D&D 5E (2024) CoDzilla? Yeah Na Its CoDGFaW.

[EzekielRaiden]

Various weapons had wish soells in them. Wizards coukd create them (losing a con point permanently)

Yes. So it's not "Fighter casting wish". It's "Wizard casting wish but letting a Fighter decide what happens."

You couldn't scam that stuff bit AD&D were loaded up with lavish amounts of loot.

Oh boy, don't open that can of worms. Possibly the earliest edition-war-like argument the community has ever had is the dispute over "Monty Haul".

Wizards generally didnt dominate combat. Tgey had to few hp in AD&D, capped hit points from con modifier and if the game did go to high level fighters were still useful to have around. Magic resistance could be 90%, resolving spells was horrible. 3E removed a lot of restrictions.

Note the bold thing. "Resolving spells was horrible"--yes, that's exactly the bad design I'm calling out. It should not be "horrible" to determine whether or not your stuff works. It should not be horrendous bookkeeping. Ridiculous hurdles solely present in order to contain ridiculous power.

Why offer people Phenomenal Cosmic Power if it's going to be so gorram frustrating to ever USE it? "Oh, sure, you can have all this cool stuff, but it'll suck to use, you'll probably lose it anyway, and even if it succeeds you'll just have to deal with the same BS again and again forever."

I suspect most games then also ended by 7-10 so you never saw high level Wizards except as NPC antagonists.

I mean we know that's not true because we have several documented high-level Wizard characters. Mordenkainen, at the very least.

In 5.5 themes rares started dropping lvl 3, very rare and legendaries dropped lvl 5-7 and you got lots of them. A sword you found level 5 could still be used 10 levels later (unlikely the gane ran that long but still).

I have never, not once, seen this. Ever. Nothing even remotely like it. Hussar is the only 5e GM I've ever had who I would call "generous" with items. All of the others, literally every single one, were reluctant to even give out ONE SINGLE magic item by level 3, not one for every player, ANY permanent magic items at all.

I have seen, time and time and time again, a seething antagonism for anything like what you describe. 5.5e changed nothing about this attitude. Not one thing.

I saw a 2E fighter solo a dragon, lich, marilith one after the other 1 round each.

Okay. That's a neat achievement for that player. Sincerely; I worry you might take my words there as sarcasm, but I swear I mean it with full sincerity.

But this leads to the actual question: Is this good evidence that the Fighter class, as it existed in that edition, has stronger tools, greater reach, or higher efficacy than an equivalent Wizard with an equal degree of appropriate treasure rewards and equivalent system mastery?

Fighters had best saves, best initiative in effect (if you used the advanced rules we did), and magic armor boosted some saves.

They had stronger passive stats, yes. Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot, because the numbers are literally right there, for all to see.

But better passive stats is not the same as being the thing which achieves victory most, the thing which is the most efficient at translating actions into results, nor the thing which has the greatest breadth and/or depth of impact.

A smart, well-played Wizard with good Wizard equipment and a reasonable input of spells, even if they're randomly determined, is simply going to be able to achieve radically more than an equal-level, equal-skill, equal-equipment Fighter could. Yes, the Wizard will likely still desire the help of meat shields between themselves and their enemies. That's what mercenary hires are for. Hell, you can even sweeten the deal by offering all those Fighter-related magic items that were secretly a Fighter class feature that was never written down (and thus subsequently forgotten by the WotC designers.)

Wizards don't need Fighters half as much as Fighters need Wizards--because Fighters need their magic items far more than Wizards need theirs, and only one of the two can actually make magic items. I guarantee you that that Fighter you mentioned could not have taken those three extremely dangerous enemies without absolute scads of magic items, all of which came from a Wizard at some point. "I took down three mega-powerful creatures! .....because I was loaded up with power given to me by 8 Wizards" kinda blunts the impact of the achievement, don't you think? I certainly do.

And the game flowed a lot faster and easier to run than 3E-5E. 2E was also the best tool box D&D.

It's statements like these which made me believe you thought 2e was simply superior to all other editions of D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes...exactly. But even if they weren't a powergamer, as the first player was not (or I imagine you'd have mentioned it), would you agree that simply by choosing to play a Cleric or Druid, their characters would have an inherent leg up over essentially anyone else? They'd just be...better at succeeding than someone who didn't pick one of those things. Do you agree?

