Are we all becoming balance lawyers?

[Aus_Snow]

Okay I have gripe about D&D 3.X and it is the assumption that all of the player classes should be balanced. Just scroll through the list of discussions and anyone can see that "Class Balance" is an important issue in most player's minds. I used to believe the same thing, that overall the classes should be balanced so that no class is any more powerful than another but then again I've had a revalation if you will.

What ever happened to just picking a character concept and playing what you want without regards to the "power-level" of the classes of the other characters? What ever happened to playing a character for the fun of playing and not getting all wound up about how powerful they are in combat compared to the other party members?

Hm.

Well firstly, there is NOTHING stopping a 3e player "just picking a character concept [...]" (etc.) - nothing at all.

Secondly, people "getting all wound up about how powerful [their characters] are in combat compared to the other party members" is so unbelievably not limited to D&D 3e, that words (very nearly ) fail me.

1e and 2e certainly didn't have "Balance"

Yes they most certainly did. Only, the balance was *much* more poorly thought out. Sloppy, shoddy, subpar - these are words that spring to mind.

I was recently reading a discussion on how powerful Psions are when I came to the conclusion... Do I really care as a DM or as a Player? Not really...

Many do, and (IMO) rightly so. After all, balance is definitely a part of every (sane) DM's thoughts. What is truly being argued here is the *level* of balance that is supposedly required, or supposedly not required. Without even a nod to balance, these games would be *unplayable* - except perhaps by certain categories of insane people.

my purpose isn't to defeat my players but to challenge them.

"Them". That is the key word there. Because, as it happens, what is challenging for a weaker character will conceivably not be for a strong character.

It seems that game balance is actually important to you, Calico Jack - but you prefer to adjudicate that on the fly, rather than rely on prewritten rules and/or guidelines. Fair enough. But in the end, it comes down to your opinion that your judgement of game balance is better (at least for your own purposes) than the designers'.

Fair enough! You're definitely not the only one who feels that way. But I don't see the reason for any actual 'gripe' here. You simply run games the way you want to run them, as does every other GM. Um..?

 

[Stalker0]

I think people are forgetting that people didn't talk about balance much in 2e and earlier because they couldn't talk!!!

The internet hasn't been around forever, and neither has places like enworld. Its only been relatively recently that we all could jump on big forums like this and talk about this stuff in the first place.

And really, what else are we going to talk about? Balance is a nature consequence of rules discussion, and the rules of the game are a nice common denominator for everyone to get behind.

Sure, I'd love to tell you all about boris, my character for this game in a custom world who has this cool item the dm made up for me, and does this and so forth. But without the context of the world I play in, the house rules we use, there's only so much you can say to that.

But everyone has the rules. So if I say, "Hey guys, what do you think about X?" Everyone can grab their books, take a look, and drop in their 2 cents.

So I think balance discussion is natural, and probably would have occured back in 1e and 2e days if players back then had a nice big discussion board to post ideas.

 

[Hussar]

THere is another issue to keep in mind with balance as well: How balanced?

That came out wrong. What I mean is, is balance a knife point where the slightest breeze brings it crashing down or is balance a pretty broad thing where the addition of this or that likely won't be a problem, although it might be.

To me, 3ed balance is the latter. While there have been some broken mechanics out there, by and large, none of the classes dramatically outshines another. And, in a team oriented game, you don't really want one player to constantly outshine the others. That's fun for one guy, but the rest are out in the cold. Far better, IMO, to keep the classes roughly on par and work from there.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

IMO the current focus on balance is kind of a crock. A lot of designer, DM, and player effort is put forth to make sure that every character is equally effective in combat. It's more effort than it's worth and it does weird things to the game, like requiring that fighters possess a veritable magic-item arsenal. Unless combat is the sole focus of the game, I really don't care if everyone is equally effective on combat. What's important to me is that

1) There is a roughly equal division of spotlight time among the players where each player's character really gets to shine, and

2) Situations where any character is totally useless is rare

i.e. I'm fine with a bard being stronger in social situations than the fighter and vice-versa in physical combat as long as both situations occur with reasonable frequency

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I think the primary problem is that the books are written in an attempt to be balanced, sometimes throwing out sense, style and/or flavor to achieve this. <snip>

QFT

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I think people are forgetting that people didn't talk about balance much in 2e and earlier because they couldn't talk!!!

