D&D 5E How much should 5e aim at balance?

[billd91]

As to the other point, I think that [MENTION=32536]TwinBahamut[/MENTION] and others are saying that they don't care for games that prioritise simulation over balance, and are articulating their reasons for that. (Ie they think it is not just an arbitrary preference.) But no one has denied that others have different preferences, I don't think. Maybe I'm misreading (or reading too charitably)? But I mean, who would deny that there is a market for Traveller, or Runequest, or Rolemaster?

Market for them? Perhaps. But I'm also seeing a fairly strong undercurrent that anything not balanced is an incompetent game design or an insult to the consumer. That's not really a live and let live kind of sentiment, as I see it. I don't have a problem with people having that kind of attitude, but I think it's narrow minded. I really don't believe the mainstream of RPG players or designers think in such stark terms.
I think the viewpoint is incompatible with a variety of RPGs, particularly the ones entirely based on point-buy like Hero, GURPS, and M&M. After all, those game systems are the most unbalanced because you can make any number of totally min-maxed or gimped characters with them and balance is dependent on GM participation in character development.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Balance is important to game design. This idea that balance is somehow 4E's domain is complete and utter garbage. Gary Gygax was always big on balance and mentioned it all the time in his text.

This is an interesting point. A lot of the time, you hear people going on about how bad it was that 4e tried to balance the game, and how much more desirable 1e was because there wasn't all this attention to balance. It's not quite right. 1e /tried/ very hard to be balanced, but it was still a new kind of game, and it already had 'baggage' from the original game that it stuck to. It tried, but the balance it delivered was baroque and fragile where it succeeded at all, and more often, it simply failed outright.

4e is better balanced than prior eds, but it's not because prior eds didn't try. It's because prior eds failed. True, Monte Cook came right out and said that 3.0 was designed to 'reward system mastery,' as an explanation of why it's balance was so poor, so maybe 3.0, specifically, was the one half-ed that actively avoided balance - even though that statement is at odds with those made running up to it's release. :shrug:

It's nice to consider it in the context of history, but the fact remains that 4e - as much as some folks hate it for their own reasons - took a design approach that successfully delivered fairly robust class balance across all levels for the first time. As is so often the case, the solution was actually less complexity. 4e has fewer individual balancing mechanism that 1e did, because it's balanced from the ground up, from a unified structure. It was a bold, elegant approach, and a remarkable success as far as that one element of game design went.

But, of course, a lot of people hate it. Why is often hard to pin down. There are many, often contradictory criticisms of 4e, making it seem, at times, as if the "h4ters" are just groping around for rationalizations for their hatred. I don't believe it's quite that simple. I think, at bottom, the criticism with a grain of truth to it, the one that's the foundation for all the others, is that "it's not D&D."

Of course, it /is/ D&D, and any court would find that, since it's loaded with D&D IP, published by the owners of the D&D trademark, with that trademark plastered all over it. But, heck, they even put the D&D trademark on Gamma World and on a series of board games.

That's just not the same thing as being the D&D you started with or the D&D you had the best times with. A new ed of D&D /can/ evoke those old experiences, though, and 5e is on track to doing so. In that sense, if it succeeds, it'll "be D&D" in the visceral, personal way 4e couldn't. Of course, to do that, it won't be as well-balanced or 'elegant' as 4e was.

But it should still, like 1e, try to be just as balanced as it possibly can be given the unique demands and challenges of its market niche and baggage.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If D&D Next really manages to bring the 3 pillars to shine (combat, social and exploration) and be equally relevant, then I think it's perfectly fine if the Fighter dominates combats. Such a system will probably mean that even tougher combats are over in 15-30 minutes at worst, and that's probably a "spotlight" time that every group could deal with. And it would imply balance, if a 15 minute fight is followed by a 15 minute exploration where the Rogue shines and a 15 minute social interaction where the Bard shines or whatver.*

But if it works like 3E, Pathfinder and 4E, and combats can take one or more hours, and many adventures containing multiple combat encounters followed by an exploration or social "piece" as binding glue, then a Fighter shining in combat and everyone playing second fiddle will not be much fun. (And anyone diverging from that and playing, say "Lords & Ladies" instead of "Dungeons & Dragons" and focusing on court intrigue will not leave the Fighter much to do...)

