D&D 5E "But Wizards Can Fly, Teleport and Turn People Into Frogs!"

[Ahnehnois]

The argument here (and elsewhere) is that with the 3.x wizard's mechanics and general lack of downsides, spotlight-sharing through targeted obstacles like you'd see in ensemble-based fiction just doesn't work.

I'd agree with that, but for an entirely different reason. I don't see wizards or other spellcasters hogging spotlights or taking the game from fighters, but I do think that the mechanics fail to capture the downsides that we expect from magic. Rarity. Unpredictability. Costs of all sorts.

I think adding those elements probably does improve whatever balance can be found in the rules themselves, but I don't think that's the reason to do it, nor do I think that there can be a one-to-one comparison with nonmagical abilities (as was being done above), nor is there an equation that can be balanced that says that wizards have the "right" level of power or rate of advancement.

What can be done is to add enough variant rules that curtail the power of magic that those DMs who need to use them to reign in wizard players can do so.

 

[Sunseeker]

I'm going to stop you right there. D&D isn't a video game. Balance in D&D is not the same thing as balance in a video game, board game, athletic competition, or any of various other types of games.

And you, like so many others, would be wrong.

Balance is balance. It doesn't matter if it's a video game, or a TTRPG. You can break down any power, any spell, in any game ever to determine it's balanced based on the properties I listed above.

You cannot say "D&D is different!" and call it an argument.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Balance is balance. It doesn't matter if it's a video game, or a TTRPG. You can break down any power, any spell, in any game ever to determine it's balanced based on the properties I listed above.

Only in a closed system.

You cannot say "D&D is different!" and call it an argument.

I didn't (just) say that. I explained that D&D, as a roleplaying game, is infinite in scope and has no inherent goals. Therefore balance cannot be evaluated in the same way as it can for the subset of games that are closed systems and have clear goals.

And you, like so many others, would be wrong.

At least there are many of us.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

...nor do I think that there can be a one-to-one comparison with nonmagical abilities (as was being done above), nor is there an equation that can be balanced that says that wizards have the "right" level of power or rate of advancement.

On the second point, there is indeed such a measurement: it's called class level. The only reason to have a level-based system is if the same level characters and monsters are supposed to correlate in overall power level.

D&D is many things to many people, but it evolved from a tactical minis game, and the vast majority of its rules are about running complex tactical skirmishes (ie combat), so it might as well be a well-designed game in that respect. And some sort of correlation in power between the actions available to a wizard and those available to, say, a fighter is pretty important for achieving that end. If a wizard spell takes three rounds to cast, or if it only can be used once a day, or if it leaves the wizard exhausted, that's fine as a balancing factor. But if a wizard can have twice as much on his turns as a fighter can, without some significant drawback, for all intents and purposes he's not the same level as the fighter.

That's fine too, of course. If you want wizards to start weaker than fighters and end up as demigods, have them start two levels behind and gain double xp. But it's much harder to house-rule a well balanced system than it is to house-rule an intentionally unbalanced system.

 

[Ahnehnois]

On the second point, there is indeed such a measurement: it's called class level. The only reason to have a level-based system is if the same level characters and monsters are supposed to correlate in overall power level.

Not true at all. They used to be explicitly different when there were separate XP tables for each class, and it got even funkier when you started talking about multiclassing. At what level does a 2e fighter/thief equal a fighter or a thief?

But even in 3e and 4e (and 5e) that isn't the case. A fighter 10 is not equal to a wizard 10 or a druid 10 or a commoner 10. It's not equal to a CR 10 monster, nor to an ECL 10 monster. No one ever pretended that this was the case. That's not what balance is.

