Can you balance Combat against Non-Combat abilities?

[pemerton]

Suppose that resolving combat challenges took the same amount of real time as is taken (in 3E) resolving a Diplomacy check or the discovery and disarming of a trap. In that case, there would be no need for all classes to be balanced in combat, and the notion of "taking turns to have fun" would work.

D&D, however, has always had very distinctive and elaborate rules for resolving combat. Therefore, combats take a lot of real time to resolve. As it sucks for a player to be irrelevant during that time, all character classes must have something meaningful to do during combat.

As long as combat is time intensive and other tasks are not, it is also important that combat abilities be balanced against one another, and it is natural for non-combat abilities be treated separately. And as far as non-combat is concerned, it can still be about "taking turns to have fun".

But 4e seems likely to have elaborate mechanics for challenges that are not combat challenges - the main categories I can think of here would be traps, environmental hazards and social challenges, but I'm sure there are others. It therefore becomes important, if this is the case, that no character be irrelevant during the resolution of these challenges - because that will suck for the player. Therefore, 4e needs it to be possible for any class to contribute to any of these sorts of mechanically- and real-time-intensive challenges.

I don't think that siloisation of abilities is necessarily the best way to achieve this design goal. I think an attractive alternative is to find mechanics that put a given suite of class abilities to work in the context of different challenges.

Thinking about Fighters participating in environmental challenges, it is easy to see how this would work: their great strength and endurance would enable them to plow ahead where others would falter (think Aragorn and Boromir on Caradhras). In game terms, their STR and HP give them a useful capacity to succeed at the environmental challenge.

Likewise, I can easily see how a Roguish ability suite can apply both to combat challenges and trap challenges. In either case, the ability to sneak around (therefore avoiding detection by foes, or avoiding pressure plates, tripwires and magic mouths), to move with speed and agility (thereby dodging AoOs, or swinging pendulums) would be put to work.

Some combinations of class abilities and challenge types are a little harder to see. How does a Rogue deal with environmental hazards? Or a Fighter with traps? I'm sure the designers can come up with something!

Fighters and social challenges are easy to see, however: a Fighter's physical and martial presence naturally create an impressive persona in social situations - intimidating if nothing else. It shouldn't be that hard to find a way to find a way to bring these attributes of a fighter into play within the context of social challenge mechanics.

I would actually prefer this approach to siloisation, for the following reason. Siloisation is likely to mean that the present distinction between combat mechanics on the one hand, and skill check resolution of other challenges on the other hand, remains. And skill check resolution leads to situations where only one character (namely, the one who has that skill) can meaningfully participate. SWSE-style skills can help with this a bit, but ultimately I think it would be better to generalise the mindset that "everyone should have something meaningful to do in combat" to the other sorts of challenges also, and I think this is best done without siloisation, and by designing resolution mechanics that draw on the existing attributes of various character types.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Not only that, but Warblade can get some combat uses for Diplomacy & Intimidate (e.g. via Clarion Commander). So it becomes brutally unfair*. He's rewarded in combat for not sucking out of combat.

Cheers, -- N

*) "well designed"

I wonder whether that would actually be a good thing more generally - i.e. if lots of the out of combat skills had one or more genuine uses in the middle of combat; encouraging combateers to pick up some (traditionally) noncombat skills, while giving skillmonkeys extra stuff they can do in combat?

(in 3e the use of intimidate in combat is pretty futile in most cases - too little a benefit for too short a time - but at least it is an attempt, I suppose)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I wonder what kind of "Roles" one could assign to social challenges.

Leader: The guy representing the group and making the decisions (or getting the group to make a decision and then presenting it outward)
In D&D 3.x, skills would probably be Diplomacy. This is a bit at odds with my idea of Fighters being typical leaders of a group. These days, Bards, Clerics and Rogues do this job.

Our Man on the Street (need a clever name for this): Someone that finds people in the city, sells or buys equipment, finds new "contractors". Typically a Rogue or Bard.

