D&D 5E Final playtest packet due in mid September.

[Ahnehnois]

I don't see the unlikeliness of ever attaining "perfect balance" making it any less of a target worth striving for - we may never reach it, but we can look to get closer, rather than further away. The fact that certain classes are "underpowered" or "overpowered" can be recognized, and efforts made to correct that.

I change things for balance reasons all the time. I just don't think about absolute equality of all options as a goal, or the absence of that is a failure.

See, here we come to giving bonuses to players who don't want to invest character resources in certain areas. In the source material, I would agree the typical leader is most often a martial character.

Your thinking is a bit too conventional here. Who says a barbarian (or other martial character) doesn't spend any resources on these areas? One of the themes of my houserule environment is trying to reward that kind of choice mechanically. I see barbarians with decent mental ability scores (not encouraged by the core rules) and some noncombat skills (which is encouraged by the core rules) and treat them accordingly.

I could just as easily note that Wizards or Clerics are typically held in awe and viewed as sources of sage advice (or powers to be feared), leading to NPC's being inclined to take their advice very seriously - that is, their skills and accomplishments command a lot of respect. For that matter, nobles often want to be seen as educated, erudite, literate and artful - so they were patrons of the very arts the Bard epitomizes. So shouldn't they also show respect for those achievements and accomplishments.[?]

Sure. Again, there's a place for everyone. In my world, there are more people that respect combat than those that respect other things, because I'm playing in a pseudo-medieval fantasy world. In modern settings that changes. In certain subsets of the fantasy world, that changes.

Well, I would agree, at least in part. I believe he concluded (consciously or otherwise) that he made the wrong choice for your game (including both your and your fellow players' playstyles and attitudes), and later decided to try another path better suited for success in that game. That's no different than selecting Power Attack because your GM uses a lot of Giants with low AC's and high hp's, but choosing Weapon Focus in a different game because that GM uses a lot of high AC low hp undead, or picking Ranger favoured enemies based on the type of monsters the GM likes to use - making character choices to suit the game style.

Okay, guess we're on the same page now. If you want to call a DM who uses a lot of low-AC creatures "biased" in favor of Power Attack, you can. I just think that's a poor choice of words.

You can have lots of rolls without those rolls being overly meaningful. Does failing those knowledge checks lead to character death, or to combats that gather more xp and loot? With the classes you cite, and your comments on locale, I also wonder whether it is knowledge of nature specifically which is valuable in your games.

Each individual roll is unlikely to be all that impactful (then again, the same could be said of each individual attack roll). However, monster identification is rather important in my games, and I allow players to use various skills to identify magic items. I find that Arcana is thus one of the most useful, followed by Nature, Planes, and Religion, and then the others. However, I'm noted for making players pull out the whole rulebook, and I call for almost every skill in some meaningful context pretty regularly.

I wonder how much of this is simply dumping abilities your games don't favour to pick up abilities your games do favour. Here again, I don't see how we can compare classes under the rules if you're not using classes under the rules. If, for example, every rewrite I propose that would create a favourable class focused on combat in the style for which a Halfling is best suited for gets rewritten so it would be better for a high STR brute, I'll quickly learn not to play Halfling warriors. Since your game already seems to shy players away from non-warriors (again, which I can attribute to the manner in which revised classes get accepted and rejected), why would I ever play a Halfling at all?

Because you enjoy playing halflings? If I were writing a class for a light warrior it would be optimized to be the best light warrior it could. My players do tend to favor the Dex-ier warriors over the brute strength ones. I see a lot more rangers than barbarians, so clearly you're misreading exactly what I encourage. In any case, my players come to me with the concept, and the mechanics are finalized later. If someone wants to play a halfling fighter, it's incumbent on him to come up with a way to make it work. They often do come in with suboptimal concepts, and we make them work.

I also think you've misattributed why players stick with warriors. It's not because of how I DM, it's more because they don't like tracking spells and they prefer being tough. I doubt they'd suddenly all play bards given a different game.

