from 3e. But, that may just be my own personal filters in place.

 

[Lanefan]

At the same time, my first published game (the one where I had the least experience) remains my most popular game (outselling games I personally think are better designed). At the end of the day what matters is how many people play a game, and how many people like it. If I make a game that is deemed the best designed by a small cabal of game designers, but is rejected entirely by the people who actually play rpgs, it isn't much of an achievement in my mind. So while I think you raise a good point here, the danger (and the this is one I see wotc constantly fall into) is the designers will design to please their own egos as designers rather than make a game that people want ("first, do no harm").

An analogy here is movies: do you make a movie to please the critics or the ticket-buying public; as rarely if ever are both the same.

Often, if the general public takes something to heart the critics will eventually come around: best example is the 1977 Star Wars - critically scorned on release, 35 years later it regularly appears on all-time top-100 lists. D&D 1e has suffered the reverse fate: almost universally loved on release, 35 years later some people have made an art form out of poking holes in it.

A more recent example is James Cameron. Like him or not, his critics-be-damned style movies tend to be outrageously successful at selling tickets - Titanic, anyone? Avatar?

Lan-"then again, with the LotR movies the critics and public both got it right"-efan

 

[billd91]

Out of curiosity Bill91:



How would you characterize the design change from 2e to 3e?

I would call it very much revolutionary, since 3e is at least as different from 2e as 4e is from 3e. But, that may just be my own personal filters in place.

More evolutionary than revolutionary, but a bigger jump than 1e to 2e. I'd say it's about as far a shift it can be without really being revolutionary.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Emphasis mine above.
I don't think there's any doubt, game design is a balancing act between competing demands of the players. And we're really seeing that now with 5e because I believe WotC has now realized that, while they lost sight of much of it in 4e. Frankly, I find this as much as anything else to be a good argument for incremental, evolutionary design (along the lines of 1e to 2e) rather than revolution (3e to 4e).

Back on the car analogy, there are even competing issues with respect to improvements in multiple areas, not just old-style features. Designing for fuel economy undermines improvements in safety because it generally necessitates lighter materials while heavier materials, even in the crumple zones, do a better job of absorbing energy rather than transmitting it to the passengers. And I think you can see the same in game design too.

Yeah, I think the issue of tradeoffs is far too often not understood. Look at the oodles of posts over on the DDN forum that amount to "I want AD&D except with TONS of character options, but it has to be simple!" lol. You can only fit 10 pounds of stuff into a 10 pound bag. No amount of trying for the last 100 years has yielded a flying car. Some things just aren't possible and some goals are diametrically opposed.

At the same time game design is both an art form and a discipline subject to logical engineering-like constraints which arise out of, well, logic, but also human factors, practical constraints, etc. Nobody REALLY knows when they start on a game design exactly what is going to come out the other side. You make some decisions and trade-offs based on intuition and experience, and some based on logic, and you TRY to make aesthetic choices to create what you want, but truthfully you don't often end up with exactly what you went in looking for. You may often end up far from the original goal, or you may miss it by a hair and still be off by a mile.

I really think 4e falls into the category of only really missing by a small percentage. I think the people designing it, because it was a pretty large team and surrounded by a layer of closely associated playtesters and whatnot just started out to make something closer to maybe say a better AD&D. After you spend a year inside that you've made lots of decisions and committed yourself to a lot of approaches, and you've played the death out of all the parts and figured out how to make it do what you wanted to do. So you have this great thing, but when you go and put it in front of a whole other audience they may not 'get' what you're doing. Furthermore they don't use it like you did, they don't interpret it like you did, and it doesn't work the same way for them. It is almost a completely different thing.

I think from a pure perspective of just making a game that could do something much closer to what say AD&D does than what 4e does though, 4e isn't actually all that far off. It isn't really about the sort of mechanics you're using, that's a side issue. It is about how does it feel and what things does it encourage you to do. If you rewrote 4e and say made the combat system faster and cut back on some things and just polished and re-presented some things that would make a huge difference. The fan base isn't in the mood for that now, so it isn't really quite that easy NOW, but if you were Mike Mearls back in your time machine to 2007 (or whenever) to say "hey, lay off on that and make this simpler, and present this like so and not like such" you could easily have a hit game that is recognizably 4e. It just never happens that way in the real world.

 

[Hussar]

More evolutionary than revolutionary, but a bigger jump than 1e to 2e. I'd say it's about as far a shift it can be without really being revolutionary.

I think this goes a LONG way towards explaining the difference of opinion that floats around. To me, 4e is very much an evolutionary change for 3e. Virtually all the systems in 4e come from 3e. There are very few elements in 4e that didn't appear in almost exactly that form, at some point in 3e. Skills work the same, combat is largely the same, although saving throws are an obvious change, as well as NAD's. Most of the task resolution systems are ported over largely unchanged from 3e to 4e.

Whereas I look at 2e to 3e and see that as truly revolutionary. Virtually none of the systems in 3e appear in 2e. Feats are a completely new addition. The skill system is completely different. Combat is changed in a thousand different ways - 5 foot grid, AOO's, out of turn actions (something that is greatly increased in 4e), on and on. Heck, even the meaning of the base stats are entirely different and on a different scale. A 16 Str in 3e and 4e means exactly the same thing. And it's completely different from what a 16 Str means in AD&D (1e or 2e). There's a reason that your 18 Str character got converted to like a 22 or 24 Str in 3e using the WOTC conversion rules.