Loremaster: The guy who gets information about magic, legends or far places. Bards or Wizards in D&D 3.x. Gather Information, Knowledge, and Research skills (if the latter was in D&D, which it isn't currently)

Are there additional roles? Should they be different? How can they be mapped reasonably to character classes?

 

[Quartz]

There's a big gap between the Fighter and the Cleric. The Fighter - as written - really can't contribute to many out-of-combat situations, so sits there waiting for the next combat. Of course, individuals may roleplay well, but the actual mechanics don't really support the Fighter in an out-of-combat role much.

There's this little thing called multiclassing. Many heroic fighters in fiction clearly have several levels - or even most of them - in Rogue, Ranger, or even Bard. Instead of a 20th level fighter, you might be Ftr 4 / Kt 5 / Rog 8 / Pal 3, using the variant where the Rogue gets feats instead of SA.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

One of the key design precepts of 3e was that roleplaying penalties should not balanced mechanical advantages. I still subscribe to that precept.

I'd like to offer something else that I think should be adhered to in 4e design. Discuss as you like:

* Characters need to be balanced in combat activities. That is, during a combat they should always have "fun" things to do - perhaps not every round, but certainly they shouldn't sit out an entire combat going, "can we get onto the next bit please?"

* Characters need to be balanced in non-combat activities. That is, when the DM has finished doing all his combat stuff and is advancing the plot, roleplaying, presenting puzzles, all the characters have "fun" things they can do, and they're not just sitting there going "can we get onto the next combat please?"

If I were to divide up the non-combat roles of the main classes in 3e, I'd get something like this:

Fighter - almost nothing. Perhaps intimidate.
Cleric - good Interaction skills (if Int high enough to take skills), Spells to overcome challenges.
Magic-User - Spells to overcome challenges
Rogue - Skills to overcome certain challenges; Good Interaction Skills.

There's a big gap between the Fighter and the Cleric. The Fighter - as written - really can't contribute to many out-of-combat situations, so sits there waiting for the next combat. Of course, individuals may roleplay well, but the actual mechanics don't really support the Fighter in an out-of-combat role much.

I don't think the designers can assume how much each campaign splits between combat and non-combat abilities; and so a balance for *both* aspects of the system would be appreciated.

What do you think?

Cheers!

That would, in my opinion, require a rebalancing of the importance of combat and non-combat scenes at the core assumption of the game. If the core assumption is "back to the dungeon" v. 2.0, we'll get more combat, more interesting combat, more varied combat, and as an end result (apart from more loot) more focussing around balancing classes around combat (which is done by clarifying the roles of classes in combat, for example, and by trying to adapt the power curves of classes concerning their battle effectiveness) and clarifying the roles a monster has in combat encounters.

A tighter integrating of combat and non-combat can (and must) be done both on a roleplaying and a rules level. To explore what role a class can play in a "generic D&D" setting, those roles need to be defined first. For example, Cleric as religious leader or frontiersman, fighter as secular leader, military man, etc...wizard as scholar or magical scientist, opening academies or researching in seclusion, rogues as underworld chiefs, charismatic buffoons or daring tomb raiders. Add mechanics that support those roles IF they are taken (one 3E example is the Leadership feat, which could have been made a bonus fighter feat for fighters of 6th level or higher). A few more skills for fighters would have indeed been nice, along with a few more skill points along the whole class set of 3E.

The thing is that I'm not sure it's a good idea to try and balance combat and non-combat, or more general the mechanical and the roleplaying aspects separately, since in a game that's supposed to flow smoothly, one is there to support and draw substance from the other. That's why it always rang a bit weird to me to try and separate those two aspects. To be frank, the 3E attempt sounded to me as if they were saying "D&D players can deal better with limited numbers than with a roleplaying challenge, so all mechanical advantages need mechanical disadvantages to equalize them. Nobody likes to be limited in his roleplaying just because he chose something that does so, but limiting numbers is okay." Yet a lot of complaints arose about the mechanical limitations as well. This is a bit akin to older editions that (to some people arbittrarily) limited the numbers of levels a race could attain in a certain class because that was easier than to express it as a roleplaying challenge...you want all the mechanical advantages of an elf? Fine, here's the mechanical limits of elves you got to swallow along with them (and which were houseruled out of a LOT of games, if you believe the posts about that here. ).