Customizing each character also allows a far greater scope for bias to be exercised than sticking largely or entirely to the RAW. I'm curious how your players would make out in a game that did stick to the rules, rather than customize each and every aspect of a character. I suspect they would perceive a completely different game (for good or ill).

For ill, I imagine. They're very logical, and they pick apart inconsistencies in design very easily. My heavy customization environment is as much a product of them constantly asking for things as me pushing that philosophy; I've adapted to them over the years. I don't know why I would ever attempt to run such a game.

For example, one player insists on playing weird monstrous characters, and came up with a tauric halfling/blink dog rogue. By the RAW, this is a huge no-no as the blink dog has no LA and has abilities that a PC could run wild with it. Moreover, he wants the ability to act after jumping (like a blink dog) but also wants the ability to carry equipment (unlike a blink dog). Whoa there, tiger. And yet, I allowed it. I set a weight limit, and made the jumping and blinking swift actions, and instituted the PF version of blink (that doesn't make opponents lose their Dex), but fundamentally, I allowed something that the rules would never have allowed.

And it was interesting and worked fine. If I were playing RAW, I would say no, the player would be pissed off, and the game would be more static and less interesting. Even if it were more balanced from the start, it would hardly be worth it.

Your assumption is, in itself, a bias.

I'm quite confident that if I had never played D&D, and looked at the class options, I would assess the bard as being completely inept. If anything, my experience biases me in favor of bards, as I've seen how the D&D rules has made the concept somehow work, and I've seen what individual DMs and players can do to work with unconventional ideas.

"Not as well suited for adventuring" seems to me to be second class.

Personally, I think that a character that is not ideally suited to adventuring but somehow ends up doing it can be quite interesting.

 

[N'raac]

I change things for balance reasons all the time. I just don't think about absolute equality of all options as a goal, or the absence of that is a failure.

So we agree balance, however elusive, should be the goal, but is not perfectly attainable.

Your thinking is a bit too conventional here. Who says a barbarian (or other martial character) doesn't spend any resources on these areas?

If they do, and I think they should, then they should benefit from it. This, to me, creates better balanced characters. Others see it as "suboptimal" for a martial character to sacrifice combat damage for...well...anything. Largely, I believe, because we can measure and compare combat effectiveness far more easily than other areas of effectiveness.

Okay, guess we're on the same page now. If you want to call a DM who uses a lot of low-AC creatures "biased" in favor of Power Attack, you can. I just think that's a poor choice of words.

That game presents a bias in favour of Power Attack, yes. If you have a better term, feel free, but I think bias is appropriate in this context.

For ill, I imagine. They're very logical, and they pick apart inconsistencies in design very easily...

For example, one player insists on playing weird monstrous characters, and came up with a tauric halfling/blink dog rogue.

I find it interesting to read these two in close proximity...

I'm quite confident that if I had never played D&D, and looked at the class options, I would assess the bard as being completely inept. If anything, my experience biases me in favor of bards, as I've seen how the D&D rules has made the concept somehow work, and I've seen what individual DMs and players can do to work with unconventional ideas.

I would say your initial "bards are a silly concept" bias has been reduced through experience.

Personally, I think that a character that is not ideally suited to adventuring but somehow ends up doing it can be quite interesting.

I see no character "ideally suited to adventuring" - somehow, the characters in fiction, however unsuitable they may seem (yes, Bilbo, I am looking at you...) always seem to have something to contribute. So should characters in the game. More so given my own belief that the characters in the game are the "main characters", not bit players, and thus not be relegated to only an occasional contribution of value, much less than their fellow PC's.

How happy would your tauric halfling/blink dog player have been if his character was merely a curiosity, and his abilities rarely, if ever, had any meaningful in-game impact?

 

[Ahnehnois]

That doesn't rely on or prevent a balanced game. If you wish a "Barbarians are all things to everyone" experience, isn't it easy to take a balanced game and give Barbs a discount on levelling? I think so. However, if another person does want a balanced game, its extremely difficult to re-balance all the classes, races, etc. starting from an unbalanced game. (Witness the nigh-infinite amount of online effort to do so in the 3e era.) An unbalanced D&D limits rather than enhances the diversity of play experiences available to various playgroups.

