No. I'm saying I as the DM am under an obligation to ensure some semblance of balance regardless of the desires of the players. I make sure the game is balanced. I don't expect the players to do so. That is irresponsible DMing in my opinion. If as a DM you can't assess rule problems and create a solution to balance them, then it is your fault when the game goes off the rails.
It is my obligation to provide the players with a clear idea of how they should structure their backgrounds to fit the story. If I provide them with no clear direction for their background and they create one that doesn't fit the story, whose fault is that? It is my fault as a DM, not the players.
The DM has an obligation to provide clear guidance for the player to create a character. If the DM fails to do so, the player has no obligation to seek to do so himself. I consider such mistakes my failure. I have had this happen before where a player makes something that doesn't fit and I've had to tell him to make something else. When that happens, I screwed up, not the player. Same as I had to modify some class capabilities and spells to balance them after the player used them. That is the fault of the game designer, not the player. It is my obligation to make appropriate changes to balance the game.
I tend to consider it the DM's responsibility to consider all these things prior to play. The player's only responsibility is to follow the guidelines outlined by the DM.
People are responsible for their fun. Not me, not the other players.
I'm responsible for utilizing the character backgrounds in the story in a manner that is entertaining and fun for the players. I'm responsible for providing an entertaining and fun adventure experience.
Let me give you a clear example that occurs in my group quite often. One player likes to read the rules, read the message boards, and build a highly effective character he enjoys. Another player doesn't read the rules much, doesn't spend much time to build an effective character, and finds the min-maxing annoying. Which one do you side with? Player 1 or player 2? Player 2 has the option to do what player 1 does, but he chooses not to. Would it be fair to force player 1 to stop doing what he finds fun about the game? I don't think so. He's likes the game. He likes to spend his free time reading up on it. He likes to try things he's read up on. It makes player 2 unhappy.
I don't feel it is the responsibility of either player to rectify the situation. Player 1 is doing what he's doing to have fun. If player 2 doesn't enjoy it, he can either start reading up on the game as player 1 does or find another group. I'm not going to worry about taking responsibility for his lack of willingness to maximize his character.
Now take these two players and carry it over to the group. What if each player has a different reason they're not having fun? Then what? Do I rewrite the entire rule system until it is fun for everyone? Hardly my responsibility.
This isn't my experience at all. But hey, I'm not one of those GMs that has runs tables for a hundred different players. Probably only about twenty people.It's far too difficult to try to appease everyone's idea of fun.
I mentioned my Rule #2 being, "The character must be fun for everyone." However, Rule #1 is, "The character must work in a group." And hell, Rule #3 is "The character must have a reason to be with the party."I try to ensure that the party is capable of working together. If a player makes a character that isn't interested in working as a team, they have no real reason to be there.
This is my experience. And this is why I've had players with disruptive tendencies curb that behavior at my table. Because if they don't, they'd be gone.If someone runs a good game, a player will put up with a lot.
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People are responsible for their fun. Not me, not the other players. Let me give you a clear example that occurs in my group quite often. One player likes to read the rules, read the message boards, and build a highly effective character he enjoys. Another player doesn't read the rules much, doesn't spend much time to build an effective character, and finds the min-maxing annoying. Which one do you side with? Player 1 or player 2? Player 2 has the option to do what player 1 does, but he chooses not to. Would it be fair to force player 1 to stop doing what he finds fun about the game? I don't think so. He's likes the game. He likes to spend his free time reading up on it. He likes to try things he's read up on. It makes player 2 unhappy.
I don't feel it is the responsibility of either player to rectify the situation. Player 1 is doing what he's doing to have fun. If player 2 doesn't enjoy it, he can either start reading up on the game as player 1 does or find another group. I'm not going to worry about taking responsibility for his lack of willingness to maximize his character.
Now take these two players and carry it over to the group. What if each player has a different reason they're not having fun? Then what? Do I rewrite the entire rule system until it is fun for everyone? Hardly my responsibility.
IMO, it becomes, over time, unavoidable for the group to become responsible for each other's fun because each other's fun depends on a particular play style which a given group will eventually settle on if the group is going to be long term stable.
I'd say this is also something of a shift in attitude from the mid-1990s when 2E was mid-life.
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D&D suffered from a lot of elitism from people playing other systems that seemed to feel (sometimes outright said) it was a "beginner" system and not for "serious roleplayers" (which seemed to be a code word for LARPers and.. well, that's another story. Balance complaints, however, were unheard of.
Yet oddly enough I used to talk to other D&D players (and RPGers more generally) about balance issues in games and systems.They were definitely unheard of.
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MMOs did not yet exist, so "balance" when it was discussed still referred to the balance of a particular campaign (you might remember the term Monty Haul), and whether a system was balanced wasn't a concept that even occurred to anyone to talk about.
My only quibble with this is over the nature of the "predictability". The outcomes will be mechanically fairly predictable - but the fiction associated with those outcomes can be as varies as the players and GM like (especially when it comes not non-combat resolution).Nowhere in the history of never and/or ever has Ikea (and its instructions) stopped anyone from drilling a hole 3/4 of an inch lower because they thought the result would look better.
All "select DC by level" verbiage in 4e is assuming you wish to create a dramatic situation with fairly predictable outcome with regards to the PC/party's general power. It is a guidebook saying : "If you use these numbers, there is a good chance the game will work in this* way."
Show me a passage, sentence or whatever that tells you to base the actually difficulty ratings (actual numbers) on the adventure
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the basis in the 4e books always starts with character level.