To a point. There's many other aspects to the game that determine character survivability, the biggest and most important of which is sheer random chance which is the most powerful balancer of them all. However, if randomness is downplayed then...

Because if you do, then you and I already agree on the fundamental point of balance: that there should not be classes that are simply, objectively better than other choices, nor should there be options which are most of the time strictly better, but which might be equivalent or ever-so-slightly-worse in specific, narrow/niche situations.

...the designers have to get into this morass of weeds, made more difficult all the time by their addition of new classes, species, feats, and other (potential) sources of power.

I believe that it may be the most fun class to play.

It is, objectively, not the most effective class to play. Because magic, especially in TSR editions, is overwhelmingly more powerful than anything else you could try (except possibly psionics, but that's just a parallel track of supernatural power).

Magic is extremely useful in utility and non-combat situations but for reliable damage output per round the post-UA 1e Fighter is king, queen, and royalty.

Sure. Here's the problem: Those fixes do achieve the goal of limiting the otherwise incredibly stupid power levels of casters. They do so by being extremely frustrating and un-fun, at least for most players.

"You can have phenomenal cosmic power, but we'll constantly make you hate your life for trying to get it" is not good game design. It just...isn't. "Have a bad time in order to be SUPER SUPER SUPER POWERFUL" is bad design. I'm sorry. There's just no other way to put it. Making the most effective tools feel bad to use is just...why would you do that? Why would you put something into your game that rewards using it by being the most powerful thing anyone can do, only to then say "BUUUUUT if you DO try to use it, you're going to be extremely bored and frustrated most of the time." That's bad! That's...that's literally not what games are designed for.

This is, and previously has been, a fairly fundamental disagreement between us: I see not-constant player-side frustration as not only being an acceptable part of the game but an essential part of the game.

Games should, to at least some extent, be actually fun to play in the ways that the rules reward. That doesn't mean they need to make the player maximally, perfectly blissed-out happy every nanosecond of every session forever. But it means that designing a system with "phenomenal power" only held back by "the GM can nerf things if they feel like it" and "it's really dull and un-fun to USE that phenomenal power" is bad design. It's a game that is dull and frustrating to play in the way it's actually written, and only exciting and fun when someone goes through and literally rewrites it dynamically behind the scenes, meaning the players aren't even playing a "game" at all, they're playing "who gets to be the GM's favorite today".

The fun comes when you pull it off.

The baseball batter doesn't get a hit every time at the plate (a really good hitter might get a hit 1/3 of the time) and much less often hits a home run, but it's sure fun for them when they do.

3e absolutely did not "rein in" arcane casters. Like...at all. The Wizard does just fine, and the Sorcerer is only less-fine because it has fewer spells and fewer slots for no good reason but "we wanted to punish spontaneous casting" I guess.

My own experience is that the Wizards in our group (of which there were two main ones, I played one), while certainly useful, weren't up to par with the Cleric and, later, Druid.

Of course, you know that my opinion of 4e is different from yours. All I'll say is, they may have gone overboard in SOME ways, but not nearly as many as folks accuse them of. Which is pretty typical, because most people who poo-poo 4e either don't know or don't care what 4e actually did, they only care about blasting it as hard, as often, and as thoroughly as possible.

My point was more that WotC designers have built up a pretty solid track record, across the 3 editions and 2 half-editions they've done, of coming up with what could be a good idea and then completely overcooking it. A light touch is not their forte.

Frankly, I've never actually seen this. Like ever. I hear it complained about all the time from the "PlAyEr EnTiTlEmEnT" crowd, which gets so incredibly irritating. But I have literally never seen it, and when I ask people who complain about it, they have to defer because they haven't actually seen it either, they just (allegedly) hear about it.

Missing too much, however, should be unacceptable. Because if you miss most of the time, that sucks. It's boring, and not in the constructive "you're building toward a cool thing" way, it's just "and now you continue to be Absolute Garbage at the thing you're supposed to do Fairly Well". I mean, for God's sake, we have a class called "Fighter". You would think such a person would be, I dunno, exceptionally good at FIGHTING.

