What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Ovinomancer]

No, I just dislike communicating in long, multi quote posts.

That's okay, I don't like responding to broken up posts.

 

[Tony Vargas]

From my point of view, the contrast is this: if the unit of balance is the encounter (scene), then it is possible to allow events to unfold as they do in accordance with the logic of play, complications, framing, etc, without this having any implications for mechanical balance across PCs (which is a feature of a mechanically heavy system like D&D).

Sure - but if you have a hard-reset between encounters, like the last ed of Gamma World did - then events might unfold a little oddly, too. If your recent experiences & challenges make no impression on you, at all, that's likely to be at odds with some those (or other) elements, too, no?

If the unit of balance is the adventuring day which is understood to include multiple encounters (eg 6 to 8 in 5e), then the dynamic becomes different. The GM has to have sketched out a sequence of events in advance, or at least maintain the "threat" of such, in order to constrain the use of resources by players whose PCs are on a longer rather than shorter recharge cycle. As well as this implication for pacing and expectations around pacing/framing, there is also another consequence: players who withhold the use of resources out of concern for subsequent encounters which don't occur don't get to use those resources, which leaves those elements of the player archetype unrealised.

True, it's a constraining approach, but it does allow for some tension between urgency & preparation.

On one extreme, pacing is irrelevant to play as well as balance, at the other, pacing is dictated to the degree that you don't (or do, in the case of the classic 5MWD) want to wreck balance. Ideally, depending on exactly what you're going for, you'd want the potential for tension in pacing, so pacing has a meaningful, but not overwheliming impact on difficulty, for instance, without the worry of significant imbalances among the PCs, as well.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I’ve scanned this thread and the other – I admit, I don’t have the patience to read upwards of 4000 posts – but I’ve gotten a general sense of the arguments articulated.

I advocate for worldbuilding. I reject efforts to separate worldbuilding from “setting development” or “adventure preparation”; these are artificial divisions on a continuum of creativity.

Worldbuilding is an art. Like any art, it can be crap. It can be predictable, derivative, onanistic garbage. Bad GMs can over-identify with their own creations to such an extent that it negatively impacts the experience of players at the table; that’s fine, but it doesn’t reflect on the value of worldbuilding itself which, as an art, I maintain is an intrinsic good.

Worldbuilding can hone the eye for verisimilitude. It demands that we investigate history, sociology, anthropology, religion, language, myth and culture in the quest for authenticity. The act of creation – or sub-creation, if one wants to adopt a particular Tolkienesque lens – is rewarding and exhilarating.

How can creative endeavor ever be bad?

Only the finished effort can be judged as bad – and that is an aesthetic judgment.

What is worldbuilding *for* ?

What is art for?

 

[Maxperson]

I'm assuming you mean abilities that have limited in encounter usages that would then recharge daily rather than by encounter. You could, but then you'd be placing a strong incentive on daily encounter design to only have that many encounters a day, which would then pretty much be encounter balanced despite the daily recharge.

You wouldn't need to provide the same number of encounters in a given day. All you need to do is occasionally have that many encounters. Players won't nova it all away and risk a TPK if they know that sometimes a day will be encounter heavy. They will self-limit during the days with fewer encounters.

 

[Maxperson]

I am talking about how 1e and 2E balances classes over the campaign Magic Users started out weak, but had some truly powerful abilities later, when they reached higher levels. Classes even advanced at different rates. That is all about balance over the campaign.

5th level. Once a wizard hit 5th level he was gold, especially if you were playing 2e and specialized. 7th and you were platinum. Higher levels were not required for the power to come out.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You wouldn't need to provide the same number of encounters in a given day. All you need to do is occasionally have that many encounters. Players won't nova it all away and risk a TPK if they know that sometimes a day will be encounter heavy. They will self-limit during the days with fewer encounters.

That's DM overhead, though -- the DM now has to plan and push encounters onto the party to find a reason to prevent players from using their encounter powers during encounters based on the possibility that they need to reserve some for later. I've already mentioned that as a workaround for day/encounter balance issues. The problem I have with that is that it falls entirely on the DM's shoulders to make the encounter budget work. For me, there's already a lot I have to work on as DM, anything that adds to that overhead (like balancing the game through encounter pace planning) isn't something I'm keen on.

