Balance Meter - allowing flavorful imbalance in a balanced game

[billd91]

I am beginning to notice highly selective use of this "argument". If you want to be consistent with it, then 3E, and all prior versions, have things that didn't go so well, either.

Of course they did. Lasted a bit longer though and didn't have as much evidence of a declining market share. 4e has serious deficiencies as the standard bearer of D&D. The whole D&DNext project, aimed at broadening the appeal of D&D again, tell us that 4e isn't cutting the mustard for some, undoubtedly multiple, reasons. The argument has a validity for 4e that it doesn't have for other editions.

 

[billd91]

Apparently Hasbro's targets for the D&D line are $50 million/year. It isn't going well by the standards of unrealistic financial targets. (And honestly, 4e is pretty close to a complete game mechanically at this point - it's hard to see too much more room for splatbooks no matter the quality that aren't just product churn - and it has several very nice setting books.)

But have those standards changed? If not, 5e's almost certainly doomed as well. I doubt WotC, unable to meet the expectations with 4e, would be likely to get the green light for 5e with the same expectations at Hasbro's end. And if expectations have changed, why aren't they continuing with 4e (aside from the splatbook saturation, which still shows that there have been weaknesses in 4e's publishing model) under the new targets?

I suspect there are other things going on than Ryan Dancey's $50 million figure for 5e now. I certainly hope there are. WotC should have a pretty good argument for being an overall performer with Magic's resurgence even if D&D isn't meeting unrealistic expectations. I hope they can exert some leverage with that, using a high performance product to subsidize a lower performing but higher prestige product.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Of course they did. Lasted a bit longer though and didn't have as much evidence of a declining market share. 4e has serious deficiencies as the standard bearer of D&D. The whole D&DNext project, aimed at broadening the appeal of D&D again, tell us that 4e isn't cutting the mustard for some, undoubtedly multiple, reasons. The argument has a validity for 4e that it doesn't have for other editions.

I'm happy to see the acknowledgement of multiple reasons, but the original remark, which I have seen in that form several times recently by multiple people, does not. In it, you are conflating at least three different things, and thus implying a casual connection that you are in no way illustrating:

1. Market share - which we know only from anecdote, but even granted for sake of argument, is the sum of a whole host of things. No doubt there are particular features of 4E that have contributed, but we don't know the exact ratio. For example, we don't know how much 4E is hurt by the fact that it happened so "soon" after 3E/3.5 were done, compared to the decade of lying fallow that 3E dropped into.

2. Economic conditions totally separate from the quality or appreciation of the games. 3E was launched in the middle of a booming recovery (best possible moment for a luxury product). 4E was launched in one of the worst global recessions since gaming starting (the worst possible moment).

3. Things in 4E that have led directly to less appeal and/or restricted what people wanted to do with it. (And to stay on topic here, only those things that are related to or in the pursuit of balance.)

In short, if you have an argument that something in 4E related to balance has restricted its appeal, you should be able to make that argument outside of the first two issues (or indeed, even particular flaws of 4E not in any way related to balance--such as the sometimes goofy names). There are good debating reasons for doing so, but I'm not primarily interested in those. I'm interested in solutions. The only way we get to solutions is to talk about the particulars of the actual problems. Saying, "this has been tried and some people aren't buying it," is a worthless remark. Everything in D&D, by definition, has been tried, and I guarantee that someone didn't like it.

 

[hanez]

The only way we get to solutions is to talk about the particulars of the actual problems. Saying, "this has been tried and some people aren't buying it," is a worthless remark. Everything in D&D, by definition, has been tried, and I guarantee that someone didn't like it.

Good point.

More relevant perhaps would be that the desisngers and WOTC shows some interest in changing focus. As someone who is mostly interested in 5e because of the way in which it was announced, it can be frustrating to have to argue that the things you love in D&D won't fit because of balance. I don't begrudge many of the concepts and class styles in 4e, they could slide right along with the classes and things I love about D&D and players could decide what they prefer. Unfortunately it seems sometimes that the other side is the side that finds my preferences as being acceptable in the core game.