See above re baseball hitters - they're really good at what they do and yet the very best of 'em still only get a hit about 1/3 of the time. (there was one guy in the 1940s-50s named Ted Williams who had a 40% hit rate for a few years; he was a real outlier even among great hitters and nobody's got consistently close to him since)

I suspect that if the average success ratio in D&D - both in melee attacks and spellcasting - was reduced to 1-in-3 there's be howls of protest from all directions. And yet it's fine for baseball and has been for about 130 years now.....

 

[Lanefan]

Can they cast wish?

Most 1e games tapped out at 'name level', i.e. the 9th-11th range, which is a way long time before Wish comes online. BECMI went higher, as did 2e in some cases.

That said, my namesake character Lanefan - a pure Fighter through and through who recently got his 11th level - has in his career personally cast two* Wishes via device.

* - or maybe three, I might be forgetting one. One revived half a party, the other got his keep built.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes. So it's not "Fighter casting wish". It's "Wizard casting wish but letting a Fighter decide what happens."

This assumes Wizards create all magic items, which while perhaps true in some campaigns or settings is by no means universal.

Note the bold thing. "Resolving spells was horrible"--yes, that's exactly the bad design I'm calling out. It should not be "horrible" to determine whether or not your stuff works. It should not be horrendous bookkeeping. Ridiculous hurdles solely present in order to contain ridiculous power.

Why offer people Phenomenal Cosmic Power if it's going to be so gorram frustrating to ever USE it? "Oh, sure, you can have all this cool stuff, but it'll suck to use, you'll probably lose it anyway, and even if it succeeds you'll just have to deal with the same BS again and again forever."

If a Fighter can miss x-percent of the time with her attacks then IMO it's only fair that a caster shouldn't be 100% reliable either.

The big miss in all editions was allowing casters to place their AoE spells without requiring a roll to hit or aim.

I mean we know that's not true because we have several documented high-level Wizard characters. Mordenkainen, at the very least.

Worth noting those characters were from versions earlier than 1e, and in 1e he intentionally designed the game to soft-cap at the 9th-11th range - probably because he had learned the hard way that the wheels fall off if you go much higher than that.

I have never, not once, seen this. Ever. Nothing even remotely like it. Hussar is the only 5e GM I've ever had who I would call "generous" with items. All of the others, literally every single one, were reluctant to even give out ONE SINGLE magic item by level 3, not one for every player, ANY permanent magic items at all.

I have seen, time and time and time again, a seething antagonism for anything like what you describe. 5.5e changed nothing about this attitude. Not one thing.

Not from me, you haven't.

5e treasure, at least in the quite-a-few modules I've read, is pathetic except at high to very high level.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes. So it's not "Fighter casting wish". It's "Wizard casting wish but letting a Fighter decide what happens."


Oh boy, don't open that can of worms. Possibly the earliest edition-war-like argument the community has ever had is the dispute over "Monty Haul".


Note the bold thing. "Resolving spells was horrible"--yes, that's exactly the bad design I'm calling out. It should not be "horrible" to determine whether or not your stuff works. It should not be horrendous bookkeeping. Ridiculous hurdles solely present in order to contain ridiculous power.

Why offer people Phenomenal Cosmic Power if it's going to be so gorram frustrating to ever USE it? "Oh, sure, you can have all this cool stuff, but it'll suck to use, you'll probably lose it anyway, and even if it succeeds you'll just have to deal with the same BS again and again forever."


I mean we know that's not true because we have several documented high-level Wizard characters. Mordenkainen, at the very least.


I have never, not once, seen this. Ever. Nothing even remotely like it. Hussar is the only 5e GM I've ever had who I would call "generous" with items. All of the others, literally every single one, were reluctant to even give out ONE SINGLE magic item by level 3, not one for every player, ANY permanent magic items at all.

I have seen, time and time and time again, a seething antagonism for anything like what you describe. 5.5e changed nothing about this attitude. Not one thing.


Okay. That's a neat achievement for that player. Sincerely; I worry you might take my words there as sarcasm, but I swear I mean it with full sincerity.

But this leads to the actual question: Is this good evidence that the Fighter class, as it existed in that edition, has stronger tools, greater reach, or higher efficacy than an equivalent Wizard with an equal degree of appropriate treasure rewards and equivalent system mastery?


They had stronger passive stats, yes. Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot, because the numbers are literally right there, for all to see.

