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

[Emerikol]

What's annoying is people who think there's somehow differences between the martial daily and the rest. Quite simply, there's not. You've told yourself over and over there's a difference until you've come to believe it, but that doesn't change the fact it's a fallacy.

There are oodles and scads of numbers, values and resources. They're the guts of the game. The only way to actually make the game like you say it runs is to take ALL information away from the players, including their character sheets. Then you really don't know exactly how hurt you are, you lose track of which spells you have left, etc. You just tell the DM what you want to do, he rolls behind the screen and tells you what happened.

Any other way is player resource management.

This may have nothing to do with liking (or disliking) whatever game element is the subject du jour, but it's just another form of the "4E is not D&D" meme that needs to die if there's going to be any meaningful unification of players.

You are sticking your head in the sand.

Magic spells, since they are magic and have no analog in our world, are defined as being daily. The wizard knows the names of his spells and he knows they are no longer available once used. That is something the character knows. That's a big difference from the fighters.

You are drawing ridiculous distinctions. I gave you good answers for each of your examples and you stuck your head in the sand. Abstractions of real things in the game are fine. Hit points abstract general health and that is part of your character. Fighter dailies have NO ANALOG with reality. They are plot couponish all the way. And that is the problem. A lot of us do not like plot couponish stuff.

 

[Emerikol]

Also a sidenote:
I started out completely pro-4e. I recruited a group to play it. I went in with a favorable attitude. I got my dislike from playing the game. The actual play of the game. I wasn't even on any of these boards commenting on D&D 4e during the early days. I was playing. I played for one year. At that time my group decided they couldn't take 4e seriously. It drove us out of our immersion constantly by causing us to laugh at game mechanics that were nothing less than ridiculous.

 

[Neonchameleon]

From a social contract POV, that's like your wife asking you to take out the garbage, so you put the garbage outside the front door, and she says "why didn't you put it in the garbage can?!" and you say "being such an obvious loophole to me feels like I'm trying to make up for you having ed up in an extremely obvious way". Which is not to say that a wife's request is the same as a game designer's rule, but that justifying your own optimized lifestyle supersedes an implied social contract.

And to me that's simply ducking the question. The quick answer is "There was no garbage can outside the door. There has never been a garbage can. And we leave binbags outside for the binmen because that is what the tenancy agreement says to do. Now you may think we ought to have a garbage can. But at present we do not. So shall I put one on the shopping list?" (Of course that wouldn't be a diplomatic way of replying).

I'll bite. Firstly, the wizard has to have that high wisdom.

I thought the Triton was summoned through Summon Nature's Ally - and therefore summoned by a Druid. That is why I gave the summoner Wis 18. If summoned through summon monster Wis 18 would indicate summoned by a cleric. A wizard would have 18 - and both therefore be a genius and the sort of person who could come up with such ideas.

Then the intelligence and monster lore to know that Tritons can summon Thoqquas.

Professional skill. Downright common knowledge IMO.

Even so, the wizard may assume that the summoning aura interferes with other summoning magic.

You mean the wizard wouldn't know how a fundamental form of magic works despite being (a) a genius and (b) having his life depend on such tools. And no wizard in the hisory of wizarddom had (a) tried to find out and (b) communicated the results of such a very basic experiment to other wizards? Despite this being the class that recruits geniusses. You're seriously straining my suspension of disbelief here - making almost all wizards incurious, unknowledgeable about their very are of expertise, and generally the very opposite of what I think of when I think "wizard".

Not that it matters because the rule says summoned monsters cannot summon.

The 3.5 spell description says summoned monsters cannot summon. And says it for a very good reason. I've checked the 3.0 SRD and it appears to be missing those two lines in the Summon Monster spell.

One could arrive at the same conclusion according to the social contract and putting less emphasis on the metagame priorities.

You talk about "The Social Contract" as if it was either included in the PHB or handed down from Mount Sinai. It was neither. And from what I can tell, Gygaxian D&D would have laughed at the very concept of holding back just because it would be overpowered. The so-called social contract is different in different places and part of the reason our pretend elfgames have rules is so we can reach a mutually acceptable social contract with a minimum of fuss. The rules of the game are part of the social contract - what you seem to be proposing is that we telepathically draft a second social contract that says that "you not only stick to the rules agreed when you sat down to play the game and any that come up in play, but you should be able to intuit a further set of rules that are written down nowhere".

I think what some of us object to is that we don't think DMs are or should be referees.

Neither do we. That's why we want a balanced set of rules - so we can stop handling the annoying nonsense of filling in the gaps where there should be rules and balancing systems that should be balanced, and instead get on with the job of DM - managing the world, the NPCs, and the challenges.

We don't need the game to tell us how to run our game, we need the game to LET us run our game. When balance is enforced over our being able to run what we want then it becomes a problem.

Where are the restrictions on a DM in a balanced game? The DM can do whatever the hell he likes.

