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

[TwoSix]

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

Oh no, oh God NO!

<starts rowing the boat to get away from the howling maelstrom that is "disassociated mechanics on a D&D forum">

 

[Lwaxy]

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?

Rules are rules, and believability is something different hehe.

I'm sure I could come up with explanations in game if needed, but this is why we use endurance points.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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

I'm sure I recall Emerikol mentioning the concept and the article on the WotC boards.

The original article was posted before 4e even hit the shelves, a preemptive first strike in the Edition War:

The Alexandrian Blog Archive Dissociated Mechanics

 

[Herschel]

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.

Again, the distinctions you make are arbitrary. The Fighter may only have strength/stamina once per "scene" to make that big whirlwind attack. It may not only be tiring, but after seeing it, even a semi-skilled adversary won't let him complete it again. Or it may leave him open to counter attack that he knows he can't take more than once. Or to make a specific attack work like he wants it he needs to complete a move where his sword is high and right and the enemy has its weight shifted back and on its left foot with its defenses also high and (to "your") right.

It's not any different than sports from that standpoint. Look at football. Quarterbacks don't just heave the ball deep every play and get touchdowns, they have to read the receiver and the coverage and anticipate properly.

The QB steps behind center, calling out the signals. He sees the corner taking an inside position on the Z receiver, he could be in a position to blitz, or he could just be lining up on an inside position trying to take away a crossing route. Will he come up and "jam" the receiver at the line, play close, or drop back, yielding a very short completion zone? Where's the Safety lining up? Is he over-the-top, close, wide or tight? Will the receiver adjust his route the same way the QB anticipates he will?

The ball snaps, the Z receiver runs up 5 yards, fakes in, breaks out two steps with the corner biting inside. The Tight End from the other side of the formation gets a (relatively) clean release and slants towards the Safety and the QB pump fakes a pass to the TE, drawing the Safety over and in as the receiver breaks back up the field and deep with the corner still trying to recover from biting on the double move. With no Safety over-the-top the QB can then launch it deep and if he hits the receiver (and the receiver catches it) Touchdown!

The thing is, they look for this play often, but only rarely does the opening to actually execute it properly exist. In this example, if the corner doesn't bite, he's still in tight coverage and the receiver isn't open. If teh corner drops back, teh receiver can break off his route and instead of breaking back up the field, he continues out for a short gain. If he bites and the Safety is over-the-top and picks up the receiver, the receiver then isn't open either.

The QB could still choose to throw it deep every play, but the results are likely to be less than satisfactory. The same thing with the Fighter, the reverse spin, down cut, knee sweep with the push high will only work when he gets that specific opening so he only every tries it then. Were he to try it without those specific conditions the enemy either just rips his back apart or steps back and lets teh fighter over-balance and mauls him. If you've ever done martial arts or stage combat with any real degree of proficiency you'll understand this.

 

[Herschel]

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

And there we have it, Representative Edition Warring.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, the definition of magic is arbitrary. Vancian magic is as legitimate as non-Vancian, and vice-versa. There's no more need to explain /why/ Vancian is daily than there would be a need to explain why it's being dropped in favor of something that works better.

In 4e, the game successfully balanced the Fighter and the Wizard by giving them each a mix of at-will, encounter, and daily powers. It worked. There was no explanation as to why the wizard's encounter powers worked 1/encounter or his at-wills worked all the time, in spite of the long-standing Vancian rationale for D&D magic-users. There was no explanation as to why the fighter had 1/encounter and 1/day powers. Explanations are flavor text, and 4e left flavor to the individual player. But, the explanation for magic is always easy: "It's maaaaagic!"

What 4e did 'wrong,' if anything, was to leave the wizard dailies, thus necessitating the fighter dailies. That is, it balanced the abilities of the martial classes around those of the casters, when the abilities of casters can be changed arbitrarily by virtue of being 'magic,' while those of the fighter arguably could have some grounding in reality.

5e, not surprisingly, is making the exact same mistake: First they decided Vancian was in, then they try to balance the fighter with the vancian casters. Problematic without fighter dailies (it forced them to dictate the length of the adventuring day), and fighter dailies have that percieved problem with verisimilitude. Simply ganking Vancian and defining magic differently would not have that same problem, since there's no 'realistic' baseline for magic. (It would have a different, equally insurmountable problem of "not being D&D," but any change, refinement, or improvement to the game faces that problem.)

 

[Lanefan]

That hasn't been my experience. 4e, in keeping with D&D tradition, has lots of lists - of monsters, maps, skill challenge ideas etc - that can be run without prep. (I run monsters from books without prep all the time.) And the cosmology is there in the books (a lot of it in just the PHB and DMG). Apart from that I just use the standard techniques for encounter-driven narrativist play. (Very thematically light - or, if you prefer, hackneyed - narrativist play in my own case.)

My own campaign notes, after (I would guess) 70-odd sessions, are 4 A4 pages of background, about the same length of "campaign diary", plus probably a few dozen pages of printed out monster stats, plus the typical scratch sheets, battlemaps etc produced in the course of actual play. Not all that onerous.

My problem with trying to run a game like that - story-driven by the players - would be my sieve-like memory. If the players have control over the story such that one can dream up a village three days ride over the hill and have it stick to the game setting, 6 months later when the party's back in that area again I'm never going to remember there's a bloody village there! Which means I'd have to have been taking notes at the time - fine, except one thing I've learned is that I simply cannot DM and write at the same time! When I find I have to take in-game notes everything grinds to a halt while I do so.

