Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrowhawk" data-source="post: 5661784" data-attributes="member: 6679551">Good post... Refreshing to talk with someone who doesn't resort to ad hominems and thinly veiled insults. Let's start with something we apparently both agree on.  1) Any class which has more options/resources is going to present more challenges for a DM than those that have less options. This isn't a revoluationary concept, nor is it brilliantly insightful. It's self-evident. But I would believe that many players/DM's have never conceptualized it i.e. understood why high level Spell Casters were chumping their campaigns. IMO, this is the most the Tier system has to contribute. Pushing Jaronk's analysis for greater granulity (as he does) is frought with issues.  Amen. Now do me a favor and add this reply to those select few in this thread who keep thinking 1v1 proves something about Jaron's ranking.  He says that..but it's little more than proof by assertion. I'm referring to the assertion that the rankings hold true as long as they have the same skill/optimization. JaronK makes a flawed induction. There's a very simple way to illustrate this. If you sit a carrot at the game table and alternatively give it a fully optimized (whatever that means) Wizard and a fully optimized Fighter, which Class will prove more useful? Low optimization and skill is going to squash any true "power/versatility" curve down to a flat line. Jaronk fails to consider this. Now, does JaronK provide us with a skill+optimization matrix versus class? No. There is no metric for determing the comparative skill/optimzation, or lack thereof, in the people in your group and matching that up with how much of a difference it will mean between Tier 1 and Tier 6.  Moving on... Please keep repeating that for the benefit of others who haven't seemed to grasp that concept when making their objections.   It doesn't do that at all. JaronK never mentions what amount of skill or optimization we are talking about. He makes a blanket statement and then adds in a few caveats that are completely underemphaised. Kind of like the fine print on the bottom of a pack of cigarettes compared to the entire add: all the cool people smoke, but these things could kill you. How much better is Nonsi than his friends? How much more optimization has he put in? Can you provide me with a metric that allows me to compare them? How familiar is the DM with Beguiler class to begin with? There is a underlying point being made here at it's crucial to a later point: these things are immeasurable from any quantitative standpoint...but yet JaronK says we can quantize the classes. Do you see the inherent problem? You respond to this notion...so we'll come back to it. I'm not saying that JaronK's system is bogus. I am telling readers to determine if the assumptions which are the basis of the analsys are valid for their campaign. I'm also pointing out problems with his analsys which affect the accuracy of his analysis. As I said, and to which I believe you agreed, if you give any class unfettered access to "magic," that class will have more options and be harder to account for than any class that does not have access to magic.   Your anecdote underscores my point. The assumptions of the Tier system aren't valid for your campaign, nor were they valid for Nonsi's. Neither of you have PC's with equal skill/opt across classes. Now let me ask you...how many times have you as aDM'd ever had equal skill and optimization across all the classes? Yet, JaronK is advocating the nerfing of Wizards compared to Monks...right out of the box. Jaronk suggests you should ...at the very moment you roll the character...give classes different point-buy totals based on their Tier ranking. Yes....yes...it's all in the context of equal skill. Okay...so what happens when the skill levels/effort put into a build are different? How does one modify the point-buy? Not too clear on that point is he?  Not precisely, but he does goes over the top in suggesting that very thing. He says the rankings are valid no matter what equal level of skill/optimzation you have.  He only offers ONE set of Tier rankings.m He suggests you nerf from day one.  He suggests you don't even allow Tier 1's to play with Tier 5's. The vast majority of his discussion in his thread is about defending his Tier system, not pointing out where it's wrong or that it is being missued.  Under what set of circumstances? How well do those circumstances represent any individual DM's campaign?  And performing those roles comes at an opportuinty costs.  So under Jaron's logic. The average person playing a Wizard can out "role" the Fighter (who is played by an average person as well) at his job--killing and tanking--and do all of the tasks that are required of him as a Wizard...all from levels 6-15? Are you going to support that as a truth?  The problem is all of JaronK's "proofs" are based on power/gaming. They aren't based on equal levels of skill. They are based on a Wizard having a high degree of skill.  And it never occured to BBEG that some spell caster might be trying to find out that exact thing? I mean this is my point. Spell casters with access to all the spells in the book have been around for 1000 years in any D&D campaign. I swear its like an 11th level Wizard is Cortes discovering the Aztecs.  