Are we all becoming balance lawyers?

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Screw that. Balance schmalance.

Older editions were as balanced as the DM. All this talk of balance in 3e is to compensate for DMs who cannot maintain this balance at their table.

I'm calling BS on this one. Every game of 1st and 2nd edition I've played in... nix that, HEARD about, the fighters were completely obsolete past 10th level, same with the rogues. If you werent a wizard or cleric, you may as well not even show. Any game where you're effectively sidelined for the major portion of the campaign sucks.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

The biggest problem with balance discussions, imo, is the number of people convinced that they can "eyeball" balance.

I have written books and had people write me like a DAY after its release (ahh the wonders of PDFs) and tell me "feat X is unbalanced".

How the heck do they know that? *I* cant balance by reading something (as opposed to playtesting it) and I do this for a living.

So I think when most people say "balance" what they really mean is "it looks strange to me" or "that's unfamiliar so I instinctively fear it" or "I don't like it".

Chuck

I had written a long rant about this sort of thing for the Rappan Athuk thread in response to something Umbran said to me but decided not to post it. You pretty much summed up part of my rant far better than I could have put it.

In short: The Map is not the Territory.

 

[Dr Simon]

I think the ideal that is aimed at with the concept of 'balance' is that no one character should out-shine another in terms of abilities and game time.

Although D&D3 was designed with this concept in mind perhaps more explicitly than earlier editions, it's still a two-way street between rules and DM.

The core concept of a D&D adventuring party is that each member has something unique to contribute. New classes, feat, options etc. that render the abilities of a class redundant upset that balance. It's not so much a question of whether a 5th level Rogue can handle himself in a fight as well as a 5th level Fighter, or even if he is as powerful - it's more a question of do his unique qualities as a rogue (sneak attack bonus, trapfinding, skills monkey) make him *as useful* (or interesting to play) as a fighter?

The rules and fundamental design play a part in this, but adventure design/DM are the second half, if you will. If the adventure is a tomb full of undead (no sneak attack), little or no traps, high places, locked doors or peopple to bluff, then the rogue is going to find himself out-classed and out game-timed by the cleric (who can turn) and the fighter (who can Great Cleave his way through those zombies).

 

[Moon-Lancer]

The biggest problem with balance discussions, imo, is the number of people convinced that they can "eyeball" balance.

I have written books and had people write me like a DAY after its release (ahh the wonders of PDFs) and tell me "feat X is unbalanced".

How the heck do they know that? *I* cant balance by reading something (as opposed to playtesting it) and I do this for a living.

So I think when most people say "balance" what they really mean is "it looks strange to me" or "that's unfamiliar so I instinctively fear it" or "I don't like it".

Chuck

*DING* we have a winner. most crys i see about balance fall under this. I think vop actualy is the most reoccuring example i can think of. When will people realize its not unbalanced or broken as long as you roleplay. Sometimes though, i see unbalanced combinations or feats like greenbound summoning or venom fire, but most of the time feats are balanced, and if they are not, usaly a typo is to blame.

 

[francisca]

What's wrong with trying to help out "n00b dms"?

Not a darn thing. I don't think a 320 page PHB, 320 page DMG, and whatever the MM is the help they need, however. The basic game might be a good entry point, and I realize the DMG II attempts to help, but having to buy another book to get help for new DMs might hamper more than help.

This is exactly the point -- if you want D&D to be more than a small niche hobby, which

Hey, newsflash: It has always been a niche hobby, and always will be. And frankly, I don't care that it is, and don't care if it is ever more than that. I have no responsibility to anyone to shepherd the growth of the game.

WotC certainly does since the growth of D&D is what's paying their salaries, then you need to make it easier for people to play the game. Yes, there's a certain cachet to having the super-genius eats-breathes-and-sleeps-RPGs dude from the gaming store as your DM, who can houserule and rebalance and rewrite everything effortlessly, but *lots of players don't have such a dude*. If me and my four friends like the idea of playing D&D but none of us has time and energy to train ourselves into being the super-DM that all of you remember so fondly from 1st edition days, are we just doomed to crappy, unrewarding, impossible-to-win campaigns? Do we *have* to struggle with unpleasant game sessions for weeks before we "deserve" to have an enjoyable game? Is that the rule?

Again, it's a matter of expectations. The guys at my table aren't there for the ultimate uber super-genius DM running the ultimate RPG experience. (They would have left the game years ago if that was the case. ) I recall my early days of DMing to be a learning experience, where sometimes I botched it. Sometimes this screwed the players, sometime it was in the player's favor. But it was never a "crappy, unrewarding, impossible-to-win campaign" and we never struggled "with unpleasant game sessions for weeks before we "deserve" to have an enjoyable game". YMMV.