I don't know if D&D Next can achieve that, since we've only seen their combat pillar so far.



*) Why do I not mention the Wizard? I don't know where he would stand here - traditionally he occupied all 3 roles, maybe social with a lesser extent since at least in my gaming circles, enchantment were mostly frowned upon to be used for social interaction. Maybe the Wizard is special that each day, he prepares his spels and can choose how much he contributes to each pillar - the only way he can actually rival the Fighter, Rogue or Bard being when he really devotes all his magic to one of the pillars.

 

[FireLance]

Market for them? Perhaps. But I'm also seeing a fairly strong undercurrent that anything not balanced is an incompetent game design or an insult to the consumer. That's not really a live and let live kind of sentiment, as I see it. I don't have a problem with people having that kind of attitude, but I think it's narrow minded.

To quote the Evil Overlord List:

"One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."

I have slightly higher standards, so my equivalent in the Game Designer List would be:

"One of my advisors will be an average fifteen-year-old. Any balance issues in my game that he is able to spot will be corrected before publication."

 

[Tony Vargas]

And it would imply balance, if a 15 minute fight is followed by a 15 minute exploration where the Rogue shines and a 15 minute social interaction where the Bard shines or whatver.*

Sure. I guess if the alternative is one guy getting hours of game time to everyone else's minutes, getting 15 minutes out of 45 would seem pretty awesome - but it still makes this hypothetical D&D 2/3rds spectator sport.

But if it works like 3E, Pathfinder and 4E, and combats can take one or more hours, then a Fighter shining in combat and everyone playing second fiddle will not be much fun.

I guess it's more obvious the larger the block. If you take turns shinning minute by minute, it's not as obvious as if you go hours. Then again, you can go do something else...

*) Why do I not mention the Wizard? I don't know where he would stand here - traditionally he occupied all 3 roles, maybe social with a lesser extent since at least in my gaming circles, enchantment were mostly frowned upon to be used for social interaction. Maybe the Wizard is special that each day, he prepares his spels and can choose how much he contributes to each pillar - the only way he can actually rival the Fighter, Rogue or Bard being when he really devotes all his magic to one of the pillars.

The wizard was historically able to contribute and eventually dominate in all three 'pillars,' even if the concept hadn't been coined yet, sure. Whether the 5e wizard will still have to let others have a shot now and then at high levels remains to be seen. He doesn't have the extreme vulnerability and limitations he faced in 1e at 1st level, so presumably the intent is not to follow in 1e's balance-across-levels footsteps.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think the viewpoint is incompatible with a variety of RPGs, particularly the ones entirely based on point-buy like Hero, GURPS, and M&M. After all, those game systems are the most unbalanced because you can make any number of totally min-maxed or gimped characters with them and balance is dependent on GM participation in character development.

Even games like Hero and GURPS have some attempt at balance. Point-buy, afterall, presumes that point costs are relative to power/usefulness. Equal points should equal roughly equal ability. In theory.

In practice, systems like those have no 'class balance' issues, by definition. Choosing a character concept in Hero (the one of the three I'm most familiar with, though I haven't even looked at the latest ed), for instance, does not relegate you to uselessness or virtually guarantee you dominance at some later date. That, alone, puts it far ahead of any version of D&D. Similarly, there's no "5 minute workday" in Hero, no 'heal bots' or 'meat shields,' and no worries about the GM giving out 'overpowered items.'

On the other hand, the role of 'system mastery' can be overwhelming. 3e 'builds' are rough, low-granularity things compared to Hero point-shaving.