But better passive stats is not the same as being the thing which achieves victory most, the thing which is the most efficient at translating actions into results, nor the thing which has the greatest breadth and/or depth of impact.

A smart, well-played Wizard with good Wizard equipment and a reasonable input of spells, even if they're randomly determined, is simply going to be able to achieve radically more than an equal-level, equal-skill, equal-equipment Fighter could. Yes, the Wizard will likely still desire the help of meat shields between themselves and their enemies. That's what mercenary hires are for. Hell, you can even sweeten the deal by offering all those Fighter-related magic items that were secretly a Fighter class feature that was never written down (and thus subsequently forgotten by the WotC designers.)

Wizards don't need Fighters half as much as Fighters need Wizards--because Fighters need their magic items far more than Wizards need theirs, and only one of the two can actually make magic items. I guarantee you that that Fighter you mentioned could not have taken those three extremely dangerous enemies without absolute scads of magic items, all of which came from a Wizard at some point. "I took down three mega-powerful creatures! .....because I was loaded up with power given to me by 8 Wizards" kinda blunts the impact of the achievement, don't you think? I certainly do.


It's statements like these which made me believe you thought 2e was simply superior to all other editions of D&D.

It was the best toolbox edition. One may not be after a tool box though.

Pre 3E plays faster than 3E to 5E. Subjective if you like that or not. Basics easier to DM than AD&D and an ascending AC version is even easier.

Price of that is its very basic. It was very noticeable playing side by side. Same with a clone or OSR game 5.0 following week.

On Sunday a player got +1 Full plate. Running a WotC adventure RAW.

In my other campaign by level 6 most of them have a rare and a few others.

. Wife lacks a rare she's got an amulet of devotion +1, headband of devotion, and a luckstone.

AD&D we used a lot of republished adventures. Still new at D&D back then. Thats why we had so many items. RAW.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To a point. There's many other aspects to the game that determine character survivability, the biggest and most important of which is sheer random chance which is the most powerful balancer of them all. However, if randomness is downplayed then...

Er...no it isn't? Like it literally isn't?

It's simply a way to make all of the other rules completely pointless. Which is why you're, y'know, supposed to literally not use the rules in early-D&D, and instead desperately hope that the GM feels like giving you a so-called "ruling" favorable to you--a "ruling" that may have zero bearing on anything else, ever. Because that's the problem with so-called "rules" that are meant to be cast aside all the time: there are no rules. The only thing there is, is playing the capricious whims of the guy (almost always a guy, back during early-edition D&D) sitting behind the screen.

...the designers have to get into this morass of weeds, made more difficult all the time by their addition of new classes, species, feats, and other (potential) sources of power.

Not at all. They get into actually needing to DESIGN, as opposed to just throwing words at the page because their mechanics literally don't matter, they're going to get ignored.

Magic is extremely useful in utility and non-combat situations but for reliable damage output per round the post-UA 1e Fighter is king, queen, and royalty.

Calling it "extremely useful" is the most ridiculous understatement I've ever seen in my entire life.

Magic solves everything. It does so instantly in most cases. And you aren't dependent on the capricious whims of a GM who can do whatever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want, and all you can do is burn bridges by leaving, or suffer through it.

This is, and previously has been, a fairly fundamental disagreement between us: I see not-constant player-side frustration as not only being an acceptable part of the game but an essential part of the game.

Okay. You have yet to prove that it isn't constant. That's the point. If this is how you balance out the power of the class...and that power is always there, which as far as I can tell it is...then the frustration must, in fact, also always be there. That looks pretty constant to me! So...how is it not so?

More importantly: Why is player frustration good? Why is it good to make the player think and feel "this SUCKS, I HATE dealing with this, it's so FRUSTRATING and STUPID"? How does that contribute to the player having a good net experience? I genuinely don't understand how you can get to that conclusion.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying something that tons of people absolutely love to shove in my mouth: "Players should always succeed at everything forever!" "I did not succeed" is EMPHATICALLY not the same as "this is frustrating". Frustration is more than just not getting what you want; it is putting in a real effort, having a well-reasoned plan, and giving things your all, only to not just not succeed, but be actually defeated. (Dictionary.com even specifically uses "defeat" and "nullify" in the definition of "frustrate".)

The fun comes when you pull it off.