What I think is that those classes that "enforce" a certain role on the class are the most difficult because people have to really try and get into that role to actually play that class, instead of just adding up numbers and losing some benefits somewhere else. See the paladin for a class that includes a (maybe pretty narrow) role for that class, and all the controversy that class inspires still, after 30 years of existence. And to me, that's a good sign, because it means people have to THINK about the role of the class, and if they like it or not, and how they want to fulfill it. Or different versions of the Knight, which almost always include some kind of knight's code to steer the behaviour of the class. As a counter example, see the cleric, a class that actually brims with roleplaying potential as a religious leader/warrior/frontiersman, but is relegated to be first-aid kit or holy tank-flamethrower in most groups, and is usually discussed in terms of combat effectiveness and "fun/unfun" discussions lately.

The reason why bards are loathed by so many, and why the biggest complaint about them is "they SUCK in combat" and "they should be equally effective to every other class in combat" is the fact that you have a class with a heavy social/non-combat role that is plugged into a game where combat is more than 50% of the game. So you either rebalance the class for better combat efficiency, or you rebalance the game for better combat/non-combat balance.

My 5 cents.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Agree 100%. I never play a low-skill character, because I hate the feeling of being a 5th wheel when it comes time to "do stuff that isn't killing things."

Iron Heroes takes the problem even further, IMO, with the Thief character. Between his limitless Skill Points (he can max out 3/4 of the skills in the game, easy) and Social Feat Masteries, he rules the non-combat situation. He's also pretty useless in combat (anything that challenges a Man-at-Arms or Weapon Master is straight deadly to him).

Except, of course, that this isn't quite true. The Thief is better at social interaction than other IH PCs, but other PCs aren't gimped, since everyone has access to a ton of skill points and to all skills. (The Thief just gets an effective +2 to skills, and is Charisma-focused.) More to the point, the Thief is actually quite effective in combat... because of his skills. The IH skill challenge/stunt system allows the Thief to use skills to effectively daze or stun opponents, confer large bonuses to attack rolls, deny active defense ("Dex bonus to AC" in D&D), and so on.

This is actually a direction 4e could move in. I have a feeling they'll go in the SWSE direction instead, but certainly, giving all characters more skills to play with, removing the class/cross-class distinction in favor of a "class skill" vs. "extra-special skill" system, and giving the social characters uses for their social skills in "combat" would be a way to balance combat and non-combat abilities.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is a bit akin to older editions that (to some people arbittrarily) limited the numbers of levels a race could attain in a certain class because that was easier than to express it as a roleplaying challenge...you want all the mechanical advantages of an elf? Fine, here's the mechanical limits of elves you got to swallow along with them (and which were houseruled out of a LOT of games, if you believe the posts about that here. ).

Strangely enough, this sounds more like an example of balancing combat benefits against role playing disadvantages. Just with a mechanical factor(and one that didn't matter most of the time) to that role playing disadvantage. The actual rule is "Since you are slow to learn things, you get to be better than everyone else for all the levels you are likely to play at."

The best examples of why not to do this are:

-Bards aren't very powerful in combat because of their role playing potential and all the non-combat abilities they have.
-In 2e, Paladins got to be better than all other fighting classes because of their alignment restrictions
-In 2e, the Swashbuckler kit for thieves let them have the THACO of a fighter in exchange for the fact that "trouble finds them".

The bard problem is just less obvious, since you are still trading numbers for numbers, so it wasn't noticed as easily. Someone just failed to consider that not all numbers are equal.

To be frank, the 3E attempt sounded to me as if they were saying "D&D players can deal better with limited numbers than with a roleplaying challenge, so all mechanical advantages need mechanical disadvantages to equalize them. Nobody likes to be limited in his roleplaying just because he chose something that does so, but limiting numbers is okay." Yet a lot of complaints arose about the mechanical limitations as well.

That isn't it at all. The problem is that role playing disadvantages can be wormed out of or even turned into an advantage.

