Balance Meter - allowing flavorful imbalance in a balanced game

[billd91]

I wonder what percentage of D&D players have read through the book of their edition of choice. I suspect a small minority.

Read, skimmed, or actually understood? There are a lot of people who clearly read parts of rulebooks but didn't really understand the point it was making. You see this a lot with 3e when topics of encounter levels and balance come up as well as wealth by level.

 

[BryonD]

Actually having looked the original quote up, it's option 4. You are mis-summarising Mearls. What the actual quote was was “In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’” says Mearls. “But there’s other ways to play guitar.”

This does not mean that Thrash Metal is all 4e can do. Or that Mearls thinks that Thrash Metal is all 4e can do. It means that Encounters, Keep on the Shadowfell, and Scales of War were geared to Thrash Metal - and that's where most people got their introduction. It's like the designers of 4e were superb instrument makers who also put out beginners primers for how to play - and the primers all spoke about thrash metal and used almost all their examples as Thrash Metal.

Now kindly don't twist Mearls' words to mean something they don't. I'm going to take what you wrote as a good faith representation of what was actually said - and get very disappointed when, as here, that proves not to be the case.

I would say you are taking a HIGHLY charitable spin on what Mearls said there.

But whatever, I'll simply stand by my explanation as both a fair assessment of what he said and also an accurate representation of 4E in general.

And besides. Do you want me to dig up what WoTC was saying about 3E before 4E was released and treating that as the Unquestionable Word?

Go ahead. They said all kinds of things. You''l get no argument from me.

If I want to play chamber orchestra music, I have Spirit of the Century. And that, to me, is the point.

Spirit of the Century is completely unrelated to the point. WotC wants D&D to be vastly more popular than it is and we are talking about whether or not 4E can do a wide range of things. Saying you can turn your back on 4E and play a different game offers nothing to either of those points beyond effectively being a concession.

And to me the point is that 3.X covers a medium range. For a genuinely wide range I have GURPS 4E.

Whatever. "Medium" and "wide" are relative terms that mean nothing without context. I already agreed that GURPS does more than either edition, so saying that again adds nothing to the conversation and saying it the first time offers nothing to help understand how 3E was so much more popular than 4E and how 5E can learn from that to be more successful.

And the critical point to me is that 3.X does it badly.

And, again, I already completely agreed with your personal opinion. I'm not disputing it and further, I'm endorsing it. To you, and a lot of other people, 3E sucks. That is a fact. That fact changes nothing whatsoever in my point.

Hell, I'd even honestly say that if you just polled 4E fans about 4E and you just polled 3E fans about 3E then you would get a result that suggested that 4E is vastly better than 3E. This comes back to the niche appeal of 4E. If you are in that niche 4E is awesome. I really grok that point and if you continue to feel the need to restate that then you are not grokking my point.

But the important point is that if you took a nose count of the 4E fan group and then sliced off that many people from the top of the 3E fan group the 3E poll would start looking a lot more like the 4E poll. And 3E would still have a significant fan base left over that were not as dedicated, but still found quality tools to make it their game of choice.

To take one example, by the book NPC design rules are a nightmare. Yes, you can change this behind the screen. But I don't have to.

I'm really talking about core. You can call out some crap WotC 3X splats. I won't even begin to dispute that. And I won't offer an opinion on WotC 4E splats.

Not at all. The right DM can make any game rock. I've dealt with a DM that made Rifts rock - and for all its faults, 3E is a much better designed game than Rifts. However that people can make a game rock despite the system doesn't mean that the system takes the credit. It means that the DM rocks.

You said that the monk is "the load". Either admit that isn't a truism or admit your are saying my experience doesn't exist.

I don't care about a safety net. What I care about are greased rungs and a fraying tightrope. And 3e has both those.

Now you are just playing word games. 3E will let you screw up and provides a lot of freedom and added value for those who don't.