Balance is not whether a particular character is as powerful as another character of the same level. It's (in the context of character classes) whether that character is equally powerful in the rules and in the fictional world they're creating. For example, if all characters (in an otherwise 3e-like system) received an ability that let them deal 50 damage at will, they wouldn't all be balanced. They'd all be equally unbalanced, due to their ability to topple castles and slaughter powerful enemies. Of course, that's an extreme example, but a more practical is the 4e first level characters. They all have a full suite of powers, healing surges, and inflated hit points at level one. Even if they're all balanced with each other, they're unbalanced, because they're too powerful relative to the game world. A first level D&D wizard who can use a meaningful spell at will is overpowered, even if that spell is no more powerful than anything the other characters can do.

Conversely, if a fighter 10 is as good a fighter as his experience warrants (however good that is), and if a wizard 10 is as powerful as the players expect him to be, then they're balanced, even if they're wildly different in power from each other.

Even more importantly, what if you have, say, a two 3e barbarians (level 1). They both have full hit points, decent gear, similar ability scores. However, one used his one rage per day earlier, while the other one did not. Put them in a cage fight. Who wins? Clearly the one with his rage left, most of the time. However, there's no good reason to expect that outcome. The other guy isn't tired or hurt, and has every bit as much motivation. But he loses because he ran out of some intangible resource that means nothing in the game world. The barbarian isn't balanced with itself. The first class I houseruled for balance, and the one I've had the most trouble with, was the barbarian, not the fighter, cleric, or wizard. You can't really balance a class against anything else when it's not balanced with itself.

D&D is many things to many people, but it evolved from a tactical minis game

Evolved, in your words.

and the vast majority of its rules are about running complex tactical skirmishes (ie combat), so it might as well be a well-designed game in that respect.

I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but D&D isn't about combat (any more, if it ever was). (link). No need to rehash. So yeah, it should be decent at combat, but that isn't the primary criterion on which it should be judged, nor is characters' relative combat power the sole test of how balanced the rules are.

And some sort of correlation in power between the actions available to a wizard and those available to, say, a fighter is pretty important for achieving that end. If a wizard spell takes three rounds to cast, or if it only can be used once a day, or if it leaves the wizard exhausted, that's fine as a balancing factor. But if a wizard can have twice as much on his turns as a fighter can, without some significant drawback, for all intents and purposes he's not the same level as the fighter.

I don't particularly disagree. There's a thread on how to balance wizards that's gone pretty far down that road. However, I think it's just a rough cut, one that the DM finalizes using optional rules, not an equation that the game designers solve.

That's fine too, of course. If you want wizards to start weaker than fighters and end up as demigods, have them start two levels behind and gain double xp.

Why? If the fighter class is "guy who hits people with swords" and the wizard class is "guy who learns to manipulate the natural laws of the universe", why shouldn't the mechanics reflect that? A fighter starts out as a novice combatant and over 20 levels (or whatever) becomes a really good one. A wizard starts out as an apprentice and becomes, over 20 levels, an archmage. A commoner over 20 levels (however he gained them) becomes a really good dirt farmer. A bard over 20 levels becomes a jack of all trades, master of none. A rogue over 20 levels becomes a criminal mastermind (allegedly). Those are all pretty different trajectories in principle, why shouldn't the mechanics reflect that?

But it's much harder to house-rule a well balanced system than it is to house-rule an intentionally unbalanced system.

I know. That's why I still run 3e.

3e has variants aplenty and is very receptive to homebrewing and is pretty well balanced. The various D&D-like games that have come out since would require too much effort for me to fix.

 

[pemerton]

They invented notions what classes are "supposed" to do; there wasn't really anything to solidify.

Gary Gygax, in his DMG, has a system for PC advancement (namely, the training rules) that is explicitly based around expectations of what classes are "supposed" to do: fighters who are cowardly, MUs who enage in melee, etc, take longer to train and hence must pay more money - a major disadvantage in level advancement.

If you want a big hero not to be subject to a fluke of the dice, you should write rules that prevent that explicitly and specifically, "hero points" (or action points or some other such mechanic). Conflating this concept with hit points (which are primarily about tangible things like how much blood you have left in your circulatory system) was a bad idea.