If you are a Swashbuckler Kit from 2e and "trouble finds you more often", it meant that either the DM now had a bunch of work throwing encounters at you that he hadn't originally planned in order to make sure there was a disadvantage for your advantages, in which case you got more XP for defeating more enemies. Or, he forgot about your disadvantage and you just got benefits for nothing. Plus, the strength of your disadvantage depended entirely on how much trouble the DM felt was appropriate.

In Skills and Powers in 2e, you were able to get more points to build your character based on taking disadvantages like "disagreeable" and "loner". I originally thought this was a GREAT idea. Give the players a REASON to role play out their disadvantages. Then I had a friend show me why it was a REALLY bad idea. He took nearly every role playing disadvantage he could find in the book and bought nearly every combat power he could afford (d12s for hit points, best saves in every category, THACO of a fighter, able to get full bonus from his con, cast wizard spells and cleric spells, with max str, con, and dex).

I said "Fine, but you generally make everyone around you angry all the time, people who have never met you get into fights with you, you get arrested for no good reason at all. The character will be unplayable." He said "Let's see."

So, we started the campaign in a tavern. He roleplayed his character perfectly, being belligerent, ornery, and downright mean to everyone he met. So, a really big guy challenged him to a fight to make up for the insult he gave him. The player just pulled out his sword and cut him in half with damage like I had NO idea anyone could do. So, everyone in the bar stared in amazement. A couple of more people challenged him trying to beat him. He killed them without blinking. Then the watch showed up and I figured I'd finally show him why it was a bad idea to play this character. I figured they'd be around 3rd level with a 6th level leader. There were 4 of them plus their leader and I figured they were used to dealing with adventurers so I gave them some magic items that I figured would turn the tide in their favor.

So, he then proceeds to kill all of them, getting hit only once. I then tell him "Well, that was only the first group, they didn't know how powerful you were, they'll send more powerful people next time." He says "Good...they'll likely have better items for me" as he proceeded to put on the better armor and weapons he collected from the corpses. "Oh, and could I get my xp from all the people in the bar and the guards, I think I might be level 2 now?"

That was pretty much the day that I saw that if you are going to give a character a mechanical advantage in combat, you need to give them a mechanical negative in combat. You can't give someone a negative in something they already wanted to be bad at in exchange for a bonus to something they wanted to be good at.

 

[Nifft]

Yep yep yep. Nice example.

I feel that you could in theory balance combat vs. non-combat abilities, but then you'd also have to supply a 'balanced' number of combat vs. non-combat situations to the party. You can easily do this in video games because player choice is so severely constrained, but I suspect it's harder in live D&D.

Many games feature both already, but IMHO it's terrible design to tell everyone they must include a fixed proportion of combat vs. non-combat just so the system works as designed.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Strangely enough, this sounds more like an example of balancing combat benefits against role playing disadvantages. Just with a mechanical factor(and one that didn't matter most of the time) to that role playing disadvantage. The actual rule is "Since you are slow to learn things, you get to be better than everyone else for all the levels you are likely to play at."

The best examples of why not to do this are:

-Bards aren't very powerful in combat because of their role playing potential and all the non-combat abilities they have.
-In 2e, Paladins got to be better than all other fighting classes because of their alignment restrictions
-In 2e, the Swashbuckler kit for thieves let them have the THACO of a fighter in exchange for the fact that "trouble finds them".

The bard problem is just less obvious, since you are still trading numbers for numbers, so it wasn't noticed as easily. Someone just failed to consider that not all numbers are equal.

That isn't it at all. The problem is that role playing disadvantages can be wormed out of or even turned into an advantage.

If you are a Swashbuckler Kit from 2e and "trouble finds you more often", it meant that either the DM now had a bunch of work throwing encounters at you that he hadn't originally planned in order to make sure there was a disadvantage for your advantages, in which case you got more XP for defeating more enemies. Or, he forgot about your disadvantage and you just got benefits for nothing. Plus, the strength of your disadvantage depended entirely on how much trouble the DM felt was appropriate.

