Class Balance - why?

[Crazy Jerome]

Yes, consciously chosen imbalance is better than accidental imbalance any day of the week. If it was consciously chosen, there was some competing factor that needed to be addressed--and presumably was. You can even think of this as "balance" in the larger sense, of balancing the game across competing interests.

Accidental imbalance is just trouble. You get all the problems, with nothing in return. If you don't pay attention to balance, you'll get a lot of the accidental imbalance. That doesn't mean the attention should be kneejerk in its application.

 

[Dellamon]

I
This is what we call the Oberoni Fallacy. It essentially means that "You cannot make the argument that the rules don't have to be correct/balanced/work as written because the DM can fix it by doing X because that argument is invalid."

You can't state "The rules work fine, you just have to change things so they work fine." It's an illogical argument.

The enemy should be able to be whatever you want them to be. There's no way to guarantee that the enemy even has a wizard or a cleric or anything else. There's no way to guarantee that the enemy wizard attacks the PCs' wizard or vice versa.

It isn't going to help the fighter one bit if the enemy wizard has the ability to paralyze all of the PCs at once, but the PC wizard is unaffected because he has his Protection from Paralysis spell up or his Resistance to Magic spell up.

I do not understand your argument here - perhaps you are speaking of something else? What I was implying was encounter balance and maybe I did not phrase it well. It is the DMs responsibility to ensure the encounters are balanced to properly challenge the party. If the enemy wizard has the capability to do those things to the party, does the party wizard not have the same ability against the encounter?

The answers to this depend on which edition of D&D you were playing in. Wizards in 1e/2e WERE actually weak enough that their immense power was balanced...up until about 5th or 6th level. Then they had enough hitpoints to survive an attack or two by most enemies. Plus, they began to have the spells that allowed them to ignore attacks. In 1e, spells were fairly easily disrupted(you still had to go first).

In 2e, it was very difficult, since you had to act in the small window between when the spell started and ended, had to be ready to disrupt the spell, be in range, etc. Most of the time the first spell a wizard cast was something like Mirror Image or Stoneskin that made it nearly impossible to hit them and do damage...therefore making the rest of their spells undisruptable.

This got even worse in 3e/3.5e. Most Wizards in 3.5e had better AC than the fighters, since they could stack 2 or 3 protection spells on themselves. Most of the time they were nearly immune to attacks from the enemy while able to fly, teleport, and use any other number of means to never get hit.

I don't argue that things got more imbalanced over time. But this is not a discussion of how imbalanced things had gotten, its more about the necessity of roles needing to be balanced in a new edition. Clearly, if one class is a "god" among classes, it needs to be fixed. But does that mean that all classes need to have the same levels of powers? Do we need to dumb it down in the rules so everything is equal and every class feels special in every encounter?

4e math isn't broken. There are a couple of feats and powers that when combined together in ways they weren't meant to break the math. Those need to be corrected, I admit. But the whole system itself is based on very accurate math. If you can give me an example of what is broken in 4e math, I would like to know.

I cannot cite a specific instance since I do not play a lot of 4E but I recall reading several forum posts about things being broken. Maybe that was early on and fixed int he errata?

At 5th level, wizards got fireball. Back in 1e/2e, it was the be all end all of 3rd level spells. It had a HUGE radius that could be made even bigger if you were in an enclosed space. It did 5d6 points of damage at the level you got it. Most of the enemies you were fighting were 1-4 hitdice creatures at that time, which meant you killed most enemies you were fighting on an average roll of a fireball. If not, they were so low in hitpoints at that point that you could sit back and watch the fighters pick off the last couple of points of damage.

Thieves in 1e/2e weren't good at combat at any level. Being limited to daggers for damage and encouraged not to have a high strength meant they were often doing 1d4+1 points of damage at early levels. Which averages 3.5 damage or about 1/5th that of the wizard's fireball. Backstabs could only be used if the enemy didn't know you were there...which meant you couldn't use it most combats that you started by walking in a door.

And it isn't about concentrating too much on the math. It doesn't require concentrating on the math for longer than a couple of seconds and a simple understanding of numbers to say "I have a THAC0 or 15, so I need a 15 to hit this enemy for 1d8+3 points of damage to one enemy. You have an 70% chance of doing 5d6 points of damage and a 30% change of doing half that to all 20 enemies we are fighting(for a total of 350 points of damage if no one saves and 175 points of damage if everyone saves) ....how is that fair?"

I actually think it's the DMs JOB to understand the math behind the system and to correct for it when possible. Perhaps you aren't thinking enough about the math.