Balance, comprehensive crunch, rules that "assume a DM who applies them heartlessly like a computer" -- all of these are *important*, because for the game to sell and be accessible it has to be usable by stupid DMs. Most DMs start out as stupid DMs, after all, and it's a lot easier for a stupid DM, using comprehensive rules that treat him like a CPU, to *learn* how to become a good DM and *learn* how to use discretion and so on, than for the stupid DM to have an unbalanced, incomplete ruleset that needs tons of tweaking dumped into his lap and have no idea where to go. The most likely situation in that scenario is that the group has an awful session and then stops playing D&D in favor of something else.

Again, I don't see spending half the session (for the new DM/players) flipping through the PHB and DMG to figure out how flanking works ("what? pick a corner, draw a line, if it intersects? What?") as being any better.

What you are describing sounds like a "one size fits all" solution. I can't see that ever being the case.

 

[francisca]

My opinion is that we all think that we're experts on the game and balance (all of us, from the designers of the game to the latest newbie) but that in reality the game is so complicated that no one is an expert on the issue. A group, with talented proofreaders and experienced playtesters, will always uncover problems and mistakes . . . and identify balance issues.

I'm an expert on the players at my table, to a much larger degree than any designer could ever be. I recognize the effort to make the balance as widely applicable as possible, and 3e succeeds to a degree, better than previous editions, possibly. However, in the end, balance comes down to the DM desgining encounters which challenge the party and provide an enjoyable experience. 3e attempts to facilitate that, but at the cost of complexity.

 

[francisca]

Also, I felt 1E was pretty well balanced UNTIL (and this is a big until) Unearthed Arcana was thrown into the mix. That was where the wheels came off and in a big way. Cavaliers, Barbarians, off the chart multiclass options you didnt have before, like Druid/Ranger, Full Plate that gave you Damage Resistance, stat-rolling methods that basically guaranteed a ton of really high scores...

So until the designers decided to make a book that was every power gamer's dream, I contend 1E was fairly well balanced.

Chuck

I'm with you. When I was a kid, we couldn't find this book. In retrospect, I'm glad we couldn't.

 

[francisca]

I'm calling BS on this one. Every game of 1st and 2nd edition I've played in... nix that, HEARD about, the fighters were completely obsolete past 10th level, same with the rogues. If you werent a wizard or cleric, you may as well not even show. Any game where you're effectively sidelined for the major portion of the campaign sucks.

I'm calling BS on your BS. Stop projecting your crappy experience onto others. I'm sorry to hear your experience with 1e was bad. Mine wasn't.

Time for me to get to work. I'll offer up this blanket statement:

I'm not saying 3e sucks. I'm saying the "fair and balanced" aspect of it isn't what it is hailed as. Hell, I give the designers at WotC and other publishing houses BIG TIME props for even attempting this Quixotic task. Kudos to all of you, because you have done a pretty good job overall. However, in the end, it's about a table, some gamers, and having a good time. Balance comes down to them, not the ruleset.

 

[Mort]

I don't want to start an edition war: but saying 1e was unbalanced is missing the mark.

1e was fairly well balanced, in part because each character filled a very specific niche and couldn't really deviate from that niche. The main problem with 1e was flexibility not balance. It was pretty easy to stumble into territory where the DM had to ad-lib a rule because there just wasn't one (try tripping someone in 1e).

3e attempts to add options and flexibility while still maintaining balance, and that's much trickier. That's why the rules books are thicker and read like college textbooks. I think 3e does an ok job, but obiously opinions vary.

 

[Jupp]

This is being written by someone that played AD&D mainly and who gave up on 3E about 2 years ago:

I never considered inter-class balance as a game-breaker/maker since I play D&D. I couldn't care less if a Thief is not that cool in combat. If I wanted to play a thief I'd have other motivations to do so than combat statistics and their comparison to other classes. Because, every PC has his 5 minutes of fame in an adventure at least once, and those are the moments that count, not the question if you are playing a "balanced" class or not.

In the end it all comes down to the responsibility of the DM to give the PCs appropriate encounters and challenges so they have a tough time solving them while still making it possible (in whatever way that may exists) to do so. That is the only kind of balance I care about. Make it hard (or very, very hard) but stay fair. And it is in the hand of the DM alone to succeed at that. All this talk about balance is nice for discussion forums because you can go on about it for ages. But it is certainly not a topic in our game group (at least not since we went back to AD&D).