The equation of hit points with luck is found in Gygax's PHB and DMG. You may not like it, but I don't see that it is objectively a bad idea. It creates a lot of flexibility in the system, for instance, by allowing a wide range of recovery and inspriation effects to be handled in mechanically similar ways (4e develops this idea the furthest of any edition).

D&D also has a lot to learn from the worlds of theater, literature, and film and television

This has roughly been the point of Robin Laws's career as an RPG designer. The version of D&D that most reflects his design approach, I would say, is 4e. Which is not to say that it is the only way to put together a fiction/performance inspired D&D. But I think it is clearly one such way.

D&D, as a roleplaying game, is infinite in scope and has no inherent goals. Therefore balance cannot be evaluated in the same way as it can for the subset of games that are closed systems and have clear goals.

I don't agree with this. Many RPGs have balanced mechanical effectiveness across PCs despite having no "inherent goals." But I am guessing that they approach the GM side of things - and particularly encounter building - in ways that are not your preferred approach. 4e D&D would be such a game. HeroWars/Quest, Maelstrom Storytelling, The Dying Earth and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying are some other RPGs that are similar in this respect.

 

[Bluenose]

Not true at all. They used to be explicitly different when there were separate XP tables for each class, and it got even funkier when you started talking about multiclassing. At what level does a 2e fighter/thief equal a fighter or a thief?

But even in 3e and 4e (and 5e) that isn't the case. A fighter 10 is not equal to a wizard 10 or a druid 10 or a commoner 10. It's not equal to a CR 10 monster, nor to an ECL 10 monster. No one ever pretended that this was the case. That's not what balance is.

You can test, find out what abilities a Fighter needs to be as useful to the party, and make sure that at 10th level they have those abilities. The only reason not to do that is if you want the classes to be unbalanced in terms of how useful they are.

3e has variants aplenty and is very receptive to homebrewing and is pretty well balanced. The various D&D-like games that have come out since would require too much effort for me to fix.

Presumably if 3e is pretty well balanced then AD&D, whose Mages and Clerics were considerably weaker than 3e made, is a game you consider badly balanced.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Given that roles are a 4e invention, pre-4e wizards, fighters, etc. also did not fill the same role.

This is absolutely and completely 100% false. Take a look in a 2e PHB. It has roles. The roles in question are IIRC Fighting Man (Fighter, Ranger, Paladin), Cleric (Cleric, Druid), Mage (Wizard, Illusionist (which had been demoted to a specialist wizard), other specialist), Rogue (Thief, Bard). And mysteriously they fit the archetypal four person party of magic user, cleric, fighter, thief in exactly the same way 4e does.

For a slightly more interesting example, look at 1e. Look at the Monk class in specific. The class itself makes little sense when looked at for the first ten levels (i.e. the overwhelming majority of play) - that 2d4 hit points at first level is just plain weird and their combat was terrible. On the other hand if you treat the monk as an explicit variant of thief, with thief being the role, the whole thing makes perfect sense. Monks were a type of thief who was better at running away, falling off walls, and playing dead (all useful to a thief).

The pattern on roles has been oD&D barely needed them because there weren't enough classes, 1e had them, 2e made them explicit, 3e dropped them and ended up in the sort of complete mess you'd expect, and 4e brought them back. The 4e roles are, of course, different from the 2e ones - at least in part because with the change from backstab to sneak attack wrought by 3e the role of the thief/rogue had significantly changed.

I don't see this at all. I mean, all editions of D&D are generally considered to be balanced.

This is in no sense true either. It is possible to find people who consider any given edition to be balanced - but if the 1e PHB is balanced then the 2e one isn't (Weapon Specialisation is a huge boost for fighters) and Gygax has stated on these boards that the classes like Cavalier were added for balance purposes. Also I know very few people who consider 3.X is anywhere approaching balanced.