Okay, but since there are no "balanced games" under the D&D name (or even under the rubric of D&D-like games), I don't know what your point is.

For the sake of the professional designers and companies producing adventures, I would hope that the levels of various classes are relatively balanced in overall effectiveness and ability to conclude an adventure. If the classes vary wildly in their capacities, it makes writing sensible adventures extremely unlikely. I mean, how can you write a 7th level adventure if an all-Barbarian party will be twice as effective as an all-Rogue party of the same level? Its fine to say that D&D should have an "easy mode" and a "hard mode", but putting that into the character class choice seems a poor idea to me.

Well now you're just crossing threads. To reference the ten years ago, I find the idea of creating a standardized play experience or publishing a specific adventure a complete non-issue when actually designing the game. It would be like designing the rules of football specifically to balance the Ravens and the Broncos, which could create very disappointing results when all the other teams start playing.

As to the last point, I think class choice is invariably wrapped up in it. If you're playing a game set in the wilderness, druids are more useful. If you're in a city, druids are less useful. And endless list of similar contextual variables exists for each class. Trying to figure out what will be the most useful choice is part of what character creation in rpgs is all about.

I think it largely depends on the situation.

Doesn't it always? Again, I think if you run through a hundred different situations, the big guy with X amount of skill will come out on top more often than the small guy with the same amount of skill (realizing that now we're talking about levels in the same class, not different classes). But it won't be a hundred to zero.

An issue rarely addressed, but unquestionably characters that can buff the group are more effective in large groups than small groups, and more effective with certain teammates than others. There are a host of moving parts. I commented a while back on spell choice in Zeitgeist. Since we seem to see a lot of human/humanoid opponents, spells like Charm Person or Hold Person that only affect such targets seem much more effective than in a typical "lots of weird monsters" game.

It's worth noting that when we had a few bard PCs, I had ten players, and now I have three. I much prefer the three, but clearly a smaller party disincentivizes certain character types. Which is not a "bias", simply a natural consequence of a character type that is built on its ability to influence others.

If he invested skill points in that knowledge skill - but why would the Duke listed to someone with knowledge of trees in assessing strategic decision? And if he will, why would he not give equal consideration from a Bard, or a Wizard, or a Rogue, with the same level of Knowledge of Nature?

I imagine he would consult someone with high BAB for tactical decisions, since D&D has no skill for tactics that I'm aware of. In any case, he'll consult each character when it makes sense to, and act rationally. He won't say to himself "gee that bard player hasn't gotten a lot of love this session" and slavishly attend to only his whims.

Provided he has invested in the Intimidate skill. And here, his CHA Dump hurts him. A Rogue with an equal investment in Intimidate should be just as able to intimidate people more, probably, as he will have more CHA). A Bard, not so much as it is not a class skill.

Sure, but all your ongoing stuff about bards being great influencers of people also rests in the investment of limited resources. It's fairly easy to make a bard that focuses on other things. As to intimidating, I do think it works no matter who has the ranks.

That's definitely one opinion. That being the case, are you good with:

- roll for each stat once, and what you roll is what you get
- roll for race
- roll for class (perhaps a chart for each race with stat-based modifiers, and for history when leveling up)
- roll for skills (table skewed to class skills and/or racially favoured skills)
- roll for feats (again, skewed by class/race)
- roll for spells known (wizards, sorcerers)
- roll for starting level (it's called "d20 system", right?)
- roll ONCE in front of the group - what you get is what you play?

That would be another one of those ridiculous overstatements. Then again, said game would be every bit as valid as a "balanced" game where all character choices have been homogenized.

There seem to be two very different concepts you link together. I am in favour of mechanical differences. However, I am also in favour of those mechanical differences balancing out overall such that different classes/races/choices are not "weaker" or "stronger" in an overall sense.

Which leads to you trying to take an orange and make it redder and taking an apple and trying to give it a rind to peel. I don't see any reason why different things have to be made the same, only that they need to be independently worthwhile.