It is also a problem when balance, not fun or creativity or anything else, is the primary driving purpose.

Good. Because I thought the primary driving purpose behind 4e was the Tyrrany of Fun. Being serious, balance is not and has never been the primary driving force although it might be possible to argue that it is the Bed of Procrustes for 4e (not an argument I think is correct but one that might be arguable).

Good but it isn't the same for all of us. Balance itself also has very little to do with this. If any system is well designed it can reduce prep time and allow you to use it for fun stuff like creating NPCs and plots. 4e isn't unique here. In that regard, I think it is "best" only by virtue of being newest. Balance has very little to do with prep time. Balance by itself has very little to do with fun either. You need a lot of other aspects to do that.

Balance actually has quite a bit to do with prep time and fun. Balance is information - and will tell you at a glance whether something is too easy, too hard, or almost right. This is only one aspect of prep time and of fun - but is definitely one of them.

 

[Lwaxy]

What about a fighter knowing he can't do that maneuver again this day because he's exhausted and doesn't have the strength left?

 

[Underman]

What about a fighter knowing he can't do that maneuver again this day because he's exhausted and doesn't have the strength left?

Does this fighter know why he can still do something else equally exhausting that day, but just not that other thing?

 

[Lwaxy]

Maybe. He can still do that fancy kick because he's exhausted his arms doing the super sword swing He can still cleave through his enemy from below because it won't require him to lift his axe up high.

 

[Underman]

And to me that's simply ducking the question. The quick answer is "There was no garbage can outside the door. There has never been a garbage can. And we leave binbags outside for the binmen because that is what the tenancy agreement says to do. Now you may think we ought to have a garbage can. But at present we do not. So shall I put one on the shopping list?" (Of course that wouldn't be a diplomatic way of replying).

That's the kind of conversation you would have with your wife (as far as the analogy goes) or the gaming table (as far as the social contract goes)? Because my answer would be "This isn't fun/worth it; I want a separation"

 

[Underman]

Maybe. He can still do that fancy kick because he's exhausted his arms doing the super sword swing He can still cleave through his enemy from below because it won't require him to lift his axe up high.

So the rules say that fighters can do 1 arm-related power once per day and 1 leg-related power once per day?

What happens if the fighter exhausts his arm-related encounter power so that he can't do that anymore but can still do his arm-related daily?

 

[Alzrius]

In some cases, sure, why not. In the real world, it has happened that a horrible individual espoused a "good" idea or concept.

Saying "some cases" misses the point that I was trying to make - I believe that the merit of an idea is completely divorced from the person who came up with it. A "bad" idea may come from a "good" person, or a "good" one from a "bad" person, etc.

What I'm saying is that, in game design, it's a questionnable idea, inspired by questionnable ideals, spawned by questionnable people.

I think it's an issue more of game-play than game-design, which makes the ideal more of the central issue (e.g. it asks the question of what's trying to be achieved), and nothing to do whatsoever if the people involved are "questionnable" (which is usually the nice way of saying "I pass judgment on them as bad people").

Roleplaying games should never be designed to put one person over an other; there should be no "winners" in (modern) rpgs because the way one person wins is for everybody else to lose.

The question of being "designed" for something is nebulous, almost as much so as the idea of "putting one person over another." The problem is that this - much like the idea of "winners" - carries a degree of finality to it that simply aren't present in RPGs. If such a circumstance occurs where a character is "put over" someone else, that circumstance tends to be highly transitory.

I've heard many people talk about how the high-level wizard is so much better than the high-level fighter. But if the encounters keep coming, the wizard will eventually expend his spells, and then it's the fighter who's so much better (or any of a number of other scenarios where the wizard is put at a disadvantageous element).

Strangely, the fact that the GM will go out of his way to create scenarios designed specifically to check the wizard's power in favor of the fighter tends to provoke howls of "but that's not how the game is meant to be played," which strikes me as strange...why would the way the game is "meant" to be played be a play-style that favors one character over another...something you yourself noted is bad?

You could design a game where one type of character thoroughly dominates all other types (ie an unbalanced game from a character creation POV), but balance it out by making each player have a go at controlling that character. Or you could give large narrative control of the game to other characters through stuff like Fate points, bennies, what have you. It has to be explicit, though. It has to be in the game text.

I strongly disagree with your last sentence. The rules are a framework, but how things actually progress around the table is the ultimate arbiter of how well they're working, that I've experienced.

 

[Alzrius]

Also a sidenote:
I started out completely pro-4e. I recruited a group to play it. I went in with a favorable attitude. I got my dislike from playing the game. The actual play of the game. I wasn't even on any of these boards commenting on D&D 4e during the early days. I was playing. I played for one year. At that time my group decided they couldn't take 4e seriously. It drove us out of our immersion constantly by causing us to laugh at game mechanics that were nothing less than ridiculous.

Emerikol, have you read Justin Alexander's essay on dissociated mechanics? Because that's what you're describing to a "T."