Being the GM's favorite? I mean I guess some people might find that fun, but I don't.

The baseball batter doesn't get a hit every time at the plate (a really good hitter might get a hit 1/3 of the time) and much less often hits a home run, but it's sure fun for them when they do.

Yes, but they also get (at least) three chances to bat, don't they? So having a ~1/3 average is, functionally, the same as saying that most players actually do get the chance to play, and don't simply strike out consistently. You're talking about having something like...one specific player on the team gets to wear Sonic shoes, so he can literally run at the speed of sound and thus guarantee a home run if he can just hit one single ball: but he's forced to use the world's least-functional baseball bat, such that he only has a 10% chance of getting one hit out of three attempts. (Meaning, roughly speaking, a 3.451% chance of hitting on any given attack.)

More importantly, the "game designers" of baseball (there weren't any, that's not how sports are born) cannot control player hit rates. Like that's...literally not possible for them to control, as it's a function of the player's physical abilities, training/skill, and their ability to read the pitcher and adapt accordingly. That could not be further from the truth with TTRPGs, where the designers have full control over every aspect of combat, and where there is no physical feedback, nor need for constant drills and training and practice.

The analogy simply fails, because tabletop games aren't sports. (This, among many other reasons, is part of why I so thoroughly dislike the "Combat-as-Sport" label, or as I see it, flagrant mockery disguised as a mere label.)

My own experience is that the Wizards in our group (of which there were two main ones, I played one), while certainly useful, weren't up to par with the Cleric and, later, Druid.

I can't speak for early-edition D&D. All I can say is, if that occurred in 3e, it means your Wizards weren't being played very well.

My point was more that WotC designers have built up a pretty solid track record, across the 3 editions and 2 half-editions they've done, of coming up with what could be a good idea and then completely overcooking it. A light touch is not their forte.

Okay. Can you argue with a straight face that Gygax ever acted with a "light touch"? Because his words certainly do not support that as far as I can tell! Pretty much the diametric opposite. If he were a mathematician, he'd be using nuclear flyswatters.

See above re baseball hitters - they're really good at what they do and yet the very best of 'em still only get a hit about 1/3 of the time. (there was one guy in the 1940s-50s named Ted Williams who had a 40% hit rate for a few years; he was a real outlier even among great hitters and nobody's got consistently close to him since)

And see above re: the difference between sports and tabletop games, as the two are nearly nothing alike.

Certainly, even to you, they cannot be that much alike, because you love to insist that roulette-wheel-like randomness, where you can have nearly any outcome happen and your plans, efforts, resources, and abilities are a vanishingly small grace note next to "and now chance decides that only bad things happen, only for later things to be the exact opposite, your efforts are meaningless before the unstoppable march of fate."

I mean, surely you'd agree that a baseball game isn't something determined almost exclusively by the ungracious whim of luck?

I suspect that if the average success ratio in D&D - both in melee attacks and spellcasting - was reduced to 1-in-3 there's be howls of protest from all directions. And yet it's fine for baseball and has been for about 130 years now.....

Yes, there would be, because it would be NOT FUN in that context.

Tabletop games are not sports, and sports are not tabletop games. Trying to apply the logic of one to the other is a GIGO situation.

This assumes Wizards create all magic items, which while perhaps true in some campaigns or settings is by no means universal.

A spellcaster of some kind. Picking nits like this does not suit you. You know what I mean. You know that most people use "Wizard" as the emblematic class for "full spellcasters".

Plus, what OTHER caster could even attempt to make such a thing in early editions? Clerics (and 2e Priests) didn't get wish. Illusionists were the only other full-caster in 1e, they were functionally just a specialized type of Magic-User aka Wizard, and they didn't originally get wish either. (It was added in Dragon magazine content.) Sooooo...what exactly are you on my butt about here?

If a Fighter can miss x-percent of the time with her attacks then IMO it's only fair that a caster shouldn't be 100% reliable either.

And yet it often is! That's precisely the problem. Magic is extremely reliable in many ways. Remember: Every single time--literally every single time--the Fighter wants to do something cool, they have to not only succeed at some roll or the like, they also have to get special GM dispensation. The spellcaster only has to succeed at a roll. Oh, and the spellcasters of OD&D could create their own spells, meaning, they could literally invent entirely new ways to automatically succeed at things.

