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

[Majoru Oakheart]

We agree much of the time, but one of the distinguishing features of 3e was its jettisoning of most balancing factors which kept spellcasters in check.

I agree. I also normally agree with Hussar but have to disagree with this one...to a point. He's right that most of the balance issues in 2e came from certain choices being so much more powerful than other choices. Pretty much every fighter dual wielded because it was so much better than everyone else. They were the kings of damage and if you simply wanted to do damage you'd be one. But then going up levels meant nothing because you never got anything important except hitpoints and THAC0. They WERE front loaded.

However, Wizards in 2e were the nuclear bombs of the game. They had the ability to take out 30 enemies in one fireball when rolling only average on their spell damage. They could only cast one or two per day but when they cast it, they singlehandedly defeated the encounter. Unfortunately, they tended to get worse and worse as they went up levels. Nearly every enemy had enough hitpoints to survive their (now capped) damaging spells. All of them made their saves 90% of the time now, so Wizards did even less damage than before.

He's right that in a way 3e balanced things. It smoothed out the curve for both Wizards and Fighters. Fighters actually got things as they went up levels and Wizards didn't lose power as they went up levels. The problem is that Wizards got so much more from 3e than Fighters did that it made them even more unbalanced than before.

Material components are another big one. 1e and 2e, you needed to track them. 3e, you're solid as long as you have a very metagamey "pouch", which was basically Bugs Bunny's back pocket of whatever you needed.

Meh, material components are one of those things that is hard to classify. We never used them, even in 2e. We had a couple of DMs who attempted to enforce them and everyone kind of refused to play a Wizard in their campaigns. Keeping track of each spell component was just a pain in the butt. I think a couple of people said "How much does it cost at the local store to buy 100 uses of every spell I have in my spellbook? 100gp? Alright, I pay that and I'm marking it down. I'll mark off each charge as I use them." and then didn't have to buy more spell components for the rest of the game.

I'm fairly certain that situations like that are what eventually caused WOTC to say "You are assumed to bring enough spell components with you".

In 1e, you get interrupted if you're hit during casting, even for 1 point. In 3e, you need to act at a specific moment with a readied action and your target gets a chance to resist with a skill check.

So I'm not sure where you're coming from, basically.

Yeah, Wizards got interrupted WAY more before. After 3rd level or so, it's impossible to interrupt a 3e caster. Though, I have to say that in 2e it was still extremely rare. The enemies had to get close enough to the Wizard to hit him and then with speed factors, it almost always ended up with the spell being cast before the attack successfully interrupted it.

I'm not sure about 1e, however, since I never played it.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Yeah, Wizards got interrupted WAY more before. After 3rd level or so, it's impossible to interrupt a 3e caster. Though, I have to say that in 2e it was still extremely rare. The enemies had to get close enough to the Wizard to hit him and then with speed factors, it almost always ended up with the spell being cast before the attack successfully interrupted it.

I'm not sure about 1e, however, since I never played it.

I'm not all that familiar with 2e spell casting times, but in1E, the higher level the spell, the easier it is to get interrupted. Meteor Shower for example, has a casting time of 9, which, when added to the initiative score, can end up taking a round and a half. One arrow, rock, etc can ruin it. And don't forget, the MU cannot even use his dex bonus to ac. A fighter is wise to use a dagger or even a fist to disrupt spells in melee.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I'm not all that familiar with 2e spell casting times, but in1E, the higher level the spell, the easier it is to get interrupted. Meteor Shower for example, has a casting time of 9, which, when added to the initiative score, can end up taking a round and a half. One arrow, rock, etc can ruin it. And don't forget, the MU cannot even use his dex bonus to ac. A fighter is wise to use a dagger or even a fist to disrupt spells in melee.

Yeah, it was similar. It's been too long to remember exactly, but from memory each side declared their actions then you rolled a d10 per side and added your speed factors. So, it happened often that the enemies had to declare their actions first so they had no idea if the Wizard was going to cast a spell at all.