 

[Ahnehnois]

So we agree balance, however elusive, should be the goal, but is not perfectly attainable.

A secondary goal, not the goal.

I find it interesting to read these two in close proximity...

Not this player's first tauric monstrosity of a character either.

How happy would your tauric halfling/blink dog player have been if his character was merely a curiosity, and his abilities rarely, if ever, had any meaningful in-game impact?

You mean, if I had taken away his unique abilities in the name of "balance"? He'd probably be disappointed and play something else.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I see no character "ideally suited to adventuring" - somehow, the characters in fiction, however unsuitable they may seem (yes, Bilbo, I am looking at you...) always seem to have something to contribute. So should characters in the game. More so given my own belief that the characters in the game are the "main characters", not bit players, and thus not be relegated to only an occasional contribution of value, much less than their fellow PC's.

I agree.

The thing is, it's easy for fiction to have these types of characters that "seem" unsuited for adventuring but eventually prove their worth. The reason fiction can do this is because it's perfectly valid to write a story where one character hides in the back of the party cowering because they are afraid of the monsters for 90% of a book only to slip on a magic ring and save the day at the end.

It's easy to write this story because there's no player who has a vested interest in that character being useful more often. No one's feelings are hurt that that character didn't get enough "screen time". The battles didn't get harder because there were more people in the group. The battles were always just as hard as the author needed them to be to make the plot interesting and the result of the combat was always certain because the author can write anything he/she wants. It's easy in a book or movie to write in such a way that the combat inept character never faces a challenge too powerful for him or has an amazing amount of luck that saves him whenever he gets in over his head.

In a D&D game, each attack has a die roll associated with it. Each hit has an amount of damage that everyone in the game can see. The results of the combat are likely weighted by the DM to get the results he'd like to see...however, they aren't guaranteed. The weighting works only as well as the math in the game and the experience of the DM. The die rolls are still random and a string of bad luck can turn even a battle that the PCs were nearly guaranteed to win into a TPK.

In fact, it's this weighting that is almost precisely the issue at hand. If a DM has to write an adventure and all he knows is there will be 5 people playing. A balanced game is fairly easy to weight for. Let's assume all the PCs will be doing between 4 and 16 points of damage each round(whether that's with spells, swords, songs, backstabs, or whatever...we don't care). Then we can say the average damage of a PC is 10. During an average round, 5 PCs do 50 damage. A monster with 100 hitpoints will survive 2 rounds and, let's say, does 20 damage a round.

So, if everyone in the party has more than 40 hitpoints, we can say that all of them are likely to survive this combat.

Of course, if one of them is a class that can't do any damage and another one spends his round smoking his pipe because he refuses to fight until he's smoked and another one comically slips and falls unconscious then the remaining 2 are up against an enemy that it now takes 5 rounds to defeat. Now, unless the PCs have more than 100 hitpoints, they are likely to die.

In fiction, it's really easy to resolve this situation. It turns out the 2 characters who are fighting as simply good enough to defeat the challenge. Monsters in fiction can die in one hit if the story demands it. In a D&D game, it doesn't work that way. The combat rule only factor in actual skill. Which means that Ogre isn't going to magically trip and fall onto the sword of the Hobbit who accidentally skewers it in a D&D game. Instead, the Hobbit will be pounded into the ground and die.

 

[Ratskinner]

Okay, but since there are no "balanced games" under the D&D name (or even under the rubric of D&D-like games), I don't know what your point is.

erm...whatever other faults it may have, I'm pretty sure "unbalanced" isn't one of 4e's. If anything, it might put a little too fine a point on balance by eliminating the valuable (for some) mechanical differences between classes, that is, making the balance too explicit.

Well now you're just crossing threads. To reference the ten years ago, I find the idea of creating a standardized play experience or publishing a specific adventure a complete non-issue when actually designing the game. It would be like designing the rules of football specifically to balance the Ravens and the Broncos, which could create very disappointing results when all the other teams start playing.