Also, this concept doesn't work in sandbox play, where the players set their own pace. In the threads on encounter pacing here, this is a common theme -- how do I allow the players their freedom to choose while making adventuring days balance against the different recovery mechanisms?

Regardless, we're talking about how to work around issues caused by ability recovery mechanics, which is much better than if classes are balanced in a given edition. It's addressing a way to analyze games. I think there's a lot of value in looking at how games govern character ability recovery, as this gives strong indications as to what kinds of play that game is well suited for. D&D through 3rd used daily recovery almost exclusively, and the style of play best supported is the more traditional, strategically focused play. This aligns. 4e shifted to a strong encounter based recovery mechanism (hp recharged per encounter with short rests, most abilities recharged per encounter, etc.) and that strongly affected play. For the first (and only) time, an edition of D&D reasonably supported a much more narrativist gamestyle without heavy hacking. 5e has moved the needle back towards a blend, with both kinds of balance discussed so far in evidence. This has led to some incoherence in daily encounter balancing, depending on party make-up, but there's a broad width of play mechanics being used with 5e, from more permissive, character driven story styles with framework worldbuilding rather than adventure planning, to traditional DM-led play. It's interesting to look at just this narrow analysis of ability recharge and see how it impacts play.

Non-D&D games can use this as well. One of the things I did in learning Blades was look at how abilities are used, the frequency available, and the recharge mechanics. Blades uses a mix of recovery mechanics to create a focus of tension in the scene framework (or encounter) by how abilities are spent. The most common recover mechanic is more of a spending mechanic -- you can use X ability Y times this score. Equipment works this way. But some mechanics randomize the costs, like how denying an outcome works as at variable cost in stress (too much stress and you're out of the score). Wounds are interesting as well, because their earned negative conditionals rather than taken away from a resource pool, and removing them takes expending other limited resources (downtime actions) with variable results. All of these interlocked and variable recovery mechanics (and expenditure mechanics) function to make Blades a very fluid game where you cannot count on an outcome. This means that it's very much in the player interest to maximize the immediate action results, because failure will limit next actions, sometimes gravely. So play is in the moment with long term strategic consequences emerging from play rather than the focus of it.

Looking at how players can spend and recover PC abilities is a good way to get a handle on the type of play a ruleset enables. Fighting against that ruleset due to a misunderstanding of the incentivized play will lead to bad outcomes. 4e suffered from this as traditional play was tried with a ruleset that didn't work as well with that objective. 5e doesn't do Story Now well at all, as so many abilities for many classes are daily balanced requiring strategic expediture and so fight against the focus on the now of that playstyle. Blades would be absolute pants at trying to do a dungeon crawl. Looking at games in this way is useful, and doesn't say that a game is bad -- games cannot be everything to everyone, so choices limiting some playstyles and play objectives are to be expected and welcomed, not dismissed. There's a lot of dismissal going on, and defensive thinking.

 

[Ovinomancer]

From my point of view, the contrast is this: if the unit of balance is the encounter (scene), then it is possible to allow events to unfold as they do in accordance with the logic of play, complications, framing, etc, without this having any implications for mechanical balance across PCs (which is a feature of a mechanically heavy system like D&D).

This isn't sufficient for your conclusion. There are games that use encounter framing that have huge disparities in character mechanical balance (Buffy, frex, where one character is vastly superior in many ways to others, such that some encounters can be trivialized by their mere presence in the scene). Encounter balanced games doesn't have to have character balance at all. 4e does. Most Story Now games do, but that's mostly because it's a design goal of the game in addition to encounter based ability balance.