The internet hasn't been around forever, and neither has places like enworld. Its only been relatively recently that we all could jump on big forums like this and talk about this stuff in the first place.

I beg to differ. I've been discussing D&D online since about 1982 on my 150 baud C-64 modem. BBS' were around LONG before the internet.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Classes should be balanced in such a way that a fighter should be best at fighting, a thief (I detest rogues) should be best at stealing and stealth. Wizards should be best at blowing stuff up and utility spells, clerics at healing and petitioning the gods for favors and information. When they cross into each other's fields they SHOULD suck. I don't hire a writer to build a house or an engineer to balance my checkbook.

 

[Herobizkit]

I'm sort of on the same page with JRRNeiklot; in the role-playing game of D&D, you are choosing to PLAY a ROLE in a GAME. The GAME aspect assumes that players will not be identical, that each ROLE offered will have strengths and weaknesses which require players to work (or PLAY) together to accomplish a common goal. Wizards blast, Fighters fight, Rogues sneak, Clerics heal; at its inception, D&D is essentialy Gauntlet on 'roids.

But then you have players who want more than the dungeon crawlin', monster brawlin', arrow shootin', treasure lootin' game. They want "deep" characters, characters who expand beyond their in-game abilties. They have rich personae, motivations, desires, relationships, what have you. The GAME aspect has been eclipsed by the ROLE-PLAYING aspect of the "shared hallucination" of a fantasy world.

So, how does one ROLE balance against one another? You have the "core 4" which are still, at their basest form, your "typical" fantasy roles (we could argue the "Cleric" being atypical, but for the sake of argument, it's one of the boys).

But then you have the Barbarian. And the Druid. And the Bard. All of which try to fill another niche in the GAME aspect of D&D, but are really catering more to the ROLE-PLAYING aspect of the game; each comes from a specific area in a campaign world, each offering unique abilities that may or may not mesh with other roles in the game. For example, throw a Barbarian, Ranger, Druid, and (say) a Paladin together. The Paladin sticks out like a sore thumb. Now put the party in a city-based adventure; now the Paladin becomes the hero while the others stand around and wonder why they're there.

The classes make a vain attempt to balance the GAME verus the ROLE-PLAYING. You can measure GAME results, but ROLE-PLAYING becomes more difficult to gauge.

I think that's my point, anyway.

 

[Hussar]

For example, throw a Barbarian, Ranger, Druid, and (say) a Paladin together. The Paladin sticks out like a sore thumb. Now put the party in a city-based adventure; now the Paladin becomes the hero while the others stand around and wonder why they're there.

Well, there needs to be some communication between the players and between the players and the DM about the campaign before chargen, of course. If the campaign is city based, I would wonder why people would be playing a barbarian, ranger and druid.

However, that's not to say that you couldn't do that. Flip it over to the nature based campaign and say that its mostly outdoorsey stuff. Ok, barbarian, range, druid. No problems. Paladin... well, Ehlohna is NG, so, we make a paladin of Ehlonna (sp). Dedicated to healing the natural world and destroying anything which threatens nature, our Paladin is now the Druid's best friend.

I think people get too hung up on the mechanics and can't seem to step back from that. Sure, paladin, Duddley Do-Right. Ok, but, let's use those mechanics, tweak a bit and get an entirely new character. Role is what you do with a character AFTER you assign the class. You don't need to balance Role, since Role is defined by the campaign, not by the game. If someone is taking a Role which is completely unsuited for the campaign, that's a player problem, not a game one. However, the mechanics are largely broad enough that I can take most classes and create a role that will fit in almost any campaign.

 

[Agent Oracle]

I beg to differ. I've been discussing D&D online since about 1982 on my 150 baud C-64 modem. BBS' were around LONG before the internet.

Sadly, the BBS' posts of "the text time" are mostly lost to us. Much like usenet, they are foerign to modern web surfers... just as some day, ENWorld.org, and rpg.net will be forgotten cycles in the void of history.