Not intending to cross threads, I just think its an applicable point. Its not (for WotC) about creating a standardized play experience, its about creating valuable products for the audience, and the concept holds across many types of product: adventures, supplements, monster manuals, etc. At for them, making that available and useful is a big concern (I would suppose.) The football analogy is lost on me. I don't see how the two pursuits are even remotely similar for these purposes.

As to the last point, I think class choice is invariably wrapped up in it. If you're playing a game set in the wilderness, druids are more useful. If you're in a city, druids are less useful. And endless list of similar contextual variables exists for each class. Trying to figure out what will be the most useful choice is part of what character creation in rpgs is all about.

Certainly. I would hope that individual DMs would consider their players' choices when designing a campaign (or vice versa, I suppose). Nonetheless, I think those choices are easier to make in a more balanced game.

 

[Manbearcat]

Seems to me like you're okay with things that are "loosely balanced", which was kind of my point. After all, the original 3e classes are loosely balanced, and though they need revision for any number of purposes, I don't see that we need a game where a completely disparate barbarian and bard have exactly equal utility. I doubt they do in 13th Age, though the game is still young.

Every point that I made in that post still stands. The designer noting that the game is "loosely balanced" in a FAQ is a far, far cry from your "The designers there pretty explicitly stated that they approached class balance in vague terms and that it wasn't the be all end all of design." And that isn't splitting hairs. They aren't even in the same ballpark. To be quite honest with you, 4e is "loosely balanced" as well. 4e had unshapely holes in its math at onset (since fixed), has various "in-role" classes that perform better than others at the primary role (while performing better at secondary roles), and has the same issue with feat disparity of power (and horrific synergies playing off of them) that 3.x has suffered from. The idea of rigidity of 4e balance and homogenization is truly absurd to those who have played it a lot. It codified. It siloed. It brought up the meek. It nerfed the all-powerful. It focused classes into combat roles. It opened up non-combat conflict resolution to all classes. Specifically, in the name of balance, 4e did 4 things that made for a better play experience for the people who enjoy it (of which 13th Age has 3 of them in its design framework):

1 - It gave Fighters specifically (and Martial characters generally) a primary focus (Defender) and gave them amazingly fun tools to achieve that. Fighters finally thoroughly dominate a battlefield and are a fun, interactive, tactically robust class. 13th Age has this.

2 - It removed the utter dominance of spellcasters (specifically Generalist Wizards) in all arenas of conflict from the mid-upper levels onward to Epic levels. It removed, leveled up, or siloed game-breaking spells while maintaining the thematic spirit of the Wizard and giving it new tools to perform a focused combat and out of combat role. 13th Age has this too.

3 - It created Broad Skills which allow every class more things to do per trained skill investment. Further, it has lots of siloed PC build tools (Backgrounds, Themes, Utility Powers, Skill Powers, Multi-class Feats, * Rituals, Martial Practices) that allow everyone equal access to game-changing resources to deploy in non-combat conflict resolution. You can play Sherlock Holmes the Fighter with a Theme, a Background and the investment of a Feat and a Utility Power. 13th Age has this too.

4 - * Ritual Casting (and Martial Practices) available to all classes. This is a huge one. Now any class has access to the big, game changing effects that were formally only available to spellcasters. Also particularly awesome is that there is a very solid martial form of them as well in Martial Practices. 13th Age does not have this and this is my only concern for balance amongst classes as noted in my review of 13th Age. I note that combat is going to be a little more swingy than 4e but my only real concern for balance in that game lies in Ritual Casting being available solely to spellcasters. I have no empirical evidence as of yet, but this is one of the great balancing efforts of 4e...one that enriched the game considerably and allowed for archetype diversity and spotlight sharing in non-combat challenges at an unprecedented level.

However, as I said in my prior post, the monster math is tight and explicit as is the encounter budgeting. The scaling of classes appears to be pretty uniform. There are a few heavily narrative abilities (Utility Spells, Swashbuckle, Storyteller) that are intended to be unbounded/non-hard-coded. However, throughout the book, the designers regularly speak to balance and the "balance-centric" reasons they did what they did, such as the aforementioned 2 above. 13th Age is not a swingy ruleset nor is it true that "the designers there pretty explicitly stated that they approached class balance in vague terms and that it wasn't the be all end all of design."

