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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 5781234" data-attributes="member: 5143">It's still both.  You talk to people, you get quests, you explore, and then you fight monsters in a tactical war game.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.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.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.AsAt 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.</blockquote>

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