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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Can we have a discussion about the assumptions we make in terms of balance?
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<blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 9145967" data-attributes="member: 27957"><p>Another failure state to watch out for is fight sims that only test for 1v1 single target encounters. When I was an active MMO raider, you'd see the sim crowd put out their rankings after a new patch dropped a bunch of balance changes. And then a month later we'd get the actual play rankings from the new raid, and they were always different. Maybe that raid, the raid designs included multiple fights with two or three boss councils, so classes that could do cleave damage were highly advantaged. Maybe there were several bosses with scripted periods where the boss wasn't attackable, and classes that generated resources passively instead of actively were far ahead. But there was always <em>some</em> encounter design factor that rewarded certain classes over others, that the white room damage sims couldn't predict.</p><p></p><p>This is the sort of thing you can't ever make the sim take into account because it changes depending on the individual DM. Do they like to throw waves of minions into the mix, rewarding casters with big AoE spells? Do they like set pieces with boss monsters that have legendary saves, making martials and their reliable single target damage shine? Do they prepare complex terrain for their encounters, making PCs with ranged attacks or mobility features stand out? Each DM designs their fights differently, and that changes a lot.</p><p></p><p>(Also we're not even getting into the question of party composition. It's exciting to be the big damage dealer, but to steal a 4e-ism a good party needs defenders and leaders and controllers, not just strikers. Even if those roles aren't as codified in 5e, there's still both the ability and the need to have things like the high durability frontliner or the support caster who can help enable the focused damage dealers.)</p><p></p><p>This is not all to say that the 1v1 white room sims don't have their place. But it is a <em>limited</em> place, and their results need to be appraised as a specific data point and not as the ruling metric for overall performance.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Kurotowa, post: 9145967, member: 27957"] Another failure state to watch out for is fight sims that only test for 1v1 single target encounters. When I was an active MMO raider, you'd see the sim crowd put out their rankings after a new patch dropped a bunch of balance changes. And then a month later we'd get the actual play rankings from the new raid, and they were always different. Maybe that raid, the raid designs included multiple fights with two or three boss councils, so classes that could do cleave damage were highly advantaged. Maybe there were several bosses with scripted periods where the boss wasn't attackable, and classes that generated resources passively instead of actively were far ahead. But there was always [I]some[/I] encounter design factor that rewarded certain classes over others, that the white room damage sims couldn't predict. This is the sort of thing you can't ever make the sim take into account because it changes depending on the individual DM. Do they like to throw waves of minions into the mix, rewarding casters with big AoE spells? Do they like set pieces with boss monsters that have legendary saves, making martials and their reliable single target damage shine? Do they prepare complex terrain for their encounters, making PCs with ranged attacks or mobility features stand out? Each DM designs their fights differently, and that changes a lot. (Also we're not even getting into the question of party composition. It's exciting to be the big damage dealer, but to steal a 4e-ism a good party needs defenders and leaders and controllers, not just strikers. Even if those roles aren't as codified in 5e, there's still both the ability and the need to have things like the high durability frontliner or the support caster who can help enable the focused damage dealers.) This is not all to say that the 1v1 white room sims don't have their place. But it is a [I]limited[/I] place, and their results need to be appraised as a specific data point and not as the ruling metric for overall performance. [/QUOTE]
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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Can we have a discussion about the assumptions we make in terms of balance?
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