Your example of the 5th level wizard is fine. But he is a one and done with that fireball. If you play by the RAW, it will slow things way down for him to re-memorize that to be used again. So he just cleared out a room with 20 orcs using his most powerful spell (and hopefully not frying everyone in the party at the same time). There are 20 more rooms to go. I guess he will be a god in all of those as well? Your damage calculations will more than average out over the course of those additional room, I think (and probably fall vastly in favor of the melee types).

It is well and good to talk basic math, but are we playing the game to crunch numbers or have fun?

 

[nightwyrm]

I do not understand your argument here - perhaps you are speaking of something else? What I was implying was encounter balance and maybe I did not phrase it well. It is the DMs responsibility to ensure the encounters are balanced to properly challenge the party. If the enemy wizard has the capability to do those things to the party, does the party wizard not have the same ability against the encounter?

I've highlighted the main problem here. The PC wizard have the ability to deal with the encounter but the rest of the party who have mundane classes are left behind.

As a DM, what kind of enemy do you throw up against a party consisting of Superman and Jimmy Olsen? Anything Jimmy could fight would be trivial for Superman and anything that can challenge Supes would flatten Jimmy without a thought. Of course you can throw a mixed enemy party against the PCs where some enemies are for Superman and some for Jimmy, but then you're basically saying the main characters can fight each other and the sidekicks do their own thing. This gets pretty close to "the designated chick fight" phenomenon.

 

[hanez]

I also think that some of the Oberoni Fallacy arguments are a bit illogical. You are saying there is only one situation, and we are pointing out other possible situations that make all classes shine.

I say "the dm should give magic items to if the fighter is feeling week" you say "Why should he have to?"

I say "the DM should have a varitey of situations to make all classes powerful" you say "Oberon Fallacy! You have to make a situation for the fighter to shine!"

and on, and on...

But In D&D the DM DOES set the parameters, and he IS supposed to set the parameters to make the game fun right? That's the purpose of the DM. So perhaps if in your game a class was running around being god, maybe it was the DMs fault in not puttin up situations where other classes could shine.

And if the only thing you found unbalaned in D&D was the situation "walk into a room, roll initiative", then again perhaps the DM was doin it wrong because there are supposed to be a variety of situations in D&D (right?).

In 3e, I didnt notice the problem as much, but if it was really that bad then sure, the rules need to be fixed so that classes are balanced. Maybe I was just an amazing DM (haha). So if a lot of people noticed it and they were playing with nonhorrible DMs then I agree, lets make some tweaks. But its possible that there was also a DM problem too or even an adventure problem, WOTC has been known to make one sided adventures.

But I stress that any ruleset you make will still depend on the DM. If the DM repeatedly only throws one type of situation at you, then the class that shines in that situation will be seen as stronger. And it is perfectly logical and NOT a fallacy for me to say "well if the DM did this .... then you wouldnt have the problem"

I also see a little bit of puttin words in peoples mouths, like arguing against a false case. The superman/jimmy olsen thing. I don't believe that metaphor was true in ANY edition of D&D. (Superman was a superhero, jimmy is a weak regular human). So if your using that as a construct for your argument, your on weak ground. Unless you can somehow show that the difference between any two classes was equal to the difference between superman and jimmy olsen. Maybe instead you mean Superman/Batman?


I still maintain my previous posts position that we are mostly all agreeing. Sometimes arguing is fun for its own sake though (lol)

 

[nightwyrm]

But In D&D the DM DOES set the parameters, and he IS supposed to set the parameters to make the game fun right? That's the purpose of the DM. So perhaps if in your game a class was running around being god, maybe it was the DMs fault in not puttin up situations where other classes could shine.

The problem with 3.x is that there is no situations where the wizard couldn't shine due to the huge variety and quantity of spells he have access to.

Telemarketer voice: You have a problem with X, there's a spell for that.

 

[SlyDoubt]

I agree to some extent. Inter-class balance isn't something that's ever going to happen and since your objective isn't to kill your friends (usually) it isn't so much of a concern.

I think it has more to do with how the DM designs around stuff to make magic users less overpowering in every situation they encounter.

However there is a limit. You want your less magical classes to also be powerful and able to do extremely awesome/ridiculous things. like tracking a mouse's path through a blizzard. I think the real issue is that magic at a certain point sometimes destroys all the cool special stuff different classes can do. when you can suddenly just teleport everyone or fly or whatever, the ranger's survival skills don't mean a whole lot.

So there should be some kind of limit there but ultimately it's in the DM's hands to make sure everyone has something to contribute to the adventure.

 

[hanez]

The problem with 3.x is that there is no situations where the wizard couldn't shine due to the huge variety and quantity of spells he have access to.

Telemarketer voice: You have a problem with X, there's a spell for that.

are you saying THE wizard or A wizard? Theres a difference right? Are we constructing a wizard for a specific situation, and then memorizing the particular spell to be perfect for that situation? Or are we making a class from the ground up, that gains spells as he finds them and levels, that chooses spells based on what he thinks he MIGHT encounter that day? In a campaign where he encounters a variety of situations?

I don't think that if you go through the above realistically you will find that the wizard "is better in all situations". If they chose utility, they lost damage, if they knocked the door, they lost invisibiltty.

Memorizing spells is frustrating. I ran into lots of situations where there WAS a perfect spell for that. But often I just didn't memorize it, or never even had access to it. Mages don't have access to every spell eh? Maybe I was just bad at picking spells, and maybe the wizard in your experience was really good at picking spells. Or maybe my DM was varied, and yours was well predictable. Or maybe this is an academic discussion where people look at the class and say "hey look what it can do!" I got fireball, and spider climb, and phantom steed, and lightning bolt, and hold person, and fly, without remembering that they were all the same spell level and you couldnt have them all? Picking one or two from that list is pretty tough and certainly doesnt make you superman when superman is slicing and dicing you 3 times a round with his sword that he gets to use over and over again.

You do remember wizards using there pesky staffs and crossbows cause they were all out and just had a couple utility spells right? That happened in 3e to many many people which kind of counters your "god" argument.

Still I grant you that you may find the wizard is too strong and should be tweaked, I agree with that statement completely. But I think if you found that he is better in every single situation, then there is definitely a problem in the way YOUR game was run.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

In 2E, wizards have no bonus spell slots for high intelligence. This seemed to make the priest classes unfair, but those spell slots were exactly the place were they should be preparing healing spells (which benefit the whole party).

A wizard with 18 Int would only know a maximum of 18 spells of a given level. Gnomes could learn all of them, with 19 Int, but they had their own limits (illusionist only).

Spells took time to learn and a lot of pages in a spellbook (many of them were necessary for a single wizard, and he would probably be adventuring with a traveling spellbook containing only his best, signature spells).

Preparing them was time-consuming as well (30 min for a fireball). Throwing a fireball at the room full of orcs instead of allowing your warriors to take care meant that your party would be waiting 30 more minutes in the next morning. It was actually worth your time to have spells still prepared by the end of the day.

As someone pointed earlier, taking damage while casting was game over. No concentration check, no combat casting, no 5-foot step.

Enters 3E:

Clerics don't need to prepare their healing anymore. They will be better just preparing a bunch of spells to find the traps for the rogue, deal area damage for the wizard and fight for the fighter.

Wizards have bonus spells for high intelligence. Contrary to the cleric, though, the system doesn't expect him to spend some of them just keeping the party alive.

All those details regarding spellbooks and spell preparation? Drop them! Maximum number of spells known? This is sorcerer stuff! Limited spellbooks? How about a blessed book with 1000 pages?

As of today, I still believe there's nothing wrong with a vancian system where wizards are supposed to fly, teleport, fireball and even stoneskin. The 3E take on that system, though, is completely broken.

Cheers,

 

[nightwyrm]

are you saying THE wizard or A wizard? Theres a difference right? Are we constructing a wizard for a specific situation, and then memorizing the particular spell to be perfect for that situation? Or are we making a class from the ground up, that gains spells as he finds them and levels, that chooses spells based on what he thinks he MIGHT encounter that day? In a campaign where he encounters a variety of situations?

I don't think that if you go through the above realistically you will find that the wizard "is better in all situations". If they chose utility, they lost damage, if they knocked the door, they lost invisibiltty.

Still I grant you that you may find the wizard is too strong and should be tweaked. But I think if you found that he is better in every single situation, then there is definitely a problem in the way the game was run.

Wizards also have scribe scroll for rarely used utility spells.

Of course, the DM can restrict access to new spells so the wizard doesn't know every spell in the book. But the wizard can still pick 2 free spells per level and he can pick spells that are useful in a variety of situations (polymorph) or spells like limited wish or shadow evocation which actually mimic other spells. Also, DM restricting spells is functionally similar to the tier 3 restricted list caster like beguilers and warmages which is actually one solution I support for further editions - split the wizard up into thematic subclasses.

 

[hanez]

Wizards also have scribe scroll for rarely used utility spells.

Scribe Scroll!!!! Yeah your right. That was unbalanced. You have your spells why should you be able to make a hundred more. Lets remove it.

PS we had a house rule to remove it early on. Actually it wasnt a house rule, you could do it..I don't know we just didn't seem right. So yeah, maybe that house rule went along way to changing my experience with 3e