If the unit of balance is the adventuring day which is understood to include multiple encounters (eg 6 to 8 in 5e), then the dynamic becomes different. The GM has to have sketched out a sequence of events in advance, or at least maintain the "threat" of such, in order to constrain the use of resources by players whose PCs are on a longer rather than shorter recharge cycle. As well as this implication for pacing and expectations around pacing/framing, there is also another consequence: players who withhold the use of resources out of concern for subsequent encounters which don't occur don't get to use those resources, which leaves those elements of the player archetype unrealised.[/QUOTE]

Again, you're analyzing using the same play objective for both styles. A play objective to get through the session maximizing the strategic use of your abilities isn't well served by encounter balanced play, but it is by daily balanced play. Matching play objectives with game mechanics is important. That a given play objective, no matter how much it's important to you, isn't well served by a ruleset isn't automatically indicative of a failing of that ruleset. Only if the ruleset fails to deliver it's promised play objectives is it a failure.

 

[Tony Vargas]

5th level. Once a wizard hit 5th level he was gold, .

Well sure, he was Gandalf at that point.

(No, I never do get tired of that one, it seems - and it was actually a bit before my time...)

 

[Tony Vargas]

. I think there's a lot of value in looking at how games govern character ability recovery, as this gives strong indications as to what kinds of play that game is well suited for.

Games can be like the proverbial stopped clock that's right twice per day, sure. Instead of trying to fix one, you can make best use of it.

D&D through 3rd used daily recovery almost exclusively, and the style of play best supported is the more traditional, strategically focused play.

To be fair, 3e made some very significant changes that deviated from the DM-dominated/mediated dynamic in which the classic game was most nearly functional. A major one was shifting magic items from arbitrary DM mcguffins to systematic player build resources - heck the 3.x functional mode of play pretty much was the build mera-game, so much had the emphasis shifted from DM to player - one particularly notorious example being wands, the make/buy pricing of which radically changed some dynamics, such as...

4e shifted to a strong encounter based recovery mechanism (hp recharged per encounter with short rests,

... between-combat healing: you could drain a wand and heal 275 hps in, coincidentally, 5 min. And, as you leveled, the cost of one became increasingly trivial, so hps became a de-facto encounter resource in 3e. 4e pulled /back/ from that, by basing most healing (even potions) on a daily resource, surges, managed by the recipient, and virtually all non-surge healing on other daily resources, like utility powers.

4e shifted to a strong encounter based recovery mechanism...
most abilities recharged per encounter, etc.)

4e also added in-combat second wind, also using daily surges, action points that re-carged on milestones, at-will powers, and yeah, encounter powers. A first level character had one of them, to go with his two at-wills and one daily. Not exactly 'most' of his abilities.

But a much greater proportion of encounters to dailies than 3.5's amped up daily spell progression to it's more or less non-existent encounter ones. D&D having always been an extreme case of daily-resource-management emphasis.

5e has moved the needle back towards a blend, with both kinds of balance discussed so far in evidence. This has led to some incoherence in daily encounter balancing, depending on party make-up,

5e did not go all the way back to that extreme, but it did greatly increase daily spell resources, and give fewer classes encounter resources, at all. I don't think that's exactly incoherent, even by Force definitions, it's just innately imbalancing outside of the theoretical pacing target. That's limiting in a lot of ways, but, along with the many other DM -Empowerment measures the edition takes, does bring back the DM-led play dynamics of the classic game...

That can mean a traditional dungeon-crawl, but we were able to do more than just that with those same dynamics back in the day.

Blades would be absolute pants at trying to do a dungeon crawl.

By the same token, D&D doesn't have a lock on the dungeon, even some story-now indy game could go into one, if that's where the players took it. It just wouldn't /have/ to be the same kind of exercise in paranoia ...

Looking at games in this way is useful, and doesn't say that a game is bad -- games cannot be everything to everyone, so choices limiting some playstyles and play objectives are to be expected and welcomed, not dismissed. There's a lot of dismissal going on, and defensive thinking.

I suppose you can conveniently dismiss this opinion as purist-for-system, but what you can do with a system expands the better-balanced it is, because more of what it presents remains meaningful & viable. It's true that, like the stopped clock an imbalanced game can do a few specific things relatively well, in that doing anything else turns non-viable. You don't/need/ that to support a style, though.

 

[pemerton]

Ideally, depending on exactly what you're going for, you'd want the potential for tension in pacing, so pacing has a meaningful, but not overwheliming impact on difficulty, for instance, without the worry of significant imbalances among the PCs, as well.

