Mustrum_Ridcully said:
Did we not? I thought the discussion about Minions, Regular, Elite and Solo monsters, monster level did touch the balance between party and monster.
Oh, I'm not saying that they haven't touched on that. I'm just saying that the 4E info-dumps have tended to firmly favor the player side of the equation. Whenever I see talk of something being "unfun" or that "the player has nothing to do in situation X" I assume they're referencing the "we're working hard to improve intra-party balance" talking point in the memo that marketing presumably sent out before 4E was announced at GenCon.
Honestly, the only problem (in reference to game balance) I have with the direction they're taking the marketing info-dumps is that I can't tell if they're intentionally overstating the problem of players getting upset over situational power disparity for marketing purposes, or if they really believe that most players care as much as the designers think they do.
If it's the former, it's no biggie as long as they don't inadvertently convince a bunch of players to start caring about it. Oi, that would suck so much.
If it's the latter, I do worry that the differences between what I want out of a D&D game and what the designers want are significant enough that I may not enjoy 4E as much as I enjoy playing the current edition.
The base concept seems to be that a party of level X can stand best against monsters of level X, whose XP total an amount f(X). (But you can use higher and lower level monsters, provided you don't exceed the total XP "allowed". If you use less, well, don't be surprised if the combat becomes a cake walk.
And in my contributions to the threads on that topic, I've stated my opinion that they're merely matching the gaming terminology to the actual mechanics in a way that's more intuitive for GM's to use. As of yet, I haven't seen an actual innovation described here that necessarily implies better encounter balance.
I'm not even sure how "encounter-balance" is being defined. Is it the whole "after an appropriate encounter a party will be at 80%" thing we've seen thrown around? Changing the baseline certainly would certainly help them to come up with better solutions to the problem.
Reducing the importance of magical items (less Christmas Tree) also seems to indicate that party vs monster balance doesn't require a lot (if any) items. (I still haven't figured out if they actually create the balance with _no_ magic items in a party, or if there is still a "wealth per level" mechanic in place that says how much items a party should have to meet the expected effectiveness)
In my posts in the appropriate threads, I've stated that my opinion is that they're fixing the christmas tree effect (or at least decreasing its impact) by re-focusing magic items so that only a small minority provide direct improvements to combat-specific variables (ie, AC, Hit-Points, Attack Mods, Saves, etc). The vast majority of magical items will simply give characters early access to powers they're going to have in a couple of levels anyway.
That's how I read and interpreted the article, anyhow.
- magic items were definitely a requirement for party - monster balance
- inter-party balance was seen over all levels of play, instead of each individual level (low level spellcasters weaker than low-level fighters, but high level spellcasters stronger than high level fighters)
- party and monster balance assumed approximately 4 encounters of party level per day.
Right, so they were trying to balance a whole bunch of non-linear stuff all at once. Never a good idea for system design of any stripe.
It does seem like what they're trying to accomplish is to make each class more directly equivalent at a particular level so that they don't have to worry as much about weird "non-linear" synergies popping up.
Level-by-level balance of a different set of equations at each level is generally the way to go for best results I'd imagine, rather than trying to balance a single set of equations (so to speak) over the entire 1-20 play-space as they appear to have tried to do in 3.X.
Oh yeah, and when I say equations I am using that term very very loosely. I don't mean that they actually have some monster set of differential equations that "defines" D&D.
Do they even use those in video games for anything but the physics-emulators?
I think they are trying to "micromanage" the balance more in 4th edition, so that at each level, against each type of monster setup, at every "time of the day", characters and monsters (or rather: monster encounters) are in balance.
Absolutely. However, I suspect that this new and more micro-managing aspect of their approach to balance (if it truly exists) is simply due to the use of some sort of software program that allows them to get a general sense of game-play using different rule sets before they got to play-testing.
