Bad feats and PrC - a Magic: tG analogy

[MerricB]

Another definition of the Magic player profiles from Mark Rosewater:

The Spike, which is the competitive player to whom winning is everything.

The Johnny, to whom Magic is used to prove he his creative. Winning is not as important to him and when he wins he likes to win with style.

The Timmy, who just wants to have fun. To him Magic is more social and winning in not important as long as he is having a good time and fun with his fellow players.

 

[Testament]

Another definition of the Magic player profiles from Mark Rosewater:

The Spike, which is the competitive player to whom winning is everything.

The Johnny, to whom Magic is used to prove he his creative. Winning is not as important to him and when he wins he likes to win with style.

The Timmy, who just wants to have fun. To him Magic is more social and winning in not important as long as he is having a good time and fun with his fellow players.

By those definitions, if we apply them to D&D, then I want a table of nothing but Timmies.

 

[Crothian]

Indeed. However, there is a correlation between winning in Magic and having an effective D&D character.

Many people do want to have the best character they can; if this were not true, then there would be no complaints about the Order of the Bow Initiate and other instances of game mechanics.

Of course there would, these are the message boards and a lack of reason to complain doesn't actually stop people from complaining....

 

[ThirdWizard]

As ThirdWizard notes, winning isn't always the only reason for playing Magic. Although, sometimes it is more always winning isn't the reason... winning with style is more important. Thus the Johnny player who builds decks with "One with Nothing" or "Sorrow's Path", just to see if it can be done...

Much better put. Nobody plays to lose after all.

The difference being, at the end of a Magic game you do have a winner and a loser. At the end of a D&D game, well... we just had a thread on that with various good points on both sides.

I like comparing a deck to a campaign, as Rodrigo put it. The DM throws in a bunch of stuff, and the PCs start drawing things at random. Then they rip up a few cards and toss them across the table, then they draw some more cards.

 

[Mokona]

Are you sure you don't work for WotC Merric? You do enough work on D&D for free they should pay you.

Great analysis, in a friendly presentation no less. Thanks.

 

[apesamongus]

In that article, none of the reasons he gives ever get around to addressing the example he gave earlier of the lightning bolt and that Volcanic Hammer card. He kind of hints at it with his "current meta-environment" spiel, but in more straightforward language, it's only a decent card because they removed a card that is strictly better than it. They took out the better card and replaced it with a worse card. So, really, that Vocanic Hammer is really just a nerfed Lightning bolt. And that Lion diamond thing is just a nerfed black lotus. It's because Magic isn't a complex enough game to keep making cards that are unique, so to keep printing they repackage and rename the same-old cards to sell them again.

That's why this article isn't really applicable to an RPG discussion. First off, absent some errata, a previously published class is still going to be an option, so if it were strictly worse than another, there really would never be a reason to take it. For a class to go away basically takes a new edition. But then, you aren't likely to see one class that's strictly inferior to another, because there are so many different options in D&D that there is always some small thing that one can do that the other cannot (even taking a PrC from sorcerer loses familiar advancement), and as long as there is some element that each has better than the other, it's all a matter of opinion which is better (unlike those magic cards where one is as good or better in every way than the other.)

 

[Mouseferatu]

Perhaps several overpowered and underpowered PrCs can be explained through the relatively different experiences of various authors. In one person's game something can be amazingly overpowered, while in another it is considerably weak.

There's no "perhaps" about this; I can attest to it from personal experience.

I've written a goodly number of PrCs in my time in the industry to date, with (I'm certain) many more to come. And I've worked with people in the same situation.

Not a one of us agrees 100% on exactly where "balance" falls. Sure, most of us are close, but even then, there are differences. And some of us have vastly different ideas.

Is it because one of us is better than the others at judging balance? Not really. (Well, I'm sure some are better than others, but that's not always the case.) It's because, as you just suggested, experience dictates attitude. Someone who's accustomed to running an urban game is going to have a different idea of balance than someone who's running a wilderness campaign, even if their campaigns are of the exact same, by-the-book "power level." In one, a PrC that jacks up skills like Diplomacy, Bluff, and Gather Information is potent; in the other, it's useless.

It's a simplistic example, I admit--most of us have run/played in more than one type of campaign. But it still holds true, just on a larger scale.

Here's a secret. "Balance" is a myth. It's a social construct. One class, or spell, or feat is equal to another because enough people who wrote the books say it is.

So when you have new people, you have different ideas of balance. Pure and simple.

 

[MerricB]

Here's a secret. "Balance" is a myth. It's a social construct. One class, or spell, or feat is equal to another because enough people who wrote the books say it is.

I think that's too simplistic. Although I agree with the basic idea - balance is conditional on playing style - I do think there are actual examples that display a lack of balance.

For instance, in the 3e rules, Skill Focus (Listen) (+2 to Listen checks) is clearly inferior to Alertness (+2 to Listen and Spot checks). Skill Focus retains a niche because of other uses and its stackability with Alertness, but there is clearly a better choice when choosing the feat. (For the time being I'm going to ignore any potential PrC with a forced pre-req of Skill Focus (Listen)).

One can also have the example of a 1st level warrior in a group of 10th level Fighters. I think that is a clear case of imbalance.

Balance isn't imaginary, but has wide bands of tolerance; the relation of two aspects of the game to one another depend on a myriad of other factors, especially play style.

Cheers!

 

[Mouseferatu]

I think that's too simplistic. Although I agree with the basic idea - balance is conditional on playing style - I do think there are actual examples that display a lack of balance.

For instance, in the 3e rules, Skill Focus (Listen) (+2 to Listen checks) is clearly inferior to Alertness (+2 to Listen and Spot checks). Skill Focus retains a niche because of other uses and its stackability with Alertness, but there is clearly a better choice when choosing the feat. (For the time being I'm going to ignore any potential PrC with a forced pre-req of Skill Focus (Listen)).

One can also have the example of a 1st level warrior in a group of 10th level Fighters. I think that is a clear case of imbalance.

Balance isn't imaginary, but has wide bands of tolerance; the relation of two aspects of the game to one another depend on a myriad of other factors, especially play style.

Cheers!

Okay, obviously I implied something I didn't mean to.

I never meant to claim that nothing is "truly" unbalanced. There are, as you say, examples of options that are blatantly unbalanced regardless of playstyle.

In fact, what I meant was the opposite. Nothing is truly, 100% balanced against anything else under all conditions. No matter how close you get, there will always be some situation, or some style of play, that renders two options uneven, no matter how careful and meticulous the designers are.

Is that an excuse to slack off? Of course not. The trick is to make any new addition to the game as balanced as possible under the greatest number of circumstances. But it will never, ever be 100%. And eventually, there comes a point where you must simply accept Option A and Option B as "balanced," because they're as reasonably close as they're ever going to get.

 

[MerricB]

Okay, obviously I implied something I didn't mean to.

Possibly. I agree with you, btw.

Cheers!