To get a semblance of balance Hero relies on a very simple mechanism: campaign limits. Be they active points or rule of X, they put everyone on about the same scale of effectiveness. Efficient builds can do /more/ (sometimes vastly more), but even fairly pedestrian ones can usually hit the campaign limits with no problem, and thus be viable.

Is Hero 'balanced?' Well, it comes back to definitions. You can build a viable character to any concept you can imagine in any genre. That's a tremendous amount of meaningful choice. OTOH, the universe of possible trap choices is positively infinite. By my definitions of balance, it's balanced, but only at a reasonable level of system mastery. Ironically, the opposite of modern D&D, which tends to crumble in the face of system mastery.

 

[innerdude]

My frustrations reading pemerton's posts arise from the fact that he's not always clear just how much theoretical and practical knowledge he relies on for his way of playing 4e that is not in the 4e DMG. When I claim to be analyzing 4e, I'm just looking at the text itself; I'm not crossreferencing it with Burning Wheel or Maelstrom Storytelling (never even heard of this one). To me, 4e doesn't really support any metagame agenda -- gamism or narrativism -- well out of the box. The DMG presents it as essentially an adventure path system. If you follow the adventure creation guidelines then you end up with a boring piece of crap like the Keep on the Shadowfell. The DM plans a series of 10 encounters at a time, some being battles and some being skill challenges, and then the players work through it linearly with very little wiggle room for differing rewards based on skilled play or risk tolerance. It's bloodless and perfunctory. It has no metagame agenda "spark" at all; pretty much all of the entertainment value has to come from the work the DM puts in to make the encounters narratively interesting. In GNS terms the only creative agenda I see this as supporting is high concept sim -- aka play through the DMs story as new powers get unlocked now and then. I think most 4e groups play the game this way. I think this playstyle has a pretty brutal prepwork to fun ratio and limited ability to draw in new players from other forms of gaming and I don't want to see it presented as the default way to play D&D ever again.

A. "I don't want to see it presented as the default way to play D&D ever again." Yup, yes, amen.

B. The only reason I'd ever consider playing 4e EVER is because somewhere, in there, in all that muck, is a game that pemerton really likes to play. And I'm pretty sure I'd like playing in a 4e game run by pemerton.

The problem is, other than pemerton's description of his 4e campaign, I've yet to encounter a walkthrough, discussion, or play report of 4e (in addition to the 3 times I actually played it) that made want to touch the system with a 10' pole. Your baseline description of a 4e "session," replete with combat slogging and narrow, linear narrative is spot on with my sum total experience.

And as you say, to get to an experience even remotely reaching pemerton's "gonzo, narrativist D&D 4e that's fun"--even now, when I might actually consider it--the work load is pretty much a non-starter.

 

[Lanefan]

B. The only reason I'd ever consider playing 4e EVER is because somewhere, in there, in all that muck, is a game that pemerton really likes to play. And I'm pretty sure I'd like playing in a 4e game run by pemerton.

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] (along with extremely few others of which [MENTION=2]Piratecat[/MENTION] is one) has, I suspect, a talent for taking pretty much any rpg system you can think of and making out of it a game that you and I would both gladly take a seat in.

If every DM was like this all these design discussions would simply disappear; and that would sure be nice.

Lan-"that said, the weekly commute to Australia would be a female dog"-efan

 

[Neonchameleon]

See, here's the problem. That extreme charop board min/maxing is not playing the game. It's D&D's version of cheating. Antisocial behavior and its effects are not products of the game system, nor should the system be designed around trying to prevent abuse. Abuse and balance are unrelated concepts.

See, here's the problem. D&D started out life and until 4e remained a hacked tabletop wargame. (4e is closer to a hacked tabletop boardgame). And a big part of many wargames, especially fantasy wargames is selection of your starting forces. Which means that a big part of game design is making sure there aren't exploits in the design process, and things with the same supposed points cost are about the same value.