Where does the Fighter have that ability? I'll wait.

The big miss in all editions was allowing casters to place their AoE spells without requiring a roll to hit or aim.

Er, well, not...all editions. But that would require us to speak of The Edition That Must Not Be Named.

Worth noting those characters were from versions earlier than 1e, and in 1e he intentionally designed the game to soft-cap at the 9th-11th range - probably because he had learned the hard way that the wheels fall off if you go much higher than that.

Could not care less. Genuinely. I could care more, but I could not care less.

Not from me, you haven't.

5e treasure, at least in the quite-a-few modules I've read, is pathetic except at high to very high level.

I mean, okay, but I can't play "the idealized 5e Lanefan wishes existed". I can't play "the idealized 5e community Lanefan wishes existed". I can only work with the game, and community, that I see. I've had one 5e GM I would consider "generous", and that only relative to how profoundly miserly 5e GMs tend to be. And I've seen many, many, many people, including on this very forum, who have an active antipathy for the idea that players should, eventually (note: EVENTUALLY, as in, it might take a while!) find or purchase magic items that (a) the player actually likes, (b) the character would find particularly useful for the things they're good at doing, and (c) are actually to some degree powerful, not mere "I just think they're neat" knick-knacks.

(Note, I am not trying to skewer my current 5e GM, Hussar, on this one. I think he's a great GM and have been perfectly comfortable with the items that have appeared. I also appreciate his good taste in items--often quirky or unusual, but with interesting twists. I'm just saying, the one "generous" 5e GM I've had is much closer to "pretty normal" in my book, it's just that everyone else has been SO bloody stingy with magic items that, by comparison, normal feels generous.)

 

[Zardnaar]

Er...no it isn't? Like it literally isn't?

It's simply a way to make all of the other rules completely pointless. Which is why you're, y'know, supposed to literally not use the rules in early-D&D, and instead desperately hope that the GM feels like giving you a so-called "ruling" favorable to you--a "ruling" that may have zero bearing on anything else, ever. Because that's the problem with so-called "rules" that are meant to be cast aside all the time: there are no rules. The only thing there is, is playing the capricious whims of the guy (almost always a guy, back during early-edition D&D) sitting behind the screen.


Not at all. They get into actually needing to DESIGN, as opposed to just throwing words at the page because their mechanics literally don't matter, they're going to get ignored.


Calling it "extremely useful" is the most ridiculous understatement I've ever seen in my entire life.

Magic solves everything. It does so instantly in most cases. And you aren't dependent on the capricious whims of a GM who can do whatever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want, and all you can do is burn bridges by leaving, or suffer through it.


Okay. You have yet to prove that it isn't constant. That's the point. If this is how you balance out the power of the class...and that power is always there, which as far as I can tell it is...then the frustration must, in fact, also always be there. That looks pretty constant to me! So...how is it not so?

More importantly: Why is player frustration good? Why is it good to make the player think and feel "this SUCKS, I HATE dealing with this, it's so FRUSTRATING and STUPID"? How does that contribute to the player having a good net experience? I genuinely don't understand how you can get to that conclusion.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying something that tons of people absolutely love to shove in my mouth: "Players should always succeed at everything forever!" "I did not succeed" is EMPHATICALLY not the same as "this is frustrating". Frustration is more than just not getting what you want; it is putting in a real effort, having a well-reasoned plan, and giving things your all, only to not just not succeed, but be actually defeated. (Dictionary.com even specifically uses "defeat" and "nullify" in the definition of "frustrate".)


Being the GM's favorite? I mean I guess some people might find that fun, but I don't.


Yes, but they also get (at least) three chances to bat, don't they? So having a ~1/3 average is, functionally, the same as saying that most players actually do get the chance to play, and don't simply strike out consistently. You're talking about having something like...one specific player on the team gets to wear Sonic shoes, so he can literally run at the speed of sound and thus guarantee a home run if he can just hit one single ball: but he's forced to use the world's least-functional baseball bat, such that he only has a 10% chance of getting one hit out of three attempts. (Meaning, roughly speaking, a 3.451% chance of hitting on any given attack.)

