D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[dd.stevenson]

Did you cut-and-paste this from a previous post? It sounds like I've read this before.

A lot of these edition war threads are the same talking points repeated again and again. But, I've never seen anyone copying and pasting. It's easy to check.

 

[pemerton]

I GM for a lot of people. Running 3e I sometimes experienced a kind
of whiny obnoxious self-entitled behaviour.

<snip>

I suspect there is an actual system issue at work there. 3e kinda promises your PC will be a Big Damn Hero, but the mechanics don't really support that, or only very erratically.

a mismatch between expectation and reality is, in my experience, the single biggest driver for hardcore character optimisation that isn't simply a game played for the fun of it

<snip>

it's this sense of betrayal at there being a broken promise, combined with the fact that there is something you can do to get the character you were promised that leads to some forms of munchkin behaviour. This, incidentally, is something used by a lot of modern RPGs - when people don't feel they are fighting the rules to do what they want what they want tends to be relatively modest so you don't actually need rules to rein them in for this.

Interesting hypotheses!

I don't GM enough new people in a range of systems to have experienced this myself, but it seems intuitively plausible.

 

[Hussar]

I sincerely doubt that Gary Gygax invented hit points

Really? How many games have you seen prior to 1975 that used anything like hit points to measure damage to an individual.

Outside of mini war gaming and even those rarely track hp on an individual level.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Really? How many games have you seen prior to 1975 that used anything like hit points to measure damage to an individual.

Outside of mini war gaming and even those rarely track hp on an individual level.

Which was kind of my point. I am not a historian of 1970's wargaming, but I think it's likely that some similar form of health tracking appeared well before auspices of using it in a roleplaying game, and I think the intent behind it was no different than the intent behind any other piece of wargame mechanics. Whether the term "hit point" was used as such or whether it worked exactly the same way isn't the point. I'd buy that D&D popularized the idea to some extent, and certainly revised and change it.

 

[Bluenose]

Really? How many games have you seen prior to 1975 that used anything like hit points to measure damage to an individual.

Outside of mini war gaming and even those rarely track hp on an individual level.

Naval wargaming. That's where hit points came from. It might not be practical to keep track of the damage status of all 920 members of the Cohors XX Palymrenorum Equitata Milenaria, but it's possible to keep track of individual damage totals for HMS Victory and the other 32 British ships at Trafalgar. Individual ships rather than individual people, of course.

 

[Iosue]

Which was kind of my point. I am not a historian of 1970's wargaming, but I think it's likely that some similar form of health tracking appeared well before auspices of using it in a roleplaying game, and I think the intent behind it was no different than the intent behind any other piece of wargame mechanics. Whether the term "hit point" was used as such or whether it worked exactly the same way isn't the point. I'd buy that D&D popularized the idea to some extent, and certainly revised and change it.

Well, there are hit points and then there are hit points, but you can see the evolution in how hit points in D&D came about through the history of D&D. In Chainmail they were literally hit points: how many hits you could take. Regular soldier, you could take 1 hit, just like most wargame units. Hero? You could take 4 hits. Superhero? You could take 8. In OD&D we see a similar design, with a bit of added variance. Damage rolls are d6. Hit Dice are also d6, so on average, it was a similar situation as in Chainmail, but allowed for lucky and unlucky hits.

Hit points as we know them don't come into play until the Greyhawk supplement, when finally each class gets assigned a distinct hit die, with the result of a new die added to the total each level. This also introduced variable weapon damage, further obscuring the basic "1 hit vs. 1 HD".

This truly was an innovation in gaming, because previous to that wargames used either a 1 hit = 1 kill system, or, if you were playing something like a naval game, would use hit location. Arneson's original Blackmoor game used hit location, rather than hp, because that was generally the done thing when you didn't want 1 hit = 1 kill.

 

[pemerton]

I am not a historian of 1970's wargaming, but I think it's likely that some similar form of health tracking appeared well before auspices of using it in a roleplaying game

Naval wargaming. That's where hit points came from.

For both warships, and military units, it makes rough sense to track :health" in terms of attrition: it's a crude approximation, but it makes sense to think of wearing down a regiment via casualties, or putting enough holes in a warship's hull to sink it.