If you want to call it "greased rungs" then I'll just say that I can handle the grease and that the game is better for having it. Yes, I'll agree that someone may slip on the grease. But they can learn how to deal with the grease next time and then we BOTH know how to avoid it and we BOTH have a better system that isn't shackled by beign worried over not putting grease where it is needed just because someone may slip at first.

But "safety net" and "greased rungs" are just differently slanted analogies for the same point.

I believe my assessment of 3E is a lot more accurate than yours either of 4e or of a simple statement by Mearls.

Shrug. OK. It is no skin off my nose if you don't see the relevance of the market reality. I mean, I'm sure for the right price I could pay WotC to make 5E be exactly custom fit to my personal specifications. It would fail on the marketplace but if I thought my personal opinion was all that counted, I wouldn't care.

I was making predictions about 4E when it came out. And, yes, I wasn't shy about my personal preference. But I was also talking about market appeal from the beginning. There were a lot of 4E fans telling me how clueless I was and how 4E would take over everything once it got rolling. And yet here we are.

I still have my own personal gaming preferences and I also still have my assessments of what will and will not work on the market scale. And I'm not hung up on thinking one has too much to do with the other.

You are taking your assessment of 4E and Mearls words and filtering them to only apply to your personal experience. Which is fine. But don't do that and then turn around and think it applies to overall success.

You really aren't giving yourself enough credit here. I have never said it is impossible to have a fun 3e game. However 3e requires that the DM go round tuning most of the instruments personally.

Again, you insist on a lot of things that MUST happen in 3E and I'm saying they don't. The monk is not "the load". The greased rungs are there for a reason.

I agree that 3E expects the DM to go tuning instruments. That is part of the greatness of it.

For the seventeenth (or however many) times, you are mischaracterising my position. I am saying that a good DM can make any system rock. I am saying that with the right DM, probably even F.A.T.A.L. would be a fun game. Rifts certainly is.

No, you are just trying to bait and switch what your previous position was with a new position you feel more comfortable defending.

You position was that "the monk is the load", amongst other examples. You are saying my game does not exist. That is not a mischaracterization of your position.

Agreed. However a quality DM is not part of the 3E ruleset. It should therefore not be factored in to assessing how good the game system is. If anything, needing a quality rather than an average DM is a strike against 3E - quality DMs don't grow on trees.

Case in point right there. I said that 4E fans reject the rules/DM synergy. There you go.

I personally completely reject this point of view. On the high end a rule set that is designed to support a really good DM will be free to achieve a lot more without being burdened by the presumption of propping up the DM. On the low end, quality DMs grow on systems that challenge and push their boundaries and expectations. They don't grow when the system tells them they don't have to. Again, we had a healthy strong community of great DM that grew up playing 1E, OD&D, whatever. It was complex system that gave us what we have.

We already talked guitars. Go take a $100 beater from a pawn shop and put it in Satriani's hands. It will sing. But he still plays his custom Ibanez. The final product comes from a synergy of the skill of the artist and the quality of the tool.

On the other hand 3E really does not reward low amounts of time or novice DMs, and while it's still at the levels it supports you, 4e does. But when 4e stops rewarding extra time I can always jump to a new system (I'm DMing both 4E and WHFRP 3E campaigns at the moment). Of course learning a new system has significant overheads. And, having both systems on my bookshelves and having run and played both, I can't help but think that GURPS 4E would be more rewarding to sink vast amounts of time into than D&D 3E is. It's a bigger and more encompassing and flexible system.

Again, every bit of this may be completely true for you personally.

I think there is a difference between a steeper learning curve for the beginner and lack of "reward". Personally, I'd say the 3E reward is far higher, but I guess if you only looked at it from an "instant gratification" point of view, then I would agree with you.

But setting aside the irrelevant debate of my opinion vs. your opinion, the market opinion isn't hard to see.

 

[Hassassin]

Read, skimmed, or actually understood? There are a lot of people who clearly read parts of rulebooks but didn't really understand the point it was making. You see this a lot with 3e when topics of encounter levels and balance come up as well as wealth by level.

Sure, and that's the DMG. I'd expect DMs to have read more of the rules.