More importantly, the "game designers" of baseball (there weren't any, that's not how sports are born) cannot control player hit rates. Like that's...literally not possible for them to control, as it's a function of the player's physical abilities, training/skill, and their ability to read the pitcher and adapt accordingly. That could not be further from the truth with TTRPGs, where the designers have full control over every aspect of combat, and where there is no physical feedback, nor need for constant drills and training and practice.

The analogy simply fails, because tabletop games aren't sports. (This, among many other reasons, is part of why I so thoroughly dislike the "Combat-as-Sport" label, or as I see it, flagrant mockery disguised as a mere label.)


I can't speak for early-edition D&D. All I can say is, if that occurred in 3e, it means your Wizards weren't being played very well.


Okay. Can you argue with a straight face that Gygax ever acted with a "light touch"? Because his words certainly do not support that as far as I can tell! Pretty much the diametric opposite. If he were a mathematician, he'd be using nuclear flyswatters.


And see above re: the difference between sports and tabletop games, as the two are nearly nothing alike.

Certainly, even to you, they cannot be that much alike, because you love to insist that roulette-wheel-like randomness, where you can have nearly any outcome happen and your plans, efforts, resources, and abilities are a vanishingly small grace note next to "and now chance decides that only bad things happen, only for later things to be the exact opposite, your efforts are meaningless before the unstoppable march of fate."

I mean, surely you'd agree that a baseball game isn't something determined almost exclusively by the ungracious whim of luck?


Yes, there would be, because it would be NOT FUN in that context.

Tabletop games are not sports, and sports are not tabletop games. Trying to apply the logic of one to the other is a GIGO situation.


A spellcaster of some kind. Picking nits like this does not suit you. You know what I mean. You know that most people use "Wizard" as the emblematic class for "full spellcasters".

Plus, what OTHER caster could even attempt to make such a thing in early editions? Clerics (and 2e Priests) didn't get wish. Illusionists were the only other full-caster in 1e, they were functionally just a specialized type of Magic-User aka Wizard, and they didn't originally get wish either. (It was added in Dragon magazine content.) Sooooo...what exactly are you on my butt about here?


And yet it often is! That's precisely the problem. Magic is extremely reliable in many ways. Remember: Every single time--literally every single time--the Fighter wants to do something cool, they have to not only succeed at some roll or the like, they also have to get special GM dispensation. The spellcaster only has to succeed at a roll. Oh, and the spellcasters of OD&D could create their own spells, meaning, they could literally invent entirely new ways to automatically succeed at things.

Where does the Fighter have that ability? I'll wait.


Er, well, not...all editions. But that would require us to speak of The Edition That Must Not Be Named.


Could not care less. Genuinely. I could care more, but I could not care less.


I mean, okay, but I can't play "the idealized 5e Lanefan wishes existed". I can't play "the idealized 5e community Lanefan wishes existed". I can only work with the game, and community, that I see. I've had one 5e GM I would consider "generous", and that only relative to how profoundly miserly 5e GMs tend to be. And I've seen many, many, many people, including on this very forum, who have an active antipathy for the idea that players should, eventually (note: EVENTUALLY, as in, it might take a while!) find or purchase magic items that (a) the player actually likes, (b) the character would find particularly useful for the things they're good at doing, and (c) are actually to some degree powerful, not mere "I just think they're neat" knick-knacks.

(Note, I am not trying to skewer my current 5e GM, Hussar, on this one. I think he's a great GM and have been perfectly comfortable with the items that have appeared. I also appreciate his good taste in items--often quirky or unusual, but with interesting twists. I'm just saying, the one "generous" 5e GM I've had is much closer to "pretty normal" in my book, it's just that everyone else has been SO bloody stingy with magic items that, by comparison, normal feels generous.)

Youre projecting here.

Magic wasn't tgat reliable pre 3E. Some spells could outright kill you.

You declared you cant a spell before initiative. One point of damage before your turn you're spell failed and you lost the slot.

Magic resistance in 2E was a static number. 90% MR your spell failed vs them 90%. Mind flayers hadvm 90% MR. Drow had 50% base number.

Things like death existed. Auto damage automatically won initiative. Means your wizard cant resolve a spell. I saw a high level fighter bail out the wizard killing death then had to fight his own death as well.

Also wizards didnt get auto access to spelks leveling up. You had to find scrolls, a book or research them.

You haven't actually played 2E have you?