If vancian magic doesn't fit, I don't see what the point of a unity edition is. And any argument to show how they could fit together and make the game better immediately results in misrepresentation or bringing up CodZilla or strawman martial classes that can do nothing but watch the magic gods. The arguments in this forum are becoming particularly tiring, it seems there are at least two very different play style preferences that will be hard to reconcile over this format.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

If vancian magic doesn't fit, I don't see what the point of a unity edition is. And any argument to show how they could fit together and make the game better immediately results in misrepresentation or bringing up CodZilla or strawman martial classes that can do nothing but watch the magic gods. The arguments in this forum are becoming particularly tiring, it seems there are at least two very different play style preferences that will be hard to reconcile over this format.

Here's one of the elephants in the liviing room. (I'm not claiming it is the only one. ): The 4E designers didn't make the decisions they did in a vaccuum. The 3E players, collectively, playing 3E and talking about it, taught them to care about the stuff that 4E tries to address. To a lesser extent, you can see the same thing from 2E to 3E, though 3E mainly going after polish and organizational issues in 2E made it less obvious. (There are other influences on 3E and 4E, too, of course. I'm not concerned with those in this post.)

So is the 4E druid a little off-putting to someone who wants animal summoning and shapechanging flexibility? Undoubtably? Is the 3E druid easily out of control if not specifically manged by the people at the table? the evidence is pretty strong that it is. OK, so if the 4E druid needs work, it is still not a good solution to say, "Naw, nothing will fix it. Just go back to what we had before, and throw it back on the DM and the players. Put the baby back in the tub, and dump the dirty bathwater in while you are at it."

Now, giving the tricky nature of what summoning and shapechanging can do to extreme character flexibility and power (for a number of reasons), it may very well be in the particular case of the druid, that going back to 3E, more or less, is about the best we can do. If that is so, let us not pretend that it isn't a potential problem, though. At the very least, put a section in the PHB or DMG telling people they will need to deal with it, and some of the tried and true ways to do so.

It may also be true that part of the way out to reconciling those two camps is indirect. The split was always with us, but became heavily noticable in 3E play due to other changes that aren't immediately imbalancing or narrowing. One of those changes was the increasing numbers--BAB, ability scores, magic buffs, etc. compared to 1E/2E. If changing into a bear gives you a hefty increase in tight but rapid scaling, then changing into a bear is inherently more difficult to balance. The numbers matter a lot. Rein in the scaling, and suddenly it doesn't matter so much. Get the bears' numbers in the ballpark of where they need to be (which is easy to see), and "being a bear" becomes more important than the numbers. At that point, there is nothing left to reconcile between the two camps, even though the change isn't directly concerned with balance or concept flexibility.

 

[Steelwill]

I am beginning to notice highly selective use of this "argument". If you want to be consistent with it, then 3E, and all prior versions, have things that didn't go so well, either.

The difference being that WoTC got 8 years out of 3.5, as did the players, and Pathfinder was born on its back and still going strong. 4E was contentious from jump street, having the biggest division of D&D fanbase in history. So bad that the division still argues now, in nearly every thread where the 3.5 and 4e are mentioned together. Also having a drastically shorter run before having it's replacement announced. These tell us without being self deluded or fanboi'ing 4E, that it failed, at least commercially, because WoTC has decided that the potential of a new edition is worth more than maintaining 4E and the risk of alienating everyone playing it with this announcement. So say what you like, but the only thing we know for certain about 5E at this point is that 4E obviously wasn't cutting it, and that is why we are discussing it.

 

[billd91]

1. Market share - which we know only from anecdote, but even granted for sake of argument, is the sum of a whole host of things. No doubt there are particular features of 4E that have contributed, but we don't know the exact ratio. For example, we don't know how much 4E is hurt by the fact that it happened so "soon" after 3E/3.5 were done, compared to the decade of lying fallow that 3E dropped into.

2. Economic conditions totally separate from the quality or appreciation of the games. 3E was launched in the middle of a booming recovery (best possible moment for a luxury product). 4E was launched in one of the worst global recessions since gaming starting (the worst possible moment).

