I like both. Sometimes, I run or play in games that require the PCs to be a highly specialized team, for whatever the genre is (e.g., fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief or hacker, face, muscle, driver). Other times, I love games where the group is just a bunch of characters who fit together for story reasons with no emphasis on tactical specialties. The all-bard party can be particularly fun.
Hot take: get rid of the "balanced party" paradigm
- Thread starter Desdichado
- Start date
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I was thinking more of 2E than 3E. In that system, because you roll straight down, half the fun for me is not knowing what you end up with, then working with what you get. Sometimes a low stat character option that is good, is something like a Rogue where you advance quickly. I liked that aspect, and I enjoyed having characters in the party who begin weak but turn into very powerful Wizard. I played all sorts of characters and I was in the GM chair too
3E is more complicated because that largely comes down to the style of play your group was doing. In some groups if everyone wasn't optimized fully, it could be a problem, for example. And GM style had a big impact on how broken or not people perceived things like spells to be. But I didn't run into as many issues with the 2E system in that respect. I liked 3E, but it definitely favors optimizers
Also I am not a big fan of having the system balance everything around combat. I want some characters who are good at non-combat things but not great in combat
Desdichado
Hero
Exactly. A lot of GMs aren't worth their salt, though.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
The trouble is this has never been a thing D&D has handled well, because by 2E it was already filled with "solve virtually all non-combat problems" spells, and 3.XE/PF1 and 5E have only made this worse. Further, Wizards get to learn insane numbers of spells, and Clerics/Druids pick from a very large list, with only Sorcerers and classes working the same way as them having limits.
So characters who are good at non-combat things typically only get to shine briefly before they start getting regularly overshadowed or even in some cases entirely invalidated by casters. Especially as in 5E and older games, non-combat spells don't typically involve rolls, so are the better choice when doing anything really risky/hard too (but newer ones are moving away from this - I see Mearls' new game has spells fully able to fail and go quite wrong and so on, despite being quite close to 5E).
(Magic items get in on this too - the most effective Thief I ever saw in 2E was effectively largely because he had a Ring of Invisibility and those boots that are super-quiet, which in theory almost any PC could have.)
KYRON45
Hero
That's a different conversation.
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I don't know. I didn't find this to be a problem in actual play. Eventually wizards do get quite powerful, but they still have to deal with how many spells they know, and memorizing those spells in advance. Whereas a thief can spam their abilities all day long, and has plenty of time to shine in the early levels. If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. That is fair. But I think I had more fun using the 2E approach to XP and class balance than any other edition except 1st (but 1st had more generous ability score generation and I like the gamble that is the 2E default)
Wizards were good. Not saying they weren't. But you also had to deal with things like how your attributes impacted your chance to learn a spell, and it isn't like you had limitless spell slots:
Wolfpack48
Hero
Balance shmalance!
Ruin Explorer
Legend
2E has much less of an LFQW problem than 3E. The problem is there but it takes a loooooong time to manifest, whereas in 3E it manifests fairly rapidly, and PF1 even faster. Also in 2E it was a lot easier for a Thief to get to 95% on the most important checks than it is for a 3E or later character to get to where they only fail on a 1.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Having played a fair bit of CoC recently, I'm not sure that's actually true, even if I would have knee-jerk agreed a few years ago.
I say this because a lot of CoC adventures and campaigns basically collapse if all the PCs get wiped out, even if you try the old "your new PCs get the notes your old PCs made". Orient Express, for example, it's very hard to handle a TPK transition past about the 50% mark of the campaign in any way that's plausible or lets things go forwards, especially if certain events cause the TPK. The assumption in a lot of CoC adventures and campaigns very much seems to be that at least some PCs will survive, just probably not all of them. The individual adventures are often not well-written if all the PCs do perish either (especially if it's before some "final confrontation") - i.e. they don't have a cool horror-movie ending or something they just abruptly short out/stop, which is very much unlike Lovecraft or other Mythos writers, who almost always go for the cool horror ending.