See my response to #1 above.  This seems a common response when people are confronted by the spell limitations of Wizards.  JaronK specifically states that using items doesn't make that class better...because all classes can use items. Its irrelevant if the Wizard can make the scroll as a Class ability because a) He can't do that at the start of combat; 2) Any class can either buy or have an item with any particular spell custom made e.g. Boots of Free Movement, Potion of Mind Blank.  Is there any restriction on what can be made in to a potion? A Masterworks potion belt lets you drink potions as a free action. So if Wizard can do it with a scroll made before the adventure...a Fighter can do it with a potion.  So you're saying there's usefulness in a non-caster who can do something in quick succession half a dozen times?  I'm not sure what's vaguely relevant to Water Breathing...but now you're in the middle of a wholly subjective judgment call and I won't try and try to argue yea or nay. Unfortunately, it's presented as a standard of balance and its defended that way. It makes no attempt explore the areas where it fails horribly and leads to misinformation. That's a very generous thing for you to say. So now were getting to the heart of the matter...or rather the best part. People talk about balance, but that's not what balance is. Balance is not subjective. Balance is by its very definition an objective weighing of two things with a common metric. Read the definition:  a state of equilibrium or equipoise; equal distribution of weight, amount, etc.   A "balance" is also a scale where two things are weighed against each other. Game designers are taking the word...misapplying it...but then trying to benefit from its implication. The fact that you can't achieve perfect balance is not at issue. Nobody's talking about "perfect" balance. But, balance implies an empirical comparison and in the world of RPG Classes, an empirical comparison is not possible. It's literally not possible to balance things that do not have a similar metric. And what exactly are the two things you are weighing? Do they have quantitatve values? No, they don't. Their values, even with things like DPS, are entirely dependent on the context in which they are being evaluated. I'm going to expand on something I just said. A game designer wants to use the term balance because they'd like to believe (and convicne others) such a thing is not only possible (which it is not) but they've moved closer to achieving it. It's sophistry. What they are evaulating is effectiveness in some specific or set of contexts. Effectiveness is contextual. But if you use the word "balance" then everybody understands you are talking about a non-contextual quality and you are free to pursue your own personal notion of "balance" without having to defend it. If you tell people you are looking for fairness...good luck with that. Effectiveness? You'll be arguing 24/7 defending what it means to be effective. But "Balance" you can throw that word out there and the only thing people are going to argue is whether you have achieved it....and guess what is so wonderful about pursuing "balance"? People are going to have the darndest time proving you haven't achieved.  Not only can you not achieve balance, you can't even measure it.  What you are really doing is assessing effectiveness given test cases in your head. This "balancing" of a campaign is really one assessing what one believes to be the effectiveness of the party given certain scenarios or contexts. As soon as the party does something to change the context...suddenly the "balance" can be thrown out of whack.   That's exactly right. By using the word "balance" we avoid the subjective pitfalls of words like fairness and effectiveness. But the "balance" one strives for is a result of context. A budget sheet is balanced regardless of context. Why? Because the things being balanced share the same metric: money. RPG's cannot be broken down into empirical values. Hence they cannot be balanced and you cannot change the balance because such a thing does not exist. You have contextual effectiveness and perceptions of fairness. That is what you can manage as a game designer/DM. People talk about...they all have this concept of it...but they fail to understand how it is unmeasurable in an RPG and that discussions based on it a inherently flawed...and we wonder why no one ever agrees on things being balanced in an RPG?  Right. But you're not talking about balance but contextual effectiveness. You can call it achieving nirvana...but that doesn't change what it is.  Now you are talking about perceptions of fairness and fun. Balance =/= Fun. Purpose is closer to fun than balance.  What if I told you that the way to improve things is to make martial classes needed (and not in a trivial way) and effective at higher levels? Isn't that what we are really talking about? Do we really care what "balance" means as long as the Fighter class is important to party success at a high level? The problem is purpose....not balance.</blockquote>

Verification