Balance Meter - allowing flavorful imbalance in a balanced game

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's understandable.

To me the game is about being inside the shoes of someone who lives in a world where wizards can rewrite ability. You can't fix what is fun by removing that very thing. To me that is where the failures of 4E show so glaringly.

Different goals and different expectations for completely different play purposes.

No, but when did 4e remove that? Really look at 4e casters. They are FAR from being made inert. In fact they still have a huge amount of agency. The main difference is that 4e spells are generally not silver platters that hand you complete solutions to problems. Instead you've got to think and your scope of action is a bit more circumscribed, so you have to think HARDER than before.

Playing 4e wizards is a bit more like playing mid-level AD&D wizards. There's a lot of good stuff you can do, and you can hold your own in a fight with support, but you can't just waggle your left pinky and change reality to suite you (though at high epic you can come close and the DM is certainly encouraged to give you leeway to do more than come close when it makes sense).

I think any new edition should feel free to make whatever level of changes are required to improve game play. There's no need to jettison things that work or change them just to change them. OTOH sticking to something because it is awkward and degrades the game but happens to be tradition is not anything I'm interested in.

 

[BryonD]

No, but when did 4e remove that?

You need to work that out with Neonchameleon.

For me I wouldn't flat out say it removed it. It was more a combination of other games just do it far far better and "close enough" that I could respond without getting hung up on those details.

They are FAR from being made inert.

Inert? Really? Overreact much?

I think any new edition should feel free to make whatever level of changes are required to improve game play. There's no need to jettison things that work or change them just to change them. OTOH sticking to something because it is awkward and degrades the game but happens to be tradition is not anything I'm interested in.

Agreed.

Here's hoping for this time around.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

That somewhat parallels the early part of my experience. At first 3e was just a way of playing the game. As people become more experienced with it, we thought we found a lot of "flaws" and attempted to patch them. Then we noticed doing that did nothing to improve the game, just took time and effort. So we went back to playing the game pretty much as written + DM rulings as make sense.

Now everyone can just have fun, and since we know the rules it plays quite smoothly. It just requires players not to get hung up on whether another character finishes twice the orcs theirs does.

I can understand this, not because I experienced it with 3E at all, but because that is exactly my experience with BECMI, and mostly my experienced with AD&D 1E (as long as you stick to the core books).

This might be somewhat analogous to the "uncanny valley" effect in art, where, for example, a drawing of a person is almost lifelike, but a little off. A lot of people won't like it. A photo or a realistic portrayal is ok. An obviously distorted version (e.g. cartoon) is ok. But the thing in the valley is not.

BECMI and base AD&D are messed up all over the place. But having learned their quirks, I find that I don't mind them all that much. Asking for balance in BECMI is like complaining about the cartoonish characters in World of Warcraft--it's a sign you are in the wrong place. Whereas, 3E has just enough balance to make me unhappy with its gaps.

 

[Neonchameleon]

BECMI and base AD&D are messed up all over the place. But having learned their quirks, I find that I don't mind them all that much. Asking for balance in BECMI is like complaining about the cartoonish characters in World of Warcraft--it's a sign you are in the wrong place. Whereas, 3E has just enough balance to make me unhappy with its gaps.

Honestly, a lot of the quirks in BECMI, like the XP tables, are there for balance. At least according to Gygax. 3E, by unifying the systems, created a flat and even racetrack over what was a handicap course set up to play to different strengths.