Goodness I hope you don't believe those are the actual numbers.

While somewhat arbitrarily chosen in their exact specificity in my post (just to display some rough math...which I actually thought was pretty charitable), I wholly endorse the tier system and used the exact same reasoning in my 2 long-standing 3.x games during that era. I also had a slew of houserules (including normalizing the Action Economy) and outcome-based math to hold things together from at 9th level onward.

Well now you're just crossing threads. To reference the ten years ago, I find the idea of creating a standardized play experience or publishing a specific adventure a complete non-issue when actually designing the game. It would be like designing the rules of football specifically to balance the Ravens and the Broncos, which could create very disappointing results when all the other teams start playing.

This last point here is not going to work out as support for your argument. In fact, you couldn't have possibly picked a worse sports league to display your point. Quite literally everything the NFL does is to achieve parity and competitive balance, engineering as much opportunity for playoff turnover from year to year as possible:

- Hard salary cap and hard salary floor to bottleneck the teams' expenditure on rosters, mandating that big markets can't overspend and small markets can't underspend.

- Yearly out of division scheduling set up so the best teams from the prior year have more (theoretical) difficult schedules than the teams that didn't make the playoffs.

- The draft set up such that the teams that weren't competitive the prior year draft correspondingly high (with respect to their futility) and thus retain (theoretically) better collegiate prospects.

- Compensatory picks in the draft for loss of free agents.

The National Football League is the poster child, the exemplar, of professional sports leagues enforcing parity and competitive balance by design.

 

[N'raac]

Doesn't it always? Again, I think if you run through a hundred different situations, the big guy with X amount of skill will come out on top more often than the small guy with the same amount of skill (realizing that now we're talking about levels in the same class, not different classes). But it won't be a hundred to zero.

This assumes the advantages of being big outweigh the advantages of being small. They don't have to. The big guy can have advantages which carry the day about half the time, and the small one can have advantages that result in him winning the other half.

It's worth noting that when we had a few bard PCs, I had ten players, and now I have three. I much prefer the three, but clearly a smaller party disincentivizes certain character types. Which is not a "bias", simply a natural consequence of a character type that is built on its ability to influence others.

I would suggest a larger party creates a greater bias towards multi-target buffs. No difference from incentivizing same. If I am biased in favour of bards, I will tend to incentivizing players to run them. If I am biased against them, I will tend to disincentivize them. The smaller party can only be an expression of your bias if you contribute to that smaller size (and, of course, your reasons for a desired group size may include numerous non-Bard related biases or reasons).

I imagine he would consult someone with high BAB for tactical decisions, since D&D has no skill for tactics that I'm aware of.

I suspect a PS would be appropriate, such as PS: Strategist/Tactician, PS: Military Leadership or perhaps lumping it under PS: Soldier. KS: History could also be relevant, as it subsumes great battles of the past, but I'd see it as more complementary than the base skill. Nothing in the rules suggests that a high BAB equates to a knowledge of larger scale strategy and tactics. A pit fighter would have a high BAB as high as an equal level military leader.

In any case, he'll consult each character when it makes sense to, and act rationally. He won't say to himself "gee that bard player hasn't gotten a lot of love this session" and slavishly attend to only his whims.

Neither will he logically consider the views of a loner with a warrior class equally valid to those of an experienced military leader of the same, or lower, level.

Sure, but all your ongoing stuff about bards being great influencers of people also rests in the investment of limited resources. It's fairly easy to make a bard that focuses on other things. As to intimidating, I do think it works no matter who has the ranks.

Absolutely. So Graak the 8 INT 6 CHA Barbarian with no social skills is unlikely to impress anyone with his knowledge of strategy and tactics (absent an investment in that type of knowledge), while Slick, the 20 CHA con artist with +18 Bluff might well trick the Duke into believing he is a wise and experienced tactition - at least until someone with actual skill and some credibility assesses his choices (or the army is dead, but then it's too late).