Then there was the unwritten rule that enemies didn't just rush right past the front line fighters, so they always ran up to the fighters and attacked. Often this was because the fighting took place in a hallway and the fighters blocked the corridor. Other times DMs just thought it was kind of stupid that fighters would just watch enemies run right past them without stopping them or that enemies would see big, beefy fighters and run right past them only to show their backs to them. Given there were no rules for stopping anyone from running past anyone else it was just an unwritten rule that you didn't have enemies run to the back line. A couple of our DMs tried it and they just got blamed for being jerks by whoever was playing the wizard. After all, what could you actually do as a wizard if the DM had all the monsters rush you every combat? Not much at all. You had too few hitpoints and so low(high) an AC that everyone pretty much hit you and killed you the first round of every combat if the DM used this tactic.

Even with the unwritten rule, it was pretty much thrown out the window as soon as the wizard did something flashy or powerful to draw attention to themselves. Then we proceed to actually trying to disrupt the wizard. If you said "I attack with my longsword, which I believe had a Speed Factor of 5 or something like that and the wizard was casting a level 3 spell, you each rolled a d10 and added your respective numbers. The wizard always had the advantage of a lower speed factor unless they were casting a 5th level spell or higher. Given I almost never played a 2e game where we got to high enough level to regularly cast 5th level spells or higher, it was never a big deal. Even if you used a dagger, I believe the SF was 3, so it was on par or worse than most low level spells. However, given the d10, it often didn't matter. So many times someone would say "I use my dagger to disrupt the spell" and roll a 7 while the wizard rolled a 2 and easily finished casting first. Or worse, the wizard would roll a 10 and the enemy would roll a 2 and attack before the wizard even STARTED casting the spell(given the damage had to be done between the roll on the dice and the speed factor of the spell).

 

[pemerton]

There's numerous balancing mechanisms in 1e for magic. The problem is, a lot of them are nitpicky and labor-intensive (spellbook pages, material components, etc.) so they were broadly ignored by quite a few tables.

I agree. I have the same response to the intermittent suggestion that encumbrance is a balancing factor in 3E.

Spell resistance is an interesting (imo) case in point. In 1e, it was based on (iirc) a 10th level caster.

11th level (= name level for a MU).

Intra-party balance is directly important to me because of my actual gameplay experiences with 3e and its offshoots - most notably Arcana Evolved.

I thought AU/AE was meant to tone down some of the balance problems, not exacerbate them.

 

[Obryn]

I thought AU/AE was meant to tone down some of the balance problems, not exacerbate them.

Um yeah, that was the press. It basically did the opposite.

 

[pemerton]

Um yeah, that was the press. It basically did the opposite.

Because of the spell weaving and the less-than-fully Vancian?

 

[Obryn]

Because of the spell weaving and the less-than-fully Vancian?

It was a combination of a lot of factors, but yes, those were among them!

Cook's approach was basically to make some (not all) individual spells a little powered-down.  For example, there weren't many save-or-dies.  However, there were plenty of save-or-suck spells which serve essentially the same purpose in-game.  And the spells that "just" did damage?  Well, I'll get to those, but they were generally more powerful than in 3e; take the Sorcerous Blast, a flexible-element or -energy fireball look-alike with a longer range that forces a central target to save twice.

Spellcasters were basically a 3e Sorcerer/Wizard hybrid not all too dissimilar to how Next's casters operate, but with a whole lot more spells at their disposal.  What's more, they can trade a higher-level spell for several lower-level spells, or several lower-level spells for a higher-level spell meaning their flexibility was kind of immense.

This also meant that all of their save-or-suck spells could be spammed more or less infinitely.  And because Quickening spells was relatively cheap (still a feat, but you just used 2 same-level spell slots instead of one L+4 slot and you could do it on the fly) the situation was pretty darn dire.

 

You also have a bunch of casters with generally higher attributes than in a normal game.  And for the cost of a level, they could fly indefinitely, so there's that.

 

But really, the biggest offense to caster balance by far were the feats.  Two really stick in my mind.  The first was Runic Spell, which looks unassuming but really isn't.  Now, it's a full-round spell with this template, so there's that, but it forces a target to use their Intelligence modifier to resist the spell.  Think of all the monster stat blocks you see, and imagine that Intelligence was used for all the saves.

The second were feats like Acid (maybe Caustic) Spell. Remember how I said there were better fireballs?  Well throw this template on top of an acid spell (for a cheap material component) and you get to stun your target for 1 round per 20 points of damage. Lightning forced a second save for (iirc) a 2-round stun.

