Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 5794813" data-attributes="member: 5143">That's not true at all.  This is my opinion formed through playing D&D 2-3 times a week for nearly 15 years straight now.It's been different in different editions.  In 2e, since fireballs expanded to fill whatever space they were put into, people were hesitant to cast a fireball, because it nearly impossible to do the math in your head to see if the room was too small and therefore would cause the fireball to hit your party or you.But as soon as you were in any outdoor encounter or any room described as obviously big enough, the fireball came out, killing everyone.For the longest time, we didn't use the initiative system in the book.  We rolled 1d6 for each side and the highest side took all of their turns at once, in clockwise order.  Our first group had 12 players in it.  It would take way too long to follow the initiative system of saying what actions we were taking and then applying modifiers to our initiative based on those actions.  So, Wizards couldn't be interrupted no matter how close they were to an enemy in that game.In our later 2e games when we had less players, we used that system, but there is only a 3 segment time that a Wizard could be interrupted while casting a fireball.  The full details escape me right now, but if I remember correctly, you'd roll 1d10 and then if you rolled a 2 and then said you were casting fireball, you were casting from init 2 to init 5.  If the enemy rolled 6 for their initiative, even in melee, it was impossible to interrupt your spell.And yes, if you succeeded on those spells, you saved your fighters hitpoints for the next battle, where you'd switch places.  Instead of the fighter hanging back and waiting for the Wizard to kill all the enemies, the Wizard would hang back and wait the 3-4 rounds for the fighters to take out all the enemies while he watched, not willing or able to use any of his spells.Either that, or the Wizard would cast his guaranteed to hit 5d4 magic missile and still do more damage than the Fighter every round.In 1e/2e. Wizards were a lot less powerful than they were in 3e, however.  3e virtually removed the concept of spell disruption since you had to hit the wizard at the exact right time, and concentration was too easy to boost.  Fireballs didn't expand to fill the area anymore, so you could just pick a square on the map and you'd never hit your allies.  And you only needed to have the radius of the spell in space.But either way, there are millions of different situations you can get into in a D&D game.  The situation should not affect the balance of the game.  It's ok to have a battle here and there where the Wizard's best power doesn't work.  But to say that "If the room is too small, the Wizard doesn't overpower the Fighter" isn't a balancing factor.  The classes should be balanced whether the DM is running an entirely underground game with 10x10 rooms or an above ground game where all the battles start at 100 ft away with no terrain.You NEED to look at it from a purely math point of view because every DM is going to run their game differently.  And if even 10% of DMs run into problems because their games are entirely outdoors, that is a problem with the class.  You can't just say "Well, my games have been entirely underground and the Wizard is fine.  If everyone else would just run their games underground, they'd have no problem."  Just like you can't say "The Wizard is overpowered, but as long as you create more powerful enemies to counter all their abilities they are just fine."The game system needs to be designed so that nearly 100% of DMs can have an easy time running the game and nearly 100% of all players can feel like they were doing something useful in every round of combat and weren't overshadowed.  Relying on the DMs skill/battlefield circumstances to balance these things drops the percentage to much lower than 100%.</blockquote>

Verification