That would be another one of those ridiculous overstatements. Then again, said game would be every bit as valid as a "balanced" game where all character choices have been homogenized.

You said maybe more randomness is desirable. I provided a list of items which could be randomized. How many, and which, do you think would make for a better game? For myself, I like "character build" better than "random roll".

Which leads to you trying to take an orange and make it redder and taking an apple and trying to give it a rind to peel. I don't see any reason why different things have to be made the same, only that they need to be independently worthwhile.

Which would be a reason to assess a small fighter based on his own advantages and drawbacks, not force him to try to match the large fighter. Each plays to their own strengths, and there is no reason they cannot be equally viable in the game.

You mean, if I had taken away his unique abilities in the name of "balance"? He'd probably be disappointed and play something else.

No, I mean if he got all those unique abilities, but in a manner which did not allow him to use them to have any real impact on the game. Perhaps because his "blink" is treated more as a Dimension Door, so he is stunned for a round after its use. We allowed the character, but rendered it much less viable than the other characters in the group. He should be OK with that, since he chose that specific type of character, assuming being balanced against the other characters is not really an issue.

 

[pemerton]

That's the sort of strawman argument people keep bringing up. If, instead, the game lets you build a bard and offers you the chance to affect the game through persuasion and subterfuge, but makes doing that incrementally more difficult for you than it is for a barbarian to simply smash things, that can and does work.

Levels have never been the all-reaching measure of power that you seem to be implying.

<snip>

The only thing your level in a particular class really measures is how good you are at that particular class.

I've run these quotes together because I'm curious about something that crosses over the two issues.

In the model I take you to be putting forward, success with a bard in the game is incrementally more difficult than success with a barbarian in the game. Also, a level N+1 bard is incrementally more likely to be successful in the game than a level N bard. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the two increments are equal - so a level N+1 bard has about the same prospects of success as a level N barbarian. What's the objection to now rewriting the bard ability-by-level charts, reweighting the bard hit die, etc so that a revised level N bard has the same prospects of success as a leven N babarian?

Roughly speaking, this is what 3E set out to do (and what 4e largely achieved).

my games tend to involve more Knowledge checks than any other die roll, which you'd think would favor a bard. However, they also tend to involve a lot of outdoor travel and combat, and tend not to take place in urban settings. I see a lot of rangers, a fair number of druids, and the occasional barbarian (i.e. the nature-y classes). I don't see a lot of bards or rogues.

<snip>

no one plays in a vacuum and everyone's style favors something or other.

In my game, I favour conflict over exploration - and I also favour conflict between people as opposed to "man vs nature" conflict, which (i) I tend to find a bit tedious and (ii) I am not very good at GMing.

So my players generally know not to build PCs focused on exploration rather than conflict. I wouldn't expect a lot of AD&D-style druids in my game.

But that is different from suggesting that a druid is, or should be, incrementally weaker than (say) a cleric. The player of druid, by imposing his/her will on the game via situations involving nature and natural forces, should (in my view) be comparable in effectiveness to any other player. I just happen, in my game, not to provide so many of those sorts of situations.

I both agree and disagree here. For example, if the player has chosen to play a naïve character who has, to date, lead a sheltered life, trained in areas largely revolving around issues other than combat (the bookish knowledge-focused Wizard the Temple-sheltered Cleric) or even a non-tactical warrior role (a Battlerager, Ranger scout or soldier Fighter/Paladin whose role was to fight, not direct the tactics or strategy of the overall battle, and then plays the character as a tactical genius, I see that less as skill in the game and more as a poor ability to role play.

Similarly, if the choice was made to play a brute lacking in social skills, but suddenly he knows all the right things to say and do to get bonuses on interaction skills (rather than saying the wrong this as his personality and skill set would indicate), I again perceive poor role playing much more strongly than I see tactical skill.

Here we have different expectations. I expect a player to play his/her PC as its mechanics indicate, but not to deliberately gimp.