So while a few things were scaled back slightly, Monte Cook's desire to give spellcasters oodles of options ended up giving back more than he took away.  The balance is really and truly dire, and the non-caster classes weren't buffed in any significant way to keep up with full casters.

 

[billd91]

Then there was the unwritten rule that enemies didn't just rush right past the front line fighters, so they always ran up to the fighters and attacked. Often this was because the fighting took place in a hallway and the fighters blocked the corridor. Other times DMs just thought it was kind of stupid that fighters would just watch enemies run right past them without stopping them or that enemies would see big, beefy fighters and run right past them only to show their backs to them. Given there were no rules for stopping anyone from running past anyone else it was just an unwritten rule that you didn't have enemies run to the back line. A couple of our DMs tried it and they just got blamed for being jerks by whoever was playing the wizard. After all, what could you actually do as a wizard if the DM had all the monsters rush you every combat? Not much at all. You had too few hitpoints and so low(high) an AC that everyone pretty much hit you and killed you the first round of every combat if the DM used this tactic.

I think it's not merely that there were no rules for stopping anyone from dashing past the line of fighters to get to the squishier wizard in the back - but that there were no rules for bypassing the front line either. Take 1e's description of melee combat, for example. What could PCs do? The movement rules describe moving up to engage but don't address shuffling about in combat very much. That was more the job of the thief who hid and spent a couple of rounds moving around the periphery, staying in the shadows, until he was in position to strike. So I would argue it's not any kind of de facto gentlemen's agreement not to end run around the front line because there was no way to stop it. There was no clear way to do it by the rules either.

This may be an instance in which there are real differences in evolving player behavior depending on how detailed and comprehensive the rules are written. Less defined rules may theoretically open the door to anything, but end up being bounded by narrative-oriented conventions, while more defined rules lead to undermining the narrative roles of the PCs in favor of rule exploitation.

 

[billd91]

We agree much of the time, but one of the distinguishing features of 3e was its jettisoning of most balancing factors which kept spellcasters in check.

I agree that many balancing mechanisms for spellcasters in the 1e/2e rules ended up cut from 3e. I suspect 3e desigers were responding to reports of how D&D was actually played by groups on the ground and what was reported as not being very fun. How many veteran 1e/2e players can honestly say that they meticulously tracked material components? Spell memorization times? Quite a few did, I'm sure, but I'd also bet that a whole lot did not do so as well. Plus, using the chance to know a spell could lead to a wizard being unable to cast some serious bread-and-butter spells. How fun is that? How fun is tracking a long casting time? My guess is they dispensed with a lot of the complaints players had but didn't sufficiently redress what happens when they're gone - particularly once they added cyclical initiative (which has its good points from a gamist mechanic point of view, but compounds this particular set of problems).

The life lesson I take away from this example, and a couple of prominent others, is to be wary of the "unfun" complaint when it comes to some aspects of the game. There may be good reasons why a few things are "unfun" as some players put it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think it's not merely that there were no rules for stopping anyone from dashing past the line of fighters to get to the squishier wizard in the back - but that there were no rules for bypassing the front line either. Take 1e's description of melee combat, for example. What could PCs do? The movement rules describe moving up to engage but don't address shuffling about in combat very much. That was more the job of the thief who hid and spent a couple of rounds moving around the periphery, staying in the shadows, until he was in position to strike. So I would argue it's not any kind of de facto gentlemen's agreement not to end run around the front line because there was no way to stop it. There was no clear way to do it by the rules either.

This may be an instance in which there are real differences in evolving player behavior depending on how detailed and comprehensive the rules are written. Less defined rules may theoretically open the door to anything, but end up being bounded by narrative-oriented conventions, while more defined rules lead to undermining the narrative roles of the PCs in favor of rule exploitation.

I'd point out here that it wouldn't have been a case of dashing past the front lines in 1e, but a case of dashing through them. You had hirelings and henchmen, and it was 3 PCs or hirelings to a 10ft wide corridor rather than 2. Once you were engaged disengaging was painful and unpleasant - AoOs were nastier in AD&D than either 3e or 4e.