I know many of the people I've played with have never read through the combat rules in 3.5 PHB, much less the skill or exploration rules. They read rules as they need them, if they do, and that means mostly the class entry they are playing and tables of feats or spells.

Anything else they learn through play, and that means their knowledge is at least colored by other peoples interpretation and preferences. That's assuming they don't learn house rules without realizing they aren't RAW.

They point, I guess, is that how the rules play is much more important that what they actually say. If you need to have read an obscure paragraph somewhere to understand how ability X differs from Y or how this term actually means that, you are likely to just find the rules stupid in some way. And so for most people they are.

 

[BryonD]

This seems to impose an unfair burden on those who dislike 4e.

Yeah, cuz cheap shots that don't address the issues are so useful.....





There have been vast debates over the details of the game and if the number of people who bought 4E the month it came out were all excluded from "dislike 4E" then 4E would be going huge right now.

I agree that the example quoted is highly simplified. But I've also personally been in multiple debates about the problems of homogeneity in 4E. I've had people tell me that it isn't a problem to them. I've had people get really upset that I dare to say it is a drawback to the system from my point of view. What I have not had is anyone actually show me how it isn't mechanically true.

We can write an 2,000 word essay going over the same ground for the 10,001th time, or we can throw out the idea as understood.

Or we can just use cheap shots to pretend we don't have to address the real underlying issues.

 

[hanez]

However, we need to step back a bit Hanez. I'm presuming in the story that you're telling that you are not a new gamer. You'd been gaming for quite some time by that point and had a fairly decent grasp on mechanics and whatnot. Again, great.

But how many games using that same Netbook went pear shaped and down in flames? Is the chance that your game will shine worth however many games don't? Should game designers care? Who should they cater to? The guy who can write his own rules or the guy who can't?

I am not sure about how things will sell, but I have my own beliefs from looking at the market over the last 10 years or so.

Nevertheless I believe taking the risk on the "chance that my game will shine" is central to D&D. I believe taking that chance away in exchange for balance results in another game which I can only call not D&D. We have lots of games where rules are explicit, fair, balanced, unbendable and there is little to no need for an imaginiative arbiter (board games, war games, card games, online rpgs). The thing that I thought makes D&D interesting and enticing, is the group (along with the DM), collectively imagining adventure within a framework of rules. I believe the over focusing on balance undermines this aspect of D&D.

Who should they cater to? The guy who can write his own rules or the guy who can't?

I don't believe that is the real question. I believe the question is what is the nature of D&D to the majority of its active and potential fans. Once you find that answer the designers should cater to that preference.

I personally believe they made a fundamental error in believing that the majority of fans wanted and thought of D&D as a "balanced, homogenous, tactical minis game" with little to no support for non combat/roleplaying (though I concede it could be added if the players wanted to do so and thought that D&D is a game in which they should). I believe this fundamental error was shown in the first few years when they repeated over and over again that if the game didn't have an aspect you liked you could just "fluff" it.

Of course the fanbase is changing, and the split is probably wider then ever, so I am not sure which will sell better.

For me a classic example of the changing nature of the game is removing the fluff from the powers. For my group, the fluff was the whole point, it was what made D&D interesting, otherwise I have tons of games where we can just follow the rules. I was PAYING for the fluff, or rather that sweet mixture of mechanics and fluff. I wasn't paying for some irrelevant movement/burst rule I could care less about and would probably houserule anyways (let alone the exact same class copied over and over again with minor changes).

That thought makes me want to rewrite your quote -Who should they cater to? The guy who can write his own [fluff] or the guy who can't?

I guess the answer will always be whatever sells better, I'm just expressing what I want and will pay for.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Who should they cater to? The guy who can write his own rules or the guy who can't?

I don't believe that is the real question. I believe the question is what is the nature of D&D to the majority of its active and potential fans. Once you find that answer the designers should cater to that preference.

I think you are both wrong.

