D&D 4E 4e death of creative spell casting?

[frankthedm]

My take on balance is this - I expect the game designers to strive for balance in their games. That's what I'm paying them for - to provide me a consistent rules set that makes for a fun game where I don't have to debate the meaning of every word in a spell description or the meaning of a particular verbiage used to describe a feat. The words they use for these things should be clear and should mean what the designers intended them to mean - I shouldn't have to, as a random example, come up on the fly with a ruling as to whether the slickness conjured by a "grease" spell is just magical frictionlessness or real grease that the spellcaster can set on fire with a torch. The designers have an intent behind the pieces they create, and that intent should be clearly telegraphed in the description of the rule, not obscured by "flavor text".

Having said that, once I know what the underlying intent of a particular rule is, I'm free to ignore it at my table and adjudicate it using table rules. If my players and I want the grease spell to conjure up a flammable oily substance, we're gonna do it. If we want darkvision to work in a particular way that differs from the "RAW", we're gonna do that too. But knowing the intent of the designers in creating the particular rules piece helps me watch out for potential game-breaking situations when I change those rules - I want to walk into something with my eyes open for potential problems, not get blindsided by it weeks or months down the road.

Agree, though I consider some things others call 'flavor text' as rules.

 

[Rakin]

How can there be balance in a game where as long as you're not breaking the rules of the world anything can go? I mean that's one aspect, for me anyway, that makes tabletoping more appealing, the ability to think outseide of the box, even if it's not just for spells.

There's just to many possiblilities that can come up because the use of imignation that making any tabletop "balanced" is going to be impossible, well unless you fill the game up with so many rules and tell the DM and players that they are not allowed to deviate from them what so ever, but then why even play table-top at that moment, thats what computer games are for.

"What!? You used your bow to shoot out the only support for a boulder that slammed into 5 goblins!? That's unfair and unbalanced, there's no way my gnome illusionist could of done that kind of shot, and therefore couldn't of killed 5 goblins at once, waaaah, this game is unbalanced!"

Edit: I guess we should put in an illusion spell in order to move boulders.

"What, your gnome filled in the broken damn with a boulder using that new spell and saved a whole town and earned 4x the gold we did? That's Unbalanced! WaaaH!"

 

[Tanuki]

I casted a wall of ice on the floor (covering the entire room in a 1” thick slab of Ice, causing everyone to make checks to keep standing) then the following round I cast lightning bolt… into the slab of ice. Needless to say everyone in the room was fried (including myself)

How did that work? Ice doesn't conduct electricity.

As a DM, I don't let my players be creative by using a 21st century understanding of real-world physics in a game based in a medieval, magical, fantasy world. (Especially if they can't get the physics right.) That's not creativity; that's using out-of-character knowledge to meta-game. Moreover, real-world physics is very unlikely to even work in my games. In my games, Destroy Water doesn't affect living things because, in my games, living things aren't made of mostly water and carbon. They are made of blood, flesh, bone and life-force.

On the other hand, strapping a pair of giant bird wings to your arms and jumping off a cliff will probably let you glide. ^_^

 

[hong]

To be fair, metagaming real-world physics does have a fairly distinguished pedigree; cf Poul Anderson's _Three Hearts and Three Lions_.

 

[Tanuki]

How can there be balance in a game where as long as you're not breaking the rules of the world anything can go?

To me, as a software engineer, the argument "absolute balance is impossible so it's not even worth trying" is as fallacious as the argument, "Computer programs cannot be made bug-free, so it's not even worth spending the effort on the test-and-debug step. Code then release straightaway!"

When in fact, the motto of every single department I have worked for is, "Let's debug as thoroughly as possible, understanding that finding all bugs is impossible." I like my game designers to have a similar motto, "Let's balance as thoroughly as possible, understanding that perfect balance is impossible."

 

[Doug McCrae]

It's a major problem for me in all rpgs, that magic PCs are just plain better than non-magic PCs. In HERO, powers are better than skills, and that's a point-based system. In Amber, powers are better than stats, likewise point-based though it's so crazy unbalanced I don't know why they bother. D&D 4e is at long, long last holding out the promise of fighters and rogues being equal to magic guys. If they can pull this off it will be something truly amazing, a first in roleplaying.