The mechanics here don't match the goals and are inconsistent with each other. If you want a big hero not to be subject to a fluke of the dice, you should write rules that prevent that explicitly and specifically, "hero points" (or action points or some other such mechanic).

You mean like hit points? Which were written for just this purpose and have just this effect. As Gygax was clear about.

Originally Posted by AD&D 1e DMG, page 61
Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the last handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections.​

Conflating this concept with hit points (which are primarily about tangible things like how much blood you have left in your circulatory system) was a bad idea.

And this is not true either. Gygax wrote a lot about how ridiculous considering hit points to be damage was. Even explicitely pointing out that a mid level fighter was, if you took hit points as damage, tougher than a couple of horses. Stone on the other hand has 15hp per inch (and a hardness of 8). A fighter can take more damage from big blows than a six inch thick block of stone. Hit points as damage and blood you have left make no sense.

Or to quote Gygax himself on the subject of hit points again.

Originally Posted by AD&D DMG, p.82
It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage - as indicated by constitution bonuses- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness).

​

Originally Posted by AD&D DMG, p.82
Consider a character who is a 10th level fighter with an 18 constitution. This character would have an average of 5% hit points per die, plus a constitution bonus of 4 hit points, per level, or 95 hit points! Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of actual physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points.​

And you, like so many others, would be wrong.

Balance is balance. It doesn't matter if it's a video game, or a TTRPG. You can break down any power, any spell, in any game ever to determine it's balanced based on the properties I listed above.

You cannot say "D&D is different!" and call it an argument.

Balance is always balance to a specific purpose. The first question is what purpose it will be used for.

 

[Neonchameleon]

On the second point, there is indeed such a measurement: it's called class level. The only reason to have a level-based system is if the same level characters and monsters are supposed to correlate in overall power level.

The thing here is that Gygax then tweaked the levels for balance purposes realising they weren't quite the same - that's why you get the differing XP tables.

But it's much harder to house-rule a well balanced system than it is to house-rule an intentionally unbalanced system.

Was this what you meant to say? Because it's no harder to house rule a well balanced and structurally balanced system than an intentionally unbalanced one - it's simply that bad house rules are much more obvious. (Of course in an empirically balanced system like oD&D it's not easy to see where the balance issues lie so you appear to be able to house rule it easily without things sticking out).

 

[D'karr]

But it's much harder to house-rule a well balanced system than it is to house-rule an intentionally unbalanced system.

I don't agree with this statement as presented, and I might be misunderstanding the context in which house-ruling is being used.

4e, IMO, is a well balanced system. This has not prevented me from making tweaks to it (house rules) to do things I want. It was not hard to make these tweaks. 1e was another system which I tweaked quite a bit. It was also easy to do in that system, because the majority of subsystems there were in someways optional.

I don't think it's a matter of whether a system is well-balanced or not. I think it's a matter of how up front the system assumptions are, and how much knock-on effects impact the tweaking. If I change system A and, unbeknownst to me, I'm impacting system B then the system is fighting you internally. This has nothing to do with how balanced the system is. It has to do with how "cooked-in" the systems are to each other. If the systems are "cooked-in", but obvious, then tweaking is harder, but whoever is making the changes knows exactly what he's impacting with the change. If the systems are not cooked-in tweaking is very easy. If the systems are "cooked-in", but not obvious, then tweaking them can have severe impacts that are unknown.

The other thing about "house-ruling" is that certain things are put in place as balance factors. However, if it's not obvious what they balance somebody might tweak them and create great issues without even realizing it. I think the built in magical restrictions in 1e were such a balancing system (cooked-in and not obvious). Spell casting time, components, spells per day, restricted magical item creation, slow XP progression for casters, and other things were put in place to balance spell casting characters with non-spell casting characters. When these balancing systems are tweaked or removed... Well, here we are in this thread seeing the impact of those changes.