But once you apply the same mechanic to an individual complex organism like a person, the model breaks down completely, and at that point I don't think it's intended to be a simulation of health at all.
[MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION] described the evolution of the mechanic within Chainmail/D&D upthread - and when a Superhero can take 8 hits, it's not supposed that his/her "meat" is being carved off. S/he is enduring those blows that would fell a mere mortal, whether through preternatural toughness or divine providence or something similar, until eventually a telling blow is struck. Which is already pushing hp into the sort of meta-realm that Gygax would go on to explicitly describe in his PHB and DMG.

 

[Manbearcat]

The ability of players to shape the campaign? I would call that "playing D&D" or "not playing a railroad game". But if I needed a term to distinguish it from non-rail games, maybe "player empowerment"? This could be either via traditional open campaign sandboxing, or metagame ability to shape the in-world reality, or just the GM responding to player input.

I would use "player empowerment" here as well. What I was trying to convey above (with "if I was forced to use") was basically the fact that I think (a) the term "player entitlement" is (at least in part) a confused term and (b) a proxy for "player empowerment" (as its component parts lead to that).

I thought entitlements were things you were entitled to receive, not things you were able to do? So eg welfare payments for the unemployed are entitlements. A strict application of the original 4e treasure parcel system would be a player entitlement, as would 3e wealth-by-level, if treated as something the players are 'owed'. Or if the players are entitled to a certain amount of XP per session or per encounter. Or if the players are entitled that the GM stick to on-level XP budgets when building encounters.

In terms of D&D it's a concept that emerged in 3e and carried over to 4e. It didn't exist in 1e, or 2e AFAIK, since AD&D PCs clearly weren't entitled to anything except some pretty minimal combat XP.

I think the two (entitled to receive and things you can then do as result) are inextricably linked in RPGs as they correlate fictional positioning. For instance, in AD&D2e you are "entitled" (using the pejorative nature of that word as a framing mechanism for this dialogue seems pretty instructive to me, to be quite honest) to spells if you're a spellcaster or weapon spec/heavy armor/great thac0/great saves if you're a fighter. You didn't "earn" these things. You get them just by showing up and making a character. Is this "player entitlement" to the fictional positioning of your character that the game defaults to?

I think what it boils down to (as much as it can boil down to anything) is that 4e's "defaults" (specifically the mechanical elements that added horsepower) changed what some felt D&D's default PC fictional positioning was; eg from "zero" (to hero) to instead "hero" (to big damn hero). By derivative of that default, PC fictional positioning (and the mechanical elements that induce it), the level of "player empowerment" was changed. From there, it is reasoned (incorrectly by my estimation) that "power" in an RPGing session is a zero-sum game and, accordingly, the GM lost some power. I've never remotely felt that. If anything, due to the framework, I'm more empowered than ever to focus all of my mental overhead on the things I enjoy most and spend table handling time on resolving conflicts (mechanically and then by way of fidelity to the fictional positioning surrounding that mechanical resolution) that matter to myself and my players.

 

[Imaro]

I GM for a lot of people. Running 3e I sometimes experienced a kind
of whiny obnoxious self-entitled behaviour. I have never experienced this while running 4e.
I suspect there is an actual system issue at work there. 3e kinda promises your PC will be a Big Damn Hero, but the mechanics don't really support that, or only very erratically. Eg you can be Save or Died/Save or Sucked very easily, or just wasted by a x3 greataxe crit*. There's a lot of bathos in 3e.

It's funny the minute a DM steps outside the XP guidelines or even sometimes if a fight turned out harder than the players felt it should have been "for 4e"... I've seen this behavior from 4e players. On another note doesn't 3e promise Zero to Hero play... as opposed to Big Damn Hero? I feel like 4e is the only edition who promised this as the default (from level 1 onward).

 

[Savage Wombat]

It's funny the minute a DM steps outside the XP guidelines or even sometimes if a fight turned out harder than the players felt it should have been "for 4e"... I've seen this behavior from 4e players. On another note doesn't 3e promise Zero to Hero play... as opposed to Big Damn Hero? I feel like 4e is the only edition who promised this as the default (from level 1 onward).

I would like to propose the possibility that this might not be a 4e thing, but a modern/younger gamer thing - maybe players who came to D&D from video games and WoW are more prone to this behavior, and that it's not caused by the rules system at all.

It could even be that 4e (and even 3e) are designed for that kind of play is because of the kind of players they were seeing.

Just a thought.