3. Things in 4E that have led directly to less appeal and/or restricted what people wanted to do with it. (And to stay on topic here, only those things that are related to or in the pursuit of balance.)

In short, if you have an argument that something in 4E related to balance has restricted its appeal, you should be able to make that argument outside of the first two issues (or indeed, even particular flaws of 4E not in any way related to balance--such as the sometimes goofy names). There are good debating reasons for doing so, but I'm not primarily interested in those. I'm interested in solutions. The only way we get to solutions is to talk about the particulars of the actual problems. Saying, "this has been tried and some people aren't buying it," is a worthless remark. Everything in D&D, by definition, has been tried, and I guarantee that someone didn't like it.

I think I can, in no small part, argue away from the first two points because neither really is correct.

1) 3e didn't drop into a period of being fallow for 10 years. TSR was cranking lots of products into the mid 1990s and WotC, after acquiring TSR in 1997, put out a lot of product that was already in the pipeline. Plus we do have evidence of declining market share thanks to ICv2's surveys. They may not take into account online bookstore sales nor Pathfinder's direct subscriptions, but they do indicate a relative decline in the hobby market and distributors who serve them. And that's still an important market segment.

2) 3e wasn't introduced in a booming recovery since the worst of the recession at that time hit the US between 2002 and 2003. That was after the introduction of 3e, which happened right around the time the dotcom bubble burst.

As far as 4e's rejection being primarily because of the attempt at balancing the classes within the same structure? If that weren't one factor (yes, potentially out of many), why would people keep bringing it up? It's one of the most contentious issues we see on these boards. I'm reasonably confident it's a factor in 4e's troubles.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As far as 4e's rejection being primarily because of the attempt at balancing the classes within the same structure? If that weren't one factor (yes, potentially out of many), why would people keep bringing it up? It's one of the most contentious issues we see on these boards. I'm reasonably confident it's a factor in 4e's troubles.

Well, yeah. Contentious issues that won't go away takes two sides that won't quit. So contentious issues are contentious issues, and probably do hurt the game. What I think you are missing here is that the 4E adopters was in some part as much a rejection of 3.* as those that stayed with 3.* were rejecting 4E. (Excluding people who like both for different reasons.)

Now, if you want to reconcile those two camps (or to be fair, a significant portion of those camps--some people aren't going to reconcile, and we can't make them), then focusing on the root of the contention isn't going to get you very far--even if it is a necessary first step. It's an assumption of this topic that some people want balance and some people are put off by the side effects of how it has been pursued thus far. We are in agreement that just reprinting 3E/3.5 isn't going to solve this contention, either, correct?

So after that necessary first step, then what? What's your second step?

 

[hanez]

So is the 4E druid a little off-putting to someone who wants animal summoning and shapechanging flexibility? Undoubtably? Is the 3E druid easily out of control if not specifically manged by the people at the table? the evidence is pretty strong that it is. OK, so if the 4E druid needs work, it is still not a good solution to say, "Naw, nothing will fix it. Just go back to what we had before, and throw it back on the DM and the players. Put the baby back in the tub, and dump the dirty bathwater in while you are at it."

I usually like your arguments, but this ones getting close to strawmanning, or perhaps just off the mark in my opinion. Heres why:

You mention the 3e druid shapechange, which was broken because of specific flaws in the way it worked. Druids could shapechange into monsters much tougher then fighters. There were specific things you can shapechange into that broke the game. There are many ways to fix that, pathfinder tried a few. 4e fixed many of the issues by limiting the amount of beasts you could polymorph into (eliminating the problem of the 3e player pouring over monsters to find the one broken one he could morph into). What 4e ALSO did that is the issue is shoehorn the entire class (and every other class) into a very tight, combat centric and similar mold. This problem could have been fixed without the "everyone has the same amount of powers" model.

The argument as I see it isn't about whether specific things need to be tweaked, I at least readily grant that, but whether or not there is room in the game for classes that work differently.

 

[Steelwill]

Here's one of the elephants in the liviing room. (I'm not claiming it is the only one. ): The 4E designers didn't make the decisions they did in a vaccuum. The 3E players, collectively, playing 3E and talking about it, taught them to care about the stuff that 4E tries to address. To a lesser extent, you can see the same thing from 2E to 3E, though 3E mainly going after polish and organizational issues in 2E made it less obvious. (There are other influences on 3E and 4E, too, of course. I'm not concerned with those in this post.)

True and there are many things that 4E addressed very well that were concerns from 3.5, but it is entirely valid to say some of the concerns were stuff from a vocal minority not the silent majority in some cases, and in others, 4E's attempted solutions were not better than just dealing with the original problem. Also 4E wasn't 3.75, so it brought a bunch of it's very own issues to the table that had nothing to do with correcting 3.5 problems.

So is the 4E druid a little off-putting to someone who wants animal summoning and shapechanging flexibility? Undoubtably? Is the 3E druid easily out of control if not specifically manged by the people at the table? the evidence is pretty strong that it is. OK, so if the 4E druid needs work, it is still not a good solution to say, "Naw, nothing will fix it. Just go back to what we had before, and throw it back on the DM and the players. Put the baby back in the tub, and dump the dirty bathwater in while you are at it."

Maybe not, but if the discussed options are either 3.5 or 4E if we don't like what 4E is doing, then the other option is 3.5. I am sure many folks aren't opposed to a third completely new innovative option, but in these discussions by and large it becomes either or 3.5 or 4.

Now, giving the tricky nature of what summoning and shapechanging can do to extreme character flexibility and power (for a number of reasons), it may very well be in the particular case of the druid, that going back to 3E, more or less, is about the best we can do. If that is so, let us not pretend that it isn't a potential problem, though. At the very least, put a section in the PHB or DMG telling people they will need to deal with it, and some of the tried and true ways to do so.

There was a section, one that said, the DM has final say on the rules and shouldn't be afraid to tell players no. Unfortunately, bad DM's and powergamers gave that option a bad rap, even though its the very reason to have a live referee at the game. Use the freaking DM. I am not saying write sloppy rules and expect him to clean them up, but certainly use that living breathing arbiter to help adjudicate corner cases and abuses without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater due to unreasonable fear of preventing such things from ever happening. Which is what I feel 4E did instead of making use of a DM as a resource.

It may also be true that part of the way out to reconciling those two camps is indirect. The split was always with us, but became heavily noticable in 3E play due to other changes that aren't immediately imbalancing or narrowing. One of those changes was the increasing numbers--BAB, ability scores, magic buffs, etc. compared to 1E/2E. If changing into a bear gives you a hefty increase in tight but rapid scaling, then changing into a bear is inherently more difficult to balance. The numbers matter a lot. Rein in the scaling, and suddenly it doesn't matter so much. Get the bears' numbers in the ballpark of where they need to be (which is easy to see), and "being a bear" becomes more important than the numbers. At that point, there is nothing left to reconcile between the two camps, even though the change isn't directly concerned with balance or concept flexibility.

Making the change mechanically insignificant negates the point of the change. Player's of a game in which enemies and challenges ever increasingly try to kill them should not be punished for seeking power, and choices should be tied to the mechanics in meaningful ways. Parallel increases are just number inflation. (I gain +2 to hit and 5 hit points, but all enemies at this level have +2 AC, and do more damage = no change just number inflation). Same with +half level added to everything being no change when the enemies all scale up the same rate. Same with so many powers that do X damage + effect only differentiated by fluff text. There is only the illusion of gained advantage, without the actual advantage, and 4E design totally loves this. It is also why a lvl 10, a lvl 20, and a lvl 30 character more or less play about the same. Refluffling and number inflation to cover up a system that never actually changes so it can maintain its perfect numerical balance is total bunk, and that pretty much describes 4E, and why there is so little room allowed for variance. This is at its core why 4E becomes a snore, because it doesn't take long before folks notice the smoke and mirrors. REAL GAINS not illusions of gain for making choices. Not lateral, re-flavored versions of the same choice. Players want their decisions to matter. My 2 cents.