I'm not sure who you are positing this as an ideal for - a designer? a game publisher? an individual table, or GM?

In 4e, without changing the resting rules, the passage of ingame time does have a "meaningful but not overwhelming impact on difficulty" - because of daily powers and healing surge replenishment. But the GM also has the capacity to shape challenge by using the encounter-building rules.

In Cortex+ Heroic, pacing is entirely in terms of "Action Scenes" (recovery is generally harder), "Transition Scenes" (recovery is generally easier) and "Acts" (the Doom Pool resets). But these don't correlate to ingame time periods. There is also the Doom Pool, which generates a similar "threat" dynamic to hp attrition in classic D&D, but isn't directly connected to pacing at all.

In HeroQuest revised, there are only scenes/encounters, and difficulty is a function of the PCs' run of successes. (The more they succeed, the higher the difficulty, with failures producing resets of the difficulty level.) So all pacing, "encounter building", escalation, etc is built into a single mechanic.

I'm not sure any of these is the ideal, nor any sort of departure from it. I see them as various approaches.

if you have a hard-reset between encounters, like the last ed of Gamma World did - then events might unfold a little oddly, too. If your recent experiences & challenges make no impression on you, at all, that's likely to be at odds with some those (or other) elements, too, no?

I think the issue of lingering consequences is different from the issue of class mechanical balance on a per-encounter (short rest) or per-day (extended rest) basis. For instance, Cortex+ Heroic and HeroQuest revised both have lingering consequences although they have no "per day" mechanic at all.

And in a 4e-like framework one could fairly easily make hit point recovery strictly per-encounter (of course that would require revisiting other aspects of class balance, given HS is currently part of that) without getting rid of lingering consequences (eg via conditions, curses, diseases, etc). I don't know the 4e-version of Gamma World very well, so I don't know whether it had any sort of lingering consequence mechanic.

From my point of view, the contrast is this: if the unit of balance is the encounter (scene), then it is possible to allow events to unfold as they do in accordance with the logic of play, complications, framing, etc, without this having any implications for mechanical balance across PCs (which is a feature of a mechanically heavy system like D&D).

This isn't sufficient for your conclusion. There are games that use encounter framing that have huge disparities in character mechanical balance (Buffy, frex, where one character is vastly superior in many ways to others, such that some encounters can be trivialized by their mere presence in the scene). Encounter balanced games doesn't have to have character balance at all. 4e does. Most Story Now games do, but that's mostly because it's a design goal of the game in addition to encounter based ability balance.

I am not saying that "per encounter" balance is a sufficient condition of mechanical balance between classes. (How could it be?)

I'm saying that "per-encounter" balance is a necessary condition of a game allowing events to unfold in the way I describe, while also achieving mechanical balance across classes. Whereas "per day" balance is at odds with this, because in order to achieve that sort of balance across classes it requires the GM to treat the "future" of play as in some sense fixed or foretold (so as to generate the pressure and consequences that in turn will yield the balance).

If the unit of balance is the adventuring day which is understood to include multiple encounters (eg 6 to 8 in 5e), then the dynamic becomes different. The GM has to have sketched out a sequence of events in advance, or at least maintain the "threat" of such, in order to constrain the use of resources by players whose PCs are on a longer rather than shorter recharge cycle. As well as this implication for pacing and expectations around pacing/framing, there is also another consequence: players who withhold the use of resources out of concern for subsequent encounters which don't occur don't get to use those resources, which leaves those elements of the player archetype unrealised.

Again, you're analyzing using the same play objective for both styles. A play objective to get through the session maximizing the strategic use of your abilities isn't well served by encounter balanced play, but it is by daily balanced play. Matching play objectives with game mechanics is important. That a given play objective, no matter how much it's important to you, isn't well served by a ruleset isn't automatically indicative of a failing of that ruleset. Only if the ruleset fails to deliver it's promised play objectives is it a failure.

Where did the word "failing", or any synonym, appear in the post of mine that you quoted? I identified a contrast that is, from my point of view, salient. Since when did identifying a salient contrast - which is not utterly at odds with a contrast you have been drawing for the past page or two - become a (purported) identification of a failing in a ruleset?