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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6004048" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think GreyICE's reply here captures the important issues.To the extent that 4e's math is balanced on a razor's edge, or a balance beam, or a 6" wide plank, what does this mean? It means that the game defaults to its smoothest play when the typical combatant has about a 60% chance of hitting a target.But that's just a default. There can be any number of reasons for departing from it. The last combat encounter that I ran, for example, involved 2 22nd level Death Giants, plus a 17th level Eidolon, against a party of 5 17th level PCs - and this in a game in which we don't use Expertise feats, so the PCs are a point or two behind the maths even against matched-level opponents. The high defences of the Death Giants made itself evident in the course of the combat, as I could predict that it would, and that was part of the effect that I was looking for. I wouldn't do it for every fight - my default encounter is with larger numbers of equal or lower level combatants - but as a one-off to achieve a particular feel, it worked.And this, I think, goes to the point about "narrative space". 4e's "razor edge" balance is, in reality, nothing more than transparent mathematics: it is easy to estimate hit/miss ratios, and therefore think about pacing considerations, because every level of creature is associated with a particular average defence number. It occupies the same functional space as, for example, the pass/fail cycle for setting DCs in HeroQuest revised. (Some of this HQrev stuff was then reproduced by Robin Laws in his work on the 4e DMG2. My disappointment with that is that no real effort was made to integrate it tightly with the 4e action resolution and monster building mechanics, which are very different from HQ.)And reliable pacing tools, of course, do no damage to the narrative space at all - they improve it!EDIT:This is nothing to do with "razor edge balance". This is about scaling. AD&D has comparatively little scaling of AC and saving throw DCs. (Although Vault of the Drow comes up with a story kludge - magical drow items - to produce de facto scaling AC for the drow opponents - ACs well into the single digit negatives are rife, which no PC below 10th level would have any reliable chance of hitting.)Change 4e by dropping the +half per level to attacks and defences, and it will run much the same as AD&D in combat. (If you also dropped the +half per level to skills you would have to revise the DCs per level table by the same modification.) I'm pretty sure there are some 4e players on these boards who do just that!In other words, I think it is pretty trivial to eleminate the scaling from 4e and thereby render it comparable in this respect to AD&D. And the triviality is a direct consequence of the maths being transparent.</blockquote>

Verification