A good game should be designed to work for the person just picking it up, with little or no outside help. Then it should also reward continued exposure and attention as one moves past the beginner stage. It should explain how it works clearly, but not patronize the reader. That's actually a difficult thing to pull off consistently, even in a novel. It's even more difficult in a mix of flavorful color and technical writing--which, let's face it, is what game rules are. Nevertheless, that is what a good game needs.

Whereas, with fan preferences, the problem is, and always has been, that the preferences are all over the place. This is why you can, for example, say with a straight face and believe it that there is "little support" for roleplaying in 4E while others, with different preferences, find that the skill system and skill challenges to be the best mechanical support for roleplaying yet introduced to D&D (and also preferences all in between those two poles, as well).

What the heck is "support for roleplaying?" For some people, it is a mechanical widget that has a name that maps directly to some activity in game, so that if they have that thing on their character sheet, they can spin from there. For these people, not having a "bard" class or the equivalent is an impediment to roleplaying. For other people, support is having a consistent mechanical underpinning for how to resolve interaction. For yet others, it is the mechanics getting out of the way so that the roleplaying will commence. And that doesn't even get into the game advice telling you how to use whatever is there, in the several different styles in which it could be used.

 

[hanez]

What the heck is "support for roleplaying?" For some people, it is a mechanical widget that has a name that maps directly to some activity in game, so that if they have that thing on their character sheet, they can spin from there. For these people, not having a "bard" class or the equivalent is an impediment to roleplaying. For other people, support is having a consistent mechanical underpinning for how to resolve interaction. For yet others, it is the mechanics getting out of the way so that the roleplaying will commence. And that doesn't even get into the game advice telling you how to use whatever is there, in the several different styles in which it could be used.

Good point. Even as I typed it I knew it needed clarification, elaboration or something more to that part of my post. For me, when a wizard reads a 3 paragraph spell that has mechanical as well as fluff mixed in, he is thinking about how that spell works in the world, and he is more likely to act in that way this strengthens "roleplaying" in my world. For me when a fighter has to describe what he wants to do to the DM and how it works in the situation and they discuss how it works, he is "roleplaying". Or at least they are roleplaying in a way that "using homogenous with little to no fluff power x" is not. I could go on. I could stat professions, the ability to exchange combat power non combat or roleplaying power, the fact that rules for tactics combat were greatly expanded while non combat seemed at least to be removed allowing the players the "freedom" to roleplay however they like, or just not. I could reference the crappy combatcentric adventures with little to no plot but you might think that unfair because WOTC has always made crappy adventures, but then again previously they employed Paizo to make rich adventures with incredible plots. Or we could agree that a game that focuses MORE on tactics, by neccessity focusses LESS on roleplaying. You'll disagree with that I am sure.

Or I could ammend my quote "balanced, homogenous, tactical minis game with little to no support for non combat/roleplayin" to "balanced, homogenous, tactical minis game" if you prefer.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I could reference the crappy combatcentric adventures with little to no plot but you might think that unfair because WOTC has always made crappy adventures, but then again previously they employed Paizo to make rich adventures with incredible plots. Or we could agree that a game that focuses MORE on tactics, by neccessity focusses LESS on roleplaying. You'll disagree with that I am sure.

If you refuse to roleplay during combat, and thus switch modes, that would have some truth to it. However, if roleplaying is the overarching thing you do at the table most of time, regardless of subject matter, then that would be categorically false. Lack of roleplaying happens at our table when people get tired or distracted. The activities of the characters are irrelevant. We would consider anyone incapble of roleplaying during combat a poor roleplayer.

But we could go round and round on this, but let me try to cut through the muck. For my group, on this question, Paizo-style adventures pretty much suck. That doesn't make WotC adventures better. They merely suck in a different way. (I'm of course generalizing here to emphasize the point. The quality is actually all over the place.)