What I mean is, that if a barbarian PC build with Intimidate but not Diplomacy should have a hard time persuading the duke, then the mechanics should express and give effect to this. In my preferred approach, the player shouldn't have to introduce extra limitations/difficulties via roleplaying. In practice, the mechanical framework I'm familiar with that makes this happen is the skill-challenge style system of extended scene/conflict resolution.

It's easy to write this story because there's no player who has a vested interest in that character being useful more often. No one's feelings are hurt that that character didn't get enough "screen time". The battles didn't get harder because there were more people in the group.

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In a D&D game, each attack has a die roll associated with it. Each hit has an amount of damage that everyone in the game can see.

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if one of them is a class that can't do any damage and another one spends his round smoking his pipe because he refuses to fight until he's smoked and another one comically slips and falls unconscious then the remaining 2 are up against an enemy that it now takes 5 rounds to defeat. Now, unless the PCs have more than 100 hitpoints, they are likely to die.

In fiction, it's really easy to resolve this situation. It turns out the 2 characters who are fighting as simply good enough to defeat the challenge. Monsters in fiction can die in one hit if the story demands it. In a D&D game, it doesn't work that way. The combat rule only factor in actual skill. Which means that Ogre isn't going to magically trip and fall onto the sword of the Hobbit who accidentally skewers it in a D&D game. Instead, the Hobbit will be pounded into the ground and die.

This is why we need metagame builds like lazy warlords! - they have mechanical capabilites that aren't limited to actual skill, and so do permit things like accidentally skewering an ogre after it trips onto the hobbit's sword.

only 1d4 + 2 damage , so only 4.5 on average, a shortfall of 12.5 points, albeit with a better chance to hit, and to crit, and a better AC.

That hafling is only doing about 1/4 of the half-orc's damage. However you cut it, that's a weak fighter. (The increased AC is not going to make this halfling last 4 times as long, and thereby get in 4 times as many hits.)

Your ranged damage is better, but for me that goes to one of Majoru Oakheart's points - a ranged fighter is generally not soaking damage, which makes those d10 hit dice go to waste. (This was a bit of an issue in my 4e game for a while - the archer ranger was not taking damage and had no way to get his surges onto other PCs, which meant that the party as a whole was not getting the maximum benefit from its available mechanical resources.)

 

[N'raac]

Here we have different expectations. I expect a player to play his/her PC as its mechanics indicate, but not to deliberately gimp.

What I mean is, that if a barbarian PC build with Intimidate but not Diplomacy should have a hard time persuading the duke, then the mechanics should express and give effect to this. In my preferred approach, the player shouldn't have to introduce extra limitations/difficulties via roleplaying. In practice, the mechanical framework I'm familiar with that makes this happen is the skill-challenge style system of extended scene/conflict resolution.

I don't know that we are that far apart. I believe that the Barbarian's player should be aware that his ability to persuade (rather than intimidate) the Duke is limited at best, and not play the Barbarian as making eloquent speeches directed at persuading, rather than intimidating, the Duke and expecting his player eloquence to override his character's lack thereof. The mechanics will make this happen if the GM enforces them, simply by stating that the Barbarian rolls his diplomacy check at his usual -1 for having an 8 CHA.

That hafling is only doing about 1/4 of the half-orc's damage. However you cut it, that's a weak fighter. (The increased AC is not going to make this halfling last 4 times as long, and thereby get in 4 times as many hits.)

Agreed - the Halfling should not be trying to compete in the Half Orc's area of expertise, but build on his own strengths.

Your ranged damage is better, but for me that goes to one of Majoru Oakheart's points - a ranged fighter is generally not soaking damage, which makes those d10 hit dice go to waste. (This was a bit of an issue in my 4e game for a while - the archer ranger was not taking damage and had no way to get his surges onto other PCs, which meant that the party as a whole was not getting the maximum benefit from its available mechanical resources.)

Perhaps this is a flaw in the healing surge mechanic itself. As the Halfling takes limited damage, resources for healing can be directed to other characters, if the mechanics themselves allow those resources to be shared between the party members. Or perhaps, if halflings are a race designed to be best at ranged combat, a Halfling ability which allows them to apply their surges to other PC's should be considered.