And where is the line between abuse and balance? You speak as if it is obvious. Whereas I look at the 3.5 SRD and compare the Druid to the Monk. Playing a druid straight out of the PHB and just picking Natural Spell, a good animal companion, a few good spells, and Wild Shape is going to beat the tar out of even the most abusive monks going.

But practically I think a heavy focus on system mastery is unwise because it kinda sucks as gameplay, because the learning curve is brutal and once the best "builds" are discovered people just look them up online. i.e. it's the opposite of the classic formula for a good game: easy to learn, hard to master. It tend to be hard to learn, easy to master.

Likewise. On a tangent that's one of my biggest disappointments with 3.X, and one of the things I like 4e the most for. 3.X is hard to learn, fairly easy to master. Whereas the more I look at 4e the more I find.

Have you ever read or played 1e? It's a pretty coherently gamist RPG by my estimation. I don't think you tried very hard not to offend people who like pre-3e editions best.

And listening to Old Geezer on RPG.net, it was even more gamist in play than it was presented in the books.

I also disagree with your analysis of 4e. I basically agree with pemerton's earlier reply to you. My frustrations reading pemerton's posts arise from the fact that he's not always clear just how much theoretical and practical knowledge he relies on for his way of playing 4e that is not in the 4e DMG.

All I can say here is that I learned most of my DMing skills from 4e - and the way I DM looks IMO very like the way pmerton does (I'd never claim to be as good a DM as pmerton, but believe the approach to be fairly simmilar). I have theoretical knowledge from other sources, but had very little practical experience of DMing other systems until I'd been DMing 4e mor than a year.

Am I to understand that the only way that two players could create characters that were not exactly equal in power is if they set out to do so?

The only games where you can have two characters that are exactly equal in power are either character-sheet less (e.g. Fiasco, Dread) or where you have identical character sheets (most likely in games like 3:16)

"Abusive and problematic behavior" is the responsibility of the person doing the behavior and no one else.

Except those encouraging and enabling it. And where does the abusive line start and end? A 3.5 PHB only Druid or Wizard using abilities all in relatively obvious ways could be seen as abusive and was certainly broken.

Better at what?

Spotlight time brought by the class abilities.

From what I can tell, your definition (and many if not most 4e-enthusiasts' definition) of balance is, "Total balance between characters in combat damage output and battlefield effectiveness."

"in combat damage output". Um... I don't know which 4e you've been looking at - but not the one with strikers, leaders, controllers, and defenders. Strikers do the highest damage output - it's what they are about. (Unless controllers are spreading the damage to everyone).

Let's put it another way---who's REALLY at fault for a min / maxer "overshadowing" other players in a D&D game? Is it the rules? Or the DM, the offending player, and the other participants ALLOWING the min / maxer to knowingly upset the agreed upon social contract that the group's fun AS A WHOLE is more important than any one player?

Yes. All of the above. Plus the players who aren't min-maxing because they are not playing an unashamedly gamist game as a gamist game - that is in the way it was intended to be played. You speak of a Social Contract as if it was formed out of whole-cloth and packaged in the box containing the game. This simply isn't the case.

Which means that the social contract that you talk about as being normal is strictly contrary to the social contract that happened at E. Gary Gygax's table and that a lot of old school play runs on. There, picking the best spells you can get your hands on and using them as effectively as possible is simply part of smart play - and this is all you need to do to break a 3.0, 3.5, or PF wizard. So if you want your game to come with this it needs to be written down and included as a part of the rules.

Yes, the PCs are not competing. The players are Of course this an exaggeration of mine, I'm just saying that there are players (how many, I'll let you judge by yourself but IMHO quite a lot) who approach the game with a competitive spirit, that they want to prove themselves to be better than others

And if you listen to really old school players (Mornard, Zak S, and others), they talk about "Player Skill" as something that is important and to be praised.

It brings me back again to the simple question: "Should the Fighter really be the best at fighting?"