So, yeah, I think this, right here, gets right to the heart of the different ways of seeing the games. After all, flavour wise, 3e and 1e are a lot closer together. I'll totally cop to that. The cosmology, alignments, the races, monsters, etc. are pretty much pulled directly forward. And 4e's flavour changes are significant and probably rightly called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

It's all about what you see as "the game". To me, the flavour bits are usually an afterthought because I almost always run homebrew settings. Great Wheel cosmology? Never used it. Alignment? Well, used it and it caused me WAY too many headaches. Tolkien Races? Haven't had a pure Tolkien group in about twenty-five years. Whenever the Dragonlance player's book came out which had Minotaurs in it. That would have been about the last time I saw a group with all standard races.

So, yeah, it's all about perception.

 

[billd91]

I think this goes a LONG way towards explaining the difference of opinion that floats around. To me, 4e is very much an evolutionary change for 3e. Virtually all the systems in 4e come from 3e. There are very few elements in 4e that didn't appear in almost exactly that form, at some point in 3e. Skills work the same, combat is largely the same, although saving throws are an obvious change, as well as NAD's. Most of the task resolution systems are ported over largely unchanged from 3e to 4e.

Whereas I look at 2e to 3e and see that as truly revolutionary. Virtually none of the systems in 3e appear in 2e. Feats are a completely new addition. The skill system is completely different. Combat is changed in a thousand different ways - 5 foot grid, AOO's, out of turn actions (something that is greatly increased in 4e), on and on. Heck, even the meaning of the base stats are entirely different and on a different scale. A 16 Str in 3e and 4e means exactly the same thing. And it's completely different from what a 16 Str means in AD&D (1e or 2e). There's a reason that your 18 Str character got converted to like a 22 or 24 Str in 3e using the WOTC conversion rules.

So, yeah, I think this, right here, gets right to the heart of the different ways of seeing the games. After all, flavour wise, 3e and 1e are a lot closer together. I'll totally cop to that. The cosmology, alignments, the races, monsters, etc. are pretty much pulled directly forward. And 4e's flavour changes are significant and probably rightly called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

It's all about what you see as "the game". To me, the flavour bits are usually an afterthought because I almost always run homebrew settings. Great Wheel cosmology? Never used it. Alignment? Well, used it and it caused me WAY too many headaches. Tolkien Races? Haven't had a pure Tolkien group in about twenty-five years. Whenever the Dragonlance player's book came out which had Minotaurs in it. That would have been about the last time I saw a group with all standard races.

So, yeah, it's all about perception.

For me, the game is the flavor every bit as much as the mechanics. I don't really see how it can be otherwise because then there's little to keep D&D distinct from other games. I also see some of the evolutionary strains from 2e to 3e. Feats are weapon proficiencies from the earlier editions, including the style feats from Complete Fighter's Handbook and wacky stunts from the Celts semi-historical greenbook campaign setting. AoOs come directly from smacking a PC if he turns tail and runs from a melee. The 5' grid is just the old 1e 3' space PCs used to require with a little required weapon space built in.

But for me, a very important element of 3e not being revolutionary is the obvious devotion to keeping a lot of 1e/2e structures and lore intact - the spell levels, spell slots, spellbooks, differences in attack bonuses, alignments, standard 1e race mix, relatively few changes to the mix of classes even if some details of the classes change, wish spells, bless spells, fly spells, teleport spells, good storm giants, good unicorns, charmy dryads, LG paladins, and a bunch of other stuff. Shift the mechanics - you may just be evolutionary. Shift the mechanics and the flavor and you've broken out of evolutionary territory.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Often, if the general public takes something to heart the critics will eventually come around: best example is the 1977 Star Wars - critically scorned on release, 35 years later it regularly appears on all-time top-100 lists. D&D 1e has suffered the reverse fate: almost universally loved on release, 35 years later some people have made an art form out of poking holes in it.

Yeah, "the test of time."

 

[Hussar]

See, Bill91, to me, all 4e did was shift the flavour. The mechanics are still very much recognizably 3e. Particularly late 3e if you used Tome of Magic and Bo9S (which we did). Flavour changes? Oh yeah, got that in spades. Mechanics? That's just 3e with a new coat of paint AFAIC.

Whereas 2e to 3e is the reverse, for me. The flavour is largely there. But mechanics? Virtually nothing is the same. The change to grid based combat is probably the largest shift there, again, for me. So, no, the "space requirements" mechanics of 1e, which are most certainly not 3 feet required - it depended on what weapon you used and were virtually abandoned from any other explanation after the PHB came out, bear virtually no resemblance to the grid based combat of 3e.

As I said, I'm not a flavour guy. I couldn't care less what the flavour is in the core books. It simply has never mattered to me. That's not what D&D is about, for me. It's the mechanics that I'm looking at. Which, I suppose, goes a long ways towards why I would see this as a much more objective issue. The artsy stuff - how tall is a halfing - doesn't matter one whit to me. I couldn't care less because, as soon as I sit down to play, most of the flavour stuff is going to go out the window anyway.

So, when I talk about good design or bad design, I'm not talking about the flavour stuff. I'm talking about whether or not mechanic X works at the table better than mechanic Y. Which mechanic produces smoother play, is easier to understand and is less likely to cause problems down the road? Cause that one? That's the better designed mechanic.

And flavour can go sob in the corner for all I care.