So I do up a brief log after every session, while it's still fresh in mind. If I was running a game like yours there'd have to be a secondary log of player-driven story notes; or the players would have to do their own log, and I can't see that happening with my crew.

And vice versa. I can't build the PCs I want to build in 3E, nor GM the game I want to GM.

Even with all the various customization options that weren't present in 1e, I found it surprisingly hard (and in one case outright impossible) to build 1e characters in a 3e game.

The wiggedy-whack multiclassing rules were the biggest thing that got in the way. The impossible one was I wanted a Fighter-Wizard who in 1e would have put 90% of his XP into F and 10% into W; the Wizard side would very slowly advance while he'd mostly be a front-line Fighter*. But in 3e I can't do that because of its one-entire-level-at-a-time additive level advancement - if he's up to F-6/W-1 and I want to bring his him up to W-2 I have to burn way more than 10% of his total XP into that next level.

(and if I'm spending a whole level worth of adventuring bringing up his W side I feel he should realistically be operating mostly as a Wizard for that level - 3e multiclassing is to me utterly non-intuitive)

Now whether I'd be able to do this in 4e is an open question, I've never tried it.

* - the concept came from a character someone played in a game I ran, I quite liked how it worked out; but the first chance I had to try it as a player was in 3e when 3e was brand new to us.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I admire you as one of the few consistent posters advocating for classic D&D play: multiple parties in the same world; stables of PCs; intraparty contracts for the division of loot; and the like.

Thanks.

And my other main technique - that I learned, somehow, GMing Oriental Adventures (AD&D version) is to trust my players. Follow their leads, frame scenes in response, and see what happens.

Yeah, that'll be the day.

In one party right now I've got players (in character) trying to lead in 3 or 4 different directions at once* resulting in them getting pretty much bogged down. To be fair, it's a rather confusing setup they're in - plots inside plots and all sorts of different agendae in play, that sort of thing; but to a few of these players "information gathering" is to be avoided at all costs...sigh...

* - without regard for the adventure path they're not really aware they're on yet, which means I have to be ready to wing things on a moment's notice if and when they left-turn on me; which is a near-certainty at some point.

Lanefan

 

[Underman]

And there we have it, Representative Edition Warring.

Good thing he didn't call for "meaningful unification of players" after declaring that the other player's beliefs is based on "fallacy"

 

[Herschel]

Good thing he didn't call for "meaningful unification of players" after declaring that the other player's beliefs is based on "fallacy"

Except that "belief" IS demonstrably a fallacy.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The wiggedy-whack multiclassing rules were the biggest thing that got in the way. The impossible one was I wanted a Fighter-Wizard who in 1e would have put 90% of his XP into F and 10% into W; the Wizard side would very slowly advance while he'd mostly be a front-line Fighter*. But in 3e I can't do that because of its one-entire-level-at-a-time additive level advancement - if he's up to F-6/W-1 and I want to bring his him up to W-2 I have to burn way more than 10% of his total XP into that next level.

(and if I'm spending a whole level worth of adventuring bringing up his W side I feel he should realistically be operating mostly as a Wizard for that level - 3e multiclassing is to me utterly non-intuitive)

* - the concept came from a character someone played in a game I ran, I quite liked how it worked out; but the first chance I had to try it as a player was in 3e when 3e was brand new to us.

Strange, I'd think 3e came pretty close to what you wanted. You advance mostly as wizard, but get a level of fighter at some point, maybe a second one at a future date. It's strictly dilutive - nothing you get from that fighter level is worth the lost caster level, let alone getting your next spell level a level later - but that's clearly not the point.

Funny thing is, I used a variant that worked something like that in my long AD&D campaign (which spanned the 1e/2e rev-roll). I let a player choose a 'secondary class' for a 10% experience penalty (or a 'special skill' or 'special ability' were also options for the exp penalty). The secondary class would advance to half the level of the primary, rounded down, working, mechanically, like just like a character with two classes, who had advanced to that level in the secondary class before switching to the secondary. It meant your HD changed as you leveled, for instance, so it was a little messy. The actual experience cost for advancing the secondary class was pretty trivial. The rule was conceived for a campaign where everyone would play a 'Thief,' so that the other classes' critical abilities could still be present.

Now whether I'd be able to do this in 4e is an open question, I've never tried it.

4e multi-classing works very differently, the primarily one class with a 'touch' of another is what it tends towards. So you could be a wizard who MCs Fighter, and once in a blue moon swaps a spell for an exploit, or even takes a fighter PP or ED (though I doubt that'd work out). My second 4e character was a very nostalgic-feeling "elven fighter/magic-user," an Eladrin Wizard McFighter Wizard of the Spiral Tower. The campaign world was a version of Harn that the DM had run on and off back to 2e, so each edition was rationalized as a jump forward in history with mystic cataclysms changing the way things worked. I RP'd the conceit that Varnihal had learned magic from an ancestors' AD&D-era spellbook. He was big on collecting rituals. It was a surprising amount of fun, considering that, in addition to 'gimping' myself by only picking classic spells (Lightning Bolt was, for instance, widely considered one of the worst early 4e spells, but I got a surprising amount of good use out of it), I also eschewed any spell the previous campaign's wizard had had, and she'd very carefully picked the 'best' ones. But, anyway, yes, he had the feel of a Wizard with just a bit of fighter, and, because everything advances at 1/2 level, he remained pretty decent with a sword (and good at Athletics, incidentally) throughout, so you had the sense that he was advancing in both all the time.