The question is not whether but by how much.

"One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."

I have slightly higher standards, so my equivalent in the Game Designer List would be:

"One of my advisors will be an average fifteen-year-old. Any balance issues in my game that he is able to spot will be corrected before publication."

Nice! But replace the average fifteen year old with an average fifteen year old gamer please. (Would XP if I could).

B. The only reason I'd ever consider playing 4e EVER is because somewhere, in there, in all that muck, is a game that pemerton really likes to play. And I'm pretty sure I'd like playing in a 4e game run by pemerton.

The problem is, other than pemerton's description of his 4e campaign, I've yet to encounter a walkthrough, discussion, or play report of 4e (in addition to the 3 times I actually played it) that made want to touch the system with a 10' pole. Your baseline description of a 4e "session," replete with combat slogging and narrow, linear narrative is spot on with my sum total experience.

The weird thing here is that pmerton's descriptions of his 4e campaign are almost entirely in line with my play experiences and the way I DM. And I more or less learned to DM with 4e.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't think anyone is saying they want all characters to be exactly the same regardless of class. I think some are saying that they want all PCs to be comparable in their mechanical effectiveness.

Has this been defined? No. But repeated statements to the effect that virtually all editions of D&D are egregiously outside these boundaries suggest an extremely narrow definition.

As to the other point, I think that [MENTION=32536]TwinBahamut[/MENTION] and others are saying that they don't care for games that prioritise simulation over balance, and are articulating their reasons for that. (Ie they think it is not just an arbitrary preference.)

No, it's not just an arbitrary preference.

But no one has denied that others have different preferences, I don't think. Maybe I'm misreading (or reading too charitably)?

IMO, a pretty charitable reading. Referring to [MENTION=3400]billd91[/MENTION] above or posts like this:

First, balance is a property of the game's rules. If you think otherwise, then you don't understand what balance is.

Second, if you think the claim that 4E is more balanced than 3E is an "opinion," then you don't understand what balance is.

Third, if you think balance is about calculating an expected DPS value for its own sake (ignoring for a moment that the term DPS is ridiculous when talking about D&D), then you don't know what balance is.

But I mean, who would deny that there is a market for Traveller, or Runequest, or Rolemaster?

More to the point, who would deny that there is a market for non-4e D&D?

If, by "most people", you mean "D&D players exlcuding at least some subset of 4e players" than sure. But in a unity edition, the size of these two sets shouldn't be taken for granted, I don't think. You won't unify those who enjoy the metagame aspects of 4e if you just disregard their preferences, or treat them as peripheral to the activity of RPGing.

The issue isn't whether their preferences should be acknowledged, but whether they should be imposed on everyone else. If 4e's unified character creation mechanics and what you term as "metagame mechanics" are a model, that model clearly does this.

The system doesn't allow for characters or other game elements from other editions of D&D to be rendered effectively; i.e. there is no 4e character that could provide an approximately similar mechanical representation and play experience to my 3e (or earlier) fighter, wizard, rogue, druid, etc. In general, this is not true of the rest of D&D; while significant changes need be made, a character can be converted between editions (possibly incrementally changing how it is balanced, but retaining its basic features). A beginner finds in 4e a system that forces them into a much narrower design space than previous editions, preventing them from creating any character that is outside the AEDU, limited multiclassing, standard modifier box. Even if the result is increased "balance" (which I remain unconvinced of), it's exclusionary. I think it's fair to say that it's exclusionary to the majority of the D&D population, given the current state of the business. If I can't create a functioning version of every D&D character, monster, spell, etc. from earlier editions (because it isn't "balanced"), the goal of the unity edition has not been met.

Thusfar, 5e has not taken that approach; it seems to be erring on the side of letting people play what they want and not imposing such profound restrictions on them (despite its many other problems thusfar). Can I conclude that you are in the camp that doesn't think 5e will or should appeal to the 4e diehards because of this?