 

[Rakin]

To me, as a software engineer, the argument "absolute balance is impossible so it's not even worth trying" is as fallacious as the argument, "Computer programs cannot be made bug-free, so it's not even worth spending the effort on the test-and-debug step. Code then release straightaway!"

When in fact, the motto of every single department I have worked for is, "Let's debug as thoroughly as possible, understanding that finding all bugs is impossible." I like my game designers to have a similar motto, "Let's balance as thoroughly as possible, understanding that perfect balance is impossible."

but bugs cease programs from working, the lack of balance doesn't halt a table-top RPG, also to some a balance isn't even a good thing.

Good analogy though, and I see where you're coming from, and yes I agree if balance is something that you think is dire in order for the game to go on, then don't give up just because it's impossible, but, I guess what I was getting at, is that by trying to acheive the perfect balance in table-top you'll find yourself hard pressed not to just be breaking the game even more, or if not breaking it, making it into something that's not unique enough to play with the cumbersomeness of paper and pencil.

 

[Rakin]

It's a major problem for me in all rpgs, that magic PCs are just plain better than non-magic PCs. In HERO, powers are better than skills, and that's a point-based system. In Amber, powers are better than stats, likewise point-based though it's so crazy unbalanced I don't know why they bother. D&D 4e is at long, long last holding out the promise of fighters and rogues being equal to magic guys. If they can pull this off it will be something truly amazing, a first in roleplaying.

In LA, they CAN be more powerful, but they counterbalance it with having to roll to cast spells just like you roll to swing a sword, and on top of that, there's casting times and harm will cause your spell to cease.

So, sure, you could blow up half the country side but you're gonig to have to sit there for 20 seconds with no one touching you and THEN pass your roll.

I love it.

 

[Counterspin]

To me, as a software engineer, the argument "absolute balance is impossible so it's not even worth trying" is as fallacious as the argument, "Computer programs cannot be made bug-free, so it's not even worth spending the effort on the test-and-debug step. Code then release straightaway!"

When in fact, the motto of every single department I have worked for is, "Let's debug as thoroughly as possible, understanding that finding all bugs is impossible." I like my game designers to have a similar motto, "Let's balance as thoroughly as possible, understanding that perfect balance is impossible."

This has always been my thought on the subject, but I've never managed to distill it down to this level of perfection. So yeah, I agree with Tanuk.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

When in fact, the motto of every single department I have worked for is, "Let's debug as thoroughly as possible, understanding that finding all bugs is impossible." I like my game designers to have a similar motto, "Let's balance as thoroughly as possible, understanding that perfect balance is impossible."

I certainly agree with this. So long as designers realize the perfect balance is impossible in a differentiated system, and so long as they're willing to restrain themselves to some degree, and allow differentiation even at the cost of balance, then we'll be fine.

My worry is simply that as spells get more "balanced", we'll start seeing things like hard caps on the number of monsters a spell is allowed to hit (even though, logically, it could hit more, due to it's shape), all spells of a certain level and "style" (i.e. single-target, radius, etc.) have a single specific effect (damage, for example), and always doing same range, with no interesting or "real"-seeming special effects.

Codification doesn't necessarily do this, but the more you balance, the less differentiated things get. Not all differentiation is good, mind.

We're already seeing this in other areas of 4E, for example in the way that Wizards are getting scaled back, and Fighters getting scaled up, and in that process, given the martial equivalent of "spells". Is it a bad thing? No, I think it'll improve the game, but it needs to be treated with caution, I feel.

Spells are the same way - it's cool to upgrade weak spells, ensure all spells have a raison d'etre, etc. but I don't think having four-fives "flavours" of basically the same spell is terribly beneficial.

The bug-balance analogy is imperfect, too. Take out bugs straightfowardly costs time and effort, whereas balancing something means you have to determine specific balance criteria, and then apply them to it, and likely change the operation or value of the thing you're balancing- this is a very different process, I think you'd agree. One thing both do share, of course, is a benefit from testing, but with balance, this can be misleading. The MMORPG world is littered with examples of spells and powers that seemed absolutely fine when they were initially tested, but after years of gameplay and sometimes due to small changes in other game systems, became unreasonably powerful (which is only really bad in a TT RPG if they start trivializing encounters and overshadowing the other players on a regular basis).