In Skills and Powers in 2e, you were able to get more points to build your character based on taking disadvantages like "disagreeable" and "loner". I originally thought this was a GREAT idea. Give the players a REASON to role play out their disadvantages. Then I had a friend show me why it was a REALLY bad idea. He took nearly every role playing disadvantage he could find in the book and bought nearly every combat power he could afford (d12s for hit points, best saves in every category, THACO of a fighter, able to get full bonus from his con, cast wizard spells and cleric spells, with max str, con, and dex).

I said "Fine, but you generally make everyone around you angry all the time, people who have never met you get into fights with you, you get arrested for no good reason at all. The character will be unplayable." He said "Let's see."

So, we started the campaign in a tavern. He roleplayed his character perfectly, being belligerent, ornery, and downright mean to everyone he met. So, a really big guy challenged him to a fight to make up for the insult he gave him. The player just pulled out his sword and cut him in half with damage like I had NO idea anyone could do. So, everyone in the bar stared in amazement. A couple of more people challenged him trying to beat him. He killed them without blinking. Then the watch showed up and I figured I'd finally show him why it was a bad idea to play this character. I figured they'd be around 3rd level with a 6th level leader. There were 4 of them plus their leader and I figured they were used to dealing with adventurers so I gave them some magic items that I figured would turn the tide in their favor.

So, he then proceeds to kill all of them, getting hit only once. I then tell him "Well, that was only the first group, they didn't know how powerful you were, they'll send more powerful people next time." He says "Good...they'll likely have better items for me" as he proceeded to put on the better armor and weapons he collected from the corpses. "Oh, and could I get my xp from all the people in the bar and the guards, I think I might be level 2 now?"

That was pretty much the day that I saw that if you are going to give a character a mechanical advantage in combat, you need to give them a mechanical negative in combat. You can't give someone a negative in something they already wanted to be bad at in exchange for a bonus to something they wanted to be good at.

Just going to quote you in toto, if you don't mind, since it's a pretty nice post, and I don't want to cut it apart.

You're making a few pretty good points there. Thing is that a system that tries to balance mechanical advantages (not just "combat" advantages, but every advantage that is basically expressed through a rules-mechanical value) with roleplaying disadvantages (or vice versa, of course) should include a few fail-saves to keep abuse to a minimum...but so do systems that only exchange one kind of bonus for the same kind of penalty. Ideally, you trade a mechanical AND roleplaying advantage for a mechanical AND roleplaying disadvantage. The paladin, for example, trades his abilities (which ARE a mix of mechanical bonuses and roleplaying advantages) for a mix of mechanical AND roleplaying disadvantages*.

Or lets say I'd at least like to see some hints in how a mechanical (dis)advantage is also roleplayed out, and not just added and subtracted to a die roll. See, I can be easily pleased.

Concerning your example...I never used the Player's Options books, so I've got to ask...didn't they include a limit on how much points of disadvantages one could take for his character? Somehow that's something I've seen in all games I played that used such a system. Just curious, I can well see something like this abused if not carefully handled.

*Assuming the generic D&D background, a paladin is equally a well-trusted and welcome guest in nearly every civilized area as he is a burden on any party that prefers shady tactics or travels through evil-occupied areas, hence roleplaying advantages and disadvantages. YMMV, of course.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Yep yep yep. Nice example.

I feel that you could in theory balance combat vs. non-combat abilities, but then you'd also have to supply a 'balanced' number of combat vs. non-combat situations to the party. You can easily do this in video games because player choice is so severely constrained, but I suspect it's harder in live D&D.

Many games feature both already, but IMHO it's terrible design to tell everyone they must include a fixed proportion of combat vs. non-combat just so the system works as designed.

Cheers, -- N

But that's already done...or rather, it's one step further even. We're not getting told how the proportions of both components in D&D is, the predominance of combat is simply assumed during design already.

Which is of course partially because D&D has its roots in wargaming, I guess. Or because the designers think that combat and numerical thinking comes easier to more players. I don't know. The fact that 4E is supposedly including a "social combat" system sounds like a good idea...even though I can see the disdain of those who think dice rolling should NEVER replace roleplaying social situations. But who on Earth can please everybody?