What does the adventure mean here?I'm not basing my DC's on the level of the PC's in my game, I'm designing an adventure, sometimes on the fly, that uses the DC's for a party of 10th level characters... and my PC's just happen to be 10th level characters... but they're not what I'm basing my DC's on... I'm basing them on the level of the adventure I am creating... for my 10th level PC's
The only difference between 4e and earlier editions is that in 4e they actually gave you numerical ranges for determining difficulties instead of letting the DM try to guess what would be appropriate for that level of an adventure.
5e doesn't have "level appropriate" DCs. Instead it has "level appropriate" damage ranges, which is why monsters in 5e have CRs but some non-combat situations don't. (But presumably some do: in deciding how much damage a PC suffers from a blizzard, or falling down a mountainside, doesn't the 5e DMG provide advice on level-appropriate damage?)Point me to the section in 4e about sandbox play and how to set it up
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I use 5e there are no DC's for the level of my PC's
In addition to the point you were making in this passage, I think it also feeds into a more general issue with "objective" DCs - namely, that they are not self-evident. The notion of a mountain being Hard vs Very Hard for some (notional) "ordinary NPC" is not something that can just be read of the world (either the real one or the imagined one). The GM has to make stuff up, or alternatively the game designers have to make stuff up and provide lists of DCs.OK, then explain to us how its different then in 5e. How there's some mysterious procedure by which the DM, blind to any possibility that he's got an actual party of characters to cater to, simply divines how hard it would 'really be' to pick a magical lock, or dispel a demon? Or even climb a mountain.
What you say about setting "objective" DCs may be true of 5e. It's not true in general - for instance, two of the systems I've mentioned a bit upthread (Rolemaster and Burning Wheel) have lists of objective DCs for a much broader range of tasks than opening doors and locks and climbing walls.Its not the objective DCs themselves that leads to grittiness, it's the fact that objective DCs are so subjective that your chances of success are unfathomable. Aside from a handful of fixed, obvious challenges(ie doors, locks, walls) everything else is set difficulty at the whim of the GM based on his subjective feelings at that second. 99.9% of the time, that judgement is going to give a DC that is wildly to difficult for the task at hand even tho it is ostensibly based on objective reality of the fiction.
On the lack of play example, I have no real hypothesis.What I find frustrating it (what seems to me) an urge to engage on the technical matters of PC building (and related) but (for whatever reason) there is resistance to vigorous, technical evaluation of system and GMing techniques (including posting, what I feel are the most constructive, play examples). Further, there is (what seems to me as arbitrary) admonishing of it when folks (such as myself) do try to engage in technical details of system and GMing techniques. Again, I don't know if it is because there is a very strong undercurrent of "it is more art than engineering" or "system doesn't matter because good games are mostly born on the back of utilization of strong GM Force" or if it is something else entirely.
I don't share you first theory - I don't think that GMs have particularly strong personalities compared to other people I know (both personally and professionally) for whom analysis is part and parcel of engaging with any sort of activity.My theory is two-fold. One is that GMs have strong personalities and I just think things get taken too personally, out of context, delivered insensitively, and so on. In response, GMs are unlikely to just accept it and move on because of said strong personalities, so things keep going down the road less constructive.
The other is that people are too tied up with the need to fight the edition fight
My group tends to assume the opposite on both scores. Players are expected to build their PCs having in mind the fun of others, thinking about how their PCs might fit into the bigger picture of the game and the play experience. They are also expected to build keeping balance in mind. This isn't appropriate during actual action resolution - I find there is nothing quite as insipid in RPGing as having to hold back your PC so as to avoid overshadowing/dominating - but PC build, being a pre-play rather than play stage of the game is precisely the right point to have regard to balance issues.Players are under no obligation to build characters with the fun of others in mind. They are under no obligation to build characters with balance in mind.
I thought most posters on ENworld were GMs. Isn't there some survey data about this?The reason there is not much talk from a GMing viewpoint on general forums is the majority of posters are players.
To some degree everyone already does this though. You talk about limiting optimisation to ensure balance. Aren't you doing that to ensure everyone at the table is having fun? You are adding house rules in order to limit abuse in order to make sure everyone has a good time. That's just DMing 101. It's pretty basic stuff. The difference is simply one of scale.
Now, if the group's tastes are all so different that everyone is annoyed by someone else's fun in the game, then that group is dysfunctional and headed for a break up before too long. Too many competing interests and, barring some outside factors (only game in town for example) it's pretty likely that this group has a half life usually reserved for small animals on a brightly moonlit night.
And, of course, there has to be willingness to compromise. Everyone has to accept, to some degree, different play styles. Like your two players, one who is an optimiser and the other isn't but the issue isn't large enough to cause either to outright quit. And most tables, over time, will settle on a fairly middle of the road approach. The optimiser maybe tones it down a touch or the non-optimiser picks up the game a bit. Depends on the DM really. If the DM consistently builds encounters to challenge the optimiser, then the Timmy is likely going to be very frustrated and eventually leave the group. OTOH, if the DM's encounters are somewhere in between, then both players are probably content enough to stay.
But, group building, just like any social interaction, is something of a weeding process. Stable groups will generally share play styles and it becomes circular. People with similar play styles will build stable groups, which stay together longer, which causes the group to further meld their play styles together. Those whose play styles are too different will simply move on.
Wow, not sure where I'm going with this. This kinda got away from me. No idea what my point is here, other than, IMO, it becomes, over time, unavoidable for the group to become responsible for each other's fun because each other's fun depends on a particular play style which a given group will eventually settle on if the group is going to be long term stable.