This is because a linear adventure, with not much thought put into running a more sandbox game, doesn't particular help in the roleplaying department. I'll have to fill in all kinds of gaps, take out pieces and change them, etc. OTOH, a story-based series (even with a gloss of "event-based" to hide the tracks), also isn't much help in the roleplaying department. Here, I've got a bit more useful material to take out and change, but I've also got a lot of dross to sift through to find that useful material. When I read the first, my eyes glaze over. When I read the second, I want to sling it against the wall (and have a couple of times). Neither of these characteristics adds one iota of roleplaying to our sessions.

"Predefined Plot" is not "Roleplaying". Such things may be very useful to you and others as an aid to roleplaying. But where you may see "Interesting NPC with full background and stats to interact with," I too often see, "Amateur novelist gets too cute writing about his pet NPC and forgets to give me useful adventure information." You know, in this adventure where my players' characters are supposed to be the stars, but I have to work overtime to get around some "high drama" equivalent of a "Mary Sue".

And just to be absolutely clear, I don't object to you or anyone else getting a lot of use out of such adventures (or NPCs or plots therein). I do object to this repeated (and rather unexamined and ignorant) assumption that having certain widgets on your character sheet and certain techniques in your adventure modules is the heart and soul of all roleplaying everywhere, all the time. And anyone without these things is merely playing a "tactical game". If your group played 4E, that might be what you'd get. I don't know if you would adapt your techniques or not, and its hard to guess at what might be. I do know that I get more actual roleplaying at my table out of evocative bits than I ever got out of Paizo plots.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

For good, multi-purpose adventures, that straddles the fence on what I see as the full range of play, but nevertheless has something to offer to almost everyone, dig out some old Dungeon adventures written by Willie Walsh--or indeed, about half the stuff written from about issue #20 to #40.

Could be some earlier, don't know about those. I think they had several issues before the shook out the bugs. By #36, the magazine had started a long, slow decline for multi-purpose adventuring writing, getting more and more specialized with every editor change. By the mid #50s, I don't think they ever again published an adventure that was worth my time to read, right up through the mid-point of the 3E run, when I dropped my subscription. For my table, I could do better, faster on scratch paper.

 

[hanez]

Here, I've got a bit more useful material to take out and change, but I've also got a lot of dross to sift through to find that useful material. When I read the first, my eyes glaze over. When I read the second, I want to sling it against the wall (and have a couple of times). Neither of these characteristics adds one iota of roleplaying to our sessions.
...
But where you may see "Interesting NPC with full background and stats to interact with," I too often see, "Amateur novelist gets too cute writing about his pet NPC and forgets to give me useful adventure information." You know, in this adventure where my players' characters are supposed to be the stars, but I have to work overtime to get around some "high drama" equivalent of a "Mary Sue".

Completely agree actually. They can go waay too far sometimes with NPCs and stories which often hides the best points about the adventure. I find it hard to identify what is useless drivel that I can ignore and what will pertain to my game. I am often frustrated by reading the obligatory 5 paragraphs of history that my players will likely never learn about in the course of the adventure. Still I find them much more useful to help me make engagin storys and adventures then WOTCs typical "dungeon with a million rooms" adventures. (See H1-H3) For Paizo to improve, I would recommend ripping out 15%-30% story out of each adventure, printing as is, and remembering I likely don't have time to read their stories, for WOTC to improve H1-H3, I wouldn't know where to begin they would likely have to start from the ground up.

You mentioned a sandbox game, I thought the Kingmaker series was particularly good in this area.

I do object to this repeated (and rather unexamined and ignorant) assumption that having certain widgets on your character sheet and certain techniques in your adventure modules is the heart and soul of all roleplaying everywhere, all the time. And anyone without these things is merely playing a "tactical game".

I am merely advocating for the rules and adventure types that help or encourage my players to roleplay. I know what a focus on balance & tactics does to players that I have personally seen. Roleplaying in combat sure, but when every player is innundated with generic powers that are largely similar, devoid of fluff, and it gets to the point where it seems trivial to even remember the powers name, we have a problem. I specifically said in my previous post that players could add roleplaying to it if they wished, that's besides the point, I